And he would cry like a little boy for real…
Mommeeee!
He had overheard enough to know that his mother had not been captured-and there was a time when he had wandered the labyrinth looking for some sign of her.
The realization that she was nowhere within the Palace was hard in coming.
How? How could she abandon him? After all his work, his toil, isolating her from distractions, infiltrating her, possessing hermaking her love…
How could she leave without her little-boy?
Some nights, he even dared creep into her bed. He would breath through her pillows and his head would spin for her scent… Mommy.
She was missing… He could not think this without gasping in terror, so he thought it rarely. He had always been able to sort his inner parts, to keep them one from the other. But within a week of the coup, the merest thought of her, or even a whiff of her favourite incense or perfume, would be enough to undo this sorting, to seize his face with grimaces, to draw his lip down trembling. He would curl into his own arms, imagine her cooing warmth, and fall asleep sobbing.
But he did not grow lonely-not for real real. Even though he was but one, isolate boy, he was not alone. Sammi was with him-the secret Samarmas-and they played as they always played.
You're filthy. Your skin and clothing are soiled.
'I am disguised.'
They stole food at will, baffled the slaves with their pilfering.
Uncle knows about us…
'He thinks I have fled, that someone shelters me.'
And they pondered the great game that had caught them, endlessly debated moves both possible and actual.
Uncle has her… He lies to deceive Father.
'She will be executed.'
And they cried together, the two brothers, shuddering within the cage of the same small boy.
But they knew, with a cunning not so different from that of mundane children, that he who covets his brother's power also covets his things. They knew that sooner or later Uncle Holy would take up residence in their Palace, thinking it his own. Sooner or later he would sleep…
And for all the alacrity of his senses, for all the profundity of his Strength, the Holy Shriah of the Thousand Temples would eventually err in his assumptions and fall to their childish knife.
They were as much Dunyain as he. And they had time.
Food. Secrecy.
All they were missing was meat.
Fugitive days became fugitive weeks.
Imhailas would vanish for days at a time. When he returned it was usually with dismaying news carefully wrapped in false hopes or, even worse, the absence of tidings. Maithanet, the Imperial Custodian, continued to consolidate his position, exacting declarations of allegiance from this or that personage, concocting yet more evidence of her Imperial malfeasance.
No word on Theliopa. No word on Kelmomas.
And her children, she had come to realize, were really all that mattered. Despite the black moods, the endless anxious watches, the restlessness that seemed to perpetually threaten madness, she had found reprieve in her forced seclusion. When it came to titles and powers and privileges, she felt far more liberated than deprived. She had forgotten what it was like to live a life focused only upon the most basic needs and passions. She had forgotten the slow-beating heart that was simplicity.
Let the Empress die and the Whore live, she sometimes caught herself thinking. So long as her children could live free and safe, what did she care for the cloud of curses that was the Empire?
Only Naree prevented her from owning this sentiment outright. The girl continued taking custom, despite Imhailas and his violent prohibition, and despite the pricked eyes and ears of the Holy Empress.
'You do not know,' she once said to Esmenet in tearful explanation. 'You do not know the… the insolence of my neighbours. If I were to stop, they would think I had a patron, that someone great had taken me as a mistress… They would become jealous-you have no idea how jealous they would be!'
But Esmenet did know. In her previous life, one of her neighbours had actually pushed her down her tenement stairs out of jealousy for her custom. So she contented herself with being the ailing mother, laying in her cot behind the screen while Naree gasped and keened, pinioned beneath grunting men. A caste-noble woman, one born to the privileges Kellhus had delivered to her, would have died in some way, she imagined. A portion of her pride would have been stamped out. But she was not a caste-noble. She was what she had always been-an old whore. Unlike so many, she did not need Anasurimbor Kellhus to show her around the barricades of vanity and conceit. Her pride had been stamped to mud long, long ago.
What troubled her was not her pride, it was her fear.
To listen to Naree pleasure strangers was to listen to herself as she once was, to once again be made a scabbard for edge after cutting edge. And she knew it all, remembered it with rank clarity. The liquid instant of insertion, the breath pent, then released, far too quick to be caught in a passion so clumsy as regret. The grinding tickle of the little, and the thrusting ache of the great. To be a flint struck, never knowing what fire would be stoked within her, be it disgust or tenderness or gasping pleasure. To make a tool of her turmoil, to make theatre of the wincing, flinching line that so inflamed men.
But what she had not known, not truly, was the danger.
She had respected her custom-to be sure. She had her rules, precautions. No drunks, unless she knew them well. No white-skinned teamsters or black-skinned mercenaries. No ulcers. But she had always-and she found this thought difficult to think-believed herself greater than the sum of the men who used her. She was at least as embittered as other whores and perhaps more inclined to self-pity. But she had never seen herself as a victim — not truly. Not the way Naree so obviously was…
She did not think herself a lonely child used and traded between lewd and dangerous men.
Sometimes, peering through the narrow slots between the screen's panels, she watched their faces as they toiled upon the girl, and she balled her fists for terror, so certain was she that whoever it was would break Naree's neck for simple domination's sake. Sometimes, after the tall shadow had left, she would peer at the girl lying naked across mussed and soiled blankets, raising a hand as about to speak to someone, only to lower it in indecision. And the deposed Empress of the Three Seas would lie riven with thoughts of gods and animals, of heartbreak and pollution, and the purity that hides in the bewildering in-betweens. The World would seem a place of rutting hungers and Men no more than Sranc tied into more complicated knots.
She would yearn for her Palace and her adoring slaves, for the sunlight lancing through scented steam, and hidden choirs singing. And she would cry, as silently as she could manage, for want of her little son.
'I am… shamed,' the girl said to her once.
'Why should you be?'
'Because… You could have me damned to Hell.'
The Empress nodded in indulgence. 'So you're afraid, then… not ashamed.'
'You are his vessel!' Naree cried. 'I've been to the Scuari-I've seen Him at your side. The Holy Aspect- Emperor. He is a god-I am certain of it!'
These words left a breach that only shallow breathing could fill.
Then Esmenet said, 'What if he were simply a man, Naree?'
She would never understand the dark whim that overcame her in saying this, though she would come to regret it.
'I don't understand.'
'What if he were simply a man pretending to be more-a prophet, or even as you say, a god-simply to manipulate you and countless others?'
'But why would he do such a thing?' the girl cried, seeming at once thrilled, confused, and appalled.
'To save your life.'
