opportunity to socialize while watching entertainments in the public arena. Still, they were men and women of lofty positions and they could not help but continue manoeuvring for advantage amongst themselves.
Kirkus allowed such petty concerns to wash over him as he chomped the soft flesh of a parmadio fruit, quivering at each spike of narcotic pleasure as he crunched down on its bitter pips. Occasionally his eyes would rove the room, and study its occupants as they inhaled from steaming bowls or imbibed cooling liqueurs. But always, his gaze would end up watching the large double doors at the far end.
Lara would not be appearing today, he suspected. Indeed her latest lover, General Romano, had arrived by himself, and was now standing in a corner in deep discussion with General Alero. Even as Kirkus studied the young general, the man turned his head and locked eyes with him across the distance of the room.
Something of hatred passed in the look between them.
Romano was nephew to the last Patriarch, and considered the leading prodigy among one of the oldest and most powerful families within the order. Young Romano was the foremost rival to Sasheen's position, though it was understood he would wait for her reign to come to an end before making his own attempt at the leadership, a time when Kirkus himself would be expected by many to assume the position of Patriarch; in her own way, Lara could not have chosen herself a new lover placed more firmly against Kirkus than this one.
Across the chamber Romano inclined his head towards Kirkus. Kirkus bowed in response, his eyes guarded.
Lara would have come with Romano, if she was coming at all. Obviously she was still avoiding Kirkus. His latest public outburst, in the upper baths of the Temple of Whispers on the day after his return, had been an embarrassment for them both.
He had hoped that, upon seeing Lara again, he could be calm and mature about their situation. He felt he had developed that much, at least, during his ventures abroad. Instead, as soon as he laid eyes on her, his body had suffered some overwhelming reaction of shock, so that, standing there in his tower, stunned as she walked by him without the merest glance in his direction, Kirkus had found himself shouting at her departing back, his voice so shaken with rage that it took long moments for him to decipher exactly what he had said.
'I will require your consent soon, Matriarch,' the priestess Sool was murmuring to his mother. 'It is little more than a month now before the anniversary of the Augere el Mann.'
Kirkus swallowed around a painful lump in his throat. He dragged his gaze from the closed doors at the rear of the chamber, and refocused his attention on the general conversation around him.
The priestess Sool had her head bent low, playing the loyal subservient, as always, though Kirkus sometimes suspected otherwise. 'I will need to know if our plans for the commemoration are suitable. After all, this is the year in which we commemorate the fiftieth anniversary of Mannian rule. Perhaps you have some ideas yourself.'
'Oh, don't hark on so,' replied his mother with a throw of her hand, the other holding her robes hitched over one extended thigh, cooling off. 'I leave all such decisions to you and your people, you know that. Believe me, I have other things to concern myself with just now.'
'Yes,' said Sool submissively, her head dipping a fraction lower. 'I suspect I may have heard of them. This new petition of Mokabi's: another invasion plan for the Free Ports. The old warrior grows restless in his retirement, no doubt.'
'As always, your ears hear only whispers borne on the wings of boredom.' There was impatience in his mother's tone, and a weariness that Kirkus noticed ever more often these days.
'Still. Even so…' Sool continued, then checked abruptly.
Kirkus was laughing at her. 'It is just as well you and my mother are the closest of friends,' he quipped. 'Who else would listen to both your nagging?'
Sool smiled, though it may have been a grimace. 'Your mother gave birth to you in her time,' she said. 'You might show some respect, young pup.'
His reply was another crunch of seeds between his teeth. He did not say what he might have said next.
Kirkus had watched this interchange with interest. In her own subtle way, Sool had been like a maternal aunt to Kirkus as he was growing up, or at least as much as any woman could be maternal within the order, where such bonds were nurtured by loyalty and necessity – certainly not love and seldom kindness. As a boy, Kirkus had lived in the Temple of Whispers, in the extensive apartments of his mother and grandmother, one of them the latest glammari, or chosen consort, to Patriarch Anslan, the other a long-trusted advisor in the ways of the faith. Sool had often visited the women there, sometimes accompanied by her daughter Lara. On summer evenings, Sool would tell them stories from the past, he and Lara, as they sat together on the balcony of his personal chamber, with the many animals he had collected over the years squawking and clattering in their cages, while evening light hung like a shroud over the city of Q'os below them.
