prayed to them. She had clutched her knees sobbing their names…
The broad-shouldered man who knelt in prayer beneath them, she had known for less than half her life-if indeed she had known him at all. She knew him enough only to know that he never prayed. Not truly.
Anasurimbor Maithanet, the Holy Shriah of the Thousand Temples. He turned the instant she came to a pause below, held her in his monolithic regard. He was dressed in full ceremonial splendour, with elaborate vestments hooding his shoulders, draping down in two long, gold-tasselled tongues. He had allowed his beard to grow, so that the plaits fanned across his ritual chest plate. They seemed to have stained the white felt of his vestments where they touched, as if he had used a cheaper dye than usual to conceal the blond that was his true colour. His hair gleamed with oils, making him seem of apiece with the idols framing him.
She flinched at the deep bass of his voice.
'The officers who beat you,' he said. 'They are being flayed even as we speak. Several others will be executed as well.'
He seemed genuinely apologetic, genuinely furious…
Which was how she knew he lied.
'Apparently,' he continued, 'they thought apprehending you without the knowledge of their betters would earn them more glory in this World.' His look was at once mild and merciless. 'I have invited them to try the next.'
She neither spoke nor breathed for several long blinking moments. She wanted to scream, 'My husband! Don't you realize? Kellhus will see you gutted!' only to find her outrage robbed of voice by some perverse reflex.
'My-my chil…' she began instead, coughing and blinking tears. 'Where are my children?'
Her face crumpled about a sob. So long… So long she had toiled… feared…
The Shriah of the Thousand Temples loomed above her, his manner cold and absolute.
'The Empire is falling apart,' he said in a voice fairly bottomless for its wisdom. 'Why, Esmi? Why have you done this?'
'You killed my son!' she heard herself shriek.
' You killed your son, Esmi, not me. When you directed his attempt on my life.'
'I did not!' she cried, her limbs thrown to the impotent limit of her chains. 'I only needed to know if you were hiding anything! Nothing more. Nothing less! You killed my son. You made this into a war! You! '
Maithanet's face remained perfectly blank, though his eyes glittered with what seemed a wary cunning. 'You believe what you're saying,' he finally said.
'Of course!'
Her voice peeled high and raw beneath the airy gloom of the domes, faded into the white hiss of the mob's roar.
He gazed at her, and she had this curious sense of throwing herself open, as though her face had been a shuttered window.
'Esmi…' he said far more softly. 'I was mistaken. Both in what I assumed to be your intentions and in your capacity.'
She almost coughed for shock. Was this some kind of game? She thought she laughed when in fact she wept.
'You thought me mad-is that it?'
'I feared…' he said.
The Shriah of the Thousand Temples descended the steps, then-impossibly- knelt before her, raised a hand to her bloodied cheek. He smelled of sandalwood and myrrh. He produced a small key from his girdle, crudely cast.
Esmenet reeled. She had assumed this audience would be nothing more than a pantomime, a ceremony required to stamp her inevitable execution with the semblance of legitimacy. She had hoped only to throw her defiance and her righteousness into the air between them, where memory could not deny it.
She had forgotten that pride and vanity meant nothing to him, that he would never merely covet power for its own sake…
That he was Dunyain.
'Long nights, Esmi…' he said as he worked the lock on her manacles. And it seemed madness, the absence of embarrassment or contrition-or any other recognition of the absurdity between them. In a way, it seemed almost as terrifying as the doom she had originally expected.
'Long nights have I pondered the events of the past months. And the question is always the same…'
One by one he cracked open the locks, beginning with her wrists, then bending to free her ankles. She found herself flinching from his powerful proximity, not bodily, but in her soul, which had feared him for too long to so quickly relinquish its aversion.
'What?' he asked as he worked. 'What is my brother's plan?' The Holy Shriah looked up from the posture of a penitent. 'He must have known that the Gods would begin clamouring against him, that one by one their far-off whispers would take root in the Cults. He must have known his Empire would crumble in his absence… So then why? Why would he entrust it all to someone with no Dunyain blood?'
'To me,' she said with more bitterness than she intended.
A roaring swell rose from the rioters beyond the walls, a reminder that for all the temple's immensity, it was but a small pocket of gloom in a world of sunlit war.
A reminder of the people they would command.
'Please, Esmi,' he said, standing to gaze down into her eyes. 'I beg you. Set aside your pride. Listen as your husband would listen, without-'
'Prejudice,' she interrupted, drawing her lips into a sour line. 'Continue.'
She gingerly rubbed her wrists, blinking in the manner of those with sand in their eyes. She could not see her way past her shock and incredulity. A simple misunderstanding? Was that it? How many people had died? How many men like… like Imhailas?
'Out of all his tools,' Maithanet said, 'I have long known that ignorance is the one he finds most useful. Even still, I succumbed to the vanity that bedevils all men: I thought I was the lone exception. Me, another son of Anasurimbor Moenghus, one who knows the treacherous ways of conviction… the way certainty is simply an illusion born of ignorance. I convinced myself that my brother chose your hands, which were both weak and unwilling, because he had deemed me a threat. Because he did not trust where the Logos might lead me.'
For all the disorder of her soul, these words burned with peculiar clarity-probably because she had rehearsed them with such morbid frequency.
'The way he did not trust your father,' she said.
A grave nod, steeped in admission. 'Yes. Like my father… Perhaps even because of my father. I thought he might have suspected I possessed residual filial passions.'
'That you would betray him to avenge your father?'
'No. Nothing so crude as that. You would be dismayed, Esmi, to know the way caprice and vanity distort the intellect. Men ever cast themselves into labyrinths of thinking, not to lose themselves in the pursuit of truth, but to hide their self-interest in subtleties and so make noble their crassest desires. Thus does avarice become charity, and vengeance, justice.'
It was as if a drawstring had been yanked tight about her breast.
'You convinced yourself that Kellhus feared the same of you?'
'Yes…' he said. 'And why not, when Men so regularly yoke their intelligence to self-serving stupidity? I am half a man. But the Interdiction… The questions it raised plagued me, even as I acted in ways I thought my brother would demand of me. Why? Why would he forbid all communication between the Great Ordeal and the New Empire?'
She glanced at the shackles discarded at her feet, noticed a bead of blood welling from one of her toes.
'Because he feared that tidings of discord would weaken the Ordeal's resolve.'
This, at least, had been what she told herself… What she needed to believe.
'But then why would he cease communicating?' Maithanet asked. 'Why would he personally refuse to answer our pleas? From his brother. From his wife…'
She did not know. The Holy Empress of the Three Seas wiped at the tears burning in the creases of her eyes, but the filth on her fingers only made them sting more.
