The White-Luck Warrior (78 page)

The coos in the dark. The creak of dowelled wood. The groan of dowelled loins. The breaths stolen, as though every thrust were a sudden fall.

He was a man, she told herself: you could no more ask a fox to resist a rabbit. But
Naree
, she was a woman—even more, she was a
whore
—and so commanded her desire the way carpenters commanded their hammers. If Esmenet had heard Imhailas cajole her, bully her with the cruel singularity of purpose that distinguished lust from love, then she might have understood. But instead, she heard Naree
seducing him
—in the very same tones she used to ply her daily custom, no less. The girlish pouting. The coy teasing. The restlessness of limbs impatient for carnal struggle.

She heard a woman, a
rival
, making love to the man between them for
her
sake.

Leave him to me,
the girl was saying.
You are old. Your peach is bruised and rotten. Your passion is flabby and desperate... Leave him to me.

Esmenet told herself it was nothing, merely the coupling of shadows in the dark, something that was scarcely real because it could scarcely be seen. She told herself it was his real motive, the primary reason why Imhailas wanted her to flee the city and abandon her son, so that he could plumb Naree with abandon. She told herself it was simply punishment, the way Fate chastised old whores so conceited as to think themselves queens.

She told herself many things as her ears roared for listening: the pluck of lips clasping about gasps, the cotton sweep of hot dry skin against hot dry skin... the pasty peal of wet from wet.

And when he began groaning, the Holy Empress of the Three Seas could feel him hard and beautiful upon
her
, as he was meant to be, the reverence in his flower-petal touch. And she began weeping, her sobs stifled, lost between the gusts of their passion. What had happened? What rite had she foreshortened? What deity had she offended? What had she done to be wronged so, again and again and again?

The bed cracked with pent tensions. What was languorous became rugged with pitched passion. Naree cried out, rose upon Esmenet's lover like the white on the forward curl of wave...

Leave him to
me
!

And the door exploded open on lances of torchlight. Armoured men burst upon its astonished wake. Naree gagged more than screamed. The screen was kicked aside even as Esmenet bolted from her blankets. Tear-spliced torchlight. Grinning faces, beards greasy in the uncertain light. Strapping figures, draped in impregnable chain. Gleaming blades. Golden
Tusks
stamped everywhere across the floating madness.

And Imhailas, nude and howling, his beautiful face cramped in wanton savagery.

A shadow clenched her hair, heaved her to the floor, yanked her to her knees.

"Imagine!"
some leering voice cackled.
"A whore hiding among whores!"

And her Exalt-Captain battled, solitary, his broadsword whooping through the close air. An armoured man fell clutching his throat.
"Apostate!"
Imhailas bellowed, suddenly the pale-skinned barbarian he had always been.
"Trait—!"

One of the Knights tackled him about the waist, carried him hard to the floor.

They fell upon him, hammering, stomping. One heaved him to his knees. Three others began striking his face with iron-girded fists. She watched his beauty disintegrate as if it were nothing more than leather wrapped about pottery. She felt something primal climb from her throat, heard it fly...

The Shrial Knight gripping his hair let him flop to the floor, where his skull drained. It seemed she could not look away from the socket that had been his face, so violent was its impossibility.

This could not be happening.

Naree's shrieking scarcely seemed human. It hung high, warbled with insanity.

And for the longest time it seemed the World's only noise.

The Knights of the Tusk looked to one another and laughed. One silenced Naree with a vicious backhand. The girl toppled from the far side of the bed.

Esmenet had forgotten the carelessness of men who kill—the danger of their dark and turbulent whims. But the old instincts were quick in returning: the sudden vigilance, the slack body, the numbness that passed for cold concentration...

The ability to see past the death of someone beloved.

The party consisted of some eight or nine Shrial Knights, but not from any company she could identify. Their breaths reeked for wine and liquor. A cloaked priest, whom she now recognized as a Collegian, walked to where Naree had retreated, curled naked beneath one of the shuttered windows. He bent above her, clutched her wrist with careless force, and as the girl wept and shook her head in negation, he counted out five gold kellics into her palm.

