'Again you ignore the question. But this time you state a truth, one that you know will intrigue me. You mean Uncle Holy, don't you? Uncle Holy is coming to visit me? I smell Mother in that.'
The boy found strength in her mere mention.
'Y-yes. Mother wants you to read his face. She fears that he plots against Father-against us! She thinks only you can see.'
'Come closer.'
'But Uncle has learned how to fool you.'
Even as he spoke the words, Kelmomas cursed them for their clumsiness. This was an Anasurimbor crouched before him. Divinity! Divinity burned in Inrilatas's blood as surely as in his own.
'Kin,' Inrilatas crowed. 'Blood of my blood. What love you possess for Mother! I see it burn! Burn! Until all else is char and ash. Is she the grudge you bear against Uncle?'
But Kelmomas could think of nothing else to say or do. To answer any of his brother's questions, he knew, was to wander into labyrinths he could not hope to solve. He had to press forward…
'He has learned to disguise his disgust as pity, Uncle Holy. His treachery as concern!'
There was no other way through the monstrous intellect before him.
This is a mistake…
'The whisper warns you!' Inrilatas laughed, his eyes bright, not for the twin flames they reflected, but something more incendiary still: apprehension. 'You do not like sharing… Such a peevish, devious little soul! Come closer, little brother.'
He sees me!
'You cannot let him fool you!' the boy cried, trying to goad a pride that did not exist.
'I see him — the one you hide, oh yes! The other one, the whisperer. I seeeeeeeee him,' Inrilatas crooned. 'What does he tell you? Is he the one who wants Uncle Holy dead?'
'You will want to kill him, Brother, when he comes. I can help you!'
More laughter, warm and avuncular, at once teasing and protective. 'And now you offer the beast candy. Come closer, little brother. I want to stare into your mouth.'
'You will want to kill Uncle Holy,' Kelmomas repeated, his thoughts giddy with sudden inspiration. 'Think, brother… The sum of sins.'
And with that single phrase, the young Prince-Imperial's dogged persistence was rescued-or so he thought.
Where his brother had fairly radiated predatory omniscience before, his manner suddenly collapsed inward. Even his nakedness, which had been that of the rapist-lewd, virile, bestial-lapsed into its chill and vulnerable contrary. He actually seemed to shrink in his chains.
Suddenly Inrilatas seemed as pathetic as the human shit breathing on the floor between them.
The young man's eyes flinched from the boy's gaze, sought melancholy reprieve in the shadowy corners of his cell's ceiling.
'Do you ever wonder, Kel, why it is I do what I do?'
'No,' the boy answered honestly.
Inrilatas glanced at his brother, then down to the floor. Breathing deep, he smiled the sad smile of someone lost in a game pursued too far for too long. Too long to abandon. Too long to continue.
'I do it to heap damnation upon myself,' he said as if making an absurd admission.
'But why?' the boy asked, genuinely curious now.
Be wary… the secret voice whispered.
'Because I can think of no greater madness.'
And what greater madness could there be, exchanging a handful of glorious heartbeats for an eternity of anguish and torment? But the boy shied from this question.
'I… I don't understand,' he said. 'You could leave this room… anytime you wished! Mother would release you-I know it. You just need to follow the rules.'
His brother paused, looked to him as if searching for evidence of kinship beyond the fact of their blood. 'Tell me, little brother, what rules the rule?'
Something is wrong… the voice warned.
'The God,' the boy said, shrugging.
'And what rules the God?'
'Nothing. No one.'
He breaths as you breathe, the secret voice whispered, blinks as you blink-even his heartbeat captures your own! He draws your unthinking soul into the rhythms of his making. He mesmerizes you!
Inrilatas nodded in solemn affirmation. 'So the God is… unconstrained.'
'Yes.'
Inrilatas stood with sudden grace, walked to the limit of chains. He seemed godlike in the gloom, his hair falling in flaxen sheets about his shoulders, his limbs bound in veined muscle, his phallus laying long and violet in a haze of golden down. He placed his foot upon his feces, and using his toes, smeared it in a foul arc across the floor below him.
'So the God is like me.'
And just like that, the boy understood. The senseless sense of his brother's acts. The miraculous stakes of his mad exchange. Suddenly this little room, this shit-stained prison cell hidden from the light of shame, seemed a holy place, a temple to a different revelation, the nail of a darker heaven.
'Yes…' the boy murmured, lost in the wisdom-the heartbreaking wisdom! — of his brother's constant gaze.
And it seemed his brother's voice soaked into the surrounding walls, cupped everything that could be seen. 'The God punishes us according to the degree we resemble him.'
Inrilatas towered before him.
'And you resemble him, little brother. You resemble…'
What was this trap he had set for him? How could understanding, insight, capture?
'No!' the boy cried. 'I am not mad! I am not like you!'
Laughter, warm and gentle. So like Mother when she is lazy and wishes only to tease and cuddle her beautiful little son. 'Look,' Anasurimbor Inrilatas commanded. 'Look at this heap of screams you call the world, and tell me you would not add to them-pile them to the sky!'
He has the Strength, the secret voice whispered.
'I would…' Anasurimbor Kelmomas admitted. 'I would.' His limbs trembled. His heart hung as if plummeting through a void. What was this crashing within him? What was this release?
The Truth!
And his brother's voice resonated, climbed as if communicating up out of his bones. 'You think you seek the love of our mother, little brother-Little Knife! You think you murder in her name. But that love is simply cloth thrown over the invisible, what you use to reveal the shape of something so much greater…'
Memories tumbled into his soul's eye. Memories of his Whelming, how he had followed the beetle to the feet of the Grinning God, the Four-horned Brother, how they had laughed when he had maimed the bug-laughed together! Memories of the Yatwerian priestess, how she had shrieked blood while the Mother of Fertility stood helpless…
And the boy could feel it! An assumption of glory. A taking possession of a certainty that had possessed him all along-possessed him in ignorance… Yes!
Godhead.
'Come closer,' Inrilatas said in a whisper that seemed to boom across all creation. He nodded to the arc smeared across the floor between them. 'Wander across the line others have etched for you…'
The young Prince-Imperial watched his left foot, small and white and bare, step forward But a gnarled hand caught him, held him with gentle insistence. Somehow the deaf-mute Attendant had circled around without the boy noticing. The man wagged his face in alarm and horror.
Inrilatas began laughing.
'Flee, little brother,' he said, passion fluting through his voice. 'I can feel the…' He dandled his tongue on his lips as if savouring his own sweetness, even as his eyes widened in animal fury. A coital shudder passed through
