The Unholy Consult (Aspect-Emperor #4)

Two eunuchs minister to her. Both are damned.

She had been pampered as a slave, cosseted and beaten. She had been pampered as an Anas?rimbor, coddled and spurned. Perfume and silk and fussing hands had hung upon her every whim, maddening her from time to time, but comforting her far more. Even now, seeing the Judgment dwelling within all things, glimpsing demons clawing the false smiles and anxious looks, she takes refuge in the absurdity of other hands doing what her hands could plainly do.

She is waiting, she realizes.

Waiting for the Judging Eye to close.

It refuses.

Apparently water was in short supply, so they cleanse her with wetted cloth. Save for the odd murmured instruction, the eunuchs do not speak, leaving the air to the supple sounds of water and fabric. They have a stunned, astonished air about them, a desperation that has wrung all routine from their task. They do what they do with a religious intensity.

As they should, given the outrages they have committed.

With clean hands and soiled hearts, they daub and wipe the filth from her skin. She marvels at her nudity in the lantern-light, at the great sphere of her belly. After a muttered exchange in some Buskritic dialect, they elect to garb her in a silk tunic—belonging, no doubt, to her stepfather—embroidered white upon white with innumerable thorn-sized tusks. It fairly drapes to her ankles. An overrun fraction of her soul mourns the tent pitched by the mound of her belly, but only for a heartbeat. It is proper that she wear white.

One of them produces a silvered shield in lieu of a mirror, but she turns her face aside, not for the bulbous and elongated character of her reflection, but for the blinding glare of holiness. She bids them fetch her ensorcelled hauberk, her belt and Emilidic blade, her Chorae, and of course, the pouch containing Nil’giccas. She can smell her journey on these things, the tang of Lord Kosoter and the Skin-Eaters, the dank of Cil-Aujas and the Mop, the sweet reek of Ishu?l and the Library of Sauglish.

She avoids looking into their faces. She feels neither remorse nor pity.

A Pillarian wearing tatters of green, filth, and gold is waiting for her beyond the chamber flap: Meerskatu, Exalt-Captain of the Pillarians. He bites his lip like a disordered child, leads her without explanation down the leather-panelled corridor. He presses open a flap branded with elaborate scenes drawn from the Tusk and the First Holy War. She glimpses her stepfather hanging from the Circumfix in Caraskand.

She thinks of Achamian, suffers a pang of worry.

Meerskatu gestures for her to enter. “Truth shines,” he says, working his mouth peculiarly. The Eye glimpses the groins his teeth have savaged.

She gazes at him in horror, unable to speak for revulsion. He fairly flees from her presence, somehow sensing, knowing.

She presses past the images of things dead and holy, finds herself in an antechamber of some kind. A second flap stamped with similar motifs lies opposite. A single lantern peers through the gloom, illuminating a haphazard tangle of Imperial baggage. Her skin tingles. To be cleansed, she thinks, is to be less real.

Light gleams across a thatch of golden thread, drawing her eye to what appears to be a heavy blanket crumpled across a cot—a kind of field settee to her right. She walks toward it, savouring the feeling of fabric beneath her toes. A terror leaps upon the summit of her breath. Her throat aches.

She clutches the blanket, draws it out like a matron inspecting wares in the market. For a time she draws no breath whatsoever.

The blanket is actually a small ornamental tapestry, supple for the extraordinary quality of the weave. The tapestry itself she has seen before, she realizes. It once hung in the Sartorials, the imperial feast hall near the summit of the Andiamine Heights. But the image … that she has seen much more recently.

It seems she can even smell it, the moss and rotting bark, the air choked of all motion—the Mop.

A dank socket between trees. A rare shaft of moonlight. Her own reflection across a black pool … only transformed by the Eye into the very image she now holds in her hands …

A pregnant woman, her cropped hair all the more black for the plate of brilliant silver about her head.

Blessed.

She hears the whisk and ruffle of the far flap—freezes.

“Who are you?”

A feminine voice, husky for disuse, too exhausted to be alarmed.

Her extremities tingle. She cannot bring herself to turn. She cannot bear to look …

A curse, Achamian said so very long ago. The Eye is a curse.

At last she understands.

“Mim?”

Her hands wring the fabric. The air buzzes about her ears, daring her to breathe.

Breath drawn, as if at a sudden cut. “Mimara?”

She turns, though all her will clamours against it. She turns, the very hinge of absolute judgment, a little girl pitched to sorrow’s sobbing edge.

“Momma …”

More gasp than voice.

There she stands before her, Anas?rimbor Esmenet, the Blessed Empress of the Three Seas. Haggard. Palace-pale. A rose-silk sheet clutched to her breast …

Dark with the writhing, straining shadows of countless carnal transgressions.

Glowing with the promise of paradise.

Tears … An inarticulate cry.

Tears.



Sorweel wasn’t sure when she had slipped into the squalid interior of his tent, but then he himself had no recollection of entering. Anas?rimbor Serwa stooped to the bellied slope of the canvas, bound in her Swayali billows, carved in the ink and gold of his solitary lantern.

“Zsoronga was your friend,” she said, peering with the same impervious mien as her elder brother. But he no longer feared her scrutiny. At long last he trusted that she would see what was required of her.

“My father murdered him.”

The otherworldly density of her presence disoriented, especially in such base surroundings.

“Executed,” the youth emended, “in accordance with the terms of the treaty struck between Zeum and the Empire.” He glanced at the wild old hermit over his shoulder, sobbing and raving as he did.

She crouched, her knees pinned tight by her gown, clutched his shoulders, and he jolted (as he had always jolted) at the shock of her touch, the miracle of her proximity. The scent of cinnamon.

She clutched his shoulders, and he leapt in his skin.

“How can you say this?” she demanded.

“I will die to protect you …” Mu’miorn whispered, wiping away tears.

She clutched his shoulders, and he clawed at the brutal hand about his throat, swatted and convulsed for the pummelling hips, the jetting seed, looping cursive upon his skin …

He stared at the white point, light conjured from the fat of skinnies, awaiting her arrival. He looked up, and saw her kneeling before him, beseeching—as far as the daughter of any demon could beseech.

“Sorweel? How is it you still believe?”

He knew not her motive. He knew not whether she entertained suspicions or genuinely cared for his well-being. He knew only that she saw the face the Dread Mother had prepared for her …

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