“You believe the one speaking is Kelmomas,” the Holy Aspect-Emperor said, “and that the one whispering is Samarmas, not realizing the two of you continually trade places.”
The boy watched as blank as a thing of sugar—and as fragile.
“You are!” he gurgled as much as screamed or wheezed. “You are! You’re go-going to kill me!”
The occluded presence stood inscrutable. A clenching in the passage of time.
“I’m not convinced there’s anyone to kill.”
The Anas?rimbor stepped into a wider stance, rolling Malowebi along his thigh.
“Look-into-my-my-face!” the little Prince-Imperial cried, reaching out as if to catch a slamming portal.
Metagnostic singing—still pinching the Iswazi sorcerer despite the absence of living ears. Reality vibrated like sand on a drum-skin, a sound that blew through the drooped ceilings, echoed as rain through shuttered windows.
“My-my face! Pleasssee. Daddy. Look into my face, please-Daddy-please! You can-can seeee! Serwa convinced me! I serve yo—!”
The Cant of Translocation cut the darkness along a different set of angles, made a shadowless plate of the little boy’s face, glutinous for remorse, bright for sneering— Then the page turned and everything was different, and Malowebi alone remained unmoved.
Drusas Achamian mooned about the entrance to the leather-walled chamber, fear clenched like an anxious fist in his breast. He found breathing difficult. His heart had become rot and slurry—something beaten for merely beating.
Simple being, it seemed, had become a question.
How had it all come to this?
Agony seized the beloved voice, held it high upon a screech, then smashed it into hacking shards.
“It hurts …” Mimara gasped from the mattress. “It huuurts!”
She shrieked again.
She lay naked and gleaming, a soiled sheet across her mountainous abdomen. Her shadow writhed as she writhed, drawn long across the chamber … like a spider, Achamian could not help but think, black, elongated limbs flexing about a black, bulbous thorax.
“Too much!” she cried in the spasm’s wake. “Some-some-something is wrong, Momma! It hurts too-too much!”
Esmenet sat cross-legged at her side, daubed her forehead with a wetted rag.
“Nothing’s wrong, my Sweet,” she said, smiling as best as she could manage. “The first is always the most painful.”
She drew the cloth down either cheek, and the image caught the old Wizard’s breath, for on certain angles in certain casts of shadow and light, only their ages distinguished them, as if one and the same woman had been divided between times.
“Shhh …” the Blessed Empress continued. “Pray this one isn’t so stubborn as you were, Dewdrop … I screamed for two days!”
Mimara grimaced—a smile, he realized. “Don’t …” she said about a huff. “Don’t call me that!”
“Dewdrop-Dewdrop-Dewdrop …” the Blessed Empress chimed. “I called you that when yo—”
“Don’t call me that!” Mimara shrieked in abrupt fury.
It was her third such mercurial outburst, but Achamian started as violently as he had at the first.
Esmenet, however, scarcely blinked, continued smiling after catching her lips in a firm line, continued her soothing ministrations.
“Shush … shush … Let it pass. Let it fade.”
“I’m s-sorry, Momma.”
Something within him clawed and clamoured for escape. Esmi had demanded that he stay, that he assist, even though he had yet to do anything but wring his hands. “This is your doing!” she had accused. And he knew from her look and tone that she had only nominally forgiven him for loving her daughter. So he had stayed, and he had stood, watching mute, feeling for all the world like an earthen jug filled with ever more insects, his insides crawling as palpably as his skin. This was no place for any man, let alone one so old and as put upon as himself. These were womanish mysteries, too fraught, too pungent with truth, too raw and wet for the odourless, arid heart of a man.
Besides, this wasn’t even supposed to be happening.
Mimara’s breathing eased, then became inaudible altogether. Another long lull in the spasms had begun.
“See?” Esmenet murmured. “See?”
With the relaxation of suffering came the easing of obligation. Perhaps that was why it overcame him at that moment, the eye-rolling aversion, the irresistible urge to shirk …
He fled, though he would never admit as much, batted aside the stamped leather flaps that passed for doors. The air was too close, he told himself. The sights were too delicate … for a stomach so … so wet as his.
He found himself outside, dizzy with guilt and confusion. The Horns climbed impossible in the nocturnal distance, the northernmost trailing a skein of clouds the way a stick might trail foam in a river.
Curse Esmenet and her sentence! Who was she to judge?
He leaned against his knees, breathing as if he really required the open air he had used to justify his cowardice. He need not see the two Pillarians to know they stood behind him—given the Chorae bound to their navels. They were omnipresent around the Umbilicus otherwise, garrisoned as they were adjacent to the grand pavilion and stationed throughout. It was the premonition of the Mark that drew his eyes upward, one deeper and more limned in errant peculiarities than any he had ever apprehended—including that of the Nonman King.
He saw a figure striding directly toward him from the shadowy mouth of an avenue. The old Wizard loosed a long, shuddering exhalation, warred with a far different urge to flee … knowing. He stood upright, his breast a beehive for terror and incredulity, and watched Anas?rimbor Kellhus resolve from obscurity …
The Holy Aspect-Emperor of the Middle-North and the Three Seas.
How long had it been?
He had seen the man thrice during the benediction and the subsequent uproar—three glimpses, merely, each a cold knife, so sharp were the pangs they sparked. For most souls, there’s no arrangement, no clarification of charges, no enumerating of the accused or apportioning of the guilt. For most, gall is a kind of dwelling, a place where pangs and images resolve from the inarticulate gyre of outrage that has outlived its season. Most souls are illiterate, and so cannot hope to use words to pin the shadows racing across their hearts. And even when they can, they loathe framing their resentments with any clarity that might make them disputable.
Not so Drusas Achamian. For twenty long years he had practiced and prepared for this very moment: the words he would say, the pose he would strike, the stratagems that would reclaim his trammelled honour … his … his …
Instead he found himself batting at his ringing ears.