The White-Luck Warrior (79 page)

A dais the size of small barge dominated the floor beneath the high dome. She numbly gazed at the arc of idols arrayed upon it: wane Onkhis, fierce Gilgaöl, lewd Gierra, bulbous Yatwer, and others, a tenth of the Hundred, the eldest and the most powerful, cast in gold, shining and lifeless. She had learned their names with her mother's face, the souls that joined all souls. Her whole life she had known them, feared and adored them. And she had prayed to them. She had clutched her knees sobbing their names...

The broad-shouldered man who knelt in prayer beneath them, she had known for less than half her life—if indeed she had known him at all. She knew him enough only to know that he
never
prayed. Not truly.

Anasûrimbor Maithanet, the Holy Shriah of the Thousand Temples. He turned the instant she came to a pause below, held her in his monolithic regard. He was dressed in full ceremonial splendour, with elaborate vestments hooding his shoulders, draping down in two long, gold-tasselled tongues. He had allowed his beard to grow, so that the plaits fanned across his ritual chest plate. They seemed to have stained the white felt of his vestments where they touched, as if he had used a cheaper dye than usual to conceal the blond that was his true colour. His hair gleamed with oils, making him seem of apiece with the idols framing him.

She flinched at the deep bass of his voice.

"The officers who beat you," he said. "They are being flayed even as we speak. Several others will be executed as well."

He seemed genuinely apologetic, genuinely furious...

Which was how she knew he lied.

"Apparently," he continued, "they thought apprehending you without the knowledge of their betters would earn them more glory in this World." His look was at once mild and merciless. "I have invited them to try the next."

She neither spoke nor breathed for several long blinking moments. She wanted to scream,
"My husband! Don't you realize? Kellhus will see you gutted!"
only to find her outrage robbed of voice by some perverse reflex.

"My-my chil..." she began instead, coughing and blinking tears. "Where are my
children
?"

Her face crumpled about a sob. So long... So long she had toiled... feared...

The Shriah of the Thousand Temples loomed above her, his manner cold and absolute.

"The Empire is falling apart," he said in a voice fairly bottomless for its wisdom. "Why, Esmi? Why have you done this?"

"You killed my son!" she heard herself shriek.

"
You
killed your son, Esmi, not me. When you directed his attempt on my life."

"I did not!" she cried, her limbs thrown to the impotent limit of her chains. "I only needed to know if you were
hiding
anything! Nothing more. Nothing less!
You
killed my son.
You
made this into a war!
You!
"

Maithanet's face remained perfectly blank, though his eyes glittered with what seemed a wary cunning. "You believe what you're saying," he finally said.

"Of course!"

Her voice peeled high and raw beneath the airy gloom of the domes, faded into the white hiss of the mob's roar.

He gazed at her, and she had this curious sense of throwing herself open, as though her face had been a shuttered window.

"Esmi..." he said far more softly. "I was mistaken. Both in what I assumed to be your intentions and in your capacity."

She almost coughed for shock. Was this some kind of game? She thought she laughed when in fact she wept.

"You thought me mad—is that it?"

"I feared..." he said.

The Shriah of the Thousand Temples descended the steps, then—impossibly—
knelt before her
, raised a hand to her bloodied cheek. He smelled of sandalwood and myrrh. He produced a small key from his girdle, crudely cast.

Esmenet reeled. She had assumed this audience would be nothing more than a pantomime, a ceremony required to stamp her inevitable execution with the semblance of legitimacy. She had hoped only to throw her defiance and her righteousness into the air between them, where memory could not deny it.

She had forgotten that pride and vanity meant nothing to him, that he would never merely covet power for its own sake...

That he was
Dûnyain
.

"Long nights, Esmi..." he said as he worked the lock on her manacles. And it seemed madness, the absence of embarrassment or contrition—or any other recognition of the
absurdity
between them. In a way, it seemed almost as terrifying as the doom she had originally expected.

