Though the heathen Empire of Kian had been the first to topple at the Aspect-Emperor's feet, Fanayal had somehow managed to avoid his nation's fate. According to Phinersa's briefings, songs of his exploits had reached as far as Galeoth. The Judges had already burned a dozen or so travelling minstrels at the stake, but the lays seemed to spread and reproduce with the stubbornness of a disease. The 'Bandit Padirajah,' they were calling him. By simply drawing breath, the man had immeasurably slowed the conversion of the old Fanim governorates.
The Shriah and the Empress walked in silence for several moments. Their journey had taken them into the Apparatory, where the residences of the palace's senior functionaries were located. The girth of the halls had narrowed, and the mirror sheen of marble had been replaced with planes of lesser stone. Many of the doors they passed stood ajar, leaking the sounds of simpler, more tranquil existences. A nurse singing to a babe. Mothers gossiping. Those few people they encountered in the hall literally stood slack-jawed before throwing their faces to the ground. One mother viciously yanked her son, an olive-skinned boy perhaps two or three years younger than the twins, to the floor at her side. Esmenet heard his crying more in her belly than in her ears, or so it seemed.
She clutched Maithanet's arm, drew him to a halt.
'Esmi?'
'Tell me, Maitha,' she said hesitantly. 'When'-she paused to bite her lip-'when you… look… into my face, what do you see?'
A gentle smile creased his plaited beard. 'Not so far or so deep as my brother.'
Dыnyain. It all came back to this iron ingot of meaning. Maithanet, her children, everyone near to her possessed some measure of Dыnyain blood. Everyone watched with a portion of her husband's all-seeing eyes. For a heartbeat, she glimpsed Achamian as he had stood twenty years earlier, a thousand smoke plumes scoring the sky beyond him. 'But you're not thinking! You see only your love for him. You're not thinking of what he sees when he gazes upon you…'
And with a blink both he and his heretical words were gone.
'That wasn't my question,' she said, recovering herself.
'Sorrow…' Maithanet said, probing her face with warm, forgiving eyes. He lifted her small, slack hands in the thick cage of his own. 'I see sorrow and confusion. Worry for your first, for Mimara. Shame… shame that you have come to fear your children more than you fear for them. So very much happens, Esmi, both here and in places remote… You fear you are not equal to the task my brother has set for you.'
'And the others?' she heard herself ask. 'Can the others see this as well?'
Dыnyain, she thought. Dыnyain blood.
The Shriah squeezed her hands in reassurance. 'Some sense it, perhaps, but only in a dim manner. They have their prejudices, of course, but their sovereign and saviour has made you their road to redemption. My brother has built a strong house for you to keep. I hesitate to say as much, but you truly have no cause to fear, Esmi.'
'Why?'
'For the same reason I have no fear. The Aspect-Emperor has chosen you.'
A Dыnyain. A Dыnyain has chosen you.
'No. Why do you hesitate to tell me?'
His eyes unfocused in calculation, then returned to her. 'Because if I see your fear, then he has seen it also. And if he has seen it, then he counts it as a strength.'
She tried in vain to blink away the tears. His image sheered and blurred, Maithanet seemed an elusive, predatory presence. A concatenation of liquid shadows. 'You mean he's chosen me because I'm weak?'
The Shriah of the Thousand Temples shook his head in calm contradiction. 'Is the man who flees to fight anew weak? Fear is neither strong nor weak until events make it so.'
'Then why wouldn't he tell me as much.'
'Because, Esmi' he said, drawing her back down the hall, 'sometimes ignorance is the greatest strength of all.'
For a thing to seem a miracle, it cannot quite be believed.
The following morning Esmenet awoke thinking of her children, not as the instruments of power they had become, but as babies. She often found herself shying away from thoughts of the early years of her motherhood, so relentless had Kellhus been in his pursuit of progeny. Seven children she had conceived by her husband, of which six had survived. Add to that Mimara, her daughter from her previous life, and Moлnghus, the son she had inherited from Kellhus's first wife, Serwл, and she was the mother of eight…
Eight!
