The White-Luck Warrior (22 page)

If Father is gone...
the secret voice dared whisper.

"It would appear so," she said, speaking about a crack in her voice. "I fear it has something to do with your uncle."

Then we are finally safe.

"Maithanet," Thelli said.

The Empress mastered her feelings with a deep breath. "Maybe this is a... a
test
of some kind. Like the fable of Gam..."

Kelmomas recalled this from his lessons as well. Gam was the mythical king who faked his own death to test the honour of his four sons. The boy wanted to shout this out, to bask a moment in Mother's pride, but he bit his tongue. For the briefest of instants, he thought he saw his sister glance at him.

"It need not have anything to do with Uncle," Theliopa said. "Maybe the Consult has discovered some way of eavesdropping on our communications..."

"No. It has something to do with Maithanet. I can feel it."

"I can rarely fathom Father," Theliopa admitted.

"You?" the Empress cried with pained hilarity. "Think about your poor mother!"

Kelmomas laughed precisely the way she wanted.

"Ponder it, Thelli. Your father assuredly
knows
about the strife growing between us, his wife and his brother, so then why would he choose
this moment
to strand us each with the other?"

"That much is simple-simple, at least," Thelli replied. "Because he believes the best solution will be the one you find on your-your own."

"Exactly," Mother said. "Somehow he thinks my ignorance will serve me in this..." Her voice trailed into pensive thought. For several moments she let her gaze wander across points near and far within the Sacral Enclosure, then shook her head in sudden outrage and disgust.

"Damn your father and his machinations!" she cried, her voice loud enough to draw looks from the nearby Pillarian Guardsmen. She glanced skyward, her eyes rolling with something like panic. "Damn him!"

"Mother?" Theliopa asked.

The Empress lowered her head and sighed. "I am quite all right, Thelli." She spared her daughter a rueful look. "I don't give a damn what you think you see in my face..." She trailed, her mouth hanging on these words. Kelmomas held his breath, so attuned had he become to the wheel of his mother's passion.

"Thelli..." She began, only to hesitate for several heartbeats. "Could... Could
you
read his face?"

"Uncle's? Only Father has that-that ability. Father and..."

"And who?"

Theliopa paused as if weighing the wisdom of honest answers. "
Inrilatas.
He could see... Remember Father trained-trained him for a time..."

"Father trained who?" Kelmomas cried, the way a jealous little brother might.

"Kel—please."

"Who?"

Esmenet raised two fingers to Theliopa, turned to Kelmomas, her manner cross and adoring. "Your older brother," she explained. "Your father hoped teaching him to read passions in others would enable him to master his own." She turned back to her daughter. "Treachery?" she asked. "Could Inrilatas see
treachery
in a soul so subtle as Maithanet's?"

"Perhaps, Mother," the pale girl replied. "But the real-real question, I think, is not so much
can
he, as
will
he."

The Holy Empress of all the Three Seas shrugged, her expression betraying the fears that continually mobbed her heart.

"I need to know. What do we have to lose?"

—|—

Since Mother had to attend special sessions with her generals, the young Prince-Imperial dined alone that evening—or as alone as possible for a soul such as his. He was outraged even though he understood her reasons, and as always he tormented the slaves who waited on him, blaming his mother for each and every hurt he inflicted.

Later that night he pulled the board from beneath his bed and resumed working on his model. Since his uncle's treachery had loomed so large that day, he decided to work on the Temple Xothei, the monumental heart of the Cmiral temple complex. He began cutting and paring miniature columns, using the little knives that Mother had given him in lieu of a completed model. "What a man makes," she had told him, "he prizes..." Unerringly, without the benefit of any measure, he carved them, not only one identical to another, but in perfect proportion to those structures he had already completed.

He never showed his work to Mother. It would trouble her, he knew, his ability to see places just once, and from angles buried within them, yet to grasp them the way a bird might from far above.

The way Father grasped the world.

But even worse, if he showed his little city to her, it would complicate the day when he finally burned it. She did not like the way he burned things.