"Long nights have I pondered the events of the past months. And the question is always the same..."

One by one he cracked open the locks, beginning with her wrists, then bending to free her ankles. She found herself flinching from his powerful proximity, not bodily, but in her soul, which had feared him for too long to so quickly relinquish its aversion.

"What?" he asked as he worked. "What is my brother's plan?" The Holy Shriah looked up from the posture of a penitent. "He must have known that the Gods would begin clamouring against him, that one by one their far-off whispers would take root in the Cults. He must have known his Empire would crumble in his absence... So then why? Why would he entrust it all to someone with
no Dûnyain blood
?"

"To me," she said with more bitterness than she intended.

A roaring swell rose from the rioters beyond the walls, a reminder that for all the temple's immensity, it was but a small pocket of gloom in a world of sunlit war.

A reminder of the people they would command.

"Please, Esmi," he said, standing to gaze down into her eyes. "I beg you. Set aside your pride. Listen as your husband would listen, without—"

"Prejudice," she interrupted, drawing her lips into a sour line. "Continue."

She gingerly rubbed her wrists, blinking in the manner of those with sand in their eyes. She could not see her way past her shock and incredulity. A simple misunderstanding? Was that it? How many people had died? How many men like... like Imhailas?

"Out of all his tools," Maithanet said, "I have long known that
ignorance
is the one he finds most useful. Even still, I succumbed to the vanity that bedevils all men: I thought
I
was the lone exception. Me, another son of Anasûrimbor Moënghus, one who knows the treacherous ways of conviction... the way certainty is simply an illusion born of ignorance. I convinced myself that my brother chose
your
hands, which were both weak and unwilling, because he had deemed me a
threat
. Because he did not trust where the Logos might lead me."

For all the disorder of her soul, these words burned with peculiar clarity—probably because she had rehearsed them with such morbid frequency.

"The way he did not trust your father," she said.

A grave nod, steeped in admission. "Yes. Like my father... Perhaps even
because
of my father. I thought he might have suspected I possessed residual filial passions."

"That you would betray him to
avenge
your father?"

"No. Nothing so crude as that. You would be dismayed, Esmi, to know the way caprice and vanity distort the intellect. Men ever cast themselves into labyrinths of thinking, not to lose themselves in the pursuit of truth, but to hide their self-interest in subtleties and so make noble their crassest desires. Thus does avarice become charity, and vengeance, justice."

It was as if a drawstring had been yanked tight about her breast.

"You convinced yourself that Kellhus feared the same of you?"

"Yes..." he said. "And why not, when Men so regularly yoke their intelligence to self-serving stupidity? I am half a man. But the Interdiction... The questions it raised plagued me, even as I acted in ways I thought my brother would demand of me. Why? Why would he forbid all communication between the Great Ordeal and the New Empire?"

She glanced at the shackles discarded at her feet, noticed a bead of blood welling from one of her toes.

"Because he feared that tidings of discord would weaken the Ordeal's resolve."

This, at least, had been what she told herself... What she needed to believe.

"But then why would
he
cease communicating?" Maithanet asked. "Why would he
personally
refuse to answer our pleas? From his brother. From his
wife
..."

She did not know. The Holy Empress of the Three Seas wiped at the tears burning in the creases of her eyes, but the filth on her fingers only made them sting more.

"Then it dawned on me," Maithanet continued, looking out to the recesses of the shuttered Temple. "What if he foresaw the
inevitability
of his empire's collapse? What if the Three Seas were doomed to unravel
no matter who ruled them
? You. Me. Thelli..."

His blue eyes fairly bored through her. He seemed apiece with the great weights soaring about him, so broad did he appear in his white-and-gold vestments, so impressive were the accoutrements of his exalted station. She felt a rag-bound whore standing in his Dûnyain shadow...

Another childish human.

"If the Empire was doomed to perish," he said, "what would his reasoning be then?"

The mob's roar heaved across the background the same as before, only marred with pitches that warbled across the limits of hearing.

