simply too ingenious not to devise tools for some kind of mischief. Once he managed to make a shiv, which he used to kill one of his attendants, using only the fabric of his tunic and his seed.
'I want Maithanet brought here… to you.'
She could feel him peering into her face, the strange tickle of being known. She experienced some sense of exposure with almost all her children by Kellhus, but it differed with each one. With Kayutas, it simply seemed to render her irrelevant, a problem easily dismissed or solved. With Serwa, it raised her ire because she knew the girl could see the pain she had caused her mother and yet chose to ignore it. With Theliopa, it was simply a fact of the time they spent together, and a convenience as well, since it allowed the girl to more completely subordinate herself to her mother's wishes.
But with Inrilatas it always seemed more profound, more intrusive, somehow…
Like the way she felt in her husband's eyes, only without the sense of… resignation.
'Uncle Holy,' he said.
'Ye-'
'They smell it on you, you know,' he interrupted. 'Fear.'
'Yes,' she replied on a long breath. 'I know.'
Kellhus once told her that Inrilatas's soul had been almost perfectly divided between the two of them, his intellect and her heart. 'The Dunyain have not so much mastered passion,' he had explained, 'as snuffed it out. My intellect is simply not robust enough to leash your heart. Imagine bridling a lion with string.'
'You are blackened by Father's light,' the adolescent said, his voice straying across resonances only her husband used. 'Rendered pathetic and absurd. How could a mere whore presume to rule Men, let alone the Three Seas?'
'Yes… I know, Inrilatas.'
What was the power that a mother wielded over her son? She had watched Inrilatas reduce her flint-hearted generals to tears and fury, yet for all the cutting things he had said to her, for all the truths, he managed only to increase her pity for him. And this, it seemed to her, kindled a desperation in him while rendering her a kind of challenge, a summit he must conquer. For all the labyrinthine twists of his madness, he was just an anguished little boy in the end.
It was hard to play God in the eyes of a heartbroken mother.
Inrilatas grunted and huffed air. She tried to ignore the strings of semen that looped across the oblong of sunlit floor several paces from her feet.
He was always doing this, marking the spaces about him with his excretions. Always staining. Always defacing. Always desecrating. Always expressing bodily what he sought to do with his mastery of word and expression. All men gloried in transgression, Kellhus had told her, because all men gloried in power, and no power was more basic than the violation of another's body or desire. 'Innumerable rules bind the intercourse of Men, rules they can scarce see, even if they devote their lives to the study of jnan. Our son lives in a world far different than yours, Esmi-a visible world. One knotted and stifled and choked with the thoughtless customs we use to pass judgment one upon another.'
'Aren't you curious?' she asked.
Her son raised a finger to his mouth. 'You think Father left the Empire to you because he feared the ambition of his brother. So you suspect Uncle Holy of treachery. You want me to interrogate him. Read his face.'
'Yes,' she said.
'No… This is simply the rationale you use. The truth is, Mother, you know you will fail. Even now, you can feel the New Empire slip from your grasp, topple over the edge. And because you know you fail, you know Maithanet will be forced to wrest the Empire from you, not for his own gratification, but for the sake of his brother…'
And so the game began in earnest. 'You must be forever wary in his presence,' Kellhus had warned her. 'For truth will be his sharpest goad. He will answer questions that you have never asked yet lay aching in your heart nonetheless. He will use enlightenment to enslave you, Esmi. Every insight you have, every revelation you think you have discovered, will be his.'
Thus had her husband, in the course of arming her against their mad son, also warned her against himself. As well as confirmed what Achamian had said so very long ago.
She leaned forward, braced her elbows against her knees to watch him the way she had when he was but a babe. 'I will not fail, Inrilatas. If Maithanet assumes my eventual failure, then he's mistaken. If he acts on this assumption, then he has broken the Aspect-Emperor's divine law.'
Inrilatas's chuckle was soft, forgiving, and so very sane.
'But you will fail,' he asserted with a slaver's nonchalance. 'So why should I do this for you, Mother? Perhaps I should side with Uncle, for in truth, only he can save Father's Empire.'
How could she trust him? Inrilatas, her and her husband's monstrous prodigy…
'Because my heart beats in your breast,' she said out of rash maternal reflex. 'Because half of your madness is mine…' But she trailed, troubled by the way Inrilatas could, merely by listening, reveal the falsehood of sentiments that seemed so simple and true otherwise.
A jerk and rattle of iron chains. 'Things heave in me, Mother. Be. Quick.'
'Because I know that you want the Empire to fail.'
His laughter was curious, as though crazed forces sheered the humour underpinning it.
'And you will trust… what I tell you?' he said, his voice cracked by inexplicable exertions. 'The words… of a madman?'
'Yes. If only because I know that Truth is your madness.'
A kind of jubilation accompanied these words-one that she immediately repented, knowing her son had already seen it, and fearing he would deny her for simple perversity's sake. Even as a young child, he had always sought to quash whatever was bright within her.
'Inspired words, Mother.' His tone was thin and blank, almost as if he mocked his older sister, Theliopa. 'The very kind Father has warned you not to trust. You cannot see the darkness that precedes your thoughts, but unlike most souls you know it exists. You appreciate how rarely you are the author of what you say and do…' He raised his shackled hands for a clap that never came. 'I'm impressed, Mother. You understand this trick the world calls a soul.'
'A trick that can be saved… or damned.'
'What if redemption were simply another form of damnation? What if the only true salvation lay in seeing through the trick and embracing oblivion?'
'And what if,' Esmenet replied with more than a little annoyance, 'these questions could be debated endlessly without hope of resolution?'
In a wink, Theliopa's manner vanished, replaced by a hunched ape, leering and laughing. 'Father has been rubbing off on you!'
Perhaps she should have been amused. Perhaps she would have been, despite the utter absence of trust. But her heart had been bludgeoned, her hope battered beyond the possibility of amusement.
'I tire of your games, Inrilatas,' she said, speaking a fury that seemed to gather strength in the sound of her voice. 'I understand that you can see my thoughts through my voice and face. I understand your abilities as well as anyone without Dunyain blood can. I even understand the predicaments I face in merely speaking to you!'
More laughter. 'No, Mother. You most certainly do not understand. If you did, you would have drowned me years ago.'
She fairly leapt to her feet, such was the sudden violence of her anger. But she caught herself. 'Remember, Esmi,' Kellhus had warned her, 'never let your passions rule you. Passions make you simple, easy to master. Only by twisting, reflecting upon your reflections, will you be able to slip his grasp…'
Inrilatas had leaned forward from his hunch, his face avid with a shifting melange of contradictory passions, a face like a pick, sorting through tumblers of her soul.
'You lean heavily on Father's advice…' he said, his voice reaching for intonations that almost matched Kellhus's. 'But you should know that I am your husband as he really is. Even Uncle, when he speaks, parses and pitches his words to mimic the way others sound-to conceal the inhumanity I so love to flaunt. We Dunyain… we are not human, Mother. And you… You are children to us. Ridiculous and adorable. And so insufferably stupid.'
The Blessed Empress of the Three Seas could only stare in horror.
'But you know this…' Inrilatas continued, his gaze fixed upon her. 'Someone else has told you this… And in