Bugs, he thought. He needed to fill the streets of his little city with bugs. Nothing really burned, he decided, unless it moved.

He thought of the ants in the garden.

He thought of the Pillarian Guardsmen patrolling the Sacral Enclosure. He could even hear their voices on the evening breeze as they whiled away the watches with fatuous talk...

He thought about the fun he could have, sneak-sneaking about them, more shadow than little boy.

He thought about his previous murders and the mysterious person he saw trapped in the eyes of the dying. The one person he loved more than his mother—the one and only. Convulsing, bewildered, terrified, and beseeching...
beseeching
most of all.

Please! Please don't kill me!

"The Worshipper," he declared aloud.

Yes,
the secret voice whispered.
That's a good name.

"A most
strange
person, don't you think, Sammi?"

Most strange.

"The Worshipper..." Kelmomas said, testing the sound. "How can he travel like that from body to body?"

Perhaps he's locked in a room. Perhaps dying is that room's only door...

"Locked in a room!" the young Prince-Imperial cried laughing. "Yes! Clever-clever-cunning-clever!"

And so he slipped into the gloom-gloomy hallways, dodging and ducking and scampering. Only the merest shiver in the shining lantern-flames marked his passing.

Finally he arrived at the Door... the high bronze one with seven Kyranean Lions stamped into its greening panels, their manes bent into falcon wings. The one his mother had forbidden the slaves to polish until the day it could be safely opened.

The door to his brother Inrilatas's room.

—|—

It stood partially ajar.

Kelmomas had expected, even hoped to find it such. The slaves who attended to his brother generally did so whenever lulls in his tantrums permitted. During his brother's calm seasons, however, they followed an exact schedule, cleansing and feeding Inrilatas the watch before noon and the watch before midnight.

The boy mooned in the corridor for several moments, alternately staring at the stylized dragons stitched in crimson, black, and gold across the corridor's carpet and stealing what glimpses the narrow slot provided of the cell's bare floor interior. Eventually his curiosity mastered his fear—only Father terrified him more than Inrilatas—and he pressed his face to the opening, peering past the belt of brushed leather that had been tacked to the door's outer rim to better seal in the sound and smell of his mad brother.

He could see an Attendant to his left, a harried-looking Nilnameshi man soaping the walls and floor with a rake-mop. He saw his brother sitting hunched like a shaved ape to the right of the room, his edges illuminated in the light of a single brazier. Each of his limbs were shackled to a chain that ran like an elongated tongue from the mouth of a stone lion head, one of four set into the far wall, two with their manes pressed against the ceiling, two with their chins across the floor. A winch-room lay beyond that wall, Kelmomas knew, with wheels and locks for each of the chains, allowing the Attendants to pull his brother spread-eagled against the polished stone, if need be, or to grant him varying degrees of freedom otherwise.

From the look of the links curled across the floor, they had afforded him two lengths or so of mobility—enough both to relieve and to embolden the boy. Inrilatas usually howled and raged without some modicum of slack.

At first, Kelmomas thought him absolutely motionless, but he was not.

He sat making faces... expressions.

Not any faces, but those belonging to the slave who bent to and fro with his mop a mere toss away, scrubbing away urine and feces with a perfumed astringent. Periodically the deaf-mute would cast a terrified glance in his prisoner's direction, only to see his face reflected back to him.

"Most of them flee," Inrilatas said. Kelmomas knew he addressed him even though he did not so much as glance at the boy. "Sooner or later, they choose the whip over my gaze."

"They are simple fools," Kelmomas replied, too timid to press open the door, let alone cross the threshold.

"They are exactly what they appear to be."

The shaggy mane turned. Inrilatas fixed the young Prince-Imperial with wild and laughing blue eyes. "Unlike you, little brother."

Save for his long face, Inrilatas looked utterly unlike the brother Kelmomas remembered from his infancy. His growth had come, gilding his naked form in a golden haze of hair. And years of warring against his iron restraints had strapped his frame in luxurious muscle. A beard stubbed his chin and the line of his jaw but had yet to climb his cheeks.

