CHAPTER ELEVEN
This one thing every tyrant will tell you: nothing saves more lives than murder.
No two prophets agree. So to spare our prophets their feelings, we call the future a whore.
Early Summer, 20 New Imperial Year (4132 Year-of-the-Tusk), Momemn
'I gutted a dove in the old way,' the long-haired man said, 'with a sharpened stone. And when I drew out the entrails, I saw you.'
'Then you know.'
The Narindar assassin nodded. 'Yes… But do you?'
'I have no need of knowing.'
The Gift-of-Yatwer leaned against the door he had already entered. The way was not barred.
The room was little more than a cellar, even though it hung some four storeys above the alleyway. The plaster had sloughed from the walls, leaving bare stretches of cracked brick. Near the slot that served as a window, he saw himself speaking with a man, his tunic grimed about the armpits. A cloak of road-beaten leather lay crumpled upon the spare bed. His hair was waist long, a peculiarity among the Ketyai. The only thing extraordinary about his dress was his war-girdle: a wide belt stamped with the images of bulls. A variety of knives and tools gleamed from holsters along the back.
'I gutted a dove in the old way,' the long-haired man was saying, 'with a sharpened stone. And when I drew out the entrails, I saw you.'
'Then you know.'
'Yes… But do you?'
'I have no need of knowing.'
The Narindar frowned and smiled. 'The Four-Horned Brother… Do you know why he is shunned by the others? Why my Cult and my Cult alone is condemned by the Tusk?'
The White-Luck Warrior saw himself shrug.
He glanced back, saw himself climbing stairs that had crumbled into a narrow slope.
He glanced back, saw himself pressing through packed streets, faces hanging like bulbs of garlic in shifting fields of cloth, soldiers watching from raised stoops, slave-girls balancing baskets and urns upon their heads, teamsters driving mules and oxen. He glanced back, saw the immensity of the gate climbing above him, engulfing sun and high blue sky.
He glanced back, one pilgrim among others braiding the roadway, watching Momemn's curtain walls wandering out to parse the hazy distances. A monumental fence.
He looked forward, saw himself rolling the long-haired man through his blood into the black slot beneath the bed rack. He paused to listen through the booming of the streets, heard tomorrow's prayer horns yaw deep across the Home City.
'The Four-Horned Brother…' the long-haired man was saying. 'Do you know why he is shunned by the others? Why my Cult and my Cult alone is condemned in the Tusk?'
'Ajokli is the Fool,' he heard himself reply.
The long-haired man smiled. 'He only seems such because he sees what the others do not see… What you do not see.'
'I have no need of seeing.'
The Narindar lowered his face in resignation. 'The blindness of the sighted,' he murmured.
'Are you ready?' the Gift-of-Yatwer asked, not because he was curious, but because this was what he had heard himself say.
'I told you… I gutted a dove in the old way.'
The White-Luck Warrior glanced back, saw himself standing upon a distant hill, looking forward.
The blood was as sticky as he remembered.
Like the oranges he would eat fifty-three days from now.
Esmenet felt a refugee, hunted, and yet somehow she also felt free.
Twenty years had passed since she had trod through the slots of a city as great as Momemn. When she married Kellhus, she had exchanged her feet for palanquins borne on the backs of slaves. Now that she walked again, alone save Imhailas, she felt as naked as a slave dragged out for auction. Here she was, easily the most powerful woman in the Three Seas, and she felt every bit as powerless and persecuted as she had as a common whore.
Once Biaxi Sankas had provided him with the time and location, Imhailas had plotted their course with the thoroughness of a military planner-even sending out soldiers, a different one for each leg of the journey, to count paces. She had dressed as the wife of a low Kianene functionary, cloaked in modest grey with a hanging half-veil that rested diagonally across her face, then she and Imhailas, who had disguised himself as a Galeoth caste- merchant, simply slipped out of the Imperial Precincts with the changing of the watches.
And she walked the streets- her streets-the way those she owned and ruled walked.
Sumna, where she had lived as prostitute, should have been a far different city, dominated as it was by the Hagerna, the city within the city that administered all the Thousand Temples. But power was power, whether clothed in the ecclesiastical finery of the Hagerna or the marshal regalia of the Imperial Precincts. Both Sumna and Momemn were ancient administrative centres, overrun with the panoply of peoples that served or seduced power. All that really distinguished them was the stone drawn from their respective quarries. Where Sumna was sandy and tan, as if one of the great Shigeki cities had been transplanted north, Momemn was largely grey and black-'the child of dark Osbeus,' the poet Nel-Saripal had called it, referring to the famed basalt quarries that lay inland on the River Phayus.
She walked now the way she had walked then, her step brisk, her eyes shying from every passerby, her hands clutched before her. But where before she had passed through the fog of threat that surrounded every young and beautiful woman in low company, now she traversed the fog of threat that surrounded the powerful when they find themselves stranded among the powerless.
Imhailas had balked at the location Sankas had provided, but the Patridomos had assured him there was nothing to be done, that the kind of man they wanted to contract was as much priest as assassin, and so answered to his own unfathomable obligations. 'You must understand, all of this is a kind of prayer for them,' Sankas explained. 'The penultimate… act… does not stand apart from the acts that feed into it. In their eyes, this very discussion is an integral component of the… the…'
'The assassination,' Esmenet said.
For her part, she did not resent the prospect of sneaking across her city. Something had to be given, it seemed to her, for her mad design to have the least chance of succeeding. What was the risk and toil of walking mere streets compared with what she wanted- needed — to accomplish?
They walked side by side where the streets permitted, otherwise she followed Imhailas like a child-or a wife- taking heart in his high, broad shoulders. Even relatively affluent passersby stepped clear of his arm-swinging stature. They followed the Processional toward the Cmiral temple-complex, turned after crossing the Rat Canal. They skirted the River District, then crossed what was called the New Quarter, presumably because it had come to house itinerant communities from across her husband's far-flung empire. The clamour waxed and waned from street
