realized, she had become a mortal risk to anyone who so much as glimpsed her without alerting the Shrial Knights. From this moment on, she was the most sought-after fugitive in all the Three Seas.
'Please!' Naree cried, her voice piteous for her accent. ' Please! Blessed Empress! You must find some other place! You-you're not-not… safe here! There are too many people!'
But Naree, she knew, wasn't simply asking her to hide elsewhere. The girl was asking her to take responsibility for leaving as well, so that she might salvage her relationship with Imhailas.
And were it not for her children, Esmenet probably would have done exactly as she asked.
'Why?' a masculine voice asked from behind them. Both women gasped, started violently enough to pop some joint in the bed. Imhailas stood by the door, cloaked as before, staring at Naree in naked outrage. The combination of gloom and surprise made him seem an apparition. 'Why are we not safe?'
The girl instantly dropped her eyes-some habit from her childhood bondage, Esmenet supposed. Imhailas strode around the bed, glaring in fury. The floorboards creaked beneath his booted feet. The girl continued staring down in submissive immobility.
'What is this?' he snapped, tugging at the blanket she had pulled about her shoulders. The girl caught an exposed breast with a forearm. 'You've been taking custom?' he cried in low, incredulous tones.
'Imma!' she called, at last looking up. Tears streamed from her eyes.
The blow was sudden, hard enough to send the slight girl rolling across the mattress. Imhailas hauled her upright, pinned her writhing against the wall before Esmenet could find her voice, let alone her feet. The girl clawed at the hand about her throat, gurgled and gagged. The Exalt-Captain pulled his knife, raised the point before her wide and rolling eyes.
'Should I send you to them now?' he grated. 'Should I let the Hundred judge you now, while you still stink for rutting before your Holy Empress! Should I send you to them polluted?'
Esmenet circled behind him as if through a dream. When did I become so slow? a vague portion of her soul wondered. When had the world become so fast?
She raised a palm to the wrist of the choking hand. Imhailas looked to her, his eyes wild and bright and clouded with the madness that is the terror of all women. He blinked, and she watched him catch himself from the murderous brink.
'Shush, Imma,' she said, using the diminutive of his name for the first time. She met his astounded gaze with a warm smile. 'Your Blessed Empress, remember, happens to be an old whore.'
The Exalt-Captain released the naked girl, who slumped to the tiles, gagging and weeping. He stepped back.
Esmenet crouched over the girl, hesitated, her soul caught on the humming threshold of compassion.
Your children! she thought with a kind of inward torsion. No enemy is so relentless as a forgiving nature. Kelmomas! Remember him!
'I'm your Empress, Naree… Do you know what that means?'
Esmenet reached toward Imhailas, gestured for his knife. His palms are hotter than mine, she thought as her fingers closed about the warm leather of the grip.
Even skinned in tears, there was something crisp and vigilant about the girl's eyes, a troubling alacrity in the way they clicked from the shining blade to Esmenet's own gaze. As young as she was, Esmenet realized, Naree was an inveterate survivor.
'It means,' Esmenet said, her smile as warm and motherly as the knife's edge was wicked, 'that your life-your life, Naree-belongs to me.'
The girl swallowed and nodded with the same air of learned submission.
Esmenet pressed the knife's point against the soft curve of her throat.
'Your soul,' the Blessed Empress of the Three Seas continued, 'belongs to my husband.'
'Maithanet has loosed an army of priests across the city,' Imhailas said, leaning back in exhaustion across the battered settee. Naree, now robed and almost comically meek, sat cross-legged on the floor at his feet, holding up a bowl of watered wine in yet another pose of ritual subservience. Esmenet sat on the corner of her cot watching them, hunched forward with her elbows on her thighs. The world beyond the shutters had gone black. A single lantern illuminated the room, casting haphazard shadows through ochre gloom.
'Criers,' the Exalt-Captain continued, 'only decked in full vestments, swinging censers on staffs…' His eyes latched on to Esmenet in the gloom, the lamplight reflected in two shining white dots low on his irises. 'He's saying you've gone mad, Your Glory. That you- you! — have betrayed your husband.'
The words winded her, even though she was entirely unsurprised. Maithanet need not be Dunyain to understand the importance of legitimacy.
Kellhus had explained nations and polities to her, how they worked like the Cironji automata so prized by the more fashionable caste-nobility. 'All states are raised upon the backs of men,' he had told her after the final capitulation of High Ainon. 'Their actions, the things they do, day in and day out, connect like wheels and cogs, from the stonemason to the tax-farmer to the body-slave. And all actions are raised upon the back of belief. When men turn from their beliefs, they turn from their actions, and the entire mechanism fails.'
'So this is why I must lie?' she asked, watching him from her pillow.
He smiled the way he always did when she missed his mark in a penetrating manner. 'No. To think in these terms, Esmi, is to think honesty is the decision that confronts you.'
'What is the decision, then?'
He shrugged. 'Effectiveness. The masses will always be mired in falsehood. Always. Each man will think he believes true, of course. Many will even weep for the strength of their conviction. So if you speak truth to their deception, they will call you liar and cast you from power. The ruler's only recourse is to speak oil, to communicate in ways that facilitate the machine. Sometimes this oil will be truth, perhaps, but more often it will be lies.'
Speaking oil. Of all the analogies he used to illustrate the deeper meaning of things, none would trouble her quite so much. None would remind her so much of Achamian and his fateful warning.
'But…'
'How did I rise to power?' he asked, seeing her thoughts as always. A rueful smile, as if remembering escapades best forgotten. 'Men make what they already believe the measure of what is true or false. What they call 'reason' is simply apology. The masses will always believe false because the fancy of their forefathers is always their rule. I rose to power by giving them truths, little truths, for which they possessed no rule, one after the other. I chased the unthought implications of what they already believed, gaining ever more legitimacy, until, eventually, men made me their one and only rule. Insurrection, Esmi. I waged a long, hard insurrection. The petty overthrow of petty assumptions precedes all true upheavals of belief.'
'So you lied?'
A small smile. 'I guided. I guided them to a lesser falsehood.'
'Then what is the truth?'
He had laughed, shining as if anointed in oil.
'You would call me a liar if I told you,' he had said.
Both Imhailas and Naree stared at her in anxious expectation, and it seemed a miracle to her, that she could be so powerless in fact, and yet hold souls such as these in her thrall-simply because they believed she possessed power over them. The way countless thousands believed, she realized.
Maithanet had removed the New Empire's head-her. Now he was simply doing what any usurper would: speaking oil. He had to give the masses an excuse to continue acting in all the old ways. Otherwise all the wheels and cogs would cease turning in concert, and the entire mechanism would come crashing down. Every palace revolt took this form.
Only the precision and alacrity of his execution distinguished him as Dunyain.
'The people will never believe him!' Imhailas finally cried when she failed to speak. 'I am sure of it!'
A wave of resignation washed over her. 'Yes,' she said, dropping her forehead into her palm. 'They will.'
His story was simple enough-believable enough. The machine was broken, and he, Maithanet, was the Chosen Tinker.
'How? How could they?'
'Because he has reached them first.'
The three of them soaked in the implications of this disastrous fact.
