The White-Luck Warrior (38 page)

Likewise, she had feared that Vem-Mithriti would literally die, so feeble did he seem. But he too flourished, organizing cadres of Schoolmen, students, and those, like Vem-Mithriti, too frail to participate in the Great Ordeal, for the defence of the Empire. All the world had thought the Cishaurim exterminated by the First Holy War. The stories of their return had sparked a new, almost fanatical, resolve in those Schoolmen who remained.

It seemed miraculous, when she paused to think about it, the way her husband's ministers rallied about her. From the outset, she had understood that the greatest strength of an empire, its size, was at once its greatest weakness. So long as its population
believed
in its power and purpose, an empire could bring almost limitless resources to bear against its foes, be they internal or external. But when that belief waned, its tendency was to dissolve into warring tribes. The very resources that had been its strength became its enemy.

This was what made the fall of Iothiah so disastrous. Yes, Fanayal had cast all of Shigek into lawless turmoil. Yes, he had cut the western Empire in half. But Shigek was but one province out of many, and the links between north and south had always been maritime thanks to the Great Carathay. Strategically, the loss of Iothiah was little more than a nuisance.

Symbolically
, however...

The crisis she faced was a crisis in
confidence
, nothing more, nothing less. The less her subjects believed in the Empire, the less some would sacrifice, the more others would resist. It was almost arithmetic. The balance was wobbling, and all the world watched to see which way the sand would spill. Anasûrimbor Esmenet had made a resolution to act as if she believed to spite all those who doubted her as much as anything else, and paradoxically, they had all started
believing with her
. It was a lesson Kellhus had drummed into her countless times and one she resolved never to forget again.

To know is to have power over the world; to believe is to have power over
men
.

With
belief
then, belief and craft, she would heave on the great chain of empire and haul the balance to the benefit of her children. Esmenet had no more illusions. She understood that if she failed, her sons and daughters would all be doomed.

And she simply would not—could not!—tolerate another...

Another Samarmas.

As always, her Seneschal, Ngarau, proved indispensable. The longer she had been involved in the New Empire's administration, the more she had come to realize that it possessed its own codes and dialects—and the more she had understood not only why men such as Ngarau were so indispensable, but also why Kellhus, no matter how bloody his conquests, never failed to spare the functionaries of each nation he conquered. Everything required translation. The more fluent the Apparati, the fewer the misinterpretations, the quicker the findings, the more decisive the Empire's actions.

The only wheel she could not turn in concert with the others was the Thousand Temples. But soon, very soon, she would have a resolution to that dilemma.

She gazed out across the dark landscape of Momemn, slowly stalking the perimeter of the veranda. She thought about how all the jumbled structures were in fact hollow, how their walls seemed little more than parchment when viewed from so far. She thought of all the thousands slumbering like miniature, innumerable larva, soft in their crisp cocoons. And she plotted their survival.

"We walk the Shortest Path,"
her divine and heartless husband had told her the last time she had seen him,
"the Labyrinth of the Thousandfold Thought. This is the burden the God has laid upon us, and the burden the Gods begrudge..."

Expediency would be her rule. As ruthless as it was holy.

Kelmomas, she knew, would be awake and waiting when she returned—he always was. Simply because she was so busy, she allowed him to sleep with her in her bed.

Save for those nights she called for Sankas or Imhailas to comfort her.

—|—

The day itself seemed daring. The wind was constant and thin. The sky was nearly empty, the horizon scraped clean. The Meneanor Sea was stone-coast dark beneath the sunlight sparking across its perforations.

She sat at a small table with Theliopa at her side, watching the Shriah of the Thousand Temples step from the shadow of the Imperial Audience Hall into the glare of the veranda. Anasûrimbor Maithanet. Because of the innumerable golden slivers—tusks—woven up and down its length, his white robe twinkled gold with every step. His hair piled high and rich upon his head, the same improbable black as his braided beard.

