She hastens to organize the city, showing the will her ailing subjects so desperately need to see. She invites the White-Luck Warrior, whom she still thinks is a mere Cultic assassin, to live with her and her surviving family in the Andiamine Heights. As much as his mother’s newfound strength dismays him, Kelmomas is more fascinated by the White-Luck Warrior, whom he sees as proof that Ajokli, the evil Four-Horned Brother, has chosen to be his protector. This conviction is confirmed when he watches the man bring about the death of his sister Theliopa—for she, after Maithanet, had been his greatest threat. But this triumph is instantly transformed into disaster when his mother, wild with grief, spies him celebrating his sister’s death.
A powerful earthquake strikes Momemn, laying low her walls and exposing her inhabitants to the desert fury of Fanayal and his Kianene. Psatma Nannaferi mocks the Padirajah as he readies himself for the assault, watched by an apprehensive Malowebi, the Emissary of the Zeumi Satakhan. Though the Mother-Supreme is Fanayal’s captive, the Goddess Yatwer has assured her mastery of the man. Without warning, Kellhus steps into their midst, killing both Fanayal and the Mother-Supreme. He overpowers Malowebi and severs his head, which he transforms into one of the Decapitants bound to his hip.
Aftershocks hammer the Imperial Capital. Kelmomas follows the White-Luck Warrior through the collapsing palace into the throne room, still thinking him a servant of Ajokli. But when he glimpses his father standing with his mother upon the dais, he realizes that the assassin hunts no less than the Aspect-Emperor—and at his mother’s behest. The little boy gains the assassin’s attention, hoping to assist, but the man gazes at him as though dumbstruck, as if a completely different soul has awakened behind his once implacable eyes.
The ceilings give way, and the boy learns that what is ruined can become more ruined still.
CHAPTER
ONE
The Western Three Seas
There’s a rumour they say,
that lures our husbands away,
from field and pillow,
and babe and willow,
to the Ark, to the Ark, to the Ark,
to the dark, to the dark, to the dark,
to the Idol more fearsome than its God.
—ancient K?niüric Harvest Song
Mid-Autumn, 20 New Imperial Year (4132, Year-of-the-Tusk), Momemn.
His father sang into the tumbling world—a Metagnostic Cant of Translocation, Kelmomas realized. Sorcery scooped him whole, then cast him as grains across the face of nowhere. Light lanced through the sound of clacking thunder. Crashing, crushing darkness became the miracle of sky.
The Prince Imperial curled about convulsions. His ears roared for misery and cacophony both, but he could still hear his mother keen. Grit scored his cheek. Vomit clotted his hair. His fabled home shrugged and fissured in the distance, collapse dragging down collapse, all the taken-for-granted spaces clamped into ruin, the Andiamine Heights vanishing into mountainous, ashen billow. He spit and heaved, wondered that he had stood within those stone shells but heartbeats before …
Watching Ajokli murder his father.
How? How could this be happening? Theliopa was dead—was that not proof of the Four-Horned Brother’s will? Kelmomas had seen him, concealed in the cracks where no eyes strayed, preparing to strike his father the way he had struck his uncle—to murder the last soul that could sound him, threaten him. Mother would have been his! At long last, truly, utterly his! His!
Not fair. Not fair.
Maithanet dead. Theliopa dead—her bitch skull hammered into a sack! And then when it came to his father—the only one that mattered—the Narindar had crashed from the Unerring Grace—and after glimpsing him no less! That was the mockery, wasn’t it? The Godspit, as the Shigeki slaves called it! Or like dramas written by slaves, where the heroes always perish by their own hand. But why? Why? Why would the Four Horned Brother give such a gift only to take everything away?
Cheat! Deceiver! He had committed everything! Gambled his very— We’re dead! his inner brother wailed, for he towered above them both, their father, Anas?rimbor Kellhus, the Holy Aspect-Emperor. Abase yourself! Samarmas demanded. Grovel! But all Kelmomas could do was cramp about his nausea, expel the honeyed pork and onion he had last eaten. He glimpsed his mother kneeling on the far side of his father, gagging on her own misery.
They stood upon one of Momemn’s walls, near the Girgallic Gate. The city smoked below, levelled in places, reduced to shattered shells in others. Only ancient Xothei stood untouched, rising through the haze of ruin, a monumental miracle in fields of raked charcoal. Thousands streamed about, over and between the wreckage, crawling like bugs over their losses. Thousands wailed.
“Momas is not finished,” the Holy Aspect-Emperor called over the roar. “The Sea comes.”
The eye balked at the sight, the Meneanor rising such that the city whole seemed to drop down. The River Phayus swelled along its length, drowning first the piers and then the banks, pulsing monstrous through the canals, slipping black and shining into the alleyways and streets, clotting into muck with accumulated wreckage, engulfing bug after racing bug …
His nausea subsided in the wake of his wonder.
The boy glanced to his mother, who looked only to the calamity that was his father, her face raised in anguish, cheeks silver beneath black-smeared eyes. It was an image the little Prince-Imperial had seen many times before, either hewn from panels of wood or stone, or daubed in paint across plaster walls, the desolate mother, the soul who had given only to be ransacked. And there was joy even here, he realized. There was beauty.
Some losses could not be fathomed.
“The-Thel-Thel—” she stuttered, clenching bumbling hands together.
Thousands drowned below them, mother and sons pinned beneath the ruin, gagging, jerking, drowning. The water climbed the stages of the massive city, making a great sty of its lower environs. The Sea even broke across the eastern walls, rendering the heap that had been the Andiamine Heights an island.
“She’s dead!” his mother barked, her eyes pinched in anguish. She shook like something ancient and palsied, even as the violence of her grief made her seem young.
The little boy watched from across his father’s booted stance, possessed of a terror greater than any he had ever known. He watched her eyes pop open, fasten upon him in lunatic fury, pin him as certainly as a shipwright’s nail. The lips thinned into a venomous line.
“You.”
His father gathered her in the crook of his right arm, then hoisted Kelmomas by the scruff, bundled him under his left. Language summoned light, and reality was passed from tongue to lip—and the little boy was pitched once again, cast headlong into pricking grasses. His gut balled his limbs into a wretched fist. He glimpsed Momemn even farther away, wrecked heights smoking.
His mother wept, shrieked, lamentations that continued leap after wrenching leap.
That night, he stared at the two of them through skeins of grass, Mother obscuring the firelight, rocking and keening as sorrow after incredulous sorrow kicked through her slight frame, Father sitting as an idol full in the twining flame, his hair and plaited beard striate with pulsing gold, his eyes flashing like blind jewels. Though Kelmomas lay with his ears pricked to their merest breath, he found he could not follow what was said, as if his soul had wandered too far from his ears to hear what had been heard.
“Y-you came back …”
“For yo—”