He hobbled close, his face inscrutable. The reek of him tainted the air.
She struck him, bloodied the lips hidden beneath the wire excesses of his mustache and beard. She raised her arm to strike him again, but he caught her wrist in a hermit fist, wrestled her into his embrace. They slumped together into the dust. He smelled of earth. He smelled of smoke and shit and decay. He reeked of things both whole and frail, of everything the Andiamine Heights had stolen. She wailed into the stink of him, somehow knowing that after this night, she would never weep again.
She heard Mimara shouting—at the Pillarians, she realized.
Her daughter’s arms slipped about her shoulders. Jasmine. Myrrh. Her belly pressed warm and taut across her back …
Esmenet, Accursed Empress of the Three Seas, wondered at the prod of a fetal kick. And she understood … With a clarity and finality she never would have thought possible, she understood.
She belonged to them. She belonged to them now.
The ones that could love.
CHAPTER
TWELVE
The Last Whelming
Not all arrows miss an enemy unseen, but no arrow hits an enemy unknown.
—Scylvendi Proverb
Before birth there is conception, and before conception there is maturation, and before maturation there is birth. Thus the light passes from brand to brand. For souls are naught but torches that burn as time and place.
—Five Apprehensions, HILIAPOS
Early Autumn, 20 New Imperial Year (4132, Year-of-the-Tusk), Golgotterath.
All nations differ in their prosperity. The zenith of every people is a thing distinct, the product of custom, belief, and expression imperious to the degree it contradicts those of its neighbours. It is ruin that divests them of luxury, ruin that strips away the florid dividends of power and ingenuity. Suffering, be it war or famine or pestilence, grinds nations into a common meal. The lamentations of the one are the wails of the other.
Thus they had come, the nations and peoples of the Three Seas, bound by common prayer and insignia, yes, but taking haughty pride in their distinction all the same, what set them apart from their fellows. So the Ainoni lords painted their faces white and scoffed at the silver masks donned by their Conriyan counterparts. So the Galeoth laughed at the beards of the Tydonni, who ridiculed the Nansur for their smooth cheeks, who derided the Thunyeri for their unruliness, and so on. Thus they had come, the Southron Kings of the Three Seas and the Middle-North, each the Son of an ancient and elaborate heritage, each hailing from cities fat with artifice and decadent age. Thus they had come, proud and debauched, their origins flashing brilliant in their carriage, their garb, and their armaments, each the distinct flower of a different soil.
Thus they had marched beyond the Pale of Men, across the trackless leagues, wandering so very far from home—in all ways.
A nightmarish transit … as much descent as crossing.
And so they had reached the Furnace Plain having passed through the furnace of E?rwa, a kind of human plunder, an assemblage of ancient relics, heirlooms, broken up and melted down, re-forged into something unlike anything the World had ever seen—recast. Accursed, where they had been blessed. Damned where they had been saved. And one where they had been many.
A new people, grim for witness, fierce for desperation, pious for hunger, their ornament cast away, their garments stained by the soils of a thousand lands, their armaments scavenged from dead kinsmen. A monochrome nation, born of demented months instead of placid ages.
The night following the Great Letting, the Holy Aspect-Emperor went to each of his most illustrious commanders, sounding their hearts in seclusion. He offered no pardon for the atrocities they had committed, nothing that might dull the horror in their hearts. He spurned their protestations, begrudged them their beseeching. He had come to them in fury, harsh in edict and impatient in audience. According to rumour, he even struck Earl Shilka Grimmel, who could not cease his lamentations. Of all the sins, unmanliness had become the most egregious.
Tomorrow, he told them, the Schools would be loosed, and the Ark would be stoked as an oven!
“And when it is naught but a gutted hulk,” he grated, luminous beneath sagging canvas, “we shall take what remains of our blasted hearts … and return home.”
And in the breathless aftermath of his visitations, the Southron caste-nobles wondered at the strangeness of that word … wept for it.
All Men yearn for home.
Mother and daughter led Achamian to the Empress’s chamber in the Umbilicus. Their reunion was fraught, as charged with disbelief and gratitude as apprehension and injury. Reuniting souls once bound together amounts to the coupling of interlocking wounds, the pressing of scar to scar, scab to scab. So when Esmenet first refused to intercede on behalf of Proyas, Achamian presumed she nursed some grudge that only understanding and patient explanation could overcome. His every glimpse of Mimara heavy with child stabbed him, after all. He reasoned the same glimpses afflicted Esmenet with the outrage corresponding to his shame.
But the more he implored her, the more the fact of Proyas’s straits clawed bubbles from the mud of his belly. Esmenet affected an attitude of forbearance reminiscent of their arguments in Sumna: the wilder his worry for Proyas, the more profound her pity for Akka. She had seen thousands “slung,” she said, especially in Nilnamesh after Akirapita’s first successes fomented rebellion. Men so bound and suspended never lasted more than several hours, strangled from within by the weight of their own bodies. “He’s beyond everyone, now,” she said, her cruelty as sharp as her glare. “You can’t save him, Akka. No more than you could save Inrau.”
Mimara had argued with him up to this point; now she looked at him with the wide eyes of a lapsed confederate.
“I’ll simply take him then!”
“So what?” Esmenet cried. “Save him so you might die together?”
He felt so very old in that moment.
Both women watched him with sorrow and apprehension now, even more alike for gloom and the convergence of passion. Despite their damaged angles, they saw one and the same man, he realized. They knew. The urge to tear out his own beard bubbled from the edge of his fingertips.
The burden was too heavy.
“Akka! The World is our object now … We recline in the shadow of Golgotterath!”
The toll too high.
Too much.
“The very shadow my boy dies in!” he cried, his heart overburdened, his senses swollen with imaginings of Proyas’s anguish. And he was on his feet, barrelling through leather flaps, canvas halls, heedless of the women shouting behind him. And then he was outside, in air too rank to impart liberation, beneath sky too grey to belong to day or night, and the image of it knocked him to his knees.