Smiling, Kelmomas sat cross-legged and contemplated his brother, who had his head to the maroon carpets, staring up at a dragon from some miniature perspective. Though his hands dwarfed the dragon's palm-worn head, he seemed diminutive, like a soapstone figurine playing with elaborately carved grains of sand. A toy Prince-Imperial poking toys that were smaller still.
Only the lazy battle of boredom and awe in his expression made him seemed real.
'So this business of the White-Luck?' his mother's distant voice asked.
'White-Luck-White-Luck,' Theliopa said. Kelmomas could almost see her rocking on her stool, her joints twitching, her hands climbing from her elbows to her shoulders then back again. 'A folk belief with ancient Cultic origins-ancient-old-ancient. According to Pirmees, the White-Luck is an extreme form of providence, a Gift of the Gods against worldly tuh-tuh-tyranny.'
'White-Luck-White-Luck,' Samarmas chimed in unison, then gurgled in his chin-to-windpipe way. Kelmomas glared him into silence, knowing that their uncle, at least, was entirely capable of hearing him.
As was anyone who shared their father's incendiary blood.
'You think it's nothing more than a self-serving fraud?' his mother asked his uncle.
'The White-Luck? Perhaps.'
'What do you mean, 'perhaps'?'
Samarmas had ambled to and from the toy trunk, bearing several more figures, some silver, others mahogany. 'Mommy,' he murmured in a world-does-not-exist voice, extracting the figurine of a woman cast in aquiline silver. He held her to the hoary dragon so they could kiss. 'Kisses!' he exclaimed, eyes lit with gurgling wonder.
Kelmomas had been born staring into the deluge that was his twin's face. For a time, he knew, his mother's physicians had feared for him because it seemed he could do little more than gaze at his brother. All he remembered were the squalls of blowing hurt and wheezing gratification, and a hunger so elemental that it swallowed the space between them, soldered their faces into a single soul. The world was shouldered to the periphery. The tutors and the physicians had droned from the edges, not so much ignored as overlooked by a two- bodied creature who stared endlessly into its own inscrutable eyes.
Only in his third summer, when Hagitatas, with doddering yet implacable patience, made a litany of the difference between beast, man, and god, was Kelmomas able to overcome the tumult that was his brother. 'Beasts move,' the old physician would rasp. 'Men reflect. Gods make real.' Over and over. 'Beasts move. Men reflect. Gods make real. Beasts move…' Perhaps it was simply the repetition. Perhaps it was the palsied tone, the way his breath undid the substance of his words, allowing them to soak into the between places, the gem-cutting lines. 'Beasts move…' Over and over, until finally Kelmomas simply turned to him and said, 'Men reflect.'
A blink, and what was one had become two.
He just… understood. One moment he was nothing, and another he was staring, not at himself, but at a beast. Samarmas, Kelmomas would later realize, was wholly what he would later see lurking in all faces: an animal, howling, panting, lapping…
An animal that, because of his unschooled sensitivities and its sheer immediacy, had devoured him, made a lair of his skull.
A blink, and what had absorbed suddenly repelled. Afterwards, Kelmomas could scarcely bear looking into the carnival of Samarmas's face. Something about it wrenched him with disgust, not the grimace-and-look-away variety, but the kind that pinched stomach walls together and launched limbs in wild warding. It was as though his brother wore his bowels on the outside. For a time, Kelmomas wanted to cry out in warning whenever Mother showered Samarmas with coos and kisses. How could she not see it, the unsheathing of wet and shiny things? Only some instinct to secrecy had kept him silent, a will, brute and spontaneous, to show only what needed to be shown.
Now he was accustomed to it, of course. The beast that was his brother.
The dog.
'Hey, Sammi,' he said, wearing his mother's mouth-watering smile. 'Watch…'
Bending over, he placed a single palm on the floor and raised his feet in the air. Grinning upside down, he bounced one-handed toward him, from indifferent carpet to cold marble.
Samarmas gurgled with delight, covered his mouth and pointed. 'Bum-bum!' he cried. 'I see your bum- bum!'
'Can't you do this, Sammi?'
Samarmas pressed his cheek to his shoulder, smiled bashfully down. 'Nothing,' he conceded.
'The Gods did not see the First Apocalypse,' Uncle Maithanet was saying, 'so why would they see the Second? They are blind to the No-God. They are blind to any intelligence without soul.'
Again the imperceptible pause before Mother's reply. 'But Kellhus is a Prophet… How-?'
'How could he be hunted by the Gods?'
Kelmomas lingered upside-down next to his brother, his heels swaying above.
'Isn't there anything you can do, Sammi?'
Samarmas shook his head, still doing his gurgle-laugh-gurgle at his brother's ridiculous pose.
'Lord Sejenus,' Maithanet was saying, 'taught us to see the Gods not as entities unto themselves, but as fragments of the God. This is what my brother hears, the Voice-Absolute. This is what has renewed the Covenant of Gods and Men. You know this, Esmi.'
'So you're saying the Hundred could very well be at war with the God's designs-with their very own sum?'
'Yes-yes,' Theliopa interjected. 'There are one hundred and eighty-nine references referring to the disparate ends of the Gods and the God of Gods, two from the Holy Tractate itself. For they are like Men, hemmed in by darkness, making war on the shadows of they know not what.' Schol-Scholars, thirty-four, twenty. 'For I am the God, the rule of all things…' '
Kelmomas swung his feet down to sit cross-legged before Samarmas, shimmied close enough to touch knees. 'I know,' he whispered. 'I know something you can do…'
Samarmas flinched and jerked his head, as though hearing something too remarkable to be believed.
'What? What? What?'
'Think of your own soul,' Uncle Maithanet was saying. 'Think of the war within, the way the parts continually betray the whole. We are not so different from the world we live in, Esmi…'
'I know-I know all this!'
'How about balance?' Kelmomas said. 'You know how to balance, don't you?'
Moments later, Samarmas was perched tottering on the balcony's broad stone rail, deep spaces yawing out beyond and beneath him. Kelmomas watched from the playroom, standing just behind the line of sunlight across the floor, grinning as though astonished by his skill and daring. The distance-filtered voices of his uncle and mother seemed to fall from the sky.
'The White-Luck Warrior,' his uncle was saying, 'need not be real. The rumours alone constitute a dire threat.'
'Yes, I agree. But how do you battle rumours?'
Kelmomas could almost see his uncle's simulated frown.
'How else? With more rumours.'
Samarmas whooped in whispering triumph. Cotton-white arms out and waving. Toes flexed across a marmoreal line. The sycamores rearing behind, dark beneath sunlit caps, reaching up as though to catch some higher fall.
'And the Yatwerians?' Mother asked.
'Call a council. Invite the Matriarch herself here to the Andiamine Heights.'
The sudden dip and lean. The stabilizing twitches. The small looks of bodily panic.
'Yes, but you and I both know she isn't the real leader of the Cult.'
'Which might work to our advantage. Sharacinth is a proud and ambitious woman, one who chafes at being a figurehead.'
Quick recovery steps. Feet swishing over polished stone. A gurgling laugh caught in an anxious, reflexive swallow.
'What? Are you suggesting we bribe her? Offer to make her Mother-Supreme?'
'That's one possibility.'
