advance and guarded at every turn by stone-faced Eothic Guardsmen. The wall sconces were idle despite the darkness of the day, so they passed through pockets of outright gloom. Despite his mother's fixed, forward glare, the young Prince-Imperial could not resist craning about, matching the ways he could see with the ways he could not-comparing the two palaces, visible and invisible.
At long last they gained the Imperial Apartments and reached the Door.
It seemed taller and broader than the boy remembered, perhaps because his mother had finally ordered it polished. Normally chalked in green, the Kyranean Lions now gleamed in florid majesty. He wanted to ask Mother whether this meant Inrilatas would be set free, but the secret voice warned him to remain silent.
The Empress stood before them, her masked face lowered as if in prayer. All was silent, save for the creak of Imhailas's gear. Kelmomas reached about her silk-girdled waist to press his cheek into her side. She ran thoughtless fingers through his hair.
Finally Maithanet asked, 'Why is the boy here, Esmi?'
No one could miss his tone, which twisted the question into, What is this morbid fixation?
'I don't know,' she replied. 'Inrilatas refused to speak to you unless he was present.'
'So this is to be a public humiliation?'
'No. Only you and my two sons,' she replied, still gazing at the Door. 'Your nephews.'
'Madness…' the Shriah muttered in feigned disgust.
At last she turned her mask toward him. 'Yes,' she said. ' Dunyain madness.'
She nodded to Imhailas, who grasped the latch and pushed the great door inward.
The Shriah of the Thousand Temples looked down to Kelmomas, clasped his small white hand in the callused immensity of his own. 'Do you fear me as well?' he asked.
Rather than reply, the boy looked to his mother in the appearance of anxious yearning.
'You are a Prince-Imperial,' his mother said. 'Go.'
He followed Uncle Holy into the gloom of his brother's cell.
The cell's lone window was unshuttered, revealing a slot of dark sky and flooding the room with chill and moist air. Rain was all the boy could hear at first, roaring across complicated rooftops, gurgling and slurping down the course of zigzag gutters. A single brazier warmed the room, pitching an orange glow into the dark. An elaborately carved chair had been set facing the wall where Inrilatas's chains hung from the four stone lion heads. The brazier had been positioned, the boy noticed, to fully illuminate the chair's occupant and no one else.
Inrilatas crouched naked some four paces from the chair, his arms about his knees. The dim light did not so much illuminate as polish him, it seemed. The young man watched them with a kind of blank serenity.
We must discover what he wants us to do, the secret voice whispered.
For certainly Inrilatas wanted something from him. Why demand his presence otherwise?
His uncle released his hand the instant the Door creaked shut behind them. Without so much as looking at either brother, he reached into his left sleeve and extracted a wooden wedge from beneath the antique vambrace. He dropped it clattering to the floor, then kicked it beneath the base of the door…
Locking them in.
Inrilatas laughed, flexing arms as smooth and hard as barked branches. 'Uncle Holy,' he said, bending his head to press his left cheek against his knees. 'Truth shines.'
'Truth shines,' Maithanet replied, taking the seat provided for him.
Kelmomas peered at the wooden butt jammed into the black seam between the floor and the portal. What was happening? It had never occurred to him that Uncle Holy might have plans of his own…
Shout, the secret voice urged. Call for her!
The boy shot a questioning look at his older brother-who simply grinned and winked.
Raw for the rain, distant thunder reverberated through the cell window. But for the little boy, the crazed proportions of the circumstances that seized them rattled louder still. What was happening?
'Do you intend to murder Mother?' Inrilatas asked, still staring at Kelmomas.
'No,' Maithanet replied.
We have missed something! the voice exclaimed. Something has 'Do you intend to murder Mother?' Inrilatas asked again, this time fixing his uncle in a cart-wheeling gaze.
'No.'
'Uncle Holy. Do you intend to murder Mother?'
'I said, no.'
The boy breathed against the iron rod of alarm that held him rigid. Everything was explicable, he decided. Inrilatas played as he always played, violating expectations for violation's sake. His uncle had stopped the door for contingency's sake… The little boy almost laughed aloud.
They were all Dunyain here.
'So many years,' Inrilatas continued, 'piling plots atop plots-could it be you have simply forgotten how to stop, Uncle?'
'No.'
'So many years surrounded by half-witted peoples. How long have you toiled? How long have you suffered for these malformed children with their stunted intellects? How long have you suffered their ignorance-their absurd vanity? And then Father, that slovenly ingrate, raises one of them above you? Why might that be? Why would Father trust a whore over the pious Shriah of the Thousand Temples?'
'I know not.'
'But you suspect.'
'I fear my brother does not fully trust me.'
'Because he knows, doesn't he? He knows the secret of our blood.'
'Perhaps.'
'He knows you, knows you better than you know yourself.'
'Perhaps.'
'And he has seen the flicker of sedition, the small flame that awaits the kindling of circumstance.'
'Perhaps.'
'And have the circumstances arrived?'
'No.'
Laughter. 'Oh, but Uncle Holy, they have arrived-most certainly!'
'I do not understa-'
'Liar!' the wild-haired figure screeched.
The Shriah did not so much as blink. His face bathed in wavering orange light, Maithanet enveloped Inrilatas in Dunyain scrutiny, a gaze that seemed to tinkle like coals. It was a profile Kelmomas had seen thousands of times, stitched into banners if not in flesh. High of cheek, virile, the strength of his jaw obvious despite the thickness of his beard.
He is our first true challenge, the voice whispered. We must take care.
Inrilatas's eyes glittered in the gloom. He crouched the same as before, his chains hanging in arcs across the floor. If their uncle's scrutiny discomfited him, he betrayed no sign of it.
'Tell me, Uncle Holy. How many children did grandfather sire?'
'Six,' the Shriah replied. There was a toneless brevity to the exchange now, as if they had shed the disguises they used when interacting with normal men.
'Were any of them like me?'
A fraction of a heartbeat.
'I have no way of knowing. He drowned them at the first sign of peculiarities.'
'And you were the only one that expressed… balance?'
'I was the only one.'
'So grandfather… He would have drowned me?'
'Most certainly.'
The stark appraisal of a Dunyain, directly to the point, careless of pride or injury. In an arena packed with the blind and the beggared, he and his family were the only sighted players. They played as the blind played-goading, commiserating, flattering-simply because these were the moves that moved the blind. Only when they vied one
