within. The priest's arms and legs remained bare under his plain white cassock; they rippled with slivers of precious metals buried beneath the skin, slivers that ran like a host of snakes all the way down to his ankles and into his sandaled feet – as though, at any moment, they would break through the skin, and wriggle free on to the ground as living things. 'We should make our own demands of the Caliphate,' the priest grumbled. 'We should insist that they cease selling to the Free Ports the very grains we sell to them. It is altogether obscene. They no longer even try to hide the practice.'
'Make such a demand and we risk an embargo,' whined Bushrali, pausing to place a hand over his wine-stained lips to cover a belch. 'And where would we be then, without a steady supply of black-powder?'
'So be it, then,' interrupted Kirkus, intrigued enough at last to contribute to the discussion. 'Perhaps it is time we tested this monopoly of Zanzahar, and saw how long they survive without our grain. I have studied the figures as much as anyone has. I am not so certain they speak of only one outcome.'
'Well spoken,' agreed Cinimon, and his mother too eyed him with interest, though said nothing.
Bushrali showed his irritation by waving his goblet about, a slosh of red wine arcing across the marble floor like pearls of blood. 'The figures are accurate, young master. Our stockpiles of blackpowder would run dry long before Zanzahar would be forced to seek grain, salt and rice from elsewhere. You think they would allow things to be any other way? You think they ration us our supplies of black-powder simply because they do not like to trade it? They know to the nearest garan how much we have stockpiled throughout the Empire. They know how much we use each month against Bar-Khos and elsewhere. They even know when a store of our powder has become aged beyond use.
'Who is it, do you think, my Regulators are working so hard to thwart? Rebels and heretics maybe? Aye, indeed so, for each week we pass hundreds of such traitors into the hands of Cinimon's Monbarri after we ourselves have finished with them. But I say this to you: at least half the reports I read concern the El-mud alone. The Night Wing has eyes and ears everywhere, and we have yet to find a way to neutralize them.'
The man stopped as he noticed the glow of anger in Kirkus's eyes. He seemed at last to remember who he was addressing, for he suddenly flushed, his bald scalp deathly pale in contrast to his burning face, and glanced towards Sasheen and the two bodyguards that flanked her. The man bowed low. 'Forgive me,' he said to Kirkus. 'I seem to have drunk too much, and lecture a man as though he was still a boy.'
Kirkus, continued to glare, enjoying watching the little man squirm. It was Cinimon who finally broke the silence amongst them.
'I would think, Bushrali, you should be the last to admit to such a deficit in your capacities.'
'I do not water the truth like some,' he retorted. In a more measured voice, he addressed Kirkus once more. 'These desert men of Zanzahar have been making an art out of shadow-play and intelligence for a thousand years now. You cannot hope to dupe them for long. The agents of the El-mud are the true reason for Zanzahar's monopoly. We could not even commit to an invasion of the Caliphate without their knowing it. To talk of such things, even here in this room full of only the most loyal, is to say too much.'
'Which is why it is merely talk,' interrupted Sasheen herself, smoothly. 'We have no intentions for Zanzahar, either now or ever.' And she sounded sincere in her words, though even then Kirkus could see that his mother was not entirely telling the whole truth. His grunt of disbelief drew a flash of warning from her eyes. He quickly hid his smile by taking another bite of the parmadio.
'Maybe you forget the history lessons I was so ardent in having schooled into you?' she reproached him. 'How Markesh fell when they brought an embargo down on their heads, for seeking out the Isles of Sky and its sources of blackpowder for themselves?'
He knew the history well, but he would not rise to the bait. He continued chewing, and watched his mother as she watched him.
'Without cannon, their enemies devoured them over the course of a decade. You should remember this, my son. Markesh was hardly weak. Their merchant empire was so influential that even now all of the Miders shares their common tongue of Trade. If not for them, we would all still be using iron tubs for cannon, and hollow sticks for rifles. And still, they fell. You really think we are so immune from such a fate?'