"And here's a silver," he said, holding the coin to the light. He spun it between thumb and forefinger, and Esmenet glimpsed the grey of her outline in the white reflecting across it. "To
remember
her by," the Collegian said, nodding in Esmenet's direction, grinning. It fell with a crack to the floor between them.

Naree slumped at his feet. The Holy Empress of the Three Seas watched the girl's eyes follow the blood-tacked floors to where the Shrial Knights held Esmenet on her knees. Imhailas lay between them, grisly and unnatural.

"Please!" she cried to Esmenet, her expression a braid of anguish and vacancy. "Please don't tell your husband! Don't-
doooon't
..." She wagged her head about a piteous grimace. "Please... I didn't
meeeean
to!"

Even as they dragged Esmenet into the staring streets, she could still hear the girl wailing, a crazed immaturity to her voice, as if everything in her past the age of five had been murdered...

Instead of enslaved.

—|—

She was not brought directly before Maithanet, as Esmenet had expected. Instead she was delivered to a commandeered watch garrison for the remainder of the night. She was beaten, almost raped, and generally suffered the leering absence of pathos that often belongs to servants who hold their master's enemy. She did not sleep, nor was she unchained. She was forced to make water in her own clothes.

Within a watch of dawn, a second company of Shrial Knights arrived, these belonging to the Inchausti, the Shriah's own elite bodyguard. A dispute broke out, and somehow shouts turned into a summary execution—as well as the hasty flight of three of the men watching her. Resplendent in their golden mail, the Inchausti took her back into the streets. They, at least, treated her with decorum and respect, even if they failed to remove the chains. She had not the heart to beseech them, let alone speak at all, and so found her way to the accidental dignity that belongs to shock and exhaustion.

She shuffled and stumbled in her ankle-chains, a woman dwarfed in a shining column of armoured men. It was still early morning, so that the sun touched naught but the sky, leaving the streets chill and grey. Despite this, more and more people gathered as they made their way toward Cmiral, craning and sometimes jumping for a glimpse of her.
"The Holy Empress!"
she heard shouted in random, broken choruses—and periodically,
"The Whore!"

The cries obviously outran their small formation, for every turn revealed more people, crowding the stoops, jostling with the Inchausti in the streets, hanging their heads from windows and roofs, their eyes bleary with sleep and wonder. She saw all castes and callings, glimpsed faces that mourned, that celebrated, that exhorted her to be strong. They neither heartened nor repelled her. The Knights of the Tusk shoved their way forward, bellowing warnings, cuffing or punching the insolent. More and more frustration and alarm replaced their expressions of studied concentration. The Inchausti's Captain, a tall, silver-bearded man the Empress thought she recognized, finally commanded his company to unfasten their sheathed swords and use them as clubs.

She witnessed first-hand how violence begets violence—and found that she did not care.

Those behind them followed. Those before them called out, waking whole swathes of the city along their path, drawing more and more into the streets. The march had become a running battle by the time they turned on the Processional, just to the west of the Rat Canal. The Momemnites continued to accumulate, their gall growing in proportion to their numbers. She saw many of them raising clay tablets that they broke as she was hustled past, but whether they were curses or blessings, she did not know.

Freed of the slotted streets, the Inchausti formed a ring about her. The Cmiral opened before them, its expanses already hazy. It seemed all the world thronged within it, spread across the plazas, packed about the monumental bases. The black-basalt facade of the Temple Xothei loomed beyond the sea of faces and brandished fists, bathing in the morning heat. Pigeons took flight across the neighbouring tenements.

The Inchausti pressed forward without hesitation, perhaps buoyed by the sight of their fellows arrayed shining across the first landing beneath Xothei. Their progress was haphazard at best, despite the clubbing fury of the Knights. Esmenet found herself looking across the mobs to their right, the obelisks of their past rulers rising like spear-points from their seething midst. She glimpsed the face of Ikurei Xerius III raised to the climbing sun, suffered a bizarre, almost nightmarish pang of nostalgia.

