The slender body bent about an invisible point, one which seemed to roll from side to side.
The surrounding air deep with the promise of gravity.
'As Shriah you hold the power of life and death over her.'
'Which is why I suspect she knows little or nothing of these rumours, or what her sisters plan.'
Eyes avid and exultant. Hands cycling air. A breathless grinning.
'That's something we can use.'
'Indeed, Esmi. As I said, she is a proud woman. If we could induce a schism in the Cult…'
Samarmas tottering. A bare foot, ivory bright in the glare, swinging out from behind the heel of the other, around and forward, sole descending, pressing like a damp cloth across the stone. A sound like a sip.
'A schism…'
The shadow of a boy foreshortened by the high angle of the sun. Outstretched hands yanked into empty-air clutches. Feet and legs flickering out. A silhouette, loose and tight-bundled, falling through the barred shadow of the balustrade. A gasp flecked with spittle.
Then nothing.
Kelmomas stood blinking at the empty balcony, oblivious to the uproar rising from below.
Just like his father, he was able to hold so much more in the light of his soul's eye than the people around him. It had been this way ever since Hagitatas had taught him the difference between beast, man, and god-ever since he first had looked away from his brother's face. Beasts move, the old man had said.
Men reflect.
So he knew the love and worship Samarmas bore him, knew that he would do anything to close the abyss of insight and ability between them. And he knew precisely where the Pillarian Guards fixed their sandalled feet, where they planted the butt of their long spears…
Alarms rang through the Enclosure, clawed up to the sky. Soldiers, their martial voices hoarse with grief and terror. The guarded babble of slaves.
As though stunned, Kelmomas walked to the marble railing, leaned over the point where his brother had fallen. He looked down, saw his brother in an armoured circle of guardsmen, his eyes rolled back, his right arm coiled like rope, his torso twitching about the spear-shaft that pierced his flank.
The young Prince-Imperial was careful to wipe the olive oil from the rail. Then he howled the way a little boy should.
Why? the voice asked. The secret voice.
Why didn't you kill me sooner?
He saw his mother beat her way through the Pillarian Guards, heard her inconsolable scream. He watched his uncle, the Holy Shriah, grasp her shoulders as she fell upon her beloved son. He saw his sister Theliopa, absurd in her black gowns, approach in fey curiosity. He glimpsed one of his own tears falling, a liquid bead, falling, breaking upon his twin's slack cheek.
A thing so tragic. So much love would be required to heal.
'Mommy!' he cried. 'Mommeeeeeeee!'
Gods make real.
There was such love in the touch of a son.
The funerary room was narrow and tall, plated with lines of blue-patterned Ainoni tile, but otherwise unadorned. Light showered through air like steam. Idols glared from small niches, almost, but never quite forgotten. Gold-gleaming censers wheezed in the corners, puffing faint ribbons of smoke. The Empress leaned against the marble pedestal in the room's centre, looking down, staring at the inert lines of her littlest.
She began with his fingers, humming an old song that made her slaves weep for recognition. Sometimes they forgot she shared their humble origins. Smiling, she looked at them as though to say, Yes, I've been you all along…
Just another slave.
She raised a forearm, cleansed it with long gentle strokes, elbow to wrist, elbow to wrist.
He was cold like clay. He was grey like clay. Yet, no matter how hard she pressed, she could not rob him of his form. He insisted on remaining her son.
She paused to cry. After a time she swallowed away the ache, cleared her throat with a gentle cough. She resumed her work and her humming. It almost seemed that she carved him more than she cleansed, that with every stroke he somehow became more real. The flawless lines and moist divets. The porcelain gleam of skin. The little mole beneath his left nipple. The constellation of freckles that reached like a shawl from shoulder to slender shoulder.
She absorbed all of it, traced and daubed and rinsed it, with movements that seemed indistinguishable from devotion.
There was such love in the touch of a son.
His chest. The low curve of his abdomen. And of course his face. Sometimes something urged her to prod and to shake, to punish him for this cruel little game. But her strokes remained unperturbed, slow and sure, as if the fact of ritual were some kind of proof against disordered souls.
She wrung the sponge, listened to the rattle of water. She smiled at her little boy, wondered at his beauty.
His hair was golden.
He smelled, she thought, as though he had been drowned in wine.
Kelmomas pretended to weep.
She bundled him tight against her breast, and he squirmed clear of the blankets crowded between them. He pressed himself against her shuddering length. Her every sob welled through him like waves of lazy heat, washed him with bliss and vindication.
'Don't let go!' she gasped, pressing her cheek back from his damp hair. 'Never-never-please!'
Her face was his scripture, written with looms of skin, muscle, and tendon. And the truths he read there were holy.
He knew it so intimately he could tell whenever a mole had darkened or a lash had fallen from her eyelids. He had heard the priests prattle about their Heavens, but the truth was that paradise lay so much nearer-and tasted of salt.
Her face eclipsed him, the ligaments of anguish, the trembling lips, the diamonds streaming from her eyes.
'Kel,' she sobbed. 'Poor baby…'
He keened, squashed the urge to kick his feet in laughter. Yes! he cried silent glee, the limb-wagging exultation of a child redeemed. Yes!
And it had been so easy.
You are, the secret voice said, her only love remaining.
CHAPTER SIX
Ask the dead and they will tell you.
All roads are not equal.
Verily, even maps can sin.