His voice was deep and beguiling. Not unlike Father's.

"Come, little brother," Inrilatas said with a comradely grin. He leapt toward the entrance so suddenly that the deaf-mute fumbled the handle of his mop and tripped backward. He landed at a point just shy of where the chains would bring him up short.

Kelmomas watched his brother squat and defecate, then retreat to his previous position. Still smiling, Inrilatas waved his little brother forward. He possessed a man's wrists now: the hands of a thick-fingered warrior.

"Come... I want to discuss the shit between us."

With anyone else, Kelmomas would have thought this a mad joke of some kind. Not so with Inrilatas.

The boy pressed the door inward, strode into the stench, pausing but two steps from the coiled feces. The slave glimpsed Kelmomas in his periphery, wheeled in sudden alarm. But the man was quick to resume his cleaning when he recognized him. Like so many palace slaves, terror kept him welded to the task before him.

"You show no revulsion," Inrilatas said, nodding at the feces.

Kelmomas did not know what to say, so he said nothing.

"You are not like the others, are you, little brother? No...
You
... are like
me
."

Remember your face,
the secret voice warned.
Only Father possesses the Strength in greater measure!

"I am nothing like you," the little Prince-Imperial replied.

It seemed strange, standing on the far side of the Door. And
wrong
... So very wrong.

"But you are," Inrilatas chuckled. "All of us have inherited our Father's faculties in some mangled measure. Me... I possess his sensitivities, but I utterly lack his unity... his control. My natures blow through me—hungers, glorious hungers!—unfettered by the little armies of shame that hold the souls of others in absolute captivity. Father's reason mystifies me. Mother's compassion makes me howl with laughter. I am the World's only unbound soul..."

He raised his shackled wrists as he said this, gestured to the polluted floor before him.

"I shit when I shit."

A ringing filled the boy's ears, such was the intensity of his older brother's gaze. He began to speak, but his voice caught as though about a hook in his throat.

Inrilatas grinned. "What about you, little brother? Do you shit when you shit?"

He sees me...
the secret voice whispered.
You have become reckless in Father's abse—

"Who?" Inrilatas laughed. "The shadow of hearing moves through you—as it so often does when no one is speaking.
Who whispers to you,
little brother?"

"Mommy says you're mad."

"Ignore the question," his older brother snapped. "State something insulting, something that will preoccupy, and thus evade a prickly question. Come closer, little brother... Come closer and tell me you do not shit when you shit."

"I don't understand what you mean!"

He knows you lie...

"Of course you know... Come closer... Let me peer into your mouth. Let me listen to this whisper that is not your voice. Who? Who speaks inside of you?"

Kelmomas fell backward a step. Inrilatas had managed to creep forward somehow, to steal slack from his chains without the boy noticing.

"Uncle is coming to see you!"

A heartbeat of appraising silence.

"Again you ignore the question. But this time you state a
truth
, one that you know will intrigue me. You mean Uncle
Holy
, don't you? Uncle Holy is coming to visit me? I smell Mother in that."

The boy found strength in her mere mention.

"Y-yes. Mother wants you to read his face. She fears that he plots against Father—against us! She thinks only you can see."

"Come closer."

"But Uncle has learned how to
fool
you."

Even as he spoke the words, Kelmomas cursed them for their clumsiness. This was an
Anasûrimbor
crouched before him. Divinity! Divinity burned in Inrilatas's blood as surely as in his own.

"Kin," Inrilatas crowed. "Blood of my blood. What love you possess for Mother! I see it burn! Burn! Until all else is char and ash. Is
she
the grudge you bear against Uncle?"

But Kelmomas could think of nothing else to say or do. To answer any of his brother's questions, he knew, was to wander into labyrinths he could not hope to solve. He had to press forward...

"He has learned to disguise his disgust as pity, Uncle Holy. His treachery as concern!"