to street, corner to corner. Tutors crying out to their classes. Blue-skinned devotees of Jukan, chanting and crashing their cymbals. Beggars, cast-off galley or fuller slaves, calling out Yatwer's name. Violent drunks, raging against the jostle.
Even the smells ebbed and flowed, too pungent and deep, too acrid and sharp, and too many-an endless melange of the noxious and the perfumed. The canals revolted her so much with their flotsam and stench that she resolved to legislate their cleaning when she returned to the palace. When she travelled as Empress, a company of slaves flanked her passage, each bearing blue-steaming censers. Absent them, she found herself alternately holding her breath and gagging. Ever attentive, Imhailas purchased an orange at the first opportunity. Cut in half and held about the mouth and nose, oranges and lemons provided a relatively effective remedy against urban reek.
She saw mule-drawn wains swaying with firewood heaped so high she and Imhailas quickened their step whenever they passed them. She tried hard not to glare at the Columnaries they passed playing number-sticks on the steps of the Custom House they were supposed to be guarding. They passed an endless variety of vendors, some walking the streets bent beneath their wares, others occupying the stalls that slotted the first floor of most buildings. She even saw prostitutes sitting on the sills of second-floor windows, hanging their legs so that passersby could chase glimpses along their inner thighs.
She could not but reflect on the miracle that had raised her from the warp and woof of the sordid lives surrounding her. Nor could she avoid the great wall that years, luxury, and innumerable intermediaries had thrown between her and them. She was one of them, and she was not one of them-the same as with the caste-nobility that showered her with flattery and insolence day in and day out.
She was something in-between-apart. In all the world the only person like her, she realized in a pique of melancholy, the only other member of her lonely, bewildered tribe, was her daughter, Mimara.
Even though she knew that countless thousands made journeys no different from the one she and Imhailas had undertaken, it seemed miraculous they should gain their destination without some kind of challenge. The streets became more narrow, less crowded, and odourless enough for her to finally discard her orange. For the span of a dozen heartbeats she even found herself alone with her Exalt-Captain, fending a sudden, unaccountable suspicion that he and Sankas conspired to kill her. The thought filled her with shame and dismay.
Power, she decided, was a disease of the eyes.
Esmenet studied the ancient tenement while Imhailas consulted the small map Sankas had provided him. The structure had four floors, built in the Ceneian style with long, fired bricks no thicker than three of her fingers. Pigeon droppings positively mortared the ledges above the ground floor. A great crack climbed the centre of the facade, a line where the bricks had been pulled apart by settling foundations. She could tell most of the apartments were abandoned by the absence of shutters on the windows. Given the clamour and hum they had passed through, the place seemed almost malevolent for its silence.
When she glanced back at Imhailas, he was watching her with worried blue eyes.
'Before you go… May I speak, Your Glory? Speak freely.'
'Of course, Imhailas.'
He seized her hand with the same urgency she allowed him during the deep of night. The act startled her, at once frightened and heartened her.
'I beg you, Your Glory. Please, I beseech! I could have ten thousand soldiers break ten thousand curse- tablets on the morrow! Leave him to the Gods! '
The gleam of tears rimmed his eyes…
He loves me, she realized.
Even still, the most she could say was, 'The Gods are against us, Imhailas,' before turning to climb the rotted stairs into darkness.
The smell of urine engulfed her.
Another one of her boys was dead. This was simply the skin of the unthinkable, the only thought her soul could countenance when it came to justifying what she was about do. Far darker, more horrifying realizations roiled beneath. The closest she could come to acknowledging them was to think of poor Samarmas, and how his sweet innocence guaranteed him a place in the Heavens.
But Inrilatas… He had been taken too early. Before he could find his way past… himself.
Inrilatas was… was…
It is a strange thing to organize your life about the unthinkable, to make all your motions, all your words, expressions of absence. Sometimes she felt as though her arms and legs did not connect beneath her clothing, that they simply hung about the memory of a body and a heart. Sometimes she felt little more than a cloud of coincidences, face and hands and feet floating in miraculous concert.
A kind of living collapse, with no unifying principle to string her together.
The stairwell had been open to the sky at some point in the structure's past: she could see threads of light between boards high above. The landlord had decided to keep the rain out, she imagined, rather than repair the drainage. The steps had all but crumbled, forcing her to claw the bricked wall to ascend safely. She had known many tenements like this, ancient affairs, raised during glory days that no one save scholars remembered. Once, before Mimara had been born, a catastrophic roar had awakened her in the dead of night. The curious thing was the totality of the ensuing silence, as if the entire world had paused to draw breath. She had stumbled to her window and for a time could see only the dull glow of torches and lanterns through the blackness and dust. Only morning revealed the ruins of the tenement opposite, the heaps, the hanging remains of corner walls. In a twinkling, hundreds of faces she had known-the baker and his slaves, the souper who spent his day bellowing above the street's clamour, the widow who would venture out with her half-starved children to beg in the streets-had simply vanished. Weeks passed before the last of the bodies were recovered.
The stench had been unbearable, toward the end.
She paused on the second floor, peering and blinking. She breathed deep, tasted the earthen rot that soaks into mortar and burnt brick-and felt young, unaccountably young. Of the four doors she could discern, one stood ajar, throwing a lane of grey light across the dirty floor.
She found herself creeping toward it. Despite the crude cloth of her cloak, a kind of fastidious reluctance overcame her, the worry of staining what was fine and beautiful. What was she thinking? She couldn't do this… She had to flee, to race back to the Andiamine Heights. Yes…
She wasn't appropriately dressed.
Yet her legs carried her forward. The door's outer edge drew away like a curtain, revealing the room beyond.
The assassin stood staring out the window, but from the centre of the room, where he could scarce hope to see anything of interest. Indirect light bathed his profile. Aside from a certain solemn density in his manner, nothing about him suggested deceit and murder. The line of his nose and jaw was youthful to the point of appearing effeminate, yet his skin possessed the year-brushed coarseness of someone hard beyond his years. His jet hair was cropped short, which surprised her, since she had thought the assassin-priests always wore their hair long, as long as an Ainoni caste-noble's, but without the braids. His beard was trim, as was the present fashion among certain merchants-something she knew only because fanatical interests in the Ministrate had petitioned her to pass beard laws. His clothing was nondescript. Brown stains marred his earlobes.
She paused at the threshold. When she was a child, she and several other children would often swim in the Sumni harbour. Sometimes they made a game of holding heavy stones underwater and walking across the mud and debris of the bottom. She had the same sense stepping into the room, as if some onerous weight gave her traction, that she would pop from the floor otherwise, breach the surface of this nightmare…
And breathe.
The man did not turn to regard her, but she knew he scrutinized her nonetheless.
'My Exalt-Captain frets below,' she finally said, her voice more timid than she wished. 'He fears you will murder me.'
'He loves you,' the Narindar replied, jarring her with memories of her husband. Kellhus was forever repeating her thoughts.
'Yes…' she replied, surprised by a sudden instinct to be honest. To enter into a conspiracy is to commit a kind of adultery, for nothing fosters intimacy more than a shared will to deceive. What does clothing matter, when all else is shrouded? 'I suppose he does.'
The Narindar turned to regard her. She found his gaze unnerving. Rather than latching upon her, his focus
