“But …”
“I loathed the covetous eyes of Men as a child,” she said, perhaps watching him through the mirror, perhaps not. “I had learned, you see, learned what it was they would take. I would see girls like the one staring at me now, and I would think them nothing more than whipped dogs, creatures beaten until they craved the rod …” She raised a cheek to a waiting pinky, smeared what looked like gold-dust across the outskirts of her plump gaze. “But there’s knowing, and there’s knowing, like all things living. Now I understand how the earth rises to the seed. Now I fathom what is given when Men take …”
Her smoky image puckered purple-stained lips.
“And I am grateful.”
“B-but …” Malowebi fairly sputtered. “She … I mean, She …” He paused upon a bolt of terror, recalling his glimpse of veins flung sodden across all the visible spaces the night the Last Cishaurim should have died. “The Dread Mother … Yatwer has wrought all this!”
Psatma Nannaferi ceased her ministrations, watched him carefully through the reflection.
“And yet none of you fall to your knees,” she said on a coquettish shrug.
She played him the way a dancing girl might, but one who cared nothing for the heft of purses. A bead of sweat slipped from his kinked hair down his temple.
“She has given you the Sight,” the Mbimayu sorcerer pressed. “You know what will happen …” He licked his lips, trying hard not to look as terrified as he was. “Before it happens.”
The Mother-Supreme continued daubing lamp-black across her lids.
“So you believe.”
Malowebi nodded warily. “Zeum respects the ancient ways. We alone worship the Gods as they are.”
A grin that could only belong to an old and wicked heart.
“And now you wish to know your part in this?”
His heart rapped his breastbone for racing.
“Yes!”
The lamp-black, combined with the ancient age of the mirror, made empty sockets of her eyes. A brown skull watched him now, one graced with a maiden’s lips.
“Your doom,” the hollow said, “is to bear witness.”
“B-bear? Witness? You mean this? What happens?”
A girlish shrug. “Everything.”
“Everything?”
She swivelled about on one buttock to face him, and despite the pace between them, her near nudity pressed sweaty and flat against his yearning, her sable lines became cliffs for the extent of his desire. Never had he so yearned to fall!
The Yatwerian Priestess smiled coyly.
“He will kill you, you know.”
Horror and compulsion. She emanated the heat of plowed earth in hot sun.
Malowebi fairly sputtered. “Kill-kill me? Why?”
“For taking,” she said as if cradling candy on her tongue, “what was given.”
He stumbled backward, fought her allure as though caught in laundered veils …
The Emissary of High Holy Zeum fled.
Laughter, like sand scoured against sunburned skin. It nipped all his edges as he bounced hip and shin against the intervening clutter.
“Witness!” an old crone shrieked. “Witnessss!”
His pulse slowed until beaten by a different heart. His breath deepened until drawn by different lungs. Watching with the constancy of the dead, Anas?rimbor Kelmomas settled into the grooves of another soul …
If it could be called such.
The man his mother called Issiral stood in the heart of his unlit chamber, watch upon watch, motionless, dark eyes lost in some bleak nowhere. The Prince-Imperial, meanwhile, kept secret vigil above, staring down through the louvres. He lowered his avian vitality to the same deep rung, made his every twitch a noon shadow.
And he waited.
Kelmomas had watched many people through the spyholes of the Apparatory, and their comic diversity had never ceased to surprise him. The lovers, the tedious loners, the weepers, the insufferable grinners: it seemed an endless parade of newfound deformities. Watching them step from their doors to consort with the Imperial Court had been like watching slaves bind brambles into sheaves. Only now could he see how wrong he had been—that this diversity had been apparent only, an illusion of his ignorance. How could he not think Men various and strange when Men were his only measure?
Now the boy knew better. Now he knew that every human excess, every bloom of manner or passion, radiated from a single, blind stem. For this man—the assassin that had somehow surprised Uncle Holy—had paced out the true beam of possible and impossible acts.
And it was not human …
Not at all.