The end of the chorus faded into the pitch of ringing stone. The Yatwerian Matriarch stiffly dipped to one knee, then the other. 'Your Glory,' she said, before pressing her face to her reflection across the marble floor.
Esmenet nodded to demonstrate Imperial Favour. 'Rise, Sharacinth. We are all children of the Ur- Mother.'
The older woman lifted herself, though not without some effort. 'Indeed, your Glory.' She looked to Maithanet, as though expecting some kind of assistance, then remembered herself. She was not accustomed, Esmenet realized, to the company of her betters. Esmenet had received many petitioners over the years, long enough to reliably guess the tenor of an audience from the first exchange of words. Sharacinth, she could tell, had made hard habit out of authority, to the point where she could not be trusted to show either grace or deference. Defensiveness hung about the old woman like an odour.
Esmenet cut directly to the point. 'What do you know of the White-Luck Warrior?'
'I thought as much,' the Matriarch huffed, her eyes narrow with arrogance. Her face was angular and curiously bent, as though it were a thing of clay left too long on one side.
'And why would that be?' Esmenet asked with mock graciousness.
'Who hasn't heard the rumours?'
'The treason, you mean.'
'The treason, then.'
For a moment the outrageousness of her tone quite escaped Esmenet. So often, it seemed, she forgot her exalted station and discoursed with others as though they were her equals. She found herself blinking in indignation. She hasn't even condoled me for the loss of my son!
'And what have you heard?'
A calculated pause. Sharacinth's eyes seemed bred to bovine insolence, her lips to a sour line. 'That the White-Luck has turned against the Aspect-Emperor… Against you.'
Esmenet struggled to draw breath around her outrage. Arrogant ingrate! Treacherous old bitch!
Was this what she had imagined all those years ago, sitting on her sill in Sumna, enticing passers-by with a glimpse of the shadows riding up and down her inner thighs? Knowing nothing of power, Esmenet had confused it with its trappings. Ignorance-few things were so invisible. She could remember staring at the coins she had so coveted, those coins that could ward starvation or clothe bruised skin, and wondering at the profile of the man upon them, the Emperor who seemed to stand astride her every bounty and privation. Not hated. Not feared. Not loved. These were passions better spent on his agents. The Emperor himself had always seemed… far too far.
In the endless reveries between beddings, she would sort through everything she could remember, all the lore, inchoate and humbling, that a citizen affixes to the subject of their sovereign. And in her soul's eye she would see him, Ikurei Xerius III, sitting in this very place.
How could it be possible?
Once, quite on a whim, she had shown Samarmas a silver kellic. 'Do you know,' she had asked, pointing to the apparition of her own profile across its face, 'who that is?' He had a way of opening his mouth when astounded, as though trying to shape his lips about a nail. It was at once comical-and heartbreaking in that it so clearly betrayed his idiocy.
My son! she silently cried. Picking wounds had become her path of least resistance, the one effortless thing. But there was no escaping the clamour of her responsibilities, the motions she had to force against the grain of what should be overwhelming grief. She had no choice but to have faith in her painted face.
'But you've heard more,' she asked in a hard and steady voice-a voice proper to the Empress of the Three Seas. 'Haven't you?'
'More. More,' Sharacinth muttered. 'Of course, I've heard more. When does one not always hear more? Rumours are like locusts or slaves or rats. They breed indiscriminately.'
They had known she was a prideful woman. It was the whole reason for summoning the bitch here: Maithanet had hoped the dimensions and reputation of her surroundings would be enough to mellow her hubris into something more malleable, something they could shape to their own purposes.
Apparently not.
'Matriarch, you would do well to recollect the stakes of our conversation.'
A sneer-an open sneer! And for the first time, Esmenet glimpsed it, the look that is the terror of all those who command positions of power: the look that says, You are temporary, no more a passing affliction. Suddenly she understood the staged calculation behind her throne and its position above the auditory floor. With one look, it seemed, the old woman had thrown it all into stark relief: the truth behind the hierarchy of disparate souls. Recognition, Esmenet realized. Power came down to recognition.
It was all naked force otherwise.
'Matriarch!' Maithanet boomed, drawing into his voice and aspect all the magisterial authority of the Thousand Temples.
Sharacinth opened her mouth in retort-not even the Shriah could cow her, it seemed. But whatever breath she possessed was sucked from her lungs…
Instead she wheezed and stumbled back, raised a hand against the sudden, immolating light that had sparked into existence above the floor before her. It danced and spiked outward, so brilliant it rendered everything dim. Crazed shadows swung from her ankles across the far corners of the Auditory. The point grew and sparkled, chattered with incandescences that possessed intensities beyond the gaze's conception…
Esmenet lowered her forearm, blinked at scalded eyes.
There he stood, tall, magnificent and otherworldly, exactly as she remembered him. A white silk tunic fell loose over his armour, embroidered in countless crimson tusks, each the length of a thorn. His beard was braided gold, his mane was long and free-flowing. The two demon heads hung bound to his right hip, mouthing curses without breath… There was a mad density to his aspect, a hoarding of reality that denied the world the sharpness of its edges and the substance of its weight.
It seemed the earth should groan beneath his feet. Her husband…
The Aspect-Emperor.
Sharacinth stood like a shipwreck survivor leaning to the memory of tossed seas. Two paces behind her and to the right, Maithanet lay supine across the shining floor. The Shriah of the Thousand Temples kneeling.
Esmenet knew enough not to watch Kellhus assume the Mantle to her right. Confidence, which in all complicated situations is nothing more than the pretence of premeditation, is ever the outward marker of power. There could be no appearance of improvisation.
'Hanamem Sharacinth,' he said, his voice at once mild and permeated with the tones of imminent murder, 'do you think you merit standing in my presence?'
The Matriach nearly fell over trying to throw herself to the floor. 'N-no!' she sobbed in old woman terror. 'M- Most Glorious… Pluh-please-'
'Will you,' he interrupted, 'take steps to assure that this sedition against me, this blasphemy, comes to an end?'
'Y-yesssh!' she wailed to the floor. She even hooked her fingers behind her head.
'For, make no mistake, I shall war against you and yours.' The grinding savagery of his voice swallowed the entirety of the hall, battered the ear like fists. 'Your deeds I shall strike from the stones. Your temples I shall turn into funeral pyres. And those that still dare take up breath or arms against me, I shall hunt, unto death and beyond! And my Sister, whom you worship, shall lament in the dark, her memory no more than a dream of destruction. Men shall spit to cleanse their mouths of her name!'
The old woman shook, arched her back as if gagging in terror.
'Do you understand what I say, Sharacinth?'
'Yessssh!'
'Then this is what you shall do. You shall heed your Empress and your Shriah. You shall put an end to the ignoble sham that is your office. You shall make claim to the truth of your station. You shall make war upon the wickedness within your own temple-you shall cleanse the filth from your own altar!'
Somewhere beyond the vaulted ceiling, a cloud engulfed the sun, and everything dimmed save the old woman writhing upon her reflection. Kellhus leaned forward, and it seemed all the world leaned with him, that the pillars themselves tilted, hanging above the Matriach, shivering in catastrophic outrage.
'And you shall hunt this witch you call your mistress, Psatma Nannaferi! You shall put an end to the sacrilege