"This is madness, Esmi," he called. "The Empire
burns
, yet you spurn my counsel?"

She hoped she looked as impressive, with her stark grey gown beneath an ankle-long vest of gold rings. And of course, she had her smoke-hazed city as her mantle, an intricate mottling of white and grey that reached to the horizon. But she was sure it would be her porcelain mask, glazed white with features as fine and as beautiful as her own, that would most weigh against his eyes.

"And now you wear a
mask
? An Ainoni mask?"

She had long pondered how he would begin. Before conferring with Inrilatas, she had thought he would be conciliatory, that he would use wise and self-effacing words to move her.
"Do this, Esmi. Confidence awaits..."
But she had reconsidered in the light of what her crazed son had told her. He would affect injury and outrage, she eventually decided, thinking her native doubts would grease his way.

And she had been right.

"This is about Sharacinth..." he continued in the same indignant tones, his voice striking resonances that seemed to warble about her heart. "You think I was involved in her murder!"

She did not reply simply because she did not trust her voice. She could only speak when she felt the "cold" within her—as Theliopa had instructed.

He took the seat waiting for him in apparent fury. Even out of doors the scent of him, myrrh and a kind of musk, bloomed invisible.

"Or has the loss—?"

He paused as if catching himself, but the implication was clear.

"Or has the loss of your son driven you mad..."

He had not meant, she realized, to say this only to halt out of some compassionate instinct. He had meant for her to complete the thought... Her! Then he could commiserate, and slowly pry open her trust the way he had so many times in the past.

But she had already decided the path this conversation would take.

She peeled a section of flat-cake, used it to grasp a pinch of spice-shredded pork. She dipped both into the cinnamon and honey, then passed it to him, searching for any sign of hesitation.

There was none.

He had not extended her any of the traditional greetings or honorifics, so neither would she. "Proyas..." she said, taking heart in the coldness she felt beneath the clarity of her voice. "Shortly after Carythusal fell, he took me hunting kanti, a kind of antelope, on the Famiri... Have I ever told you that story, Maitha?"

He gazed at her with unsettling intensity. "No."

The mask tingled against her cheeks. She found herself wondering if this was how skin-spies felt behind the digits of their false faces. Safe.

"This was after the conquest of Ainon," she said. "We had tracked a mother and her foal for the better part of an afternoon. But when we finally sighted them, we discovered we weren't the only hunters. Wolves. Wolves had tracked them as well. We had climbed a shallow ridge, so we could see it all, the kanti mother and her child watering at a black stream... and the wolves closing about her..." She glimpsed the predators in her soul's eye, sleek as fish, tunnelling through the grasses. "But the cow either heard them or caught their scent on the wind. She bolted before the noose could be knotted—bolted directly toward us! It was astonishing enough to watch from a distance. She backed her foal against the earthen drop—immediately below us—turned to battle her pursuers. The wolves flew at her, but kanti are strong, like vicious horses, and she kicked and stamped and butted, and the wolves veered away. I almost cried out for jubilation, but Proyas clutched my arm and pointed directly down..."

She paused to lick her lips behind the porcelain.

"The wolves, Maitha. The wolves
had known
what she would do, even where she would run. So even as the cow seemed to frighten off the pack, two others, who had concealed themselves in the thickets at the ridge's base, leapt upon the foal and tore out its throat. The mother shrieked, chased them away, but it was too late. The pack simply waited until she abandoned her child's body."

Esmenet really had no idea how much he could infer from the sliver of her voice. She had rehearsed this story to baffle his penetration. She had struggled to purge all sign of the passions that moved beneath her voice and intent—but how does one conceal what is already hidden?

"Do you understand, Maitha?
I need to know
you aren't a wolf waiting in the thicket."

For a heartbeat, anger and compassion seemed to war for the high ground of his gaze. "How could you think such a thing?" he exclaimed.

