The expression of a Believer-King.
The details of her beauty arrested him, the saddle of freckles about the bridge of her nose, the whitening of her brows from dark roots, the profile of the Empress on the Kellic …
The sunburnt pallor of the Accursed Aspect-Emperor.
“Does it matter, Serwa?”
The Son of Harweel gazed into her imploring face, watched the openness of it tumble as from a parapet, falling into Imperial obscurity. He started at her clutch, the heat of her palms. He watched her bolt from the squalid confines.
“To shield what is weak,” Mu’miorn cooed.
The assurance of a kiss, her face so close, then pitching back and away, dwindling, vanishing into the nocturnal nations. The scent of cinnamon. He sat, so very far from alone. He squinted for sunlight. He peered across the assembled Believer-Kings and their vassals, the battered glory of the Three Seas. He turned and saw her singing, luminance flaring from eyes rounded by horror. He smiled, stepped into the glittering violence of her lights …
While all around the darkling World heaved and danced, the Southron Kings howling at the pillar of salt that had been her father.
Do you see, my sweet?
Skinnies. The Great Ordeal had consumed their foe. Sranc.
He should have run screaming to find Mimara, but the Grandmaster’s story, when he began it, compelled him, held him riven with dismay. Dagliash. The Scalding. The Scalded.
“But you were there!” Achamian finally cried. “You could have counselled them! Told them what was happening!”
Laughter, sneering not so much out of condescension as self-loathing. “We all thought ourselves Seswatha! Mandati. Swayali … Any who had clasped the Heart!”
And so he learned of the Meat and the nightmare that was Agongorea—how the Sranc had very nearly conquered the Men of the Ordeal from within. He listened blank with incredulity as the Mandate Grandmaster, his voice harrowed, described the crimes he and his brothers had committed. Saccarees’ second mention of the Scalded occasioned a long silence.
“What are you saying?”
A long exhalation. A grimace for a smile.
“We fell upon them, Wizard … Proyas commanded it, claimed that it was the will of our Holy Aspect-Emperor! ‘What Hell hath cooked for us!’ he cried. I remember it … like another mad Dream, I remember. ‘We must eat what Hell hath cooked for us!’”
A shudder wracked the Grandmaster. He glared at nothing for one heartbeat … two.
“We fell upon them, the leprous wretches, the Scalded. We fell upon them the way … the way … Sranc would fall—and worse! We-we … feasted … Gloried in … obscenities … degradations …”
The man snorted in sudden, convulsive disgust, thumbed the tears from his eyes.
“That is why Proyas dies.”
The little Prince-Imperial asphyxiated for dismay. How? Here of all places …
You should have killed her!
And now of all times!
Kelmomas had lain next to his mother in the pretense of sleep, probing the leather-chambered complexity of the Umbilicus with his hearing. As far back as he could remember, his impulse was to own the detail of his circumstances, to know the ways, the souls, and the objects that populated his surroundings. He had known that someone had arrived, someone significant enough to send ripples of activity throughout the Umbilicus—and to command the reverence belonging to him and his family. He had heard the incredulity the arrival had evoked. He had even caught wayward tones of disapproval …
But for all that the newcomer had refused to speak.
He had lain listening and waiting, and waiting, but nothing, not a word, nothing that would betray identity. He decided it couldn’t be Kay?tas—his elder brother was far too fond of testing his voice. It could very well be Mo?nghus, who was given to long, sullen silences, but his fearsome aspect would have cast a wary shadow across the voices of those tending to him. That left his sister, Serwa, who had always unnerved him, not so much for her native penetration as her scrying attitude. Where others forever glossed their surroundings, she had a habit of peering at things near …
She was like him, that way.
Then the guardsmen showed the newcomer to their chambers, and upon hearing the quaver in the Exalt-Captain’s voice—the horror that was guilt and awe—Kelmomas knew instantly and irrevocably that someone other than Serwa had been delivered to them—someone impossible. He had lain reeling, so preoccupied with outrage that he failed to sense Mother stir. He almost cried out when she climbed upright, pulled herself to groggy feet. Instead, he lay slack in the pretense of slumber, knowing that she regarded him, blinking at the bleary turmoil that so disordered her heart. A pang of adoration throttled by grief and monstrous disbelief … he could almost smell it.
See! She still loves!
He would have exulted, twitched and cooed as if suffering some onerous nightmare, affected the semblance of a child not so much bent by birth as afflicted by happenstance. For everything he had done, he had done out of love for her. Even Father had seen it, attested to it!
She would see! She had to!
She turned on an audible shiver, and trotted from the chamber as if across cold floors. She needed to make water, the young Prince-Imperial realized.
He heard her press the flap aside, knew that she ducked her head out of some old instinct. Then she vanished into soundlessness …
And somehow Anas?rimbor Kelmomas knew.
“Who are you?”
His mother’s voice, raw for loss and survival.
“Mim?”
A long moment.
“Mimara?”
Kelmomas lay transfixed, impaled by spears of catastrophic consequence. Never … Never had he heard such wonder, such crazed surrender, in her voice. It was ridiculous—obscene even! She was whole! She ended at her skin—like everyone else! Why? Why play half a soul?
“Momma …”
More breath than voice, remote in the manner of forgotten gods, and yet more near than near …
It was stamped into him, that voice, down to the merest nuance. He need only hear it once to make it his own. But it was too late—far too late! They embraced, mother and daughter, slumped to their knees, keened and sobbed. And he lay raging, fuming, weeping. Here? Now? How could it be? He clawed the sheets. How much? What must he do? How much must he endure?
You should have killed her!
Shut-up! Shut-up!
Filthy slit! Crazed whore!
He pressed through the stamped leather, saw them, snivelling, mewling. He had no recollection of leaping from the mattress. He simply found himself standing, staring, breathing.
The two women clutched one another, balling fabric in fists. Mimara faced him, her cheek mashed into her mother’s neck and shoulder, her face pinched about a thousand passions. “I was so afraid,” Mother hissed, her voice cracked and muffled.