That was an offering, the accursed voice said.
He had spoken to the bulbous figure, then, crouching beneath it, he had used his fingernails to clip off two of the beetle’s legs. Together they had watched it chip round and round.
That was a joke!
His father was a vessel of the God of Gods! He could share jokes with the Grinning God if he pleased! He would pinch Yatwer’s teat if he pleased!
And how He laughed.
The boy froze in the dark—this time absolute—once again ….
Evil Ajokli had laughed.
They had laughed together, he and the Grinning God. He smiled at the recollection.
So? The Gods court us …
He had the Strength! He was every bit as divine!
The Prince-Imperial resumed climbing, his smile a fading bruise upon his face. His twin had fallen silent, perhaps immersed in the self-same hum that made empty bladders of his limbs. Only when he slipped out of the maze and into his mother’s bedchamber did he recognize the extent of his horror.
The stories they told about Ajokli in Temple were always the same. He was the Trickster, the one who, unlike Gilga?l, took without contest or honour. His escapades would enthrall the young, who loved nothing more than to dupe and prowl about the judgment of their fathers. Each exploit would always seem harmless, always seem comical, and so he and the other children would chortle, sometimes even cheer for the Grinning God.
But this was the trap, the lesson, the moment when the horrific truth of the Four-Horned Brother would yaw bottomless, the moment when the death and damnation of beloved innocents would begin—and when the children realized they too had been seduced, tricked into celebrating the vile and the wicked. What was sleek, what was supple, what was so roguishly human would slip as garments to the floor, revealing a primordial and poisonous God, one grown mountainous for consuming endless ages of grief and hatred.
And they would laugh, the boy and his bodiless twin, laugh at the terrified looks, the tearful remonstrations, the frantic prayers. They would laugh that it was always the same, that the halfwits would always be tricked by the exact same story, let alone similar ones. They would puzzle at the absurdity of cheering a thing one heartbeat and lamenting it the next—at the fact that souls could yearn for contrition, for the judgment of more elder fools. Who cared whether people died? If the stories were ancient, then everyone was dead in them anyway. Why wait huddled on your knees, when you could have fun?
Ajokli, the boy had decided, was by far the most sensible of the Hundred. Perhaps He wasn’t so much evil as … misunderstood.
Only now did the Prince-Imperial understand. Only now could he fathom their terror, the knifing breath of sudden, catastrophic realization. To be gulled in stories is to be armed in life.
Kelmomas often thought of himself as a hero, as the one soul doomed to prevail. The death of his brothers and his uncle had simply confirmed the assumption. Everything spoke to his ascendancy! But stories, he knew, were as treacherous as sisters, luring thought into labyrinths of smoke, coercing it down this perfumed corridor and that, all the while sealing the unseen portals shut. For the sake of simple ignorance, every victim assumed themselves the hero, and without exception, death was their enlightenment, damnation their prize.
The Gods always ate those who failed to feed.
A different boy stood pining for his mother in the Empress’s sumptuous bedchamber, one whose ears had finally been pricked to the faraway rumble of more dreadful things, gale storms hanging upon horizons that parsed him to the yolk.
A guttering lantern cast light as shredded gauze, shining across a bed that was empty save the shadows of snakes tangled through the sheets. Golden illumination filtered from the antechamber and sitting room beyond. Kelmomas found himself walking thoughtlessly toward the sound of his mother’s voice.
“Any price …” she murmured to some unidentified soul. But whom? She only resorted to meetings in her chambers when she required utter secrecy …
“So …” she continued, her voice urgent, bound as tight as a sacrificial goat, “what does the Four-Horned Brother say?”
Kelmomas stopped.
He had drawn past the marble post set into the scalloped corner. He could see her, dressed in her evening habitual, reclined backward on her gold-stitched, Invitic divan, bathed in the white of whale-oil, staring at a point toward the middle of the room. Her beauty fairly struck him breathless, the twinkle of Kutnarmi diamonds across her headdress, the brushed gleam etching her curls, the flawless caramel of her skin, the rose-silk folds of her gown, the dimpled gleam chasing the seams …
So perfect.