She breathed deep. How
had
she come by her suspicions? So often the past seemed a cistern sloshing with dissolved voices. Inrilatas had said she feared Maithanet because she despised herself. How could he not try to save the Empire from her incapacity? But something in her balked at the possibility. Her entire life, it seemed, she had fended fears without clear origin.

Just a tactic...
she told herself.
An attempt to engage me
morally
—make me defensive.
She tapped the Ainoni mask with a lacquered nail—a gesture meant for herself as much as for him.

"How?" she replied. "Because you are Dûnyain."

This occasioned a long silence between them. Watching his pained look lapse into blank scrutiny, Esmenet could not shake the nagging sense that her brother-in-law actually considered murdering her there and then.

"Your
husband
is Dûnyain," Maithanet finally said.

"Indeed."

She wondered if it would be possible to count all the unspoken truths that hung between them, all the devious grounds for their mistrust. Was there ever a family so deranged as theirs?

"If I condescend to this, this
test
, it will be only to reassure
you
, Esmi," he finally said. His tone was devoid of pride or resentment, a fact that simply made him more inhuman in her eyes. "I am your brother. Even more, I am your husband's willing slave, no different than you. We are bound together by blood
and faith
."

"Then
do
this for me, Maitha. I will apologize if I'm wrong. I will wash your feet on the Xothei steps—anything!
Wolves
pursue me..."

It was all a game for them, she realized. No word, no expression, simply was. Everything was a tool, a tactic meant to further some occult and devious goal.

Even love... Just as Achamian had said.

She had known this for years, of course, but in the way of all threatening knowledge: at angles, in the shadowy corners of her soul. But now, playing that game with one of them, with a
Dûnyain
, it seemed she understood that knowledge down to its most base implication.

She would be overmatched, she realized, were it not for her mask.

Maithanet had paused in the semblance of a man at his wit's end. His jet beard looked hot in the sunlight—she wondered what dye he used to conceal the Norsirai blond. "And you are willing to trust the judgment of a mad adolescent?"

"I am willing to trust the judgment of my son."

"To read my face?"

He was trying to extend the conversation, she realized. To better scrutinize her voice? Had something in her tone hooked his interest?

"To read your face."

"And you realize the training this requires?"

Esmenet nodded toward her daughter. For all her deficits, Theliopa had been her reprieve. She too was Dûnyain, but as Kelmomas possessed his mother's capacity to love, so too she possessed her mother's need to please. This, Esmenet had decided, was what she could trust: those fractions of her that had found their way into her children.

She would count all the world her enemy otherwise.

"The ability to re-read
passions
is largely native," Theliopa said, "and save for father-father, none can see so deep as Inrilatas. Inferring
thoughts
requires training, Uncle, a measure of which Father pro-provided."

"But you know this," Esmenet added, trying to hide the accusation in an air of honest confusion.

Gasping in exasperation, the Shriah of the Thousand Temples fell back in his chair. "Esmi..."

The tone and pose of an innocent bewildered and bullied by another's irrationality.
"If his actions conform to your expectations,"
Kellhus had told her,
"then he deceives you. The more unthinkable dissembling seems, Esmi, the more he dissembles..."
Even though her husband had been referring to their son, the words, she knew, applied all the same to Maithanet. Inrilatas had said it himself: the Dûnyain were not human.

And so she would play her own mummer's role.

"I don't understand, Maitha. If you're innocent, what do you have to lose?"

She already knew what Inrilatas would see in his uncle's face—what he would say.

"The boy... He could say anything. He is mad."

All she needed were grounds.

"He loves his mother."

—|—

Before, the young Prince-Imperial had run about the bones of the Andiamine Heights; now he ran through them.

The more Kelmomas thought about it, the more it seemed he always knew that these tunnels existed, that all the subtle discrepancies between dimensions—shortened rooms and too-wide walls—had scratched and whispered at the edges of his notice. He did not like to think that ways had been hidden from him.