The White-Luck Warrior (59 page)

Twice Imhailas stopped to ask aimless Columnaries what happened, and twice he was rebuffed.

No one knew.

Even still, hope wormed ever higher into her throat as they raced, dodged, and shoved. She found herself thinking of her Pillarian and Eothic Guardsmen, how competent, how numerous, and how loyal they seemed. For years she had dwelt among them, thoughtlessly demanding the security they provided but never really appreciating them—until now. They were handpicked, chosen from across the Middle-North for their prowess and fanaticism. They had spent the greater portion of their lives preparing for occasions such as this, she reminded herself. If anything, they
lived
for just such an eventuality.

They would defend the Imperial Precincts, secure the palace. They would keep her children safe!

Breathless, she imagined them bristling along the walls, arrayed about the gates, glorious in their crimson-and-gold regalia. She saw old Vem-Mithriti standing high upon some parapet, his stooped shoulders pulled back with outrage and indignation, raining down sorcerous destruction. She saw old Ngarau waddling in walrus-armed panic, barking out commands. And her boy—her beautiful boy!—frightened, yet too young not to be exhilarated, not to think this some kind of glorious game.

Yes! The Gods would not heap this calamity upon her. She had paid their bloodthirsty wages!

The World
would
rally...

But the smoke climbed ever higher as they raced through the ever more raucous streets, until she felt she stared up into a tree for craning her neck. The faces of those fleeing became ever more sealed, more intent. The roaring—shouts from the crowded rooftops, from the seething streets—seemed to grow louder and louder.

"The Palace burns!" one old crone cried immediately next to her. "The Empress-Whore is dead!
Dead!
"

And in the crash of hope into dismay, she remembered: the
Gods
hunted her and her children.

The White-Luck had turned against them.

At last they pressed their way free of the slotted streets onto the Processional with its broad views.

Were it not for Imhailas and his strength, the mobs would have defeated her, prevented her from seeing the catastrophe with her own eyes. He pulled her by the wrists, cursing and shoving, and she followed with the pendulum limbs of a doll. Then suddenly they were clear, panting, among the crowd's forward ranks.

A cohort of unmounted Shrial Knights guarded the bridges crossing the Rat Canal—as much to police the mob, it seemed, as to ward against any attempt to retake the Imperial Precincts. The fortifications rising beyond were deserted. She glimpsed pockets of battle here and there across the climbing jumble of structure that composed the Andiamine Heights: distant figures vying, their swords catching the sun. Smoke poured in liquid ribbons from the Allosium Forum. Three other plumes climbed from places unseen beyond the palace.

Imhailas need not say anything. The battle was over. The New Empire had been overthrown in the space of an afternoon.

Planning, she realized. An assault this effective required meticulous planning...

Time.

The Empress of the Three Seas stood breathless, an errant hand held to her veil, gazing at the loss of everything she had known for the past twenty years. The theft of her power. The destruction of her home. The captivity of her children. The overturning of her world.

Fool...

A thought like a cold draft in a crypt.

Such a fool!

Vying against Anasûrimbor Maithanet. Crossing swords with a Dûnyain—who knew the folly of this better than she?

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 Dûnyain.

"But my boy! My daughter!"

"Are children of your husband... The
Aspect-Emperor
."

Anasûrimbor 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 Moënghus, 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
!"

—|—

A wave crashed through the Andiamine Heights, swirling into the corridors, rising ever higher, foaming blood. It battered down doors. It threw itself howling into braced mobs of Eothic Guardsmen. It clutched welling wounds, grunting and crying out. It slumped dying in the corners of raucous rooms.

Slipping through hollow walls, the young Prince-Imperial tracked its grim progress. He watched men hacking and grappling, murdering in the name of symbol and colour. He saw flames leap from ornament to ornament. He watched astounded slaves beaten—and, in one instance, raped. And it seemed a miracle that he could be
alone
while witnessing such heroism and atrocity.

Never had the end of the world been so much fun.

He knew full well what he witnessed—a coup, nearly flawless in its execution. The fall of the Andiamine Heights. He knew that his Uncle would rule the Empire ere the day was done and that his mother would either be a captive or a fugitive...

If he did not think of the unthinkable consequence—that she would be
executed
—it was because he knew
he
was responsible, and nothing he authored could lead to anything so disastrous.

He
had made this happen—there was a clenching glee to this thought, an elation that at times barked as a laugh from his lungs, such was its intensity. And it seemed the Palace itself became his model, the replica he had decided to break and burn. Uncle Holy, for all his danger, was but one more tool...

He
was the God here. The Four-Horned Brother.

Wires of smoke coiled beneath the vaults, hazed the gilded corridors. Slaves and costumed functionaries fled. Armoured men rallied, charged, and grappled, as colourful as new toys: the gold on white surcoats of the Shrial Knights, the crimson of the Eothic Guard, the gold on green of the Pillarians. He watched a company of these latter defend the antechambers to the Audience Hall. Time and again they broke the Knights of the Tusk who assailed them, killing so many they began using their bodies as improvised barricades. Only when the Inchausti, the bodyguard of the Holy Shriah himself, assaulted them were the fanatics finally overcome.

Their willingness to die left Kelmomas breathless. For
him
, he realized. They sacrificed themselves for him and his family...

The fools.

He glimpsed or watched a dozen such melees moving down the Heights, isolated pockets of violence, the Palace's defenders always outnumbered, always fighting to the desperate last. He listened to the curses and catcalls they traded, the Shrial Knights beseeching their foes to surrender, to yield the "Mad Whore," the Pillarians and guardsmen promising doom and damnation for their foe's treachery.

Exploring the Palace's lower tracts, below the rising tide of battle, he saw rooms and corridors strewn with dead, and he witnessed the savagery that so often leaps into the void of power overthrown. He watched one of his mother's Apparati, an Ainoni named Minachasis, rape and strangle a slave-girl—assuming the crime would be attributed to the invaders, the astonished boy supposed.