The scene troubled her perhaps more than it should. To be Empress of the Three Seas was one thing, to be the wife of the Aspect-Emperor was quite another. In his absence, absolute authority fell to her-but how could it not bruise and break when the fall was so far? Even where one would expect her rule to be absolute-such as her own palace-it was anything but. In Kellhus's absence, the Andiamine Heights seemed nothing so much as a squabbling mountain of bowing, scraping, insinuating thieves. The Exalt-Ministers. The caste-nobles of the High Congregate. The Imperial Apparati. The visiting dignitaries. Even the slaves. It sickened her the way they all lined up moist-eyed with awe and devotion whenever Kellhus walked the halls, only to resume their cannibalistic rivalries the instant he departed-when she walked the gilded halls. Word has it, Blessed Empress, that so-and-so is questioning the slave reforms, and in the most troubling manner… On and on, back and forth, the long dance of tongues as knives. She had learned to ignore most of it, the palace would be on the brink of revolt if even a fraction of what was said was true. But it meant that she would never know if the palace were about to revolt, and she had read enough history to know that this was every sovereign's most mortal concern.
She cried out, 'Imhailas!'
Whether it was her or some perverse trick of the stone, the ringing of her voice had the character of a screech. A herd of apprehensive faces turned to her and the twins. There was a comical scuffle as they all struggled to kneel in the absence of floor space. She could not but wonder at what Kellhus would say about this lack of discipline. Who would be punished and how? There was always punishment where the Aspect-Emperor was involved…
Or as he pretended to call it, education.
'Imhailas!' she cried again. She squeezed Samarmas's hand in reassurance, smiled at him. He had a tendency to cry whenever she raised her voice.
'Yes, your Glory,' the Exalt-Captain called from the blockaded threshold.
'What are all these people doing here?'
'It's been some time, your Glory. Almost two years since the last-'
'This is foolish! Clear everyone out save your guards and the pertinent ministers.'
'At once, your Glory.'
Of course Imhailas scarce needed to utter a word: Everyone had heard her anger and her rebuke.
'They're more afraid of Father,' young Kelmomas whispered at her side.
'Yes,' Esmenet replied, at a loss as to how to respond otherwise. The insights of children were too immediate, too unfiltered not to be unwelcome. 'Yes, they are.'
Even a child can see it.
She drew the boys to the wall to make way for the file of men-a parade of seditious souls draped in ingratiating skins, or so it seemed. She acknowledged their anxious and perfunctory bows as they scurried past, wondering how she could possibly rule when her instruments so sickened her. But she had been too political for far too long not to recognize an opportunity when she saw one. She stopped Lord Sankas as he made to pass, asked him if he would assist her with the twins. 'They've never seen a skin-spy before,' she explained. She wondered how she could have forgotten how tall he was-even for a caste-noble. Her own height had always been a source of shame for her, given the way it shouted her caste-menial origins.
'Indeed,' he said with a gloating smile. Most men were only too eager to embrace evidence of their importance, but when they were as old as Sankas, it seemed more unseemly for some reason. He looked down, winked at her sons. 'The horrors of the world are what make us men.'
Esmenet smiled up at the Lord, knowing this little piece of advice to her sons would endear them to him. Kellhus was forever reminding her to seek the counsel of those whose friendship could be advantageous. Men, he was always saying, liked to see their words proved right.
'Are we going to see the monster now, Momma?' Samarmas asked in a voice as small as his eyes were wide. She looked to the child, grateful for the excuse to ignore the mob. Over the past year, ever since deciding the twins were not like the others, she had found herself retreating from the mad polity around her into the realm of maternal cares. It was more instinctive, and certainly more gratifying.
'There's no need for you to fear,' she said, smiling. 'Come. Lord Sankas will protect you.'
