She turned to Imhailas, who stood as immobile and aghast as she. 'We…' she murmured, only to trail. 'We have to go back…'
He looked down into her eyes, squinted in confusion.
'We have to go back!' she cried under her breath. 'I'll… I'll throw myself at his feet! Beg for mercy! Seju! Seju! I have to do something!'
He cast a wary glance across those packed close about them.
'Yes, Your Glory,' he said intently, speaking below the mob's rumble. 'You must do something. This is treason. Sacrilege! But if you deliver yourself to him, you will be executed — do you understand? He cannot afford your testimony!'
Threads of light tangled and distorted his face. She was blinking tears. When had she started weeping?
Since coming to Kellhus's bed, it seemed. Since abandoning Akka…
'All the more reason for you to leave me, Imhailas. Flee… while you still can.'
A smiling frown creased his face.
'Damnation doesn't agree with me, Holy Empress.'
Another one of his quotations… She sobbed and laughed in exasperation.
'I am not asking, Imhailas. I am commanding… Save yourself!'
But he was already shaking his head.
'This I cannot do.'
She had always thought him a fop, a thick-fingered dandy. She had always wondered what it was that Kellhus had seen in him, to raise him so high so fast. As a courtier, he could be almost comically timid-always bowing and scraping, stumbling over himself in his haste to execute her wishes. But now… Now she could see Imhailas as he really was…
A warrior. He was-at his pith-a true warrior. Defeat did not break his heart so much as stir his blood.
'You don't know, Imhailas. You don't know… Maithanet… the way I know him.'
'I know that he is cunning and treacherous. I know that he pollutes the Holy Office your husband has given to him. Most of all, I know you have already done what you needed to do.
'I… I…' She trailed, wiped her nose, and squinted up at him. 'What are you saying?'
'You have loosed the Narindar…'
He was inventing his rationale as he spoke: she could see this in his inward gaze, hear it in his searching tone. He would stand by her side, die for her, not for any tactical or even spiritual reason, but because sacrificing his strength on the altar of higher things was simply what he did.
This was why Kellhus had given him to her.
'All that remains is to wait,' he continued, warming to the sense of what he said. 'Yes… We must hide and wait. And when the Narindar strikes… All will be chaos. Everyone will be casting about, searching for authority. That's when you reveal yourself, Your Glory!'
She so wanted to believe him. She so wanted to pretend that the Holy Shriah of the Thousand Temples was not a Dunyain.
'But my boy! My daughter!'
'Are children of your husband… The Aspect-Emperor.'
Anasurimbor Kellhus.
Esmenet gasped, so sudden was her understanding. Yes. He was right. Maithanet would not dare to kill them. Not so long as Kellhus lived. Even so far from the northern wastes, they dwelt in the chill shadow of the Holy Aspect-Emperor's power. As did all Men.
'Hide…' she repeated. 'But how? Where? They are all against me, Imhailas! Inrithi. Yatwerians…'
And yet, even as she voiced these fears, implications began assembling about the mere fact of her husband. This, she realized. This was why Kellhus had left her the Imperial Mantle.
She did not covet it. How could one covet what one despised?
'Not me, Your Glory. Nor any Guardsmen living, I assure you.'
Kellhus would succeed and he would return-he always conquered. Even Moenghus, his father, could not overcome him… Kellhus would return, and when he did, there would be a horrible accounting.
Imhailas clasped her hands in his own. 'I know of a place…'
She need only live long enough to see it done.
He will come back for us!
She made a litany of this thought as they fled back into the city proper.
Kellhus will return!
When despair reeled through her, the sense of skidding backward into doom…
He will return!
When she imagined Theliopa, sitting rigid in her room, staring into her hands as Maithanet's shadow darkened the threshold…
He will! He will!
When she saw Maithanet kneel before Kelmomas, grasp his slender shoulders between his hands…
He will kill him with his own hands!
And it seemed she could see him, her glorious husband, stepping from spiking light to stride across the city, calling out his brother's treacherous name. And it pulled her breath sharp, wound her teeth tight, stretched her lips into an animal grin…
The fury of his judgment.
Then she found herself in a lantern-lit foyer, standing and blinking while Imhailas muttered in low tones to an armed man even taller than he was. The tile-work, the frescoed ceiling, everything possessed an air of opulence, but a false one, she quickly realized, seeing the grimed corners and grouting, the myriad chips and cracks-details that shouted an inability to support slaves.
Then Imhailas was leading her up marble stairs. She wanted to ask him where they were, where they were going, but she could not speak around the confusion that bloated through her. At last they gained a gloomy corridor. Her breathlessness-years had passed since she had last travelled such distances on foot-became a sense of floating suffocation.
She stood blinking while he hammered on a broad wooden door. She scarcely glimpsed the face, dark and beautiful, that anxiously greeted him. A room beyond, yellow-painted, dimly illuminated.
'Imma! Sweet Seju! I was wor-'
'Naree! Please!' the Exalt-Captain cried, shouldering the woman back, hustling Esmenet into the dimly lit interior without begging permission.
He shut the door behind them, turned to the two astounded women.
The girl was no taller than Esmenet, but she was darker of complexion, younger. And beautiful. Very beautiful. Despite her appearance and accent, it was actually her costume, a gaudy, glass-beaded affair, that made Esmenet realize this… this Naree… was Nilnameshi.
Naree, for her part, appraised Esmenet with open distaste.
'This will cost you, Imma…' she said skeptically.
And Esmenet understood-the tone as much as anything else. Naree was a whore.
Imhailas had brought her to his whore.
'Stop playing the fool and grab her a bowl of water!' he cried, grabbing Esmenet by the shoulders, guiding her to a battered settee. Her eyes could not make sense of the room relative to the movements of her body-everything whirled. Breathless. Why was she so breathless?
Then she was sitting, and her Exalt-Captain was kneeling before her.
'Who is she?' Naree asked, returning with water.
Imhailas raised the bowl for her to drink. 'She's not… not right … The day…'
Naree stared, her face slack in the way of long-time victims assessing threats. Her eyes popped wide, rings of shining white about dark, dark irises. She was a whore: innumerable silver kellics had passed through her hands, each bearing the image of the woman before her.
'Sweet Mother of Birth-it's you!'
