dressed by strange hands in the morning, let alone never having to hunt for her own children. Power, she had come to realize, had the insidious habit of inserting others between you and your tasks, rendering your limbs little more than decorative mementoes of a more human past. Her only organs remaining, it sometimes seemed, were those belonging to statecraft: a tongue attached to a devious soul.
She paused at the juncture of every corridor, the instinctive way parents do not so much look for their children as make themselves visible. Each time figures fell to their faces down the length of the marble shafts, the slaves like hairless dogs, the functionaries like piles of lavish fabric. Gilded corbels gleamed. Decorative columns shone with lines curved to the positioning of lanterns or ceiling apertures.
Not much had changed since the days when the Ikurei Dynasty had presided over the Andiamine Heights. Certainly, the palace had grown in measure with the Empire-or her hips, as it sometimes seemed. Momemn had been one of the few Three Seas cities with wisdom enough to throw itself upon the mercy of her husband. There had been no smoke on the wind, no blood on the flagstones, when she had first walked these halls. And what a wonder it had seemed then, that people could encase themselves in such glorious luxury. Marbles looted from Shigeki ruins. Gold beaten into foils, cast into figures both human and divine. The famed frescoes, such as the Blue Hubris by the suicide, Anchilas, or the anonymous Chorus of the Seas in the Mirullian Foyer. The white-jade censers. The Zeьmi tapestries. The carpets so long, so ornate, that lifetimes had been spent weaving them…
All it had lacked was power.
A kind of mute inattention dogged her as she walked. She found herself turning down the hall almost without realizing, though she had been able to hear the screams for some time. His screams, Inrilatas. One of her middle children, youngest save for the twins.
She paused before the great bronze door to his room, stared with distaste at the Kyranean Lions stamped into its panels. Even though she passed it several times every day, it always seemed larger than she remembered. She ran her fingertips along the greening rims. She could feel nothing of his cries in the cool metal. No warmth. No hum. The frantic sound seemed to rise more from the cold floor at her feet.
Kelmomas leaned against her thigh, mooning for her attention. 'Uncle Maithanet thinks you should have him sent away,' he said.
'Your uncle said that?' An itch always accompanied references to Maithanet, a premonition too indistinct to be called a worry. Because he was so much like Kellhus, she supposed.
'They're frightened of us, aren't they, Mommy?'
'Them?'
'Everybody. They're all afraid of our family…'
'Why would that be?'
'Because they think we're mad. They think father's seed is too strong.'
Too strong for the vessel. Too strong for me.
'You've heard… them… talking?'
'Is that what happened to Inrilatas?'
'It's the God, Kel. The God burns strongly in all of you. With Inrilatas he burns strongest of all.'
'Is that why he's mad?'
'Yes.'
'Is that why you keep him here?'
'He is my child, Kel, as much as you. I will never abandon my children.'
'Like Mimara?'
An unearthly sound burrowed from the polished stone, a shriek meant to pass sharp, cutting things. Esmenet flinched, certain he was there, Inrilatas, just on the other side of the door, his lips mashed against the portal's marmoreal frame. She thought she could hear teeth gnawing at the stone. She looked from the door to the slender cherub that was her other son. Kelmomas. Godlike Kelmomas. Healthy, loving, devoted to the point of comedy…
So unlike the others.
Please let it be.
Her smile seemed proper to the tears in her eyes. 'Like Mimara,' she said.
She couldn't even think the name without a series of inner cringings, as though it were a weight that could be drawn only with ill-used muscles. Even now she had her men scouring the Three Seas, searching-searching everywhere except the one place where she knew Mimara would be.
Keep her safe, Akka. Please keep her safe.
Inrilatas's shriek trailed into a series of masturbatory grunts. On and on they continued, each sucking on the one prior, all possessing a hairless animality that made her clutch Kelmomas's shoulder. She knew this was something no child should hear, especially one as impressionable as Kelmomas, but her honor immobilized her. There was something… personal in the jerking sounds-or so it seemed. Something meant for her and her alone.
The cry of 'Momma!' snapped her from her trance.
It was Samarmas. He burst from his nursemaid's grasp, identical to Kelmomas in every respect, save for the slack pose of his face and the outward bulge of his eyes, so like those on ancient Kyranean statuary.
'My boy!' Esmenet cried, scooping the boy into her arms. With an 'Ooof!' she swung him onto her hip-he was getting too big! — beamed mother-love into his idiot gaze.
My broken boy.
The nursemaid, Porsi, had followed in his stomping wake, eyes to the ground. The young Nansur slave knelt, face to the floor. Esmenet should have thanked the girl, she knew, but she had wanted to find Sammi herself, perhaps even to spy for a bit, in the way of simpler parents watching through simpler windows.
Inrilatas continued screaming through polished stone-forgotten.
Stairs. Endless stairs and corridors, from the reserved splendour of the summit, to the monumental spectacle of the palace's lower, more public reaches, thence to the raw stone of the dungeons, with troughs worn into the floor stones for the passage of innumerable prisoners. In one courtyard they crossed, Samarmas hugged the backs of everyone who fell to their faces. He was always indiscriminate with his loving gestures, particularly when it came to slaves. He even kissed one old woman on her nut-brown cheek-Esmenet's skin pimpled at the sound of her joyous sobbing. Kelmomas babbled the entire way, reminding Samarmas in his stern big brother way that they must be warriors, that they must be strong, that only honour and courage would earn the love and praise of their father. Listening, Esmenet found herself wondering at the Princes-Imperial they would become. She found herself fearing for them-the way she always feared when her thoughts were bent to the future.
As they descended the final stair, Kelmomas began describing skin-spies. 'Their bones are soft like a shark's,' he said, his voice lilting in wonder. 'And they have claws for faces, claws they can squeeze into any face. They could be you. They could be me. At any second they could strike you down!'
'Monsters, Mommy?' Samarmas asked, his eyes aglow with tears. 'Sharks?' Of course he already knew what skin-spies were: She herself had regaled him with innumerable stories about their sinister role in the First Holy War. But it was part of his innocence to respond to everything as though encountering it for the very first time. Repetition, as she had discovered on many cross-eyed occasions, was a kind of drug for Samarmas.
'Kel, that's quite enough.'
'But he needs to know too!'
She had to remind herself that his cleverness was that of a normal child, and not like that of his siblings. Inrilatas, in particular, had possessed his father's… gifts.
She wished she could put these worries to rest. For all her love, she could never lose herself in Kelmomas the way she could Samarmas, whose idiocy had become a kind of perverse sanctuary for her. For all her love, she could not bring herself to trust the way a mother should.
Not after so many… experiences.
As she feared, a carnival of personages great and small clotted the corridors leading to the Truth Room. The whole palace, it seemed, had found some excuse to see their latest captive. She even saw her cook, a diminutive old Nilnameshi named Bompothur, pressing toward the door with the others. The voice of Biaxi Sankas, one of the more powerful members of the Congregate, reverberated across the hooded stone spaces. 'Let me pass, you caste-menial fool!'
