Drusas Achamian suffered a second certainty then, one unlike any he had ever known. And somehow it made his remorse holy. He squinted at the one child he had loved most aside from Inrau. The second son he had taught and failed to keep alive.
“My boy …” was the most he managed to croak.
Not so high above, the bound form of Proyas, blessed son of Queen Thaila and King Onoyas, swayed on slow revolutions …
Dying in the shadow of Golgotterath.
It wasn’t a dream, the little Prince-Imperial realized upon awakening.
What he remembered … It had happened!
The light become nausea and ground. The vast slum of shelters, the encamped Ordeal knitted like mould along the inner arc of a low range of mountains. The Horns rearing beyond—the Horns of Golgotterath soaring vast and unbelievable from the blasted lands. The Ordealmen streaming from all quarters, ghastly mockeries of the Men they had been. How they had blubbered and whooped upon their arrival. Sobbed and grovelled! Like foul beggars tugging at Father’s robe. Some had even torn their beards for joy and grief!
Father abandoned him and Mother to them almost immediately, stepping back into the selfsame light they had just stumbled from. A company of crazed and filthy Pillarians took them in hand. Mother had to be carried, so violent was her illness—even Kelmomas had reeled and vomited. Father had pressed them hard across the final horizons. The Men bore them to a massive black pavilion with a kind of deranged reverence. Some had openly wept! Mother had been too sick to protest when they had installed him with her in a gloomy chamber—the Umbilicus, they had called it. And so he had lain exhausted and joyous—joyous!—his soul and stomach spinning, pondering the fact that after everything, he had somehow found himself here …
Mother’s chamber. Bellied black canvas walls, barricading the gloom. A single lantern light, plucking the geometry of empty and eclectic spaces from the black, illuminating palms of painted and brocaded pattern.
A lion. A heron. Seven horses.
A straw mattress laid out like corpses across the ground. Silk sheets, dull for the soil of unwashed bodies, but still gleaming, lines of white hooked across the restless tangle, sharp against the bruise of rose.
And Mother, the beloved one, sleeping.
Eyes closed in the grey ghost of lampblack. Lips sealed about an open jaw, slumped chin. Oblivious.
The little one watching. The fallen one.
The beauty of her was carved into his very bones. He had been drawn from her womb—hewn from her hips!—but he nevertheless remained of her in every way. The girlish tangle of her hair knotted him. The bare length of her left arm made tack and gum of his breath. The slow cycle of her breathing was a pang rising and falling within his own breast.
To gaze upon her was as near a soul such as his could ever come to worship. The Blessed Empress.
Mommy.
There was much he had refused to know—as of yet. The entire World now twisted from a solitary hair. And for all his D?nyain guile, he possessed a child’s feral understanding of powerlessness, the concessions that helplessness exacted from those, such as him, who were condemned to love. To be Kelmomas the Feared, the Hated was at once to be Kelmomas the Alone, the Unwanted … the Doomed.
For what was love, if not weakness become blessing?
She. She was the one thing that mattered. The only mystery to be solved. All the rest, Father’s return, the Narindar, the Earthquake—even Father’s interrogation—mattered not at all. Not even the mad fact that he was about to witness the Great Ordeal assail Golgotterath! Only she …
Only Mommy.
Slumbering as he had never seen her slumber before, her heart thrumming fleet, then ponderous, following deep and inexplicable patterns. Their miraculous journey across E?rwa had almost proven beyond her endurance. Father had carried her convulsing, retching spittle for a greater part of their mad and magnificent passage. She was weak …
Worldborn.
She needs us …
To protect her, yes.
The Prince-Imperial made no effort to feign sleep or otherwise conceal his scrutiny. He had always resided here, invulnerable and unknown, in the very bosom of her slumber. This was his place. And it always had been. The difference was that he had never before feared she might stir from her slumber. She would awaken, yet slumber still.
She hates us!
Hates you. She always loved me better.
The anguish was quite unlike anything he had known. There was the pain he had suffered following Uncle’s palace coup, but there had been exhilaration and play as well. As desperate, as forlorn as he had been, he had had such fun-fun! There was the pain of being abandoned, he supposed, and then there was the pain of being found, and the latter was so much worse-worse—horrible! A loss without the hope of recovery.
No! Noooo!
Yes. She could always smell Him on you!
Him. Father. They had hidden from him so long Kelmomas had thought himself invisible. But Father had simply cast his eye across the curve of the World. He need only look, the way Inrilatas had looked, to see all of it …
You mean the Strength. She could always sense the Strength in me.
Yes. The Strength.
Sharacinth. Inrilatas. Uncle. The hunting and the feasting …
All the fun.
Father knows all—Everything!
Yes. He is the strongest.
And he had told Mommy. They had seen it in her eyes, the way it died, the one part he had sought to raise above all others …
A mother’s love for her poor little son.
What are we going to do, Sammi?
That isn’t the question—you know this.
Yes-yes.
He knelt upon the corner of the mattress watching her, and he fairly swooned, so intense was the desire, so cosmic the need, to simply lay a cheek upon the maternal hill that was her hip, to hold tight what he had been, cling to the one soul that could save him.
What? What was Father going to do with his wayward sons?
Maybe the Consult will kill him.
To see is to follow. Mimara understands that now, understands why the blind are so prone to linger, to roam apart from the mob. She sees the tented slums of the encampment, follows impromptu ways that fork like old veins. The recognition belonging to that first soul on the encampment’s perimeter pursues her like a famished dog, so that Men drop all about her wherever she wanders, some grovelling, croaking and moaning like demented beggars, others beseeching, importuning, crying across outstretched fingers. She goes so far as to cast arms against the leering visages.
To see is to follow. She speaks to no one, makes no queries, and yet finds herself standing before the Umbilicus all the same. It rears as a many-poled mountain range before her, the mottled grey of things once-black, more bruised than adorned with circumfixes, so mudded and tattered was the embroidery. It seems to flap and billow, though the air is absolutely still.
She comes upon it from the east, such is the Whore’s perversity. Golgotterath rises beyond, monstrous and implacable.