The thought never ceased to surprise and to dizzy her, so certain she had been that she would live and die barren.
Kayыtas had been the first, born close enough to Moлnghus that the two had been raised as fraternal twins. She had delivered him in Shimeh upon the Holy Juterum, where the Latter Prophet, Inri Sejenus, had ascended to the Heavens two thousand years previous. Kayыtas had been so perfect, both in form and in temperament, that the Lords of the Holy War had wept upon seeing him. So perfect, like a pearl, she sometimes thought, taking in the world's shadowy jumble and reflecting only a generic, silvery light. So smooth that no fingers could grasp him, not truly.
It had been Kayыtas who had taught her that love was a kind of imperfection. How could it be otherwise, when he was perfect and could feel no love? Simply holding him had been a heartbreak.
Theliopa had come second, born in Nenciphon while Kellhus waged the first of many wars against the drugged princes of Nilnamesh. After Kayыtas, how could Esmenet not hope against hope? How could she not clutch this new babe and pray to the Gods, please, please, give me but one human-hearted child? But even then, her daughter's limbs still slick with the waters of passage, she had known she had born another… Another child who could not love. With Kellhus at war, she stumbled into a kind of bottomless melancholy, one that made her envy suicides. If it had not been for her adopted son, little Moлnghus, it might have ended then, this queer fever dream that had become her life. He at least had needed her, even if he was not her own.
That was when she began demanding resources, real resources, for her search for Mimara-whom she had sold to slavers in the shadow of starvation so very long ago. She could remember staring at Theliopa in her bassinet, a pale and wane approximation of an infant, thinking that if Kellhus denied her, she would have no choice but to…
Fate truly was a whore, to deliver her to such thoughts.
Of course, she found herself almost immediately pregnant, as though her womb had been a hidden concession in the deal she had struck with her husband. Her third child by Kellhus, Serwa, was born in Carythusal with the smell of the Zaudunyani conquest still on the wind-soot and death. Like Kayыtas, she had seemed perfect, flawless, and yet unlike him she had seemed capable of love. What a joy she had been! But when she was scarce three years old, her tutors realized that she possessed the Gift of the Few. Despite Esmenet's threats, despite her entreaties, Kellhus sent the girl-still a babe! — to Iothiah to be raised among the Swayal witches.
There had been bitterness in that decision, and no few thoughts of heresy and sedition. In losing Serwa, Esmenet learned that worship could not only survive the loss of love, it possessed room for hatred as well.
Then came the nameless one with eight arms and no eyes, the first to be delivered on the Andiamine Heights. The labour had been hard, life-threatening even. Afterwards would she learn that the physician-priests had drowned it, according to Nansur custom, in unwatered wine.
Then came another son, Inrilatas-and there was no doubt that he could love. But Esmenet had developed instincts for these things, as mothers who bear many children sometimes do. From the very beginning, she had known something was wrong, though she could never name the substance of her misapprehensions. But it became plain to his nurses by his second year. Inrilatas was three when he first began speaking the little treacheries that dwelt in the hearts of those about him. The entire court walked in terror of him. By the age of five he could summon words so honest and injurious that Esmenet had seen hard-hearted warriors blanch and reach for their blades. She would never forget the time when, after singing to him in his bed, he had looked up with his too-nimble face and said, 'Don't hate yourself for hating me, Mommy. Hate yourself for who you are.' Hate yourself for who you are, spoken in the dulcet tones of child adoration. By the time he was six, only Kellhus could fathom, let alone manage, him, and he had not the time for anything more than a cursory relationship. She still shuddered whenever she recalled the rare conversations they shared, father and son. Afterwards, it was as if Inrilatas, who had always walked the perimeter of sanity, simply tripped and tumbled in the wrong direction. The veil of utter madness was
