He thought of the Pillarian Guardsmen patrolling the Sacral Enclosure. He could even hear their voices on the evening breeze as they whiled away the watches with fatuous talk…
He thought about the fun he could have, sneak-sneaking about them, more shadow than little boy.
He thought about his previous murders and the mysterious person he saw trapped in the eyes of the dying. The one person he loved more than his mother-the one and only. Convulsing, bewildered, terrified, and beseeching… beseeching most of all.
Please! Please don't kill me!
'The Worshipper,' he declared aloud.
Yes, the secret voice whispered. That's a good name.
'A most strange person, don't you think, Sammi?'
Most strange.
'The Worshipper…' Kelmomas said, testing the sound. 'How can he travel like that from body to body?'
Perhaps he's locked in a room. Perhaps dying is that room's only door…
'Locked in a room!' the young Prince-Imperial cried laughing. 'Yes! Clever-clever-cunning-clever!'
And so he slipped into the gloom-gloomy hallways, dodging and ducking and scampering. Only the merest shiver in the shining lantern-flames marked his passing.
Finally he arrived at the Door… the high bronze one with seven Kyranean Lions stamped into its greening panels, their manes bent into falcon wings. The one his mother had forbidden the slaves to polish until the day it could be safely opened.
The door to his brother Inrilatas's room.
It stood partially ajar.
Kelmomas had expected, even hoped to find it such. The slaves who attended to his brother generally did so whenever lulls in his tantrums permitted. During his brother's calm seasons, however, they followed an exact schedule, cleansing and feeding Inrilatas the watch before noon and the watch before midnight.
The boy mooned in the corridor for several moments, alternately staring at the stylized dragons stitched in crimson, black, and gold across the corridor's carpet and stealing what glimpses the narrow slot provided of the cell's bare floor interior. Eventually his curiosity mastered his fear-only Father terrified him more than Inrilatas-and he pressed his face to the opening, peering past the belt of brushed leather that had been tacked to the door's outer rim to better seal in the sound and smell of his mad brother.
He could see an Attendant to his left, a harried-looking Nilnameshi man soaping the walls and floor with a rake-mop. He saw his brother sitting hunched like a shaved ape to the right of the room, his edges illuminated in the light of a single brazier. Each of his limbs were shackled to a chain that ran like an elongated tongue from the mouth of a stone lion head, one of four set into the far wall, two with their manes pressed against the ceiling, two with their chins across the floor. A winch-room lay beyond that wall, Kelmomas knew, with wheels and locks for each of the chains, allowing the Attendants to pull his brother spread-eagled against the polished stone, if need be, or to grant him varying degrees of freedom otherwise.
From the look of the links curled across the floor, they had afforded him two lengths or so of mobility-enough both to relieve and to embolden the boy. Inrilatas usually howled and raged without some modicum of slack.
At first, Kelmomas thought him absolutely motionless, but he was not.
He sat making faces… expressions.
Not any faces, but those belonging to the slave who bent to and fro with his mop a mere toss away, scrubbing away urine and feces with a perfumed astringent. Periodically the deaf-mute would cast a terrified glance in his prisoner's direction, only to see his face reflected back to him.
'Most of them flee,' Inrilatas said. Kelmomas knew he addressed him even though he did not so much as glance at the boy. 'Sooner or later, they choose the whip over my gaze.'
'They are simple fools,' Kelmomas replied, too timid to press open the door, let alone cross the threshold.
'They are exactly what they appear to be.'
The shaggy mane turned. Inrilatas fixed the young Prince-Imperial with wild and laughing blue eyes. 'Unlike you, little brother.'
Save for his long face, Inrilatas looked utterly unlike the brother Kelmomas remembered from his infancy. His growth had come, gilding his naked form in a golden haze of hair. And years of warring against his iron restraints had strapped his frame in luxurious muscle. A beard stubbed his chin and the line of his jaw but had yet to climb his cheeks.
His voice was deep and beguiling. Not unlike Father's.
'Come, little brother,' Inrilatas said with a comradely grin. He leapt toward the entrance so suddenly that the deaf-mute fumbled the handle of his mop and tripped backward. He landed at a point just shy of where the chains would bring him up short.
Kelmomas watched his brother squat and defecate, then retreat to his previous position. Still smiling, Inrilatas waved his little brother forward. He possessed a man's wrists now: the hands of a thick-fingered warrior.
'Come… I want to discuss the shit between us.'
With anyone else, Kelmomas would have thought this a mad joke of some kind. Not so with Inrilatas.
The boy pressed the door inward, strode into the stench, pausing but two steps from the coiled feces. The slave glimpsed Kelmomas in his periphery, wheeled in sudden alarm. But the man was quick to resume his cleaning when he recognized him. Like so many palace slaves, terror kept him welded to the task before him.
'You show no revulsion,' Inrilatas said, nodding at the feces.
Kelmomas did not know what to say, so he said nothing.
'You are not like the others, are you, little brother? No… You … are like me.'
Remember your face, the secret voice warned. Only Father possesses the Strength in greater measure!
'I am nothing like you,' the little Prince-Imperial replied.
It seemed strange, standing on the far side of the Door. And wrong
… So very wrong.
'But you are,' Inrilatas chuckled. 'All of us have inherited our Father's faculties in some mangled measure. Me… I possess his sensitivities, but I utterly lack his unity… his control. My natures blow through me-hungers, glorious hungers! — unfettered by the little armies of shame that hold the souls of others in absolute captivity. Father's reason mystifies me. Mother's compassion makes me howl with laughter. I am the World's only unbound soul…'
He raised his shackled wrists as he said this, gestured to the polluted floor before him.
'I shit when I shit.'
A ringing filled the boy's ears, such was the intensity of his older brother's gaze. He began to speak, but his voice caught as though about a hook in his throat.
Inrilatas grinned. 'What about you, little brother? Do you shit when you shit?'
He sees me… the secret voice whispered. You have become reckless in Father's abse 'Who?' Inrilatas laughed. 'The shadow of hearing moves through you-as it so often does when no one is speaking. Who whispers to you, little brother?'
'Mommy says you're mad.'
'Ignore the question,' his older brother snapped. 'State something insulting, something that will preoccupy, and thus evade a prickly question. Come closer, little brother… Come closer and tell me you do not shit when you shit.'
'I don't understand what you mean!'
He knows you lie…
'Of course you know… Come closer… Let me peer into your mouth. Let me listen to this whisper that is not your voice. Who? Who speaks inside of you?'
Kelmomas fell backward a step. Inrilatas had managed to creep forward somehow, to steal slack from his chains without the boy noticing.
'Uncle is coming to see you!'
A heartbeat of appraising silence.