"What are you saying?" she heard herself cry. "That he
wanted
me to fail? That he wanted the world, his home, to come crashing down upon his wife? His
children
?"

"No. I'm saying he understood that such a crash would happen
regardless
, and so he chose
one
evil from among many."

"I don't believe it. I... I cannot!"

What kind of man made
oil
of his children? What kind of Saviour?

"Ask yourself, Esmi. What is the
purpose
of the New Empire?"

She had the sense of retreating from his words as before a sword-point. "To pre-prevent the Second Apocalypse," she stammered.

"So if the Great Ordeal succeeds? What of the Empire then?"

"It has no... no..." She swallowed, so painful was the word. "Purpose."

"And if the Great Ordeal fails?" Maithanet asked, his woollen tone wrapped tight about the bruising iron of fact and reason.

She found herself looking down to her feet, to the charcoal grime between her toes. "Then... then the No-God walks... and... and..."

"All eyes can feel him on the horizon. Every child is stillborn. Every man living
knows
that the Aspect-Emperor, Anasûrimbor Kellhus, spoke
true
..."

The world warred and rioted about them.

She looked up without breath or volition. "And Men are... are... united regardless."

The sense of what he said struck her numb, even as the greater part of her balked. The Great Ordeal. The New Empire. The Second Apocalypse. It all seemed some vast joke, a farce of monumental proportions. Mimara missing. Samarmas dead. Inrilatas dead. Kelmomas missing.
These
were the things that mattered. The enormities that preoccupied Maithanet possessed no rule that her heart could fathom. They were simply too immense, too distant to be thrown on the balance with something as utterly immediate as a child. They seemed little more than smoke before the fire of her children.

Smoke that choked, that blinded, that led astray. Inescapable smoke. Killing.

Maithanet stood clear and bright before her, at once her enemy and her champion. And her only hope, she suddenly realized, of understanding the ruthless madness of her husband.

He killed him... He killed my—

"I made the exact same mistake you yourself made, Esmi," he said. "I thought of the New Empire as an
end
, something to be saved for its own sake, when really it's nothing more than a
tool
."

The boom of strife and discord. The Holy Shriah of the Thousand Temples graced her with a lingering look, as if satisfying himself that she had grasped the dire import of his ruminations. Then he turned his face to the high-hanging gloom, called out to invisible ears...

"We are finished!" he boomed. "The Tusk and the Mantle are reconciled!"

"He has abandoned us," Esmenet murmured into the ringing wake. When she blinked, it seemed she glimpsed the entire Three Seas burning: Nenciphon, Invishi, Seleukara, Carythusal...

Maithanet nodded. "For now... Yes."

She could hear a gathering of footfalls and hushed voices in the galleries.

"And after... after he destroys Golgotterath?"

The Holy Shriah glanced down at his palms. "I don't know. Perhaps he will leave us to our own purposes."

Her breath caught upon a pang. What would that be like?

The first sobs blew through her as a breeze, soft, soothing even as they tousled her thought and vision. But the tempest was not long in coming. She found herself weeping in his expansive embrace, wailing at all the losses she had endured, all the uncertainties...

How many revelations?
she thought as the final gusts passed through her.
How many revelations can one soul bear?

For she had suffered far too many.

She looked up into her Shriah's bearded face, breathed deep the sweet bitter of his Shigeki myrrh. It seemed impossible that she had once seen malice in the gentle blue of his eyes.

They kissed—not as lovers, but as a brother and a sister. She tasted tenderness on his lips. They gazed into each other's eyes, close enough to breath the other's exhalations.

"Forgive me," the Shriah of the Thousand Temples said.

The Empire roared and rioted unseen.

She blinked, saw Imhailas's face unmade beneath pounding fists.

"Maitha..."

A glimpse was all he needed to fathom her question, so open was her face.

"Thelli is safe," he said with a reassuring smile. "Kelmomas hides yet in the palace."