Middle-aged veterans were called up. Militias were levied. A dozen small battles were fought across lands famous and obscure. Curfews were extended. The Yatwerian temples were closed, and those priestesses who did not flee were imprisoned and interrogated. Plots and conspiracies were uncovered. In more orderly provinces, the executions were celebrated in garish spectacles. Otherwise, they were carried out in secret, and bodies were buried in ditches. The Slave Laws, which had afforded protections the enslaved had not known since the days of Cenei, were repealed. In a series of emergency sessions, the Greater Congregate passed several laws curtailing congress according to caste. Speaking at public fountains became punishable by immediate execution.
The caste-nobility of all nations suddenly found unity in their general terror of their servants and slaves. Suits were dropped, freeing the courts for more pressing prosecutions. Old and honourable enmities were set aside. The Shriah of the Thousand Temples summoned high-ranking Cultic priests from across the Three Seas for what would be called the Third Pan-Sumni Council, urging them to set aside their parochial worship, to recall the God behind the Gods. Shrial Priests everywhere inveighed on behalf of their Prophet and Sovereign. Those Zaudunyani who had not joined the Great Ordeal raised their voices to harangue their peers and their lessers. Groups of them took to murdering in the dark of night those they deemed unfaithful.
Sons and husbands simply vanished.
And though the New Empire tottered, it did not fall.
Momemn
Anasurimbor Kelmomas sat where he always sat when attending the Imperial Synod, in the Prince's Box on a bench cushioned with plush red leather: the same place where his older siblings had sat when they were young- even Thelli before she had joined Mother beneath the Circumfix Throne.
'Recall who it is you address, Pansulla,' Mother called down in a tight voice.
Though positioned relatively low on the palace heights, the chamber, the Synodine, was one of the more luxurious ones in the palace, and certainly among the most curious. Unlike other council chambers, it possessed no gallery for visiting observers and absolutely no windows. Where airy grandeur was the rule elsewhere, the chamber was long and narrow, with elaborately panelled boxes-the Prince's Box one of them-lining the short walls and with steep benches stepping the entire length of the long walls, as if an amphitheatre had been straightened and then snapped in half, forcing the audience to confront itself.
To accommodate the Circumfix Throne, a deep marble recess shelved the stepped slope to Kelmomas's left, blue-white stone trimmed with bands of black diorite. A scale replica of the Circumfix as it had hung in Caraskand, including his father hanging spread-eagled and upside down, rose in sinuous gold from the throne's back. His mother's chair and Thelli's had been cut into the marble tier immediately below it, their simple design concentrating the glory of the throne above. Some thirty identical seats had been set into the steps rising opposite, one for each of the Great Factions, whose interests governed the New Empire.
The floor lay well below all the seats, forcing those who walked it to continually crane their heads up and around to meet the gaze of their interlocutors. It was a narrow strip of bare floor, no bigger than several prison cells set end to end. Kelmomas had heard several functionaries refer to it-and with no little dread-as the Slot.
Because the man who now paced its length was so fat, Cutias Pansulla, the Nansur Consul, it looked even more narrow than usual. He had been strutting back and forth for several moments now, long enough for dark stains to bloom from his armpits.
'But I must… I must dare speak it!' he cried, his shaved jowls trembling. 'The people are saying that the Hundred are against us!'
The Imperial Synod, his mother had told Kelmomas, was a kind of boiled-down version of the Greater Congregate, what other kings in other lands often called a privy council, the place where representatives of the New Empire's most important interests could confer with their divine ruler. Of course, he always pretended to forget this explanation when he spoke to his mother and to always whine as he accompanied her to the sessions, but he secretly adored the Synod and the games within games it invariably revealed-at least when his father failed to attend them. Elsewhere, the words always seemed to be the same, glory this and glory that, and the lofty tone seemed to drone on and on and on. It was like watching men dual with bars of iron. But in the Synodine, both the words and the voices were honed to a cutting edge.
Real disputes instead of pantomime. Real consequences instead of heavenly petitions. Lives, sometimes in the thousands, were decided in this place as in no other. The young Prince-Imperial could almost smell the smoke and blood. This was where real cities were burned, not ones carved of balsa.
'Ask yourself,' Mother cried to the assembled men. 'Who will you be when the scripture of these days is written? The craven? The weak-kneed doubter? All of you- All of you! As the trial deepens, and the trial always deepens, all of you will be judged. So stop thinking of me as his weaker vessel!'
Kelmomas jammed his mouth into his forearms to conceal his smile. Though his mother angered often, she only rarely expressed it as anger. The boy wondered whether the fat Consul below understood the peril of his situation.
He certainly hoped not.
'Holy Empress, please!' Pansulla exclaimed. 'This… this talk… it does not answer our fears! At the very least you must give us something to tell the people!'
The Prince-Imperial sensed the power in these words, even though he did not fully understand their import. He certainly could see the indecision in Mother's eyes, the realization she had erred…
That one, the secret voice whispered.
Pansulla?
Yes. His breathing offends me.
Ever keen to exploit weakness, the round-bellied Consul pressed his advantage. 'All we ask, Most Holy Empress, is for the tools to work your will…'
Mother glared at him for a moment, then glanced nervously across the assembly. She seemed to flinch from the gravity of their regard. At last she waved a loose-wristed hand in weariness and capitulation. 'Read The Sagas…' she began but without breath. She paused to firm her voice. 'Read The Sagas, the history of the First Apocalypse, and ask yourself, Where are the Gods? How can the Hundred allow this?'
And the little boy could see the craft behind his mother's manner and words. Silence had seized the Imperial Synod, such was the force of her question.
'Thelli…' his mother said, gesturing to her daughter who sat gowned in absurd intricacy at her side. Dreadfully thin, she looked like a bird stranded between too many crumbs and the inability to choose. 'Tell them what the Mandate Schoolmen say.'
'The Gods are-are finite,' Theliopa declared in a voice that contradicted the stark angularity of her frame. 'They can only apprehend a finite por-portion of existence. They fathom the future-future, certainly, but from a vantage that limits them. The No-God dwells in their blind spots, follows a path-path they are utterly oblivious to…' She turned, looking from man to man with open curiosity. 'Because he is oblivion.'
Mother rested her hand atop Thelli's in a thoughtless gesture of thanks. Behind the panels of his box, the young Prince-Imperial fairly cut open his palms for balling his fists.
She loves me more! he thought.
Yes, the voice agreed, she loves you more.
The Empress spoke with renewed confidence. 'There is a world, my Lords, a world concealed, a world of shadow that the Gods cannot see…' She looked from Consul to Consul. 'I fear we now walk that world.'
A wall of bewildered looks greeted her. Even Pansulla seemed taken aback. Kelmomas almost chirped in glee, so proud was he of his mother.
'And the Hundred?' old Tutmor, the Consul for King Hoga Hogrim of Ce Tydonn croaked, his eyes rimmed with real fear. Alarmed voices clamoured in his wake.
Their Empress graced them all with a sour smile. 'The Gods chafe, because like all souls, they call evil what they cannot comprehend.'
More astounded silence. Kelmomas found himself squinting in hilarity. Why anyone should fear the Gods was quite beyond him, let alone fools as privileged and powerful as these.
Because they are old and dying, the secret voice whispered.
Pansulla still held the Slot. He now stood directly beneath his Empress.
'So…' he said, looking to the others with a strategically blank face. 'So it is true, then? The Gods…'-his gaze
