She barked in laughter.
She wandered the gloom of his pavilion, gazed upon the heirlooms of a destroyed empire. A fire-scorched standard, leaning negligently against a chair panelled in mother-of-pearl. Glittering coats of mail hanging from mahogany busts. The Padirajah's body-slave, a solemn Nilnameshi as old as she had once been, cowered in a slot between settees, watching her the way a child might watch a wolf.
She paused before the pavilion's small but sumptuous shrine. 'You are one of Her children,' she said without looking at the man. 'She loves you despite the wickedness your captors have forced upon you.' She drew a finger along the spine of the book nestled in crimson crushed velvet upon the small altar: the kipfa'aifan, the Witness of Fane.
The leather cracked and pimpled at her touch.
'You give,' she murmured, turning to fix the old man with her gaze. 'He takes.'
Tears greased his cheeks.
'She will reach for you when your flesh stumbles, and you are pitched into the Outside. But you must reach for Her in turn. Only then…'
He shrank into his refuge as she stepped toward him.
'Will you? Will you reach for Her?'
He shook his head in affirmation, but she had already turned away, knowing his answer. She sauntered toward the draped entrance, glimpsed herself in the long oval of a standing silver mirror. The Mother-Supreme paused in the lantern gloom, allowed her eyes to roam and linger across the supple lines of her reborn body. She made a tongue of her image, savoured the honey of what she saw…
To be returned, to experience the unfathomable loss, to shrink and wither-and then to bloom anew! Psatma Nannaferi had never suffered the vanities of her sisters. She did not hunger, as the others hungered, for the thieving touch of Men. Only in the execution of the rites would her flesh rise to the promise of congress. Even still, she exulted in this Gift as she had no other. There was glory in middle-youth, the tested limb and will of maturity, clothed in firm silk years away from the sackcloth it would become.
Her temples looted and burned. So many of her sisters raped and put to the sword, and here she stood, drunk with joy.
'Are you such a dog?' she asked the open air. 'Eh, Snakehead?'
She turned to where Meppa stood on the pavilion's threshold. The ornate flaps swayed into motionlessness behind him. Highland cool wafted through the interior.
'You,' he said with muttering intensity. His face remained directed forward, but the black finger of his salt asp had turned directly toward the cringing body-slave. The Mother-Supreme smiled, knowing the old man would not live to see dawn. He would die for her sake, she knew, and he would reach…
'Always guarding his master's portal,' she cackled.
'Cover yourself, Concubine.'
'You do not like what you see?'
'I see the withered old crone that is your soul.'
'So you are a man still, eh, Snakehead? You judge my beauty, my worth, according to the youth of my womb… My fertilit — '
'Still your tongue!'
' Bark, dog. Rouse your master. Let us see whose snout he will strike.'
The shining snake finally turned to regard her. The lips beneath the silver band tightened into a line.
Psatma Nannaferi resumed her appraisal of her miraculous twin in the mirror. 'You bear the Water within you,' she said to the Last Cishaurim. She drew a palm across the plane of her abdomen. 'Like an ocean! You can strike me down with your merest whim! And yet you stand here bandying threats and insults?'
'I serve my Lord Padirajah.'
The Mother-Supreme laughed. This, she realized, was her new temple, a heathen army, flying through lands where even goatherds were loathe to go. And these heathen were her new priests-these Fanim. What did it matter what they believed, so long as they accomplished what needed to be done?
'But you lie,' she croaked in her old voice.
'He has been anoin-'
'He has been anointed!' she cackled. 'But not by whom you think!'
'Cease your blasphem-'
'Fool! All of them. All these Men — all these Thieves! All of them think themselves the centre of their worlds. But not you. You have seen. You alone know how small we are… mere specks, motes in the gusting black. And yet you place your faith in errant abstraction-the Solitary God! Pfah! You throw number-sticks for your salvation, when all you need do is kneel!'
The Cishaurim said nothing in reply. The salt-asp, lantern light gleaming along the cross-hatching of its scales, hooked away from her toward a point over her shoulder.
She turned to see Fanayal standing naked in a kind of stationary lurch behind her. He seemed insubstantial for the play of shadow and gloom.
'Do you see now?' Meppa asked. 'Her treachery. Her devilry! My Lord, please tell me that you see!'
Fanayal ab Kascamandri wiped his face, breathed deep, his nostrils whistling. 'Leave us, Meppa,' he said roughly.
A moment of equipoise followed, the mutual regard of three overbearing souls. Their breathing abraded the silent air. Then with the merest bow, the Cishaurim withdrew.
The Padirajah loomed behind the diminutive woman.
He flung her about, cried, 'Witch!' He clamped callused hands about her neck, bent her back, crying, 'Accursed witch!'
Groaning, the Mother-Supreme clutched his hard muscled arms, hooked a naked calf about his waist.
Thus he ravished her.
Still huddled between the settees, the doomed body-slave wept for watching…
Soft earth deeply ploughed.
Scant ceremony greeted Uncle Holy's arrival at the Andiamine Heights' postern gate, only sombre words and unspoken suspicion. Slaves raised embroidered tarps against the rain, forming a tunnel with upraised arms, so Maithanet was spared the indignity of soaking in his own clothes. Kelmomas was careful to observe and mimic the attitude of his mother and her retinue. Children, no matter how oblivious otherwise, are ever keen to their parent's fear and quick to behave accordingly. Kelmomas was no different.
Something truly momentous was about to happen-even his mother's fool ministers understood as much. Kelmomas actually glimpsed crooked old Vem-Mithriti shaking his head in disbelief.
The Shriah of the Thousand Temples was about to be interrogated by their God's most gifted, destructive son.
Uncle Holy paced the dripping gauntlet in the simulacrum of fury. He fairly shouldered aside Imhailas and Lord Sankas to stand before Mother, who even so diminutive seemed imposing for the strangeness of her shining white mask. For not the first time, Kelmomas found himself hating his uncle, not simply because of his stature, but because of the way he occupied it. No matter what the occasion, be it a blessing or a marriage or an exhortation or the Whelming of a child, Anasurimbor Maithanet cultivated an aura of neck-breaking strength.
'Dispense with the frivolities,' he snapped. 'I would be done with this, Esmi.'
He wore a white robe with gold-embroidered hems-stark, even by his staid standards. Aside from the heavy Tusk-and-Circumfix that hung above his sternum, his only concessions to ornament were the golden vambraces that sheathed his forearms in antique Ceneian motifs.
Rather than speak, the Empress lowered her head a degree short of what was demanded by jnan. Kelmomas felt her hand tighten about his shoulder as she did so.
The young Prince-Imperial savoured the way they carried the scent of rain into the closeted halls of the palace. Moist creases of silk and felt. Feet squishing in sandals. Wet hair growing hot.
Neither party spoke a word the entire trek, save Vem-Mithriti, who begged his mother's pardon as soon as they climbed beyond the Apparatory, asking whether he could continue on his own at a pace more suitable to ancient bones. They left the frail Saik Schoolman behind them, following a path of stairs and corridors cleared in
