that is your Mother-Supreme!'
Her face averted, her elbows to the floor, she shook two white-palmed hands out in warding.
'No-noooo! Pluh-pluh-pleeeeese-'
'
The Matriarch shrieked something inarticulate. A puddle of urine spread about her knees.
Then, as though exhaling a pent breath, the world resumed its natural lines and proportions. The unseen cloud passed from the unseen sun, and indirect light once again showered blue upon the dais.
'Taste your breath,' Kellhus said as he stood. He stepped out to loom patient and fatherly over the woman blinking up at him from the base of the steps. 'Taste it, Sharacinth, for it is the mark of my mercy. Fight the inclination of your heart, conquer your weakness for pride, for spite. Do not make humiliation of truth. I know you can feel it, the promise of release, the bone-shuddering release. Turn from the shrill poison of your conceit, from the hooked fists and knuckled teeth, from the rod of cold iron that holds you rigid when you should sleep. Turn from these things and embrace the truth of the life-the life! — that I offer you.'
Esmenet had heard these words so many times they should have seemed more a recitation than something meant, an incantation that never failed to undo the knots of pride that so bound men. And yet each time, she found herself sinking through the surface, floating utterly submerged. Each time, she heard them for the first time, and she was frightened and renewed.
Over the years, her husband had ceased being many things to Esmenet. But he was a miracle still.
The Matriarch of the Cult of Yatwer wept as a child might, snuffling and mumbling, 'F-f-forgive… F-f-forgive meeeee…' Over and over.
'Comfort her,' Kellhus said to his half-brother. Nodding in obeisance, Maithanet stood and crouched at the wailing woman's side.
Smiling, the Aspect-Emperor turned to Esmenet and reached out his hand. He spoke the sun-fiery words. She clutched two of his outstretched fingers, fell into his pulsing embrace. She felt the open spaces about them collapsing, dropping in sheets of ethereal fabric, falling away.
His light consumed her…
…and they were alone together, in the cool gloom of their private apartments. His legs crumpled, and he leaned and lurched against her. Grunting, Esmenet helped him stagger to their bed.
'Wife…' was all he said, rolling onto his back even though he still wore his sword, Certainty, sheathed across his shoulder blades. He raised a heavy hand to his forehead.
More air than light filtered in from the seaward balconies. The rooms were broad and surprisingly low- ceilinged, articulated by a series of steps that divided the bedroom proper from the lower regions. The furnishings were elegant and, with the exception of the crimson-cushioned bed, spare. She often wondered if her antipathy to ornament was more a result of the maddening complexities of her new life or a pining for the simple squalour of her old.
'How many?' she asked, knowing that he could only translocate the space of a horizon, and only then to places he had long studied from a distance or to places he had actually been. He had literally travelled all the way from the Istyuli Plains horizon by horizon.
'Many.'
She found herself looking away, blinking. The profile of various cities frescoed the walls, creating the pale illusion that the room occupied some impossible space over Invishi, Nenciphon, Carythusal, Aцknyssus, and Oswenta. Esmenet had commissioned them several years previous-as a physical reminder of her position in political space. It was a decision she had long since regretted.
Simple, her soul whispered. I must make things simple.
'You came…' she began, shocked to find she was already crying. 'You came as s-soon as you heard?' She knew this could not be true. Each and every night Mandate Far-Callers spoke with him in his dreams, apprised him of all that happened on the Andiamine Heights and elsewhere. He had come because of the situation with the Yatwerians, because of Sharacinth. Not because of his idiot son.
There were no accidents with Anasыrimbor Kellhus.
He sat up on the edge of the bed, and somehow she found herself in his arms, immersed in his wide-world husband smell, wracked with sobs.
'We've been cursed!' she gasped. 'Cursed!'
Kellhus gently pressed her back into his gaze and somehow above the surface of her immediate grief. She found herself drawing cool and soothing air.
'Misfortune,' he said. 'Nothing more, Esmi.'
When had his voice become a drug?
'But isn't that what the White-Luck means? Mimara has fled, and no one can find her, Kellhus! I have this-this terrible feeling-such a terrible feeling! And now Samarmas! Sweet-sweet Samarmas! Do you know what they're saying in the streets? Do you know that some of them actually celebrate! That-'
'You must take no action against them,' he said with stern compassion-the perfect tone. He always spoke in the perfect tone, words like cool plaster trowelled across the cracks of desire and confusion. 'Not the Yatwerians. They are not a people that we can massacre or uproot like the Mongilean Kianene. They are too widespread, too diffuse. The Great Ordeal is all that matters, Esmi. It has taken us too long as it stands. Golgotterath must be overcome before the No-God is resurrected. The immediate ever clouds the far, and desire ever twists reason to its own ends. I know these concerns seem to blot out all other considerations-'
'Seem? Seem? Kellhus! Kellhus! Our son is dead!'
Her voice pealed raw across the polished stone hollows.
Silence. Where for others the lack of response augured wounds scored or truths too burdensome to ignore or dismiss, for her husband it meant something altogether different. His silence was always one with the world about it, monolithic in the way of framing things. Without exception it said, Hear the words you have spoken. You. It was never, ever, the mark of error or incapacity.
Which was why, perhaps, she found him so easy to worship and so difficult to love.
Then he uttered her name, 'Esmi…'
'Esmi,' spoken in a voice so warm, so laced with compassion, that she found herself once again crying freely. He kissed her scalp and hair, a divine monster. 'Shhhh… I'm not asking you to take comfort in abstractions, for there is none. Even still, the Great Ordeal remains the end that maps all others. We cannot allow anything, anyone, to take precedence over it. Not riots. Not the collapse of the New Empire…' It was as if she stared into her own eyes, his look was so canny-save that he knew her so much better than she knew herself.
'Not even the death of our son.'
She had understood this all along. His tone had told her so.
A breeze bellied the dust-violet sheers, drawing them over the hard line of the Meneanor Sea. A finger of light flickered across the mural of Carythusal.
'How much misfortune must there be?' she heard herself crying.
The White-Luck hunt us… Hunts us…
'All of the woe the world has to offer, if need be. So long as we overcome the only one that is fatal.'
The Second Apocalypse.
She was beating his chest softly, pressing her forehead into the jasmine-scented silk. She could feel the reptilian imprint of the nimil-mail beneath. Looking up through tears, he seemed a towering glow and shadow both. 'But it's you they hunt! What? Do the Gods want a Second Apocalypse? Do they want the world shut against them?'
She had chosen Kellhus over Achamian. Kellhus! She had chosen her womb. She had chosen power and sumptuous ease. She had chosen to lay her hand upon the arm of a living god… Not this! Not this!
'Come, Esmi. I know Maithanet has explained this to you.'
'B-but it seems… it s-s-seems…'
'Most live on the edge of heartbeats, trusting their betters and the blind eyes of habit to see them further. A rare few can apprehend the span of entire lives. But you and I do not possess either luxury, Esmi. We must act according to the dictates of the ages, or there will be no ages for anyone to live. And this makes us appear cold,
