He burrowed into the loose thatch at the pile's terminus, several paces down from the wain, then waited for the slaves to embark. He breathed deep the smell of chaff and the dust of dried-out life.
Peering through a straw skein, he watched one of the slaves, a balding man with a panicked face, climb the bench and urge the harnessed horse, a sturdy black, forward with a low whistle and flick of the reins. The Kidruhil paused in their laughter, as though struck by this moment of common mastery. Wielding pitchforks, the other slaves were already heaving great manes of hay into the air. The torches coughed and sputtered.
Kelmomas focused on the horse, timed the clopping tempo of his legs, closer, closer, until its bobbing head blotted the image of the driver. Shod hooves falling like hammers. Knuckled legs trotting, bending stiff and tensile like unstrung bows. Closer.
Kelmomas leapt into the thundering clatter, reached-
His hands hooked to the harness's nethers, he pressed himself against the veined belly, willed himself into the animal's torpid heat. The whole world rumbled. The great body floating above him, flexing to and fro. The cobbles rushing beneath, falling into the rapping wheels. The young Prince-Imperial laughed aloud, knowing the racket would swallow his every sound.
They rattled across the Batrial Campus, and as they passed the Guest Compound at a tangent, Kelmomas released and twisted, landing face down on his palms and toes. He was sprinting the instant the wain's box cleared him, a shadow flitting toward the succession of arches along the ground-floor portico.
Then he was in the Guest Compound.
Her scent was clear now, a bitter old woman smear, like the trail a worm might make. He followed it up to the third floor, paused before turning down the hall that led to her suites. He heard yet another guard's heartbeat.
He looked then hid in a single motion, one eye daring the wall's edge. A blink was all he needed. The details he could safely consider in the light of his soul's eye: a lantern-lit corridor ornate with a faux colonnade and marble mouldings. A long length of carpet, trimmed with white vining, the blue so deep that most would think it black. A single sentry, neither Pillarian or Eцthic, standing rigid before the smell of her door.
No noise, save the lanterns and their endless glowing exhalation.
Kelmomas turned the corner and began stomping down the hall, sob-crooked lips, a peevish, mucus-filled moan, tears and a look of ruinous self-pity. The sentry smiled in a manner that confirmed his fatherhood, and so his familiarity with little-boy-tantrums. He leaned in tsk-tsk commiseration, the Golden Sickle of Yatwer emblazoned on his black-leather cuirass.
Kelmomas stepped into the fan of his multiple shadows.
'Come, now, little man-'
The motion was singular, abrupt with elegance. The skewer tip entered the sentry's right tear duct and slipped into the centre of his head. The ease of penetration was almost alarming, like poking a nail into soft garden soil. Using the bone along the inner eye socket for leverage, Kelmomas wrenched the buried point in a precise circle. There was no need, he thought, to mutilate geometry as well.
He stepped to the side, his arm held high while the man toppled. The sentry's face lolled to the left and turned almost upright as his weight yanked his skull clear of the gleaming skewer. He twitched opened-eyed on the carpet, his fingers pawing the fabric like a purr-drunk kitten-but only for a heartbeat or two.
Kelmomas tugged the man's knife from its sheaf.
The brass-strapped door was unlocked.
Cloth had been drawn over the windows, so that the light creaking in from the hallway was the room's only illumination. 'Hello?' somebody called-one of the body-slaves sleeping on the floor of the antechamber. The others awoke, leaned forward into the bar of light. Four altogether, blinking. At first, they seemed little more than disembodied faces, then, when he stepped among them, levitating howls. He hacked at them, striking along the interstices between flailing shadow-limbs. No game, it seemed, had ever been so thrilling. To not be tagged by skin or soiled by blood. To walk the cracks between heartbeats. To kill as though a wind, without any trace of passing.
The faces fell one by one, gushing like slashed wineskins.
The Matriarch was quite awake by the time the little boy slipped into her bedroom. 'Tweet!' he trilled. 'Tweet-tweet!' His giggling was uncontrollable…
Almost as much as her shrieking.
Anasыrimbor Esmenet casually dismissed the four Shrial Knights they found standing rigid in the hallway, looked around sourly at the ostentatious decor-anything but the dead Yatwerian sentry slumped across the carpet. In the Ikurei days, guests had been housed within the Andiamine Heights, something that simply wasn't possible given the greater administrative demands of the New Empire. The Guest Compound was one of the Holy Dynasty's first works, raised in the heady days before the fall of Nilnamesh and High Ainon, when Kellhus seemed to hold the world's own reins within his haloed fists. The marble, with its distinctive blue bruising, had been transported all the way from quarries in Ce Tydonn. The towering panels, each depicting heroic scenes from the Unification Wars in relief, had been drafted by Niminian himself and carved by the most renowned Nansur stonemasons.
All to the glory of the Aspect-Emperor.
She had no desire to revisit the carnage beyond the threshold. Esmenet had witnessed her fair share of death, perhaps more than any woman in the Three Seas, but she had no stomach for murdered faces.
'We'll wait here,' she told the two men who had taken up positions on either side of her. As always, Phinersa's look seemed to flitter about the outskirts of her form. Captain Imhailas, on the other hand, was a study in contrast. He could stare with decisive constancy-too decisive, Esmenet sometimes thought. The man always seemed to be communicating urges he scarcely knew he possessed. Sometimes an arrogant curiosity would creep into his look, and he would press his manner to the very brink of transgression, standing almost too close, speaking in a way that was almost too familiar, and smiling at thoughts to which only he was privy. And as every prostitute knew, the only thing more threatening than eyes that had too many qualms were eyes that had too few. What had the strength to seize also had the strength to choke.
Moments afterwards, Maithanet appeared in the doorway, stepping carefully to avoid the clotted threads and buttons of blood. He was dressed plainly: no felt-shouldered vestments, no hems swaying with stitched gold, only a tunic possessing the satin gloss of a horse on parade. Ochre-coloured, it etched the contours of his limbs and torso in detail, revealing the kind of chest and shoulders that stirred some feminine instinct to climb. For the first time, it seemed, Esmenet realized how much the intimation of sheer physical strength contributed to his sometimes overawing presence.
The Shriah of the Thousand Temples was a man who could break necks with ease.
Both Phinersa and Imhailas fell to their knees, bowed as low as jnan required of them.
'I came as soon as I heard,' he said. To better cultivate the distinction between the political and the spiritual organs of the Empire, Maithanet always resided in the Cmiral temple-complex, never the Imperial Precincts, when he stayed in Momemn.
'I knew you would,' Esmenet replied.
'My brother-'
'Gone,' she snapped. 'Shortly before word of… of this… arrived. I ordered the area sealed as soon as I heard of it. I knew you would want to see for yourself.'
His look was long and penetrating. It seemed to concede her worst fears.
'How, Maitha? How could they reach so deep? A mere Cult. The Mother of Birth, no less!'
The Shriah scratched his beard, glanced at the two men flanking her. 'The Narindar, perhaps. They possess the skills… perhaps.'
The Narindar. The famed Cultic assassins of yore.
'But you don't believe as much, do you?'
'I don't know what to believe. It was a shrewd move, that much is certain. Figurehead or not, Sharacinth was our royal road, our means of seizing control of the Yatwerians from within, or at the very least setting them at war from within…'
Phinersa nodded appreciatively. 'She has become their weapon now.'
Esmenet had concluded as much almost the instant she had stepped into the blood-spattered antechamber earlier that night. She was going to be blamed for this. First the rumours of the White-Luck Warrior, then the
