'Then it dawned on me,' Maithanet continued, looking out to the recesses of the shuttered Temple. 'What if he foresaw the inevitability of his empire's collapse? What if the Three Seas were doomed to unravel no matter who ruled them? You. Me. Thelli…'
His blue eyes fairly bored through her. He seemed apiece with the great weights soaring about him, so broad did he appear in his white-and-gold vestments, so impressive were the accoutrements of his exalted station. She felt a rag-bound whore standing in his Dunyain shadow…
Another childish human.
'If the Empire was doomed to perish,' he said, 'what would his reasoning be then?'
The mob's roar heaved across the background the same as before, only marred with pitches that warbled across the limits of hearing.
'What are you saying?' she heard herself cry. 'That he wanted me to fail? That he wanted the world, his home, to come crashing down upon his wife? His children?'
'No. I'm saying he understood that such a crash would happen regardless, and so he chose one evil from among many.'
'I don't believe it. I… I cannot!'
What kind of man made oil of his children? What kind of Saviour?
'Ask yourself, Esmi. What is the purpose of the New Empire?'
She had the sense of retreating from his words as before a sword-point. 'To pre-prevent the Second Apocalypse,' she stammered.
'So if the Great Ordeal succeeds? What of the Empire then?'
'It has no… no…' She swallowed, so painful was the word. 'Purpose.'
'And if the Great Ordeal fails?' Maithanet asked, his woollen tone wrapped tight about the bruising iron of fact and reason.
She found herself looking down to her feet, to the charcoal grime between her toes. 'Then… then the No-God walks… and… and…'
'All eyes can feel him on the horizon. Every child is stillborn. Every man living knows that the Aspect- Emperor, Anasurimbor Kellhus, spoke true…'
The world warred and rioted about them.
She looked up without breath or volition. 'And Men are… are… united regardless.'
The sense of what he said struck her numb, even as the greater part of her balked. The Great Ordeal. The New Empire. The Second Apocalypse. It all seemed some vast joke, a farce of monumental proportions. Mimara missing. Samarmas dead. Inrilatas dead. Kelmomas missing. These were the things that mattered. The enormities that preoccupied Maithanet possessed no rule that her heart could fathom. They were simply too immense, too distant to be thrown on the balance with something as utterly immediate as a child. They seemed little more than smoke before the fire of her children.
Smoke that choked, that blinded, that led astray. Inescapable smoke. Killing.
Maithanet stood clear and bright before her, at once her enemy and her champion. And her only hope, she suddenly realized, of understanding the ruthless madness of her husband.
He killed him… He killed my 'I made the exact same mistake you yourself made, Esmi,' he said. 'I thought of the New Empire as an end, something to be saved for its own sake, when really it's nothing more than a tool.'
The boom of strife and discord. The Holy Shriah of the Thousand Temples graced her with a lingering look, as if satisfying himself that she had grasped the dire import of his ruminations. Then he turned his face to the high- hanging gloom, called out to invisible ears…
'We are finished!' he boomed. 'The Tusk and the Mantle are reconciled!'
'He has abandoned us,' Esmenet murmured into the ringing wake. When she blinked, it seemed she glimpsed the entire Three Seas burning: Nenciphon, Invishi, Seleukara, Carythusal…
Maithanet nodded. 'For now… Yes.'
She could hear a gathering of footfalls and hushed voices in the galleries.
'And after… after he destroys Golgotterath?'
The Holy Shriah glanced down at his palms. 'I don't know. Perhaps he will leave us to our own purposes.'
Her breath caught upon a pang. What would that be like?
The first sobs blew through her as a breeze, soft, soothing even as they tousled her thought and vision. But the tempest was not long in coming. She found herself weeping in his expansive embrace, wailing at all the losses she had endured, all the uncertainties…
How many revelations? she thought as the final gusts passed through her. How many revelations can one soul bear?
For she had suffered far too many.
She looked up into her Shriah's bearded face, breathed deep the sweet bitter of his Shigeki myrrh. It seemed impossible that she had once seen malice in the gentle blue of his eyes.
They kissed-not as lovers, but as a brother and a sister. She tasted tenderness on his lips. They gazed into each other's eyes, close enough to breath the other's exhalations.
'Forgive me,' the Shriah of the Thousand Temples said.
The Empire roared and rioted unseen.
She blinked, saw Imhailas's face unmade beneath pounding fists.
'Maitha…'
A glimpse was all he needed to fathom her question, so open was her face.
'Thelli is safe,' he said with a reassuring smile. 'Kelmomas hides yet in the palace.'
Terror hooked her throat-terror and crashing relief. 'What? Alone? '
His eyes seemed to lose focus, but even before she had registered it, he was there, before her, as immediate as her husband had ever been. 'He isn't what you think he is, Esmi.'
'What do you mean?'
He gestured to the floors behind her. 'In due time…'
She turned to the small crowd of Shrial and Imperial Apparati gathering about them, men she had known and trusted for many long years. Ngarau stood among them, Phinersa, and even ancient Vem-Mithriti. Some watched with expressions of hope-even joy-and some with apprehension.
She was not surprised to see so many loyalties overturned. Maithanet was her husband's brother. In some dark corner of her soul she had prepared for this encounter, but the curses, the cat-spitting declarations of outrage, were nowhere to be found. Instead, she felt only exhaustion and relief.
Few things are as inexplicable as the concatenation of souls. Kellhus had often told her how Men glimpsed but a sliver of the intercourse that passed between them, how passions and rivalries and understandings they could scarce fathom drove their intercourse like galleys before a storm. Perhaps they were all exhausted. Perhaps they simply yearned for the life they had known before Maithanet and his coup. Perhaps they were frightened by the battling multitudes surrounding the Temple. Perhaps they truly believed…
'He isn't what you think he is…'
Whatever the reason, something happened as she regarded them. Despite the embroidered fanfare of their robes, despite their cosmetics and jewelled rings, despite the pride and ambition belonging to their exalted stations, they became mere men, bewildered and embattled equals, standing together in the absence of judgment that was their Prophet's most beautiful gift. It did not matter who had erred, or who had betrayed or who had injured. It did not matter who had died…
They were simply disciples of Anasurimbor Kellhus-and the world clamoured around them.
Maithanet resumed his position on the dais, and Esmenet found herself watching him with a worshipper's simple wonder, blinking tears that did not sting. He seemed luminous, not simply with the overlapping rings of light shed by the hanging lantern wheels, but with renewal.
And suddenly Esmenet realized that she could see her way past her losses and her hate. Somehow she knew they would find some way to hold the Empire together, whether her accursed husband believed in them or not.
'We will stage an official reconciliation,' Maithanet said in warm, informal tones, 'something for the masses. But for the nons, I want all of you to witness what we sa-'
Then there he was, clad only in a loincloth, stepping between the golden idols of War and Birth, stepping
