Any fool can see the limits of seeing, but not even the wisest know the limits of knowing. Thus is ignorance rendered invisible, and are all Men made fools.
Late Summer, 20 New Imperial Year (4132 Year-of-the-Tusk), Momemn
Some journeys required immobility.
He took a room and waited weeks he had already endured. He did not prepare so much as tarry while the world grew ripe. He was the White-Luck Warrior…
His harvest would come as it came.
Every morning, he watched himself rise and leave the room for the final time. He chased his back about corners, between the intersecting crowds. An apple found him. A coin. A priest of Jukan, who gave him bread smudged with blue. He heard the people talking in the streets, voice piled upon voice, and he had difficulty sorting reasons from conclusions. He listened, and listened to his listening. Most people were oblivious, but some saw him with different eyes. A little girl shrieked and shrieked. A blind beggar clasped him about the knees, blubbering.
'You must give! Give!'
Sometimes he gazed out the lone window, where he could see the Cmiral Temple-complex in the near distance, the black monuments grey in the morning haze. Sometimes the stone reaches were empty, sometimes they were packed with rioting multitudes.
Sometimes he simply watched himself gaze out the window.
He saw the Andiamine Heights, the gleaming rooftops rising in a welter, the walls, sometimes white in the sun, sometimes smeared black for burning. He heard the horns call, realized what he had always known.
The woman he had murdered had been overthrown.
He saw a spider skitter across the floorboards, knew that the world was its web. He almost stepped upon it ten thousand times. Almost, again and again…
He awoke and saw himself dressing at the foot of his rack. He watched himself rise and leave the room for the final time. He did not prepare so much as tarry while the world grew ripe.
A prostitute accosted him, and the band of naked skin from her armpit to her thigh drew the eye of the Shrial Knight who had singled him out for questioning. She caught something in his look and became instantly disinterested-called out to a gang of four young men instead. He passed into the Cmiral unnoticed. Looking about, he glimpsed his back climbing the monumental steps beneath the Temple Xothei. He saw the unwitting assembly, heard the howls of horror and disbelief. He wiped the blood already wiped from his blade, then stood gazing at the Empress, who was both dead and alive, triumphant and condemned.
He heard the drums of the enemy, pounding from beyond the great curtain walls.
He saw the world roar and shake.
A prostitute accosted him…
If he were to pause and think about it, young Anasurimbor Kelmomas would understand that his knowledge of the Palace was as intimate as imaginable. Only places that puzzled could be truly solved-which is to say, truly understood. Other places were merely known through the brute fact of their familiarity.
The Andiamine Heights had many ways… secret, sneaky ways.
Like the mirrors hidden throughout the Audience Hall, or the way he need only move his head the span of a hand to overhear conversations in different rooms of the Apparatory-such was the ingenuity of the passages that passed over and between them. Once he became adept at picking the locks that barred so much of the maze's extent, he truly came to appreciate the cunning that animated its design-his father's cunning. Many passages linked to others, allowing for rapid movements so that one could seem to be in two places at the same time. Some of the barred slots and chutes and tunnels allowed parts of the labyrinth to be itself observed, so that one could fool another into speaking confidences for the benefit of a third. And some allowed the same room to be observed from secondary vantages unknown to the first, so that one could pretend to be ignorant of a transaction and so test the veracity of another. Together the myriad ways combined and combined to create untold permutations. Were the Shrial Knights to discover him, flood the tunnels, they would require a hundred companies to flush him in a direction not of his choosing. And he would be able to prey upon them as a spider upon beetles.
He had become a creature of the darkness.
Even in the days of the Nansurium, the Andiamine Heights had been a piling of ascending powers, a place where blood and might became ever more concentrated as one neared the summit. From the temples and the campuses to the Apparatory, to the myriad chambers pertaining to the Congregate and the Remonstrata, to the Imperial Audience Hall and the adjacent apartments where he and his family dwelt. Since he could remember, Kelmomas had always prided himself on the height of his footing, the way he always looked down upon the teeming city. But that had been nothing more than a vain farce. Power, he now understood, turned more upon the penetration of places seen by places invisible. Inside and outside, rather than high and low.
The reconstruction, Mother once told him, had required a thousand slaves labouring for more than five years. She had never explained what had happened to the workmen, which suggested that she knew but was loathe to tell him. Kelmomas sometimes regaled himself with tales of their death, how they had been herded onto ships that were then scuttled on the high Meneanor, or how they had been dragged to the auction and sold to Father's confederates, who then had them strangled on their various plantation estates. Sometimes it was not enough to simply skulk in the shadows. Sometimes eyes had to be put out to remain hidden.
Father had managed to contain the secret of his labyrinth: the fact that no one so much as sounded the hidden halls after the Palace's fall proved that even Uncle Holy knew nothing of them (or that if he did, he wished to keep the secret of their existence as his own). Almost as soon as the assault was concluded, the boy began waiting for the inevitable charge into the tunnels, the raucous surge of torch-bearing men. A charge that never came…
No one so much as called for him.
The Shrial Knights returned the following day and began clearing the dead.
Then the slaves came, scrubbing blood from marble floors and walls. Sopped carpets were rolled into tree trunks and dragged away. Fire- and smoke-damaged furnishings were carried out in antlike trains. Censers were set throughout the halls, billowing violet-grey smoke: a haphazard collection of incenses that spoke more of availability than design. Soon the reek of offal-Kelmomas would have never guessed that shit would be the primary smell of battle-receded into his sensory background.
In a matter of days, it seemed the coup had never happened. And it began to seem a game, playing fugitive in the hollow bones of his own home. Everything was pretend. All he need do, he told himself, is cry out and his mother would come soothing and laughing…
'Let's just play,' he would tell the secret voice.
A little while longer…
The lower, administrative portions of the Palace resumed their previous functions. At first Kelmomas crept through the glare and boom of these precincts, his whole body prickling for fear of discovery. But soon he became so bold as to run through these passages, listening to the wax and wane of voices. A mere company of Shrial Knights had been assigned to guard and patrol the abandoned upper levels. He passed through their very midst, watching, hearing, even smelling. He saw them gamble, spit, or blow snot across the grand rugs. He watched one abuse himself in his mother's wardrobe. He silently cackled at their stupidity, poked their images in hate. When he retreated to safer depths, he would mimic their voices, then laugh at the echoes.
He scuttled and he scuttled, stealing glimpses through white slits, catching conversations on drafts. And after a time the darkness became what seemed real, and the illuminated world became naught but a congregation of impotent phantoms. He would exult, revel in the joy that is secrecy and deceit.
But no matter how hard-hard-hard he tried, he could only hold on to the fun for so long. Sometimes it would slip away drip by drip, boredom accumulating like knotted hair in a brush. He would bump around feeling hollow, doing his best to battle his stinging eyes and quivering lips. Other times it would drop from him entire, and he would find himself stranded where he stood, hands clenching air, throat cramping, face aching.