She saw bands of men with Yatwer's Sickle inked across their cheeks. She saw innumerable Circumfixes, clutched in hands manicured, callused, even poxed. The shouts resounded to the Heavens, a kind of cackling roar borne of contradictory cries. Every other heartbeat, it seemed, she caught some fragment of
"Whore!"
or
"Empress!"
Every other blink she glimpsed some Momemnite howling in adulation or spitting hate. She saw men tangled in battling mobs, striking each other over shoulders, reaching out to grab hair or tear clothes. She glimpsed a man stab another in the throat.

The mobs surged against the company, and for several moments they were overcome, broken into battling clots. Esmenet even felt hands clawing at her. Her gown was ripped from her shoulder to her elbow. The nameless Captain bawled out, his battle-trained voice ringing through the din, commanding the Inchausti to draw their swords. Held fast in gauntleted hands, she saw the sunlight shimmer across the first raised blades, saw the blood rise in crimson-winking strings and beads...

Shouts became screams.

The beleaguered company resumed its advance, now skidding on blood. Xothei climbed black and immovable above them. And somehow she knew that her brother-in-law awaited her in the cool gloom beyond the gilded doors...

The Holy Shriah of the Thousand Temples... Her son's murderer.

The entire time, from Imhailas's unceremonious murder to the stairs of Xothei, she had existed in a kind trance. Somehow she had floated while her body had walked. Even the riotous tumult, which had torn her clothes and thrown her to her knees on several occasions, happened as if seen from afar.

None of it seemed real, somehow.

But now... Nothing could be more real than Maithanet.

She thought of her husband's treatment of the Orthodox Kings who fell into his power: Earl Osfringa of Nangael, whom he had blinded, then staked naked beneath Meigeiri's southernmost gate. Xinoyas of Anplei, whom he had disembowelled before his shrieking children. Mercy meant nothing to Kellhus apart from its convoluted uses. And given the rigours of Empire, cruelty was generally the more effective tool.

Her brother-in-law was also Dûnyain... What happened next depended entirely
on her uses
, and empresses, especially those who had to be discredited for power's sake, rarely found mercy.

Palpable horror. Her body clamoured as if seeking to shake free of itself.

She was about to die. After all she had witnessed and survived... She thought of her children, each in succession, but she could only conjure their faces as little children and not as they were.

Only Kelmomas stood fast in her soul's eye.

She struggled to climb the steps: her manacled feet were scarce able to clear each rise. She could feel as much as hear the rioting tracts behind her, the ardour of those who loved or hated, and the lechery of the curious. She stumbled, and her left arm slipped from the flanking Knight's grasp. She chipped free and fell face forward, her wrists chained to her waist. Her shins skidded along unbevelled edges. Stone bludgeoned her ear and temple. But she did not so much feel her misstep as
hear
it reflected in the mobs behind her: a thousand lungs gasping, a thousand throats chortling in glee—Momemn and all its roaring vagaries, passing judgment on her humiliation.

She tasted blood.

The two Inchausti who had let her fall pulled her back to her feet with dreadful ease. With gauntlets jammed into her armpits, they carried her the remaining way. Something slumped within her, something as profound as life.

And those watching could see that the Blessed Empress of the Three Seas was at last deposed.

—|—

Xothei's iron portals slowly ground shut behind her. She watched the oblong of light thrown across the floor shrink about her frail shadow, then the doors shuttered all in gloom.

Ringing ears. Airy darkness. A kind of perfume dank, like flowers hung in a cellar. Clamour hummed out from the immense stonework hanging about her, an endless crashing. She knew the world dawned bright beyond the cyclopean walls, but she had the sense of standing in an ocean cavern, a place deeper than light.

She began shuffling from the antechamber out across the prayer floor, toward the great space beneath the central dome. The weight of her shackles bowed her, made burning effort out of mere walking. Pillars soared. Lantern wheels hung from chains throughout the interior, creating a false ceiling of circular lights. A fan of faint shadows followed her as she hobbled rattling with every step.