“Celebrated?” the boy snapped.
The friendliness dropped from the caste-noble’s scowl. Eastern oaf that he was, Croimas was not one to suffer youthful impudence. “He saved your sister’s life,” he said in a tone poised between flattery and reprimand. “And a whole fraction of the Ordeal aside!”
The Prince-Imperial persisted in peering around the fool.
“He alarms you?” the Palatine of Kethantei asked.
“Yes!” Kelmomas cried in exasperation. “Can none of you fools see?”
“What is there to see?”
Malice.
What’s happening?
I don’t know! I don’t know!
Lord Croimas stood upright with the paternal air of rescinding a gift given. “After your father blesses him, I will call him over.”
Kelmomas further insulted the fool by pressing him to the side, out of his line of sight. The Son of Harweel was now but two souls back from Father … Kelmomas swept the Conriyan Lord and everything else from the plate of his attention, aimed his every sense, his every fraction, at the Traitor … until he was all that could be heard, all that could be seen or pondered …
The Son of Harweel possessed nothing of the anxious excitement that so animated the Men about him. He did not sweat. His heart did not palpate. He did not breathe, as so many others did, from below his clavicles …
There was an air of … routine about him. In a queer way, it almost seemed as if the novelty of what happened, let alone the enormity, left him entirely untouched.
His eyes did not dart, but remained fixated on the image of his Holy Aspect-Emperor, gazing with ludicrous confidence—and with a naked hatred.
Young Anas?rimbor Kelmomas understood Sorweel Harweelson was no mere traitor …
He was an assassin.
I’m afraid, Kel …
Me too, Brother.
Me too.
The Sickle has fallen. The Demon is salt.
The Demon smiles in false greeting, saying, “Blessed be Sakarpus, Eternal Bastion of the Wild. Blessed be her Most Heroic King.”
The White-Luck Warrior looks up, sees himself kneel, lean forward to place his lips against the abomination’s floating knee.
The Demon is salt. The Lords of the Ordeal are screaming.
He glances over his shoulder, sees himself—as it happens—joyous and exultant, crying out, “Yatwer ku’angshir ciphrangi!”
He stands in queue, patiently awaiting what has always already transpired, knowing and knowing and knowing … Soon the Sickle will fall.
A thronging wall of Believer-Kings, Chieftains, Generals, Palatines and Earls, Grandmasters and their advisors all but surrounded them, leering and cadaverous. For several taut heartbeats, Kelmomas peered at Father in his periphery, his leonine profile imperious, at once proximal and remote. Judgment incarnate. The air thrummed for deep-throated song …
The light that does not shine but reveals,
The sun that leans gentle upon laden fields.
Would that Kelmomas could scream it away, strike all sound and motion from the brawling carnival before him. From his position, the great rent in the westward wall and ceiling of the Umbilicus framed the head and shoulders of the petitioners. He could see only the canted Horn, shining morose in the sunless distance. The assassin’s profile lingered beneath it for several heartbeats, obscuring sepulchral fortifications. It happened quickly, so quickly that none could have seen it save Kelmomas …
A stork, angular and pristine white, flitted across the opening … great wings wide.
What?
It was a glimpse so unexpected, so incongruous, that it could only refocus his attention on the immediate.
A balm to my heart, a lamp to my feet …
Kelmomas saw the starved Schoolman in front of the traitor stand and depart, drawing a crucial fragment of Father’s care with him.
Teach me, O’ Saviour, so I might finally weep.
The Son of Harweel stepped forward and fell to his knees in the man’s place, gazed up at his miraculous Lord-and-Prophet, his lip hooked in contempt, his eyes shining for lunatic hate.
Father hailed him—welcomed him as another Believer-King!
Anas?rimbor Kelmomas, the youngest son of the Holy Aspect-Emperor, glimpsed a hand clutch in concealment, saw a pouch branded with three sickles fall from a sleeve …
Mimara is done with talk. They have been stranded at the congregation’s shadowy perimeter all along, arguing first with Kay?tas and now with Serwa, peering at the glowing heart of the assembly from where the light failed.
“Enough!” she cries over the chorus of singing Lords. She has never liked Serwa, not even when the girl was a wobbling toddler. Mother would ceaselessly chide her for treating a mere child as a rival, but Mimara always knew that some part of Mother understood (or at least feared) her daughter’s animus.
They were never quite human, her siblings. Always somehow more, somehow less.
And now here she is, Anas?rimbor Serwa, resplendent in her billows, a grown woman—a Grandmistress! The most powerful witch the World has ever known. And it irks—all the more for being petty. Irks that she’s taller, by a hand at least. Irks that she’s clean. Even the way her beauty cuts against the ferocity of her Mark irritates.
“We go where we will as we will!”
“No,” Serwa responds terse and remote. “You go where Father wills.”
“And Mother?” Mimara snaps. Mother was implacable when it was simply Kay?tas confronting them, but her resolve has wilted since the arrival of Serwa. “What of her will?”
“What of i—?”
“Father will receive you,” Kay?tas hastily intercedes. “You need only wait, Sister.”
How absurd he looks decked in their uncle’s insignia and mantle—how tragic and corrupt!
“Have you both taken leave of your senses?” she cries—with enough violence, apparently, to earn Mother’s wary hand on her forearm. “Proyas dies!” she shouts for a second time, her voice brimming with disgust for it. “Even as we speak!”
This silences them, but they remain stubbornly planted in their path nevertheless. When Mimara makes to barge around, Serwa seizes the crotch of her arm.
“No, Mim,” the witch says firmly.
“What?” Mimara cries, yanking her arm free. “Are we not Anas?rimbor, the same as you?”
“You never believed so.”
Mimara glares into her sister’s eyes, all her prior resentments twisting like sparks in the smoke of her fury. How could she not be jealous? The daughter raised in pampered splendour and the daughter sold to slavers. The daughter tended, enabled, and the daughter neglected … the daughter perpetually denied! She had been the prize of the brothel, the Empress! Allowed to pick and choose her abusers like suitors. That was the one thing Mother could never understand, the way she had been condemned by her rescue, a trampled weed replanted in the World’s most glorious garden, her blood thick with caste-menial mud, always outwitted, always outshone by her golden brothers and sisters. How could she not be ugly, incarcerated on the Andiamine Heights?