One could not dwell in the presence of Anasurimbor Kellhus as long as she had without developing an acute awareness of one's own soul: the thoughts, the passions, and, most importantly, the patterns. If she lacked insight before, it was simply because she had occupied the centre of power for so long. Nothing so deadens the inner eye as habit.
But now… Maithanet had obliterated everything she had known, and it seemed she could see herself with a peculiar lucidity. The fugitive Empress. The bereaved mother. The cycling of dismay, desolation, hatred, and a curious in-between, a sense as relentless as it was numb. The going-through-the-motions of survival.
Numbness. This was the only strength she possessed, so she strained to hold on to it.
'He's calling himself the Imperial Custodian,' Imhailas continued, his eyes tearing for frustration and disgust.
'What of the Army?' Esmenet heard herself ask. Only the pain in her throat told her the importance of this question.
As anxious and solemn as he had appeared before, Imhailas looked to her with outright horror now.
'They say Anthirul has met with him in Temple Xothei,' he said, 'that the traitor has publicly kissed his knee.'
Esmenet wanted to lash out in crazed fury, to punish petty things for the epic injustices she had suffered. She wanted to shriek in imperious outrage, heap loathing and curses upon General Anthirul-everyone who had surrendered their capricious loyalty…
But she found herself looking at Naree upon the floor below Imhailas instead. The girl glanced at her-a bright, almost animal look-only to turn away in terror. The girl was trembling, Esmenet realized. Only the palm and arm she held posed to receive Imhailas's wine-bowl remained motionless.
And the Holy Empress of the Three Seas tasted something she had not known since the crazed day she had led her daughter to the slavers in the harbour so many years before.
Defeat.
CHAPTER TWELVE
Skies are upended, poured as milk into the tar of night. Cities become pits for fire. The last of the wicked stand with the last of the righteous, lamenting the same woe. One Hundred and Forty-Four Thousand, they shall be called, for this is their tally, the very number of doom.
Know what your slaves believe, and you will always be their master.
Summer, 20 New Imperial Year (4132 Year-of-the-Tusk), the Istyuli Plains
She made love to him, draping her famed hair, which was so blonde as to be white.
They despised each other, but their passion was oblivious and so did not suffer. Her final cries brought the servants scurrying in alarm, even as her thrashing cracked his loins asunder. Afterward they even laughed at the commotion. And as the drowsiness overcame him, he thought it was not such a bad thing for a man to sound a woman without heart or scruple, so long as she was his wife.
He did not pause to ask why she had seduced him. Perhaps there will be peace between us, he thought, slipping into sleep…
Except that he remained awake-somehow, impossibly.
Through closed eyes he watched her, Ieva, his wife of seven years, scurry naked to the cabinet across their spare room and produce a philtre, which she considered with an expression hung between terror and gloating. She turned to him, her face thin and cruel.
'How she will weep,' she growled, 'the filthy whore… And I will see it, and savour it, the breaking of her heart when she learns her beloved Prince has died in his wife's arms!'
He tried to call out as she leaned above him, holding the black tube with medicinal care. But he was sleeping and could not move.
'But you will not die, my heroic husband. Oh no! For I will fall upon your corpse, and I will wail-wail-wail, claiming to the Bull Heavens that you demanded to be buried rather than burned-like a Nonman!'
He tried to spit the foul liquid she poured between his teeth. He tried to reach up and out, seize her pale neck…
'Oh my husband!' she cried in a whisper. 'My dear-dear husband! How could you not see the grudge I hold against thee? But you will know it, soon enough. When you are delivered, when you are beaten and broken-then you will know the compass of my spite!'
Cold trickled into the back of his throat-and burned.
And at last his slumbering form answered the alarums screeching through his soul. Drusas Achamian shot upright, gasping and sputtering… swatting at the afterimage of another man's treacherous wife.
Gone was the ancient bedroom. Gone was the drowsy light of afternoon…
But he could taste the poison all the same.
He spat across the dead grasses, sat clutching his temples, incredulous and reeling.
Nau-Cayuti. He had dreamed he was Anasurimbor Nau-Cayuti… and more.
He had dreamed not the experience, but the fact of his ancient assassination.
What was happening?
He turned to Mimara, who lay motionless beside him, beautiful despite the squalor of her skin and clothing. He recalled her fateful declaration the first and only night they had lain together.
'You have become a prophet… A prophet of the past.'
Never had he seen the like, not even in the darkest of Seswatha's Dreams.
They had crossed paths worn by herds of elk, vast swathes of grassland veined by innumerable trails, diverging, crossing, forking out to the limits of their vision. As gouged as they were, the scalpers could not but whistle, their souls' eyes straining to conjure a herd whose mere passing could so mark the earth. 'The ground moans at their approach,' Xonghis told them that evening. Apparently he had seen the elk herds during his days as an Imperial Tracker. 'Even the skinnies flee.'
But this…
They had spent the morning climbing long lobes of land piled one atop the other-a range of flattened hills. They paused to recover their wind when they finally crested the summit, only to find it stolen by the vista before them.
The Wizard's first thoughts were of the Great Carathay, that the drought had transformed the Istyuli into a northern desert. But as his aging eyes sorted through the distances he realized that he was gazing across another trail, one far greater than the braided immensities left by the elk…
'The Great Ordeal,' he called out to the others. Something clutched his throat, thinned his voice, a horror or wonder he could not feel.
That was when his eyes began picking out the points of black scattered all across the landscape that bowled out before them in swirls of dun and ochre. The dead.
A battleground, Achamian realized. They had happened upon a battleground, one so vast it would take more than a day to cross, even with their quickened limbs.
'A battle of some kind?' Galian called as if reading his thoughts.
