Golgotterath.
The sun already smoldered from the heights of the Upright Horn, and as he watched, the first sliver of diurnal brilliance lanced from the tip of the Canted. The static flotsam of shelters and the bare miles of the Shigogli lay jaundiced in a false dawn before him.
He doubled over, retched for the cancerous intensity of the gold, lay braced on all fours and still falling, blinking at strings of spittle …
Small hands set about each of his arms and pulled him with embarrassing ease to his feet.
“Only I can save him,” the Blessed Empress of the Three Seas said, placing her forehead to his temple. “I’m the only traitor my husband has ever suffered to live …” She looked to them with wonder and apprehension both. “So far.”
The little Prince-Imperial jerked upright on the tolling Interval, clutched his cheeks for disorientation. The chamber was commodious but crowded. The area about his cot was small, enclosed by leather panels on his left, and hedged by heaps of stores and belongings on his right. Then he remembered: the bitch Mimara had come back, and they had stowed him with the baggage.
Awakening has a curious way of bequeathing what has come before, of granting ownership to events too tumultuous to be grasped in immersion. They had fled the ruins of the Andiamine Heights, raced across the very abdomen of the World, and he had reeled for dismay and terror and regret throughout. He had simply lacked the wind to fully reckon what had happened.
Now it seemed as though breathing were his only capacity.
We have lost this game, bro—
No!
At first he sat dejected, a rigid shell about silent, shrieking disputations. Someone would come, he told himself. Someone had to come, even if only a guardsman or a slave! He was a little boy …
Nothing. No one.
His lantern had guttered through the night. Light pricked bright through a single seam across the ceiling and dull along the top of the outside wall. It was more than enough for his eyes, far brighter, in fact, than the bowel of the Andiamine Heights. He undressed, laid out his Amoti tunic—the crimson one chased with fine ropes of gold—across the cot. Then he took it up and dressed as if it were new. He wept for hunger.
He was little!
But nothing happened. No one came.
He sat on the corner of the mattress for a time, his heels kicked out, listening, sorting through voices, searching. Purchase—he needed some purchase on the catastrophe that had engulfed his World. On the Andiamine Heights he had always known beforehand when something was happening. He would lie warm and drowsy, savouring the way space and activity could bloom from the merest trickle of sound. Haste would clip the lazy sounds of routine, purpose would cinch the murmur of gossiping slaves, and he would make a game of guessing the nature and object of all the preparations. The Umbilicus differed only in the freedom the membrane walls afforded his prying ears. In the palace, marble and concrete had forced every clink and whisper to crowd the gilded corridors. Here, he need only close his eyes and the leather walls became as lace, transparent to the scratching, piping sounds of the souls who occupied it.
Silence became ranging space, emptiness animated by scattered pockets of solitary and collective industry. Two souls bickering over the lack of water. Meerskatu, Exalt-Captain of the Pillarians, giving perfunctory instructions. Someone hammering in the great cavity of the audience chamber.
He caught a voice murmuring, “Which one?” from a nearby chamber, somewhere to the rear of the great, rambling pavilion.
It was the reverence more than the servility that seized his attention.
“The wolf’s head …” a second replied.
Where the first voice had been youthful, its Sheyic marred by the barbaric twang of the Eumarnan coasts, this second was more seasoned and assured, possessing a lilting Ainoni accent that had been filed down by long years in the Nansurium. Both were hushed, overawed even, by the presence of a silent third …
The little Prince-Imperial bolted upright, clasped his shoulders tight.
Father was here.
In a panic, he probed the murk for any sign of Mother—the bouquet of sounds he knew best of all, cherished above all the World’s clamours.
Did she sleep?
Had she fled?
You did it! You chased her away!
No …
She had to be somewhere near—had to be! He was her darling boy!
Still just little …
“Good,” the second voice said. “Now pass me the brush.”
The sound of vigorous whisking. In his soul’s eye Kelmomas could see Him standing motionless, his arms held out, while a murky body-servant stooped to brush the hems of his felt vestments.
“Father …” he dared coo in the gloom. “N-no one comes for me.”
Nothing.
Something like a little monkey claw clenched the back of his throat. He scratched his face.
“Father … please!”
We’re just little!
The rhythmic susurrus of brushing fabric continued uninterrupted, so like the slaves brooming the expanse of the Scuari Campus.
The traitors within the little boy made riot of his heart. Tears scorched his eyes. He coughed about an irresistible sob, blew spittle across the dark. A kind of feline keening prised open his mouth— Forsaken! Abandoned and betrayed!
An then his father, the Holy Aspect-Emperor, said, “The Believer-Kings assemble.”
The brushing stopped.
“You will attend your brother and sister.”
Then resumed, now quick with wonder and terror …
“Heed them, Kel.”
The sound of a slave attempting to vanish into the task assigned to him.
“They know the nature of your crimes.”
They set out across the predawn expanse of the Shigogli together, the mirror brilliance of the Inc?-Holoinas lighting their way. Once they reached the Accusatory, the Blessed Empress would simply command Proyas be cut down. Once again, Mimara refused to relinquish her accursed trinkets, and so prevented him from walking them across the sky.
“Aye!” the old Wizard cried in mystified outrage, clawing the empty face of the sky. “Lest we sa—!”
“Look!” Esmenet cried. The finger of the Accusatory lay visible in the distance, still in the shadow of the Occlusion—a fact that made the faraway blue-white flare of Gnostic sorcery more visible …
“Swayali,” Mimara, the keenest eyed among them, said.
The old Wizard cursed the inevitability as much as the fact of it. The presence of Swayali meant that he indeed could do nothing without the Blessed Empress of the Three Seas. His thoughts raced, bubbled like the white upon ferocious waters. He began pacing a small circle, explaining, in what seemed a reasonable way, how he and Esmi could go ahead— “And what?” Esmenet cried. “Leave your pregnant wife to waddle across Shigogli alone?” She whirled to Golgotterath in diminutive fury, crying, “Have you forgotten where we are?”