such a thing?' he exclaimed.
She breathed deep. How had she come by her suspicions? So often the past seemed a cistern sloshing with dissolved voices. Inrilatas had said she feared Maithanet because she despised herself. How could he not try to save the Empire from her incapacity? But something in her balked at the possibility. Her entire life, it seemed, she had fended fears without clear origin.
Just a tactic… she told herself. An attempt to engage me morally — make me defensive. She tapped the Ainoni mask with a lacquered nail-a gesture meant for herself as much as for him.
'How?' she replied. 'Because you are Dunyain.'
This occasioned a long silence between them. Watching his pained look lapse into blank scrutiny, Esmenet could not shake the nagging sense that her brother-in-law actually considered murdering her there and then.
'Your husband is Dunyain,' Maithanet finally said.
'Indeed.'
She wondered if it would be possible to count all the unspoken truths that hung between them, all the devious grounds for their mistrust. Was there ever a family so deranged as theirs?
'If I condescend to this, this test, it will be only to reassure you, Esmi,' he finally said. His tone was devoid of pride or resentment, a fact that simply made him more inhuman in her eyes. 'I am your brother. Even more, I am your husband's willing slave, no different than you. We are bound together by blood and faith.'
'Then do this for me, Maitha. I will apologize if I'm wrong. I will wash your feet on the Xothei steps-anything! Wolves pursue me…'
It was all a game for them, she realized. No word, no expression, simply was. Everything was a tool, a tactic meant to further some occult and devious goal.
Even love… Just as Achamian had said.
She had known this for years, of course, but in the way of all threatening knowledge: at angles, in the shadowy corners of her soul. But now, playing that game with one of them, with a Dunyain, it seemed she understood that knowledge down to its most base implication.
She would be overmatched, she realized, were it not for her mask.
Maithanet had paused in the semblance of a man at his wit's end. His jet beard looked hot in the sunlight-she wondered what dye he used to conceal the Norsirai blond. 'And you are willing to trust the judgment of a mad adolescent?'
'I am willing to trust the judgment of my son.'
'To read my face?'
He was trying to extend the conversation, she realized. To better scrutinize her voice? Had something in her tone hooked his interest?
'To read your face.'
'And you realize the training this requires?'
Esmenet nodded toward her daughter. For all her deficits, Theliopa had been her reprieve. She too was Dunyain, but as Kelmomas possessed his mother's capacity to love, so too she possessed her mother's need to please. This, Esmenet had decided, was what she could trust: those fractions of her that had found their way into her children.
She would count all the world her enemy otherwise.
'The ability to re-read passions is largely native,' Theliopa said, 'and save for father-father, none can see so deep as Inrilatas. Inferring thoughts requires training, Uncle, a measure of which Father pro-provided.'
'But you know this,' Esmenet added, trying to hide the accusation in an air of honest confusion.
Gasping in exasperation, the Shriah of the Thousand Temples fell back in his chair. 'Esmi…'
The tone and pose of an innocent bewildered and bullied by another's irrationality. 'If his actions conform to your expectations,' Kellhus had told her, 'then he deceives you. The more unthinkable dissembling seems, Esmi, the more he dissembles…' Even though her husband had been referring to their son, the words, she knew, applied all the same to Maithanet. Inrilatas had said it himself: the Dunyain were not human.
And so she would play her own mummer's role.
'I don't understand, Maitha. If you're innocent, what do you have to lose?'
She already knew what Inrilatas would see in his uncle's face-what he would say.
'The boy… He could say anything. He is mad.'
All she needed were grounds.
'He loves his mother.'
| Before, the young Prince-Imperial had run about the bones of the Andiamine Heights; now he ran through them.
The more Kelmomas thought about it, the more it seemed he always knew that these tunnels existed, that all the subtle discrepancies between dimensions-shortened rooms and too-wide walls-had scratched and whispered at the edges of his notice. He did not like to think that ways had been hidden from him.
He wandered through the dark. He held a small hand about his candle flame to protect against drafts where he could, but he was not so afraid of losing his way as missing something of interest were the light to flicker out. All eyes, he padded through narrow corridors, a bubble of light slipping through black pipes. Everything he saw bore the strict stamp of his father. Bare surfaces. Crude stonework. Simple iron. Here and there he came across walls adorned with chapped paint, and once, an entire hall that had been vaulted and corniced: sections of the old Ikurei palace, he realized, that Father had bent to his own design. He quickly realized the stairs and halls composed but a small fraction of the complex. For every stair there were at least five tubes set with iron rungs, some climbing, others plumbing depths he had yet dared to go. And for every hallway there were at least a dozen chutes, accessing, he imagined, the palace in its entirety.
But there were too many locked doors and grates and hatches. He could almost see Mother or Father sending agents into these halls, using these portals to control how many bones could be explored.
He resolved to teach himself how to pick their locks.
Even though he knew he risked his mother's wrath, he decided to explore one of the few unbarred chutes-one leading through the Apparatory, he soon discovered. He passed innumerable voices, laughing and gossiping for the most part. He even glimpsed several shadows through tight marble and bronze fretting. He heard a couple making like dogs, and rooting around, he found a crease through which he could watch their sweaty backs heave.
'This is the way you are to me,' he whispered to the secret voice.
This is how I am to you.
'One bright.'
One dark.
His eyes little more than slits, Kelmomas watched the plunging mystery for a time. The smell of it intrigued him, and it seemed he had caught some whiff of it on every man and woman he had met in his entire life. Including Mother. Finally, answering to a rising urgency, he began retracing his steps. He happily let his candle gutter out, knowing the route step for step, rung for rung. The musty darkness blew like a breeze through his hair and across his cheeks, so fleet was his passage back to the Empress's apartment.
But Mother was waiting for him, her face as immobile as stone for fury.
' Kel! What did I tell you?'
He could duck her strike. He could catch her hand and break any one of her fingers. And while she winced for pain, he could snatch one of the pins fixing her hair and drive it deep into her eye. Death deep.
He could do any of these things…
But it was better to lean his cheek into her swatting palm, allow the blow to crack far harder than she intended, so that he could weep in false misery while she clutched him, and glory in her love and regret and horror.
Psatma Nannaferi rose from him, skin peeling from skin. She stood, savoured the kiss of cool air across her breasts, felt his seed flush her inner thighs-for her womb would have none of it. His post-coital slumber was deep, so deep he did not stir when she spat her contempt upon him. She could strike him dead and he would never know. He would writhe in agony for all eternity, thinking he need only awaken to escape.
Fanayal ab Kascamandri, blasted to charcoal, time and time again.
