Then carving, cutting.
Biting, chewing-he must be quicker next time, so the meat does not grow so cool.
Chewing and chewing and crying…
Missing Mommy.
'So what are you saying?'
'We can trust this man, Your Glory. I am sure of it.'
Esmenet sat, as had become their custom, on the settee with Imhailas cross-legged at her feet. Naree lay curled on her bed, watching them with a kind of envious disinterest. An oil lantern set upon the floor provided illumination, deepening the yellow of the walls, inking the grooves between the tiles, and throwing their bloated shadows across the far regions of the apartment.
'You're saying I should flee Momemn! And on a slave ship, no less!'
Imhailas became cautious, the way he always did when speaking around her wilder hopes.
'I'm not saying you should flee, Your Glory. I'm saying you have no choice.'
'How can I hope to recover the Mantle if-?'
'You are imprisoned or dead?' the Exalt-Captain interrupted. She forgave him these small transgressions, not simply because she had no choice, but because she knew how sovereigns who censored their subordinates quickly became their own worst enemies. History had heaped their corpses high.
'Please…' Imhailas persisted. 'Few know the ways of Empire better than you, Your Glory. Here, Maithanet's rule is absolute-but not so elsewhere! Many of the Great Factions clamour-fairly half the Empire teeters on the edge of open rebellion… You need only seize that half!'
She understood the force of his argument-not a day passed where she failed to inventory all those she thought she could trust. House Nersei, in particular, in Aoknyssus. Surely she could depend on Queen Miramis- Saubon's niece and Proyas's wife-to at least give her sanctuary, if not prosecute the interests of her family. Sometimes, when she closed her eyes, it seemed she could hear the laughter of her children, Xinemus and Thaila, smell Conriya's saline winds…
'All you need do is find some place safe,' her Exalt-Captain pressed. 'Some place where you can plant your Standard and call on those who remain faithful. They will come to you, Your Glory. In their thousands they will come to you, lay their lives at your feet. Trust me, please, Your Glory! Maithanet fears this possibility more than all others!'
She stared at him, her eyes pinned open to avoid blinking tears.
'But…' she heard herself say in a small, pathetic voice.
Imhailas seemed to blink her tears for her. He looked down, and a part of her bubbled in panic. He knew that she had surrendered all want for power, that she had been truly defeated, not by Maithanet, but by the loss of her little boy…
To leave Momemn would be to leave Kelmomas-and that was something she could not do.
Yield another child.
The girl did it, Esmenet knew, as much to spite her as to win him.
The coos in the dark. The creak of dowelled wood. The groan of dowelled loins. The breaths stolen, as though every thrust were a sudden fall.
He was a man, she told herself: you could no more ask a fox to resist a rabbit. But Naree, she was a woman-even more, she was a whore — and so commanded her desire the way carpenters commanded their hammers. If Esmenet had heard Imhailas cajole her, bully her with the cruel singularity of purpose that distinguished lust from love, then she might have understood. But instead, she heard Naree seducing him — in the very same tones she used to ply her daily custom, no less. The girlish pouting. The coy teasing. The restlessness of limbs impatient for carnal struggle.
She heard a woman, a rival, making love to the man between them for her sake.
Leave him to me, the girl was saying. You are old. Your peach is bruised and rotten. Your passion is flabby and desperate… Leave him to me.
Esmenet told herself it was nothing, merely the coupling of shadows in the dark, something that was scarcely real because it could scarcely be seen. She told herself it was his real motive, the primary reason why Imhailas wanted her to flee the city and abandon her son, so that he could plumb Naree with abandon. She told herself it was simply punishment, the way Fate chastised old whores so conceited as to think themselves queens.
She told herself many things as her ears roared for listening: the pluck of lips clasping about gasps, the cotton sweep of hot dry skin against hot dry skin… the pasty peal of wet from wet.
And when he began groaning, the Holy Empress of the Three Seas could feel him hard and beautiful upon her, as he was meant to be, the reverence in his flower-petal touch. And she began weeping, her sobs stifled, lost between the gusts of their passion. What had happened? What rite had she foreshortened? What deity had she offended? What had she done to be wronged so, again and again and again?
The bed cracked with pent tensions. What was languorous became rugged with pitched passion. Naree cried out, rose upon Esmenet's lover like the white on the forward curl of wave…
Leave him to me!
And the door exploded open on lances of torchlight. Armoured men burst upon its astonished wake. Naree gagged more than screamed. The screen was kicked aside even as Esmenet bolted from her blankets. Tear-spliced torchlight. Grinning faces, beards greasy in the uncertain light. Strapping figures, draped in impregnable chain. Gleaming blades. Golden Tusks stamped everywhere across the floating madness.
And Imhailas, nude and howling, his beautiful face cramped in wanton savagery.
A shadow clenched her hair, heaved her to the floor, yanked her to her knees.
'Imagine!' some leering voice cackled. 'A whore hiding among whores!'
And her Exalt-Captain battled, solitary, his broadsword whooping through the close air. An armoured man fell clutching his throat. 'Apostate!' Imhailas bellowed, suddenly the pale-skinned barbarian he had always been. 'Trait-!'
One of the Knights tackled him about the waist, carried him hard to the floor.
They fell upon him, hammering, stomping. One heaved him to his knees. Three others began striking his face with iron-girded fists. She watched his beauty disintegrate as if it were nothing more than leather wrapped about pottery. She felt something primal climb from her throat, heard it fly…
The Shrial Knight gripping his hair let him flop to the floor, where his skull drained. It seemed she could not look away from the socket that had been his face, so violent was its impossibility.
This could not be happening.
Naree's shrieking scarcely seemed human. It hung high, warbled with insanity.
And for the longest time it seemed the World's only noise.
The Knights of the Tusk looked to one another and laughed. One silenced Naree with a vicious backhand. The girl toppled from the far side of the bed.
Esmenet had forgotten the carelessness of men who kill-the danger of their dark and turbulent whims. But the old instincts were quick in returning: the sudden vigilance, the slack body, the numbness that passed for cold concentration…
The ability to see past the death of someone beloved.
The party consisted of some eight or nine Shrial Knights, but not from any company she could identify. Their breaths reeked for wine and liquor. A cloaked priest, whom she now recognized as a Collegian, walked to where Naree had retreated, curled naked beneath one of the shuttered windows. He bent above her, clutched her wrist with careless force, and as the girl wept and shook her head in negation, he counted out five gold kellics into her palm.
'And here's a silver,' he said, holding the coin to the light. He spun it between thumb and forefinger, and Esmenet glimpsed the grey of her outline in the white reflecting across it. 'To remember her by,' the Collegian said, nodding in Esmenet's direction, grinning. It fell with a crack to the floor between them.
Naree slumped at his feet. The Holy Empress of the Three Seas watched the girl's eyes follow the blood- tacked floors to where the Shrial Knights held Esmenet on her knees. Imhailas lay between them, grisly and unnatural.