From that high vantage point perched on the flank of the Temple of Whispers, the full shape of the island-city was visible to the eye. On the coastline to the east, a natural protrusion of land stabbed diagonally into the sea; to the north could be seen the four manmade landfills that so closely resembled fingers: all the Five Cities, as they were known collectively, each teeming to the water's edge with buildings. As a child, Kirkus had scanned the landscape from east to west: it was possible to see the island as shaped in the form of a great open hand, its palm facing skywards, its end-digit of land truncated to represent the shortened little finger of the followers of Mann. He had never bored of this sight, as a boy, perched there at the city's very heart.
On those long-ago warm evenings, Sool had recounted her tales in a harsh whisper, as though her words were precious things that needed guarding. She had told him of the time when her own mother and his grandmother had been young women working secretly for the cult during that time of famine and pestilence known as the Great Trial, each of them wild at heart, kindred in spirit, their recruitment into the order the result of having a lover they both shared without contention.
Both had taken part in the Longest Night, that evening which had followed the destruction of the city by fire. Acting as a pair, they had murdered one of the city's highest-placed officials, living in opulent splendour in his palace while the city lay in ruins and starvation all around it. They had both witnessed the frenzied execution of the girl-queen, indeed had taken their own small part in it. They had knelt prostrate and panting at the feet of High Priest Nihilis himself, as he was anointed first Holy Patriarch of Mann.
Sool had told him and Lara these things, and many others, proud it seemed of the closeness of her family and his, of their rise to power together. It was only when he was older that Kirkus learned of other sides to these stories. He recalled his grandmother, half broken after a purging, lying on her bed speaking out in some kind of delirium, grasping Kirkus's arm to detain him as she told him of the murder of her oldest friend, Sool's mother, for falling from the ways of Mann.
It had now been over a year since Kirkus had last seen Sool in the flesh. As he faced her in the close press of the antechamber he saw her as though through the eyes of his own boyhood self, and wondered when they had lost that special connection that he had cherished secretly as a child. He assumed, perhaps, it had been since he and Lara had parted ways, but on deeper reflection he knew it to be much longer than that. Since he had grown up, he realized – when he no longer needed such people in his life as this kindly matron.
I cast this women aside, Kirkus thought, as he gazed into her blue eyes, and she into his. And all the kindnesses she ever showed me.
Kirkus raised his hands up to his chest and then held them outwards, in an acknowledgement of concession. The woman blinked in surprise.
Beside him a clearing of a throat. It was Cinimon, high priest of the Monbarri sect – that cult within a cult who declared themselves inquisitors and defenders of the faith so fervently that they frightened all others. The man spoke in a voice like the shifting gravels of a flood stream, his expression all but unreadable behind the sagging burden of the many piercings that adorned his face.
'It is true, then?' he asked of Sasheen. 'Mokabi thinks he can crack the Free Ports at last?'
Sasheen tilted her head to consider the question. 'So he believes, though we have barely found time to look into his proposals yet.' She shot a glance at Sool. 'I meet with my generals soon to discuss the matter. You will, of course, be the first to hear of our findings.'
'We have also the Zanzahar question to decide upon,' muttered little Bushrali from behind the rim of his goblet, High Priest of the Regulators, and clearly drunk already. 'This quibbling over grain and salt prices can lead to no advantage for us. If we do not lower our prices, and the Caliphate extends its safe waters two hundred laqs towards the Free Ports, as they threaten to do, then this war of attrition may become a war without end.'
Cinimon shook his head, his heavy facial piercings clinking together as his black eyes shone from amongst
