Drusas Achamian fell to his knees upon wicked Shigogli, old and wrecked and more confounded than he had ever been. He opened his arms, tears spilling hot, beseeching …
“Kellhus!”
The Holy Aspect-Emperor paused to regard him, an inked apparition, wrenching for the carrion profundity of his Mark. For the first time Achamian noticed all the faces peering from the shadowy slots about them, men squinting at the dark, wondering at the truth beneath the ancient tongue Kellhus had used to conceal their exchange.
“This one thing …” Achamian cried. “Please … Kellhus … I beg.” Sobs shook him. Tears spilled. “This one thing …”
A single heartbeat. Piteous. Impotent.
“Tend to your women, Akka.”
The old Wizard flinched, coughed for the pang in his breast, flew to his feet upon bursting rage. “Murderer!”
Never had a word seemed so small.
Anas?rimbor Kellhus looked to the Horns rearing into the firmament, the vast and malevolent gleam.
“Something,” the monstrous entity said, glancing back, “must be eaten.”
“Mummy?” the little blot of blackness called.
Esmenet lifted the hood from her lantern, held the light out and away more to spare her eyes than to probe pavilion’s interior. She glimpsed bare corners, bellied seams, hanging swales of canvas bleached and mottled for long months on the trail. She smelled must and dank, the melancholy residue of some dead owner.
There was something nightmarish about the way his image simply materialized from her blinking, bright against the bare dust floors, avid of expression, keen in the way of children newly awakened. He fairly radiated need and contrition. But the look repelled far more than beckoned, attached, as it was, to the hip of so many atrocities—so many outrageous crimes and deceptions.
What was she doing? Why had she come?
She had always found joy in the smallness of her children, their compact, wagging, wriggling bodies. The reckless, careless dancing. The heedless running. With Serwa, in particular, she had marvelled over the calm she found simply watching the girl traipse through the Sacral Enclosure. A kind of profound contentment, the comfort that bodies take in the apprehension of bodies they have made. But as much as Kelmomas’s appearance summoned the memory of that joy, it was also freighted by the insanity of everything she had since discovered—bloated, as if his image were a bulge of some kind, an evil cyst on the neck of the World. The little boy before her, the form she had so cherished and adored, had become a living receptacle, a philter brimming with chaos and poison.
She exhaled, fixed him with a resolute gaze.
“Mummee-mummee please-please-please liste—”
“You will never know …” she interrupted, calling as if she were at market. “Ne-never understand what it is to have a child.”
He was bawling now.
“He-he was going to kill Father! I-I wa—”
“Cease your blubbering!” she shrieked, bending, elbows to her waist, fists clenched. “Enough! I have had enough of your deceit!”
“But it’s true! It’s true! I saved Father’s li—!”
“No!” she cried. “No! Cease pretending to be my child!”
This struck him as surely as a man’s fist.
“I am your mother. But you-you, Kel, are no one’s child.”
There it was … the same blank look that she had learned to see as wariness in her other children. How was it she had never seen it before?
He was as mangled as the others. More, for his ability to appear otherwise … to mimic the living, the human. And it returned to her, then, the enormity of all that had happened. The deaths. The destruction. The bestial truth of the child before her.
She fell to all fours on the dust, retched what little horseflesh she had been able to eat. She blinked tears, but she did not cry. She half expected him to seize upon this weakness, to cajole or to berate or to wheedle and insinuate—or even, as Kellhus had warned, to murder her.
“Attend to the limit of his chain …”
But he merely observed, as indifferent as any truth.
She spat into the dust, noticed what seemed to be a finger bone breaching the powder. She looked up to him, raised a sleeve to wipe spittle from her chin and lower lip. Her white sleeve was stained yellow.
“Why would he pretend?” he asked in a small voice. “Why would Father pretend that I lie?”
The Blessed Empress regained her feet, brushed dust from her knees and sleeves, kicked sand across her vomit. Numb. She wondered if she had ever felt this numb.
“I think—” she started roughly, only to be stymied by a thickness in her throat or tongue. She blinked, cleared her throat. “I-I think he believes that you believe.”
A single heartbeat of calculation.
“He thinks me mad, then. Like Inrilatas.”
She pulled back her hair, spared him an evasive glance.
“Yes.”
Another heartbeat.
“No one found anything in his hand.”
“He was a believer, Kel … Just like the others.”
The wide eyes narrowed. The cherubic face lowered.
Shining from the ground, the lantern transformed the dust floors into a manuscript, every scuff and track a fragment of ink, shreds of some long-lost meaning. Kelmomas stood isolate in this mad sigil, like the last significant thing … Small. Frail.
Her sweet, murderous little boy.
He looked up, his expression far too composed for his heart to be anything other than wrecked.
“Then why have you come?”
Why had she come? It seemed an act of necessity, as natural as water pooling. She simply had no other choice. To be a mother was to migrate between perspectives, to become a vagrant nation, forever pursuing desires, defending interests, and suffering hurts proper to what were, ultimately, other souls. Sometimes those souls reciprocated, but so much was given in the end, so much surrendered and forgotten, that rank injustice was all but assured.
Perhaps this was why she had come. To be wronged was the lot of mothers, to dwell with imposters, to give against any hope of recompense, to be deceived and ridiculed and exploited … and to be needed—with a desperation that dwarfed any one skin.
Perhaps she had come to mother.
Perhaps—
“I see …” he said.
The turmoil fell away, and she gazed at him with unflinching wonder, this child that perfumed slaves had pulled from her loins. She paused before fleeing, reached beneath her robe, withdrew the small file she had pilfered from the Umbilicus. The sight of her tattoo arrested her hand, but for a heartbeat, merely. She tossed the implement to the ground at his little feet, where it seemed to smoke for tendrils of dust.
Her final gift …
Borne of the love most radical.
Migagurit urs Shanyorta sat perched high on the Occlusion, occasionally glancing out across the plain to Shaita’anairull, the Grave-that-is-Golden, but for the most part studying the camps scabbed below. The fires were few. To an untutored eye, they could only deceive, give the impression of scant numbers spread thin. But Migagurit was an old hand at the ways of war. The Southron host, he knew, had taken to burning its own shelter and accoutrements, much as it had taken to consuming its own horses. All good omens.