seemed to float over and through her. The result of some ritual narcotic?
'Do you know what I want?' she asked, joining him in the indeterminate light. Her breath had climbed high and tight in her breast. She was doing this. She was seizing fate.
'Murder. To seek the Narindar is to seek murder.'
He smelled of mud… mud cooking in the sun.
'I will be plain with you, assassin. I appreciate the peril I represent. I know that even now you hedge, knowing that only something… something extraordinary, could deliver a woman of my exalted station to a man… a man… such as you. But I want you to know, it is honesty that has brought me here, alone… to you. I am simply not willing to see another damned for sins that are my own. I want you to know that you can trust that honesty. No matter what happens, I appreciate that you have placed your very soul upon the balance. I will make you a prince, assassin.'
If her words possessed effect, his gaze and expression betrayed none of it.
'Warm blood is the only gold I would hoard, Your Glory. Sightless eyes the only jewels I would covet.'
This had the sound of a catechism believed.
'Maithanet,' she said on a pent breath. 'The Shriah of the Thousand Temples… Kill him, and I shall compel princes — Do you hear me? Princes! — to kneel before you!'
It seemed utter madness, now that the words hung in the air between them. She almost expected the man to cackle aloud, but he grasped his bearded chin and nodded instead.
'Yes,' he said. 'An extraordinary sacrifice.'
'So you will do it?' she asked in unguarded astonishment.
'It is already done.'
She recalled what Lord Sankas had said about the Narindar carving events along different joints-the way this very meeting would be of a piece with raising the knife.
'But…'
'There is nothing more to be said, Your Glory.'
'But how will I… I…'
She trailed in flustered indecision. How could the world be so greased, so rounded, that matters this weighty could be discharged with such fugitive ease? The Narindar had turned to gaze through the slotted window. She reflexively followed his gaze, saw pillared smoke rising above the motley roofs to the east. Something was happening…
More riots?
She made to leave, but something intangible hooked her at the battered door, turned the tether of her gaze. He stood as if waiting for this very occurrence. He looked both old and young, as if time had lacked the tools to properly craft the clay of his skin. She wondered how she must look to him, furtive beneath her sack-cloth cloak and hood. An Empress cowering from her own Empire.
'What is your name?'
'Issiral.'
'Issiral…' she repeated, struggling to recall the meaning of the Shigeki word. 'Fate?' she asked, frowning and smiling. 'Who named you this?'
'My mother.'
'Your mother was cruel, to curse you with such a name.'
'We take such gifts as she gives.'
Something about this, and about the man's demeanour more generally, had blown terror into her anxiousness. But she reasoned that men who kill for hire-assassins-should be frightening.
'I thought Narindar were devotees of the Four-Horned Brother…'
'Devotion? The Brother cares not for our cares, only that we murder in His Name.'
The Blessed Empress of the Three Seas swallowed. That the World could accommodate such men, such designs. That even murder could become worship…
'The Brother and I have that much in common,' she said.
The Unaras Spur
Spaceless space… hanging.
Glimpses of slave-girls, shining black and naked save for a single ostrich feather between their thighs. Towering eunuchs, their ceremonial shackles gleaming in the humid gloom. Great beams of wood and bulbous pillars of marble and diorite. Pillows tossed negligently through the pleasure gardens…
The Palace of Plumes.
Soundless sound. Voiceless voice…
'Tell him, Cousin. Tell the cunning Son of Kascamandri. If he succeeds, High Holy Zeum will be as a brother to Kian. We will strike as he strikes, bleed as he bleeds!'
Even as he replied, Malowebi could feel himself toppling backward, plummeting into himself, so much had he dreaded these words. 'Yes, Great Satakhan.'
The aging Mbimayu sorcerer blinked and coughed, found the infinite nowhere replaced by the squalid confines of his tent-if the wretched thing the Fanim had given him could be called such. He sat cross-legged, the twin mahogany figurines-the fetishes that made possible the Iswazi Cant-squeezed tight in his knobbed fists. He braced his elbows against his knees, buried his face in his hands.
Tomorrow, he decided. He would tell the Padirajah tomorrow.
Tonight he would groan and complain in his canvas cage, toss and obsess-do everything but sleep.
How Likaro would laugh. The ingrate.
After the Zaudunyani conquest of Nilnamesh, Malowebi and his senior Mbimayu brothers had burned whole urns of lantern oil scrutinizing and arguing the madness that was the Aspect-Emperor and the Great Ordeal. Even if their Satakhan had not demanded it, they would have set aside all things to ponder it. For years they had believed that Anasurimbor Kellhus was simply a kind of contagion. For whatever reason, the Three Seas seemed particularly prone to prophets and their tricks. Where Zeum had remained faithful to the old Kiunnat ways, albeit in their own elliptical fashion, the Ketyai-the Tribe entrusted with the Holy Tusk, no less! — seemed bent on tearing down their ancient truths and replacing them with abstraction and fancy. 'To better measure their ages,' Wobazul had quipped in one of their discussions. Anasurimbor Kellhus, Malowebi and his fellow Mbimayu had assumed, was simply another Inri Sejenus, another gifted charlatan bent on delivering even more of his kinsmen to damnation.
But the man's successes. And the reports, both from Zeum's spies and the Mbimayu's contact with the Schools. The Aspect-Emperor was more than a gifted demagogue, more than a cunning general or sorcerer or tyrant-far more.
The question was what?
So they debated, and debated, as is the wont of wise men pondering questions without obvious answers. Nganka'kull was often criticized for his patience and leniency, but eventually even he tired of their endless delays and demurrals. Finally he summoned his cousin, demanding to know the substance of their disagreements.
'We have considered everything of note,' Malowebi reported on a heavy breath. 'There is but one clear lesson…'
The Satakhan had perched his chin on his fist, such was the weight of the battle-wig-an heirloom from his beloved grandfather-that he wore. 'And what is that?'
'All those who resist him perish.'
Word that Imperial Columnaries had occupied the ruins of Auvangshei arrived later that very night-such was the perversity of Fate. The ancient fortress meant very little to Three Seas Men, Malowebi had since discovered. But for the Zeumi, it was nothing less than the sacred threshold of their nation. The one gate in the great wall the World itself had raised about High Holy Zeum.
The Zaudunyani missionaries began arriving shortly afterward, some of them little more than paupers, others disguised as merchants. Then, of course, there was the infamous Embassy of Suicides. And during all this time, Auvangshei was rebuilt and expanded, the provinces of Nilnamesh reorganized along military lines. Their spies even reported the construction of numerous granaries in Soramipur and other western cities.
A kind of war was being waged against them, they realized. At every point of connection between Zeum and the Three Seas-mercantile, diplomatic, geographical-the Aspect-Emperor was preparing in some way.