Though the name was the same, the Truth Room was one of the palace chambers, subterranean or otherwise, that had been drastically expanded in the years since Kellhus's uncontested march into Momemn. The original Truth Room had been little more than the personal torture chamber of the old Ikurei Emperors, and every bit as dark and closeted as their peevish souls. The enormous chamber she now entered with her children was nothing less than an organ of state, a pit with walls tiered by walkways, some possessing cages for prisoners, others lined with various instruments of interrogation, and one, the uppermost, adorned with columns and marble veneers-a gallery for observers from the land of light. It was, the architect had told her, an inverted replica of the Great Ziggurat of Xijoser, carved so that the mighty monument on the Sempis Delta would fit if tipped into its hollow. Esmenet could remember Proyas quipping something to the effect that 'sometimes Men must reach down' when seeking the Truth.
She led the children to the ornate balustrade of the highest tier, where the others awaited her. Her Master- of-Spies, Phinersa, and her Vizier, Vem-Mithriti, knelt with their faces to the floor, while Maithanet and Theliopa stood with their faces lowered in greeting. Imhailas was ushering out the last of the stragglers, his humour at once officious and curiously apologetic, the air of someone executing the irrational demands of another.
Theliopa, her eldest daughter by Kellhus, bowed in a stiff curtsy as they approached. Perhaps she was the strangest of her children, even moreso than Inrilatas, but curiously all the more safe for it. Theliopa was a woman with an unearthly hollow where human sentiment should be. Even as an infant she had never cried, never gurgled with laughter, never reached out to finger the image of her mother's face. Esmenet had once overheard her nursemaids whispering that she would happily starve rather than call out for food, and even now she was thin in the extreme, tall and angular like the God-her-father, but emaciated, to the point where her skin seemed tented over the woodwork of her bones. The clothes she wore were ridiculously elaborate-despite her godlike intellect, the subtleties of style and fashion utterly eluded her-a gold-brocaded gown fairly armoured in black pearls.
'Mother,' the sallow blonde girl said in a tone that Esmenet could now recognize for attachment, or the guttering approximation of it. As always the girl flinched at her touch, like a skittish cat or steed, but as always Esmenet refused to draw back, and held Theliopa's cheek until she felt the tremors calm.
'You've done well,' she said, gazing into her pale eyes. 'Very well.' It was strange, loving children who could see the movements of her soul through her face. It forced a kind of bitter honesty on her, the resignation of those who know they cannot hide-not ever-from the people they needed to hide from the most.
'I live to please you, Mother.'
They were what they were, her children. Bits and pieces of their father. The truth of him-perhaps. Only Samarmas was the exception. She could see it in his every stitch, in the ardent affection with which he clung to Lord Sankas's hand, in the round way his eyes probed the shadows beyond the rail, in the anxiousness that warbled through his limbs. Only Samarmas could be…
Trusted.
Recoiling from these thoughts, she turned to the others and pronounced the customary greeting, 'Reap the morrow.' She felt Kelmomas's small fingers squeeze her palm.
'Reap the morrow,' they intoned in response. Phinersa jumped to his feet with bandy-legged alacrity. He was a brilliant but nervous man, one who could bloom and wilt in the course of speaking a single sentence. He was one of those men who were far too conscious of their own eyes. They had the habit of darting around the point of your own, but more ritually than randomly, as though they followed some formal rule of avoidance, rather than any instinctive antipathy to the prick of contact. Those rare times he did manage a level gaze, it was with a penetration and intensity that boiled away to nothing in a matter of heartbeats and left you feeling at once superior and strangely exposed.
She found herself bending to assist old Vem-Mithriti, the Grandmaster of the Imperial Saik, to his feet. He smiled and murmured shamefaced thanks, more like a shrinking-voiced adolescent than one of the most powerful Exalt-Ministers in the New Empire. Sometimes Kellhus chose people for their wit and strength, as was the case with Phinersa, and sometimes for their weakness. She often wondered whether old Vem was his Gift to her, since Kellhus himself had no difficulty handling the wilful and ambitious.
Maithanet, her brother-in-law and the Shriah of the Thousand Temples, towered next to the two Exalt-
