No ground could hang such for long.
Father muttered for a time to his mother, explaining the need to secure provisions and clothes as quickly as possible. The boy watched with fascination, then dismay, as he unbound the Decapitants from his waist and set them upon an oyster-shaped stone. He curled the hair of each into a black nest then laid the desiccated things like sentinels surveying different directions. Mother peppered him with demands as he did so, insisting they go to Sumna to take command of the forces she had mustered there. She did not realize they raced for the Great Ordeal far more than they fled from the Empire. Rescuing them had come at a cost, the boy understood, one Father was now keen to recover as quickly as he could …
Was the Holy Host of Hosts nearing Golgotterath?
The Empress aborted her protest at her husband’s first sorcerous word, and stood watching dismayed as lines of brilliance ravelled about him, then cinched him into blinking absence. Kelmomas fairly trembled for the hatred he glimpsed in her eyes.
Father was right, Samarmas whispered.
The youngest living son of Anas?rimbor Kellhus very nearly wept, such was his relief. Only his hope kept his face blank. He feigned distraction just to be safe, gazing up at the cleft ceilings, peering out across the rain-shrouded foothills.
It was just the two of them … finally. Wonder. Joy. Horror.
“How?” his mother said, her gaze dead for losses. She sat upon heaped wrack some five paces below him, huddled in the ceremonial absurdity of her station, attire that made her seem a flower in winter. Tears flowed down her famous cheeks.
It was just the two of them … and the Decapitants.
“Because …” he said, feigning something he could neither express nor fathom. “I love you.”
He had hoped she would flinch; he had imagined that her gaze would flutter and her hands would fist.
She closed her eyes instead. The long blink of horror confirmed.
She believes! Samarmas cried.
Father had said as much: his life hung from a hair strung about her heart. Were it not for Mother, he would already be dead. The Holy Aspect-Emperor would not squander the Strength on cracked bowls. Only the intransigence of motherhood, the impossibility of his mother hating a soul hatched from her womb, vouchsafed his survival. Even now, her flesh angled to redeem him—he could see it in her!—even as her soul balked at the instincts his presence summoned.
She forbade his execution because she wanted him alive, because in some deranged fashion his life was more precious than her own. Mummy!
The only real mystery was why Father would care … or why he would bother returning to Momemn at all. For love?
“Madness!” his mother bawled, her voice so raw as to burn in his own throat.
The Decapitants lay akimbo to her left, the one husk leaning against the other. The mouth of the nearest gaped like a dreaming fish.
Were they watching? Could they see?
“I-I …” he began. He could almost feel the faux pang that broke his voice.
“What?” she nearly screamed. “What?”
“I didn’t want to share,” he said blankly. “I could not abide the portion you had allotted.”
And he wondered why it seemed all the same, lies and confession.
“I am my father’s son.”
Nothing to see. Nothing to hear or taste or smell or even touch. But he could recollect all these things, enough to ache for their absence.
Malowebi could remember.
The Holy Aspect-Emperor shining before him. A whirlwind roaring about them, a ruinous blur that had been Fanayal’s pavilion. His head tipping from his shoulders. His body still standing, spouting blood, voiding bowel. Anas?rimbor Kellhus singing, eyes like blown-upon coals, smoking with meaning as he chanted the terror of the Daimos …
The Daimos!
And though Malowebi had no voice, he screamed, thought crushed into thought, heartbeat fluttering into steam, a thread of anguished heat waving in the embalming cold, bottomless deep. Pursed! He had been pursed in the manner of Zeumi sailors sentenced to execution at sea, and now he drowned, sewn into a sack woven of oblivion, absolute insensitivity.
No limbs to kick.
Void for wind.
Glimpsing shadows of his suffering, merely.
And then, inexplicably, his eyes were open.
There was light in the dark, feeling. Cold pressed his cheek, but his body remained utterly insensate otherwise. He tried to draw breath, to cry out—for elation or for horror he did not know—but he could not feel any tongue, let alone taste any breath …
Something was wrong.
Malowebi saw milky firelight. He could make out heaped and hanging stone, twigs broken into insect-leg tangles … Where were his limbs? For that matter, where was his breathing?
His skin?
Something disastrous had happened!
Sparks twirled in skirts of smoke climbing to vanish against unfamiliar constellations. He heard voices—a man and a woman arguing some lament. The cherubic face of a young Norsirai boy bobbed into existence from the nocturnal verge …
Bearing a stick.
To be desolate is to be of a piece with things inanimate, to belong in a manner the joyful can never know. The little boy could feel the sum of the World in his embrace, that endless, rolling ache. His mother and father bickered about firelight several paces distant. He breathed like other little boys he had heard sleeping, the rhythm of rocks cooling in evening shadow. No matter how his thoughts raced, his heart beat slowly, like a thing made of mud.
And even still, his father said, “He is not asleep.”
His mother made a noise.
“I care nothing for what he is.”
“Then let me do what needs to be done.”
Mother hesitated. “No …”
“The boy needs to be destroyed, Esmi.”
“Destroyed. You make him sound like a sick dog. You do tha—”
“I do that because he is not a little boy.”
“No,” she said, her assurance absolute for exhaustion. “You do that to change the words from those belonging to a son to those belonging to an animal.”
Father said nothing. A dead peashrub branch jutted from the intervening ground, forks dividing the orange image of his father not so much into pieces as possibilities. Kelmomas had marvelled at the Narindar, envied him his Unerring Grace, all the while forgetting the Grace belonging to his father, the unconquerable Anas?rimbor Kellhus I. He was the Shortest Path, a wave of inevitability flapped through the fabric of blind fortune. Not even the Gods could touch him! Not Ajokli, the wicked Four-Horned Brother. Not even Earth-cracking Momas!
Father had survived them …
“But why even care what I say?” Mother was saying. “If he’s so dangerous, why not simply grab him and snap his neck?”
His brother could not stop keening, Mummeee! Mummeee!
Father was implacable. “Why come back to save you?”
She held two fingers to her lips and mimed spitting to her side: a gesture she had learned from the dockmen in Sumna, Kelmomas knew.
“You came to save your accursed Empire!”