“For your Empire!” she barked.
Why did he still live? Why would they cling to him so, even when they understood the necessity of his destruction? What did it mean, parenthood, bags of meat birthing meat? He was the prodigal Viper the priests prattled about in Temple—Ku’kumammu, from the Tusk! The accursed Babe-with-teeth!
“The Empire has served its purpose. Only the Great Ordeal matters now.”
“No … No!”
“Yes, Esmi. I returned for you.”
Why not murder him! Or drive him away!
“And … and … Kelmomas …”
What source cares for its consequence? What sane soul weighs doom on the scales of love?
“He is the same as Inrilatas.”
“But Maithanet murdered him!”
“Only to save himself from our sons.”
“But Kel … K-Kel … he … he …”
“Even I was fooled, Esmi. No one could have known.”
Her head hunched into the line of her shoulders, which bounced to the rhythm of her sobbing. His father watched, impassive and golden. And it seemed to the youngest Prince-Imperial that he was truly dead, that he had been cast from a cloud or a star to land upon this very spot, where he adhered shattered. A patch of warmth was all that remained of him. Dwindling warmth.
“He murdered all of them,” Father was saying. “Samarmas and Sharacinth by his own hand. Inrilatas through Maithanet, and Maithanet through …”
“Through me? Me?”
“Yes.”
“No!” she screeched. “Noooo! Not him! Not him!” She swiped at her husband’s face, fingers drawn into claws. Blood welled across his cheek, spilled into his flaxen beard. “You!” she raged, her eyes wide with horror at what she had done—at what he had permitted her to do. “You’re the monster! The accursed deceiver! Akka saw it! Akka knew all along!”
The Holy Aspect-Emperor closed his eyes then opened them.
“You’re right, Esmi. I am a monster … The monster this World needs. Our son—”
“Shut up! Shut up!”
“Our son is a different kind of abomination.”
And his mother’s wail rose as something high and lilting against the silence of the night. Something beloved. Something true to the honed edge of hope.
The little boy lay broken, watching, breathing.
Willing his mother to break.
Exhaustion claimed Mother first, leaving only his father sitting upright before the dwindling flame. Anas?rimbor Kellhus, Holy Aspect-Emperor of the Three Seas. He had carried them bodily across more than a dozen horizons since Momemn, two sacks, each bearing their portion of terror, fury, and grief. Now he sat cross-legged, his silk gown taut between his knees, bloodstains mapping random islands and continents. The fire made shining hooks of the creases about his shoulders and elbows. One of the Decapitants lay akimbo across the other, so that its black-paper scrutiny repeated the implacable regard of his father, who stared directly at him, knowing full well the boy only pretended to sleep.
“You lay defeated,” his father said, his voice neither tender nor harsh, “not because you are defeated, but because victory consists in appearing so when necessity demands. You feign a paralysis you think commensurate with your age and the disaster you have suffered …”
He’s going to kill us! Flee!
The little boy lay as immobile as he had when spying upon the Narindar. Everything was as eggshells in the callused grip of Anas?rimbor Kellhus, be it cities or souls or lastborn sons. One need not fathom his designs to understand the mortal consequences of obstructing them.
“There is no flight from one such as me,” his Father said. Twin conflagrations glittered from his eyes, reflecting the fury that should have shook his voice.
“Are you going kill me?” Kelmomas finally asked. He could speak anything here, he understood, so long as it was to the point.
“No.”
He lies! Lies!
“Why?” Kelmomas croaked, a burning about his lips and eyes. “Why spare me?”
“Because it would kill your mother.”
Theliopa’s answer—and mistake.
“Mother wants me dead.”
The Aspect-Emperor shook his head. “I want you dead. Your mother … she wants me dead. I’m the one she blames for what you have done.”
See! See! I told you!
“Because she knows I truly lov—!”
“No,” his father said, swatting aside his son’s voice without any perceptible increase in volume or intensity. “She sees the surface of you, merely, and confuses this for love and innocence.”
Rage flexed the Prince-Imperial bodily, hoisted him upright.
“I do love her! I do! I do!”
His father did not so much as blink at the display.
“Some souls are broken in such a way as to think themselves whole,” he said. “The more they are flawed, the more they presume their own perfection.”
“And I’m so broken?”
Though he had not so much as moved, his father had come to seem something titanic, a leviathan coiled into the limbs and heart of a mortal man.
“You are the most flawed of my children.”
The boy trembled for suppressing his scream.
“So what will you do with me?” he finally managed to ask.
“As your mother wishes.”
The boy’s eyes darted to the Empress curled in the grasses to the left of his father, pathetic for the delicacy of her finery … Why? Why would a man such as his father pin his life to such a feeble soul?
“Should I be afraid?”
The fire sputtered, becoming scarce more than a pile of golden coals. The featureless tracts of the Cepalor gained colourless substance, scarcely more than the corpse of a world beneath the Nail-of-Heaven.
“Fear,” his dread father said, “has never been among the things you control.”
Kelmomas lowered himself back to the prick and weave of prairie grasses, his thoughts a clamour, his accursed brother shrieking within, demanding he slip away in the deep of night, live among more bestial, more trustworthy things, an animal among animals, free from the sublime terror of his father, the idiot tyranny of his mother.
Flee! Run-run-run away!
But the Holy Aspect-Emperor watched over all, a gaze that paced horizons, worlds. The numbness eclipsed any the eight-year-old had ever experienced, until he seemed as inert as the chill earth beneath, little more than another mound of clay.
Afterward he would recognize it as despair.
Each leap had delivered them to a more tousled world, from skin-smooth plains to gnarled foothills to rutted mountains. Father deposited them beneath a mountain that, from a distance, had appeared bent about a broken arm, bones jutting from voluminous gowns of granite. The extent of the overhang only became visible after the Cant delivered them into its shadow. It no longer resembled anything in the mossy gloom; it merely loomed, vast heights hanging out and over—shelter from the rain gowning the foothills, as well as a source of nagging worry. One could raise a hundred ziggurats from the bulbous stone affixed above, a thousand. Kelmomas could feel the torsions emanating from the concavity, it seemed, the elemental need to slough and plummet, to fall as a million hammers.