against another, the young Prince-Imperial realized, could they dispense with the empty posturing and play the game in its purest, most rarefied form.
'So why,' Inrilatas asked, 'do you think Father has spared me?'
The Shriah of the Thousand Temples shrugged. 'Because the eye of the World is upon him.'
'Not because of Mother?'
'She watches with the rest.'
'But you do not believe this.'
'Then enlighten me, Inrilatas. What do I think?'
'You think Mother has compromised Father.'
Another fraction of hesitation. Maithanet's gaze drifted in and out of focus.
Inrilatas seized the opportunity. 'You think Mother has blunted Father's pursuit of the Shortest Path time and again, that he walks in arcs to appease her heart, when he should cleave to the ruthless lines of the Thousandfold Thought.'
Again the Holy Shriah of the Thousand Temples hesitated. Perhaps Inrilatas had found the thread. Perhaps Uncle could be unmasked…
Perhaps Maithanet should be counted weak in their small tribe.
'Who has told you these things?' his uncle demanded.
Inrilatas ignored the distraction. 'You think Father risks the very world for his Empress's sake-for the absurdity of love!'
'Was it her? Did she tell you about the Thousandfold Thought?'
'And you see me,' the naked adolescent pressed, 'the fact that I have been caged rather than drowned, as the most glaring example of your elder brother's folly.'
Again Kelmomas watched his uncle's eyes fall out of focus then return-an outward sign of the Probability Trance. It wasn't fair, he decided, that he should be born with all these gifts yet be denied the training required to forge true weapons out of them. What use was Father to him, so long as he let him flounder? How could the Aspect-Emperor be anything but his son's greatest threat, greatest foe, when he always saw more, more deeply?
'I fear that you might be…' the Shriah said. 'I admit as much. But if you can see this, Inrilatas, then your father has seen it also-and far more completely. If he sees no sedition in my fearing, why should you?'
Once again his uncle tried to seize the initiative with questions of his own. Once again, Inrilatas simply ignored him and pressed on with his interrogation.
'Tell me, Uncle, how will you have me killed when you seize power?'
'These tricks, Inrilatas. These tactics… They only work when they are hidden. I see these things the same as you.'
'Strange, isn't it, Uncle? The way we Dunyain, for all our gifts, can never speak?'
'We are speaking now.'
Inrilatas laughed at this, lowered his beard-hazed cheek to his knees once again. 'But how can that be when we mean nothing of what we say?'
'You conf-'
'What would they do, you think, if Men could see us? If they could fathom the way we don and doff them like clothes?'
Maithanet shrugged. 'What would any child do, if they could fathom their father?'
Inrilatas smiled. 'That depends upon the father… This is the answer you want me to speak.'
'No. That is the answer.'
More laughter, so like the Aspect-Emperor's that goose-pimples climbed across the boy's skin.
'You really believe that we Dunyain differ? That, like fathers, some can be good and some bad?'
'I know so,' Maithanet replied.
There was something coiled about his brother, Kelmomas decided. The way he lolled his head, flexed his wrists, and rocked on his heels created an impression of awkward, effeminate youth-a false impression. The more harmless he seemed, the young Prince-Imperial understood, the more lethal he became.
All of this, the secret voice warned, is simply for show.
And that was the joke, Kelmomas realized: Inrilatas truly meant nothing of what he said.
'Oh, we have our peculiarities, I grant you that,' the adolescent said. 'Our hash of strengths and weaknesses. But in the end we all suffer the same miraculous disease: reflection. Where they think, one thought following hard upon the other, tripping forward blindly, we reflect. Each thought grasps the thought before it-like a starving dog chasing an oh-so meaty tail! They stumble before us, reeling like drunks, insensible to their momentary origins, and we unravel them. Play them like instruments, plucking songs of love and adoration that they call their own!'
Something was going to happen.
Kelmomas found himself leaning forward, such was his hanker. When? When?
'We all deceive, Uncle. All of us, all the time. That is the gift of reflection.'
'They make their choices,' Maithanet said in a head-shaking tone.
'Please, Uncle. You must speak before me the way you speak before Father. I see your lies, no matter how banal or cunning. No choices are made in our presence. Ever. You know this. The only freedom is freedom over.'
'Very well then,' the Holy Shriah replied. 'I tire of your philosophy, Inrilatas. I find you abhorrent, and I fear this entire exercise simply speaks to your mother's failing reason.'
'Mother?' his older brother exclaimed. 'You think Mother arranged this?'
A heartbeat of hesitation, the smallest crack in Maithanet's false demeanour.
Something is wrong, the voice whispered.
'If not her, then who?' the Shriah of the Thousand Temples asked.
Inrilatas at once frowned and smiled, his expression drunk with exaggeration. His eyebrows hooked high, he glanced down at his little brother…
'Kelmomas?' Maithanet asked, not with the incredulity appropriate to a human, but in the featureless voice belonging to the Dunyain.
Inrilatas gazed at the young Prince-Imperial as if he were a puppy about to be thrown into a river…
Poor boy.
'A thousand words and insinuations batter them day in and day out,' the youth said. 'But because they lack the memory to enumerate them, they forget, and find themselves stranded with hopes and suspicions not of their making. Mother has always loved you, Uncle, has always seen you as a more human version of Father-an illusion you have laboured long and hard to cultivate. Now, suddenly, when she most desperately needs your counsel, she fears and hates you.'
'And this is Kelmomas's work?'
'He isn't what he seems, Uncle.'
Maithanet glanced at the boy, who stood as rigid as a shield next to him, then turned back to Inrilatas. Kelmomas did not know what he found more terrifying: the unscalable surfaces of his uncle's face or his brother's sudden betrayal.
'I have suspected as much,' the Shriah said.
Say something… the voice urged.
Inrilatas nodded as if ruing some tragic fact. 'As mad as all of us are, as much heartbreak we have heaped upon our mother, he is, I think, the worst of us.'
'Surely you-'
'You know he was the one who killed Samarmas.'
Another crack in his uncle's once-impervious demeanour.
It was all the young Prince-Imperial could do to simply stand and breathe. All his crimes, he had committed in the shadow of assumption. Were his Uncle to suspect him capable-of murdering Samarmas, Sharacinth-he would have quickly seen his guilt, such were his gifts. But for all their strength, the Dunyain remained as blind to ignorance as the world-born-and as vulnerable.
And now… Never in his short life had Kelmomas experienced the terror he now felt. The sense of flushing looseness, as if he were a pillar of water about to collapse in a thousand liquid directions. The sense of binding