'We are Mann. They were not.'
'We are Mann, yes. But we are not invulnerable. Perhaps, during your recent cull, you should have remembered that also, hmm?'
She said no more, not in front of the others, at least.
Kirkus tossed the core of the parmadio to a passing slave, wiped his hands on his robe. He said nothing more as the conversation turned to different topics.
His mother had been livid upon his return, angry to the point of striking him, when she had found out how he had slain the wearer of a seal during his cull.
'You think they will not try to reach him, even here?' Sasheen had yelled at his grandmother.
'We have contingencies against that, if they do,' he had heard his grandmother reply through the heavy door he listened at. 'Calm yourself, child. We did not rise so high by fearing the likes of the Rshun. Such worrying is a weakness. You must purge yourself of it.'
Kirkus himself had experienced no such worries at first. The Cull had transformed him, in some way. His normal everyday arrogance had settled into something deeper instead, so that he had felt a rightness in every action he performed, whether small or consequential. He knew, with every touch of his fingers, that he had taken life with these same hands. He had bent his will to the task, and it had not been so difficult after all. At long last, Kirkus had experienced a brief taste of the divine flesh.
On his arrival home at the Temple after their grand progress, he had half expected Lara to be waiting there to see this new-grown man standing before her, and for her to come rushing into his open arms in a deeply satisfying display of regret and tears. The very last thing he had expected had been a continuation of their old hostility.
After this freshest blow of rejection, Kirkus had found himself becoming increasingly reclusive in his personal chambers, turning his other friends away more times than not. He began to dwell on the image of the seal hanging about the dead girl's neck. Stories came unbidden of the Rshun, of the impossible myths that surrounded them. He found eddies of fear often rippling in his stomach, till his new-found sense of power began to diminish.
There would be other culls, and purges too. He would feel that power again, and practise the wearing of it until he became it entirely. But still, he felt that gnawing worry as he lay awake at nights, listening to the closing of distant doors, the silences that were not silences at all but a cacophony of sounds too subtle for him to hear.
Kirkus looked down at his hands and felt the tacky sweat of them. His nostrils seemed clogged with the dust of the arena outside, borne within.
I must wash, he thought.
He turned to make his excuses to leave, but saw the priest Heelas approach from the entrance leading to the imperial stand, the man shrouded in the lace hangings for a moment as he passed through a haze of sunlight into the antechamber within. 'Holy Lady,' announced his mother's caretaker with a bow. 'The people call for you.'
The chatter in the room fell silent. Indeed, the sound of the crowd had now risen to a percussive chant that Kirkus could feel in his stomach.
'Then let us go and please them,' said Sasheen, her smile brightening in an instant.
Kirkus wiped his hands against his robe again, and sighed as he followed her outside, the high priests trailing behind them.
At the appearance of Sasheen, a hundred thousand voices roared approval from the stands of the vast arena. She raised a hand aloft to acknowledge them, and for a moment Kirkus forgot his personal grumbles as he felt a rush of excitement rising within him.
It was cooler in the imperial stand reserved for the Holy Matriarch and her high priests, the sky above it cloudless and bright. On the sandy floor of the Shay Madi arena, a host of naked men and women huddled together in chains, looking like the refugees from some natural devastation. They were heretics from around the Empire, caught in the act of practising the old religions – a furtive sign made to one of the spirit gods, a prayer to the Great Fool – and informed on by a neighbour or even by their kin.
Their ranks included the poor, too; the homeless and the crippled, those who could barely fend for themselves let alone thrive. These were people seen as failures in the eyes of Mann, parasites and carrion all, as far from the divine flesh as they could be.
One by one, they were being branded by white-cassocked members of the Monbarri, Cinimon's dour inquisitors, their heavy piercings hanging darkly in the sunlight. Some would be sent from here to the salt pans of the High
