Then she was blinking at the grey of night's slow retreat. The tree was gone, as were the arms reaching from earthen pits. But the terrible thought remained, no more clear for the fact of waking.
Mimara.
Esmenet wept as though she were her only child. Found, then lost.
The following afternoon sunlight streamed through the fretted walls behind her, embossing the table and its sheets of parchment with brilliant white squares. The secretaries, deputations from a number of different offices, uniformly squinted as they approached with the documents that required her seal. Brocaded tusks and circumfixes shimmered from their sleeves. Grids of light rolled across their backs as they bent to kiss the polished wood of the kneeling floor.
As bored as she was, Esmenet listened attentively to their petitions, typically this or that minor legislative declaration: a clarification of the Slaver Protocols, a revised order of precedence for the Chamber of Excises, and on and on. The New Empire, she had long since learned, was a kind of enormous mechanism, one that used men as gears, thousands upon thousands of them, their functions determined by the language of law. The inevitable maintenance required ever more language, all of it underwritten by the authority of her voice.
As always, she relied heavily on Ngarau, who had been Grand Seneschal since the days of the extinct Ikurei Dynasty, to interpret the import of the requests. They had developed a comfortable rapport over the years, eunuch and Empress. She would ask brief questions, and he would respond either by answering to the best of his ability or by interrogating the petitioning functionary in his turn. If the request was granted-and the vetting process required to reach her penultimate level assured that most of them were-he would dip his ladle in the bowl of molten lead that continually warmed her left side and pour the flashing metal for her to stamp with her Seal. If, as was sometimes the case, some kind of influence peddling or bureaucratic infighting was suspected, the petitioners would be directed to the Judges down the hall. The New Empire tolerated no corruption, no matter how petty.
Mankind was at war.
Several emergency funding requests from Shigek, 'tokens of the Empress's generosity,' proved tricky to parse. For whatever reason, the rumours that Fanayal ab Kascamandri and his renegade Coyauri prowled the deserts about the River Sempis refused to die. Aside from this, the session had proved uneventful-thankfully. The chill air carried the promise of renewal, and the repetitive nature of the suits made her decisions seem trivial. Though she knew full well that lives turned on her every breath, she welcomed the opportunity to pretend otherwise.
For twenty years she had been Empress. For almost as long as she could read.
Sometimes the unmapped immensity of it all would come crashing through the tedium. The mundane circuit would peel open, the matter of course would evaporate into the hollow of a million mortal obligations. Women. Children. Wilful men. A crazed anxiousness would seize her. If she were walking, she would reel like a drunk, clutch at her vertigo with outstretched hands. If she were talking, she would trail into silence, avert her face and simply breathe, as though that were the endangered thread. I am Empress, she would think, Empress, and the title would speak not to the glory, but to the horror and the horror alone.
But typically the combination of routine and abstractions kept her afloat. To condense all the administrative details into the 'Ministrate' or all the ecclesiastical confusion into the 'Thousand Temples' was a powerful and a comforting thing. She would consult the appropriate officials and that was that. Yes, I understand. Do your best. Sometimes it even felt simple, like a library with all the books inventoried and titled-all she need do was make the proper entries. Of course, some crisis would quickly remind her otherwise, that she was simply confusing the handle for the pot, as the caste-menials would say. The details would always come leaking through-in their multitudes.
Part of her would even laugh, convinced that it was simply too absurd to be real. She, Esmenet, a battered peach from the slums of Sumna, wielding an authority that only Triamis, the greatest of the Ceneian Emperors, had known. Souls in the millions traded coins with her profile. Oh what was that, you say? Thousands are starving in Eumarna. Yes-yes, but I have an insurrection to deal with. Armies, you see, simply must be fed. People? Well, they tend to suffer in silence, sell their children and whatnot. So long as the lies are told well.
At such a remove, so far from the gutters of living truth, how could she not be a tyrant? Not matter how balanced, thoughtful, or sincerely considered her judgments, how could they not crack like clubs or pierce like spears?
Exactly as Nel-Saripal had implied, the wretch.
Without warning, a small voice piped through the officious murmur. 'Thelli! Thelli! Theliopa found another one!' Esmenet saw her youngest, Kelmomas, barrelling through the secretaries, then around the grand table. He ran across his reflection to throw his arms around her waist. She hugged him, laughing.
'Sweetling… What do you mean?'
At times his beauty struck her breathless, his features avid beneath a mop of lavish blond curls. But when he surprised her like this, the bouncing perfection of him fairly hummed through her, made her throat thicken for pride. With Kelmomas she could almost believe the Gods had relented.
'A skin-spy, Momma. Among the new slaves for the stables-Theliopa found another one!'
Esmenet involuntarily stiffened. Captain Imhailas appeared on the heel of these words, fairly swinging through the entrance to fall onto his knees. 'Your Glory!'
'Leave us,' Esmenet commanded Ngarau. The old Imperial Seneschal clapped his hands in dismissal, and a retreating commotion descended on the chambers.
'How is it my son bears this news to me?' she asked, gesturing for the Exalt-Captain to take his feet.
'I beg mercy, your Glory.' Imhailas was extraordinarily attractive in a way that only Norsirai men could be. It seemed to render his embarrassment all the more ludicrous. 'I set out to inform you immediately! I have no idea how-!'
'Can I seeee, Momma? Please!'
'No, Kel. You certainly may not!'
'But I need to see these things, Momma. I need to know. Someday I'll need to know!'
Scowling, she looked from the boy to the Captain, who stood armour agleam in the broken light. Through the propped doors, she could see the last of the functionaries fleeing into the palace's polished depths. One of the laggards stumbled on the hem of his robes, and for an instant, she glimpsed the tar-black bottoms of his silk slippers.
She blinked, focused on the Exalt-Captain. 'What do you think?'
Imhailas hesitated for a moment, then with an air of quotation said, 'Calloused hands suffer no tender eyes, your Glory.'
Esmenet frowned at the hackneyed quote. Only an idiot, she found herself thinking, asks an idiot for advice. But her dismissal caught in her throat when she looked at Kelmomas. Squares of light graphed his clothes and skin, bright and oblong where not undone entirely by the compact curves of his body. For an instant, he seemed so very soft, the world's most vulnerable thing, and her heart heaved with the dwarfing confusion that mothers call love. Mere months had passed since his Whelming-since the assassination attempt on the Scuari Campus. All she wanted was to protect him. She would will herself into a cocoon if she could, an impervious and eternal shield…
But she knew that she could not. And she was wise enough not to confuse her want for her world.
'Please, Momma,' he said, his blue eyes glittering with teary eagerness. The sun seemed to shine through his flaxen curls. 'Please.'
She composed her face and looked back to Imhailas. 'I think…' she said with a heavy sigh. 'I think you're quite right, Captain. The time has come. Both my sweet cherries should see Thelli's latest discovery.'
Another skin-spy in the court. Why now, after so many years?
'Both boys, your Glory?'
She ignored this, the way she ignored all the tonal differences that seemed to colour references to Kelmomas's twin, Samarmas. In this one thing, she would refuse the world its inroads.
With Kelmomas in tow-he had become much more reluctant at the mention of his brother-Esmenet set off in search of her other darling, Samarmas. The galleries at the summit of the Andiamine Heights were not so very large, but they had the habit of becoming labyrinthine whenever she needed to find someone or something. Of course she could have dispatched slaves to search for him-even now her train of attendants followed at a discrete distance-but she was wary of delegating too much in the way of trivial tasks: It seemed madness enough to be
