No. No. Not like this.
Haloes, every bit as miraculous as Shimeh, like gold-glowing plates serving a sewage head and sewage hands. Achamian could scarce see the mundane fact of the man, so hideous was his Mark, so corrupt. He was taller than he remembered, dressed in the same white vestments as earlier, his golden beard squared and braided in the manner of the Far Antique Kyranean High-Kings. The peculiar pommel of his blade, Enshoiya, jutted above his left shoulder. The legendary Decapitants swayed gangrenous from his hip, bound to his nimil-scaled girdle by their hair. Eyelids twitched in deep sockets, revealing glimpses of glass, oiled and black. Ingrown lips masticated about teeth like black nails, as if murmuring.
Achamian shuddered, realizing that Kellhus truly had fathomed the Hells as rumour said. The floor of the World groaned, the joists of existence creaked, such was the density of his presence. Each advancing step fell upon his breast as much as upon the accursed ground, crushing the breath from his lungs …
So much power so concentrated! Never had the World seen the like …
And he, Drusas Achamian, had been the one responsible, the fool who had betrayed the Gnosis to a D?nyain!
Twenty long years ago.
Anas?rimbor Kellhus came to a halt a mere four paces before him, a vision throbbing for memory as much as for arcane intensities. The Pillarians stationed at the Umbilicus entrance had fallen to their faces, and when Achamian failed to do the same, the nearer guardsman barked some threat he couldn’t hear for the thunder in his breast and ears …
The old Wizard stood gaping.
“You spoke with Saccarees,” Kellhus said in ancient K?niüric. No solicitation. No jnan. “You troubled him.”
“Not nearly enough,” Achamian replied in numb kind.
The figure did not so much emanate light as refashion it into something worn at angles orthogonal to the World.
“You told him of your Dreams.”
Achamian nodded warily. “As much as he would listen.”
The pale eyes fixed him the way he remembered, as if he were a bauble hanging upon an abyss, not simply the last thing existing, but the only thing.
“Will you tell me?”
“No.”
Anas?rimbor Kellhus had requested it, thus it must be denied.
“Your hatred has not waned.”
“Cnaiur’s lesson.”
A heartbeat of bottomless regard.
“So he lives.”
Dismay. The old Wizard’s hackles pricked and needled, for he understood the folly of this encounter. There was no way to deceive the man before him, no way to influence or outmanoeuvre. And the longer he stood inside the circuit of his inquiry, the more he would inevitably betray—even secrets he himself did not know!
It was axiomatic.
“I’ve seen Ishual,” he said out of instinct, whether idiotic or canny he did not know.
The epic being before him paused, and for the space of a breath all the night seemed a glass for his preternatural scrutiny.
“So you know of its destruction.”
Achamian nodded, swallowed, thought of the Qirri stashed with Mimara’s belongings.
“I watched your son leap to his death.”
A nearly imperceptible nod.
“Did anyone else survive?”
“I know what it means to be D?nyain!”
The transformation was nothing short of miraculous: what was remote became warm and familiar, the smirk of a friend long accustomed to the irksome wiles of a damaged friend.
“To be ruthless?”
“No!” Achamian spat in sudden fury. “Wicked! An abomination in the Eye of God!”
A perplexed frown … one that recalled Xinemus.
“The same as you?”
Achamian stared witless.
Kellhus abruptly turned toward the great pavilion’s entrance, as if keen to something only he could hear. A fraction of the old Wizard balked at following his gaze, convinced this was but another accursed D?nyain ploy, another way to rattle and misdirect, bewilder and dominate. But he looked regardless, his chin answering to an instinct more decisive than his nattering soul. The Pillarians remained prostrate, hunched like green and gold scarabs to either side of the once-ornate flaps. The flanking braziers lapped and sparked, indifferent. The leather planes of the Umbilicus climbed beyond their meagre light …
And, like some miracle from the Tusk, Esmenet pressed through the shadowy cleft.
Her irked look immediately fastened upon Achamian, the truant soul she sought, only to be waylaid by the sight of her monstrous husband …
Her right hand reflexively clasped her left, covering the bruise that was all that remained of her conjoined-snake tattoo. Achamian could almost weep for how she stiffened, for the way her expression melted into a blank imitation of her Imperial Husband’s own. In that slender moment, it seemed, he saw the very sum of all she had lost and endured in the interval between this moment and Shimeh. Anas?rimbor Kellhus had been the greatest blight, the most onerous yoke she had ever suffered, and she hated him as she hated no other …
Achamian saw this as surely as if he were D?nyain.
“Where is Kelmomas?” she asked in the crisp, caste-noble Sheyic of the Andiamine Heights, with only the merest burr betraying her caste-menial blood. She referred to the boy, the old Wizard realized, her boy, the one behind the furor that had occasioned Mimara’s labour.
“Chained,” Kellhus said, “to a stake in Lord Shorathises’ pavilion.”
She searched the implacable face. An air of defeat had already crept into her manner. For all her matronly sturdiness, she suddenly seemed willowy, frail, standing in the shadow of her godlike Emperor.
“What happened?”
“You saw. He murdered Sorweel, Son of Harweel, the Believer-King of Sakarpus.”
He could feel it then, the enervation of dwelling overlong in the shadow of such inhuman vacancy. And he understood how profoundly it had mangled her, being the human portal for the emergence of inhuman souls, loving what could only manipulate her in turn. Another Whale-mother. A clamour to save her inflamed him, to rescue not so much their present as their past, to pluck her from the catastrophic consequences of decisions entirely his own. He would do anything, in that moment, to go back, to yield to her beseeching, to stay and make love to her on the sweaty banks of the River Sempis all those years ago …
Anything but abandon her for the Library of the Sareots.
“But why? Did he even know him?”
“He thought him an assassin. He says that he could see murder in his face, and he believes what he says.”
There was tenderness in Kellhus’s voice, even affection, but it was muted, dulled by the years, and careful as well, like all lies crafted in awareness of ineluctable disbelief.
“And was there?” she asked, her voice tight. “Was there … murder in his face?”
“No. He was a Believer … Among the most devout.”
The Blessed Empress simply stared at him, inscrutable save for the anguish bruising her eyes.
“So Kel just … he just …”
“There is no reclaiming him, Esmi.”
She looked down in thought. Then she turned on her heel and strode back toward the Umbilicus.