His eyes dull at the mention of the Gnosis—the inward look of concealed pity, or so it seems. But when he speaks, his tone is almost collegial, except that it's hollow.

  "Is it true, what they say, that witches are no longer burned?"

  "Yes. There's even a new School."

  He does not like the way she says that word, "School." She can see it in his eyes.

  "A School? A School of witches?"

  "They're calling themselves the Swayal Compact."

  "Then what need do you have of me?"

  "My mother will not allow it. And the Swayali will not risk her Imperial displeasure. Sorcery, she says, leaves only scars."

  "She's right."

  "But what if scars are all you have?"

  This, at least, gives him pause. She expects him to ask the obvious question, but his curiosity seems bent in a different direction.

  "Power," he says, glaring at her with an intensity she does not like. "Is that it? You want to feel the world crumble beneath the weight of your voice."

  She knows this game. "Was that how it was for you in the beginning?"

  His glare seems to falter over some inner fact. But it means less than nothing, winning arguments. The same as with her mother.

  "Go home," he says. "I would sooner be your father than your teacher."

  There is set manner to the way he turns his back this time, one that tells her that no words can retrieve him. The sun pulls his shadow long and profound. He walks with a stoop that says he has long outlived the age of bargaining. But she hears it all the same, the peculiar pause of legend becoming actuality, the sound of the crazed and disjoint seams of the world falling flush.

  He is the Great Teacher, the one who raised the Aspect-Emperor to the heights of godhead. Despite his words to the contrary.

  He is Drusas Achamian.

  ***

  That night she builds a bonfire not because she means to, but because she cannot overcome the urge to burn down the Wizard's tower. Since this is impossible, she begins—quite without thinking—to burn it in effigy. After throwing each hewn branch, she stands so that the walls appear to rise miniature from the crackling incandescence, crouching just enough for the flames to garland the little window where she thinks he sleeps.

  When she's finished, she stands in its blazing presence, takes comfort in the stink of her exertions, and tells herself the fire is in fact a living thing. She does this quite often: pretends that worldly things are magic, even though she knows otherwise. It reminds her that sorcery is something she can see.

  That she is a witch.

  She scarcely notices the first drops of rain. The fire seems to beat them into steam, to lap them from her clothing and skin with invisible tongues. Lightning flashes, so bright the flames become momentarily invisible. Then the black heavens open up. The surrounding forest lets loose a vast white roar.

  For a time she crouches against the downpour, her leather hood hitched over her head, the fire spitting and steaming immediately before her. The water sends long tendrils through the crease and seam of her cloak, cold roots that gradually sink to the depth of fabric and skin. The dimmer the bonfire becomes, the more the misery of her circumstance oppresses her. To suffer so much, travel so far...

  She never recalls standing, and certainly not drawing back her cloak. It seems that one moment she's sitting before her fire, her teeth clenched to prevent their chatter, then she's standing several paces away, soaked to drowning, fairly floating in her clothes, staring up at the crippled contours of the Wizard's tower.

  "Teach me!" she hollers. "Teach meee!"

  Like all involuntary cries, it seems to encompass her, to gather her like leaves and cast her into the sheering wind.

  "Teach me!"

  He simply has to hear, doesn't he? Her voice cracking the way all voices crack about the soul's turbulent essentials. He needs only to look down to see her leaning against the slope, wet and pathetic and defiant, the image of the woman he once loved, framed by steam and fire. Pleading. Pleading.

  "Teeeeach!"

  "Meeee!"

  But only the unseen wolves answer from somewhere on the higher hills, scoring the wash with cries of their own. Mocking her. Owoooooo! Poor little slit! Owoooooooo! Their laughter stings, but she is used to it, the hilarity of those who celebrate her pain. She has long ago learned how to break it into kindling, to cast it upon the bonfires behind her eyes.

  "Teach me!"

  Thunder cracks—the God's hammer striking the shield of the world. It echoes through the hiss of rain across the granite slopes. Hiss-hiss-hiss, like a thousand serpents warning. Mists rise like smoke.

  "Curse you!" she shrieks. "You will teach me!"

  She pauses in the marauding manner of those well practised at provocation, searching for any sign of reaction. Then, through the veils, she sees it. The great door opens, rimmed by an upside-down L of interior light. A shadow watches her for several heartbeats, as though weighing her lunacy against the chill. Then it slips out into the rain.

  She knows that it is him immediately, from his hobbling gait, from his bent shape, from the burning in the pit of her throat. From the deep, sorcerous bruise, like a darkness untied to any worldly light. He leans on a staff, setting it in the crooks between boulders to keep from slipping. The rain parts about him like string, and she can see it, the sense of eyes angling, of something not quite complete, that mars all sorcery from the epic to the petty.

  He descends the slope like a stair, halting only when he stands immediately before and above her. They stare at each other for a moment, the young woman, standing as though risen from the sea, and the old Wizard, waiting between the lines of falling water. She swallows at the impossibility of him, his beard frayed and feathery, his cloak dust dry in light of her fire. The forests roar about them, a never-ending rain-world.

  His eyes are hard and incurious. For a moment, she struggles with a strange embarrassment, like someone caught cursing an animal in tones reserved for people. She spits water from her lips.

  "Teach me," she says.

  Without a word, he hefts his staff, which she could now see is made not of wood, but of bone. Quite unprepared, she watches him swing it like a mace—

  An explosion against the side of her skull. Then sliding palms, knuckles scraped and skinned, arms and legs tangled rolling. She slams to a stop against a molar-shaped rock. Gasps for air.

  Stunned, she watches him pick his way back up the shining slope. She tastes blood, bends her face hack to let the endless rain rinse her clean. The drops seem to fall out of nowhere.

  She begins laughing.

  "Teeeach meeeee!"

  CHAPTER THREE

  Momemn

  On my knees, I offer you that which flies in me.

  My face to earth, I shout your glory to the heavens.

  In so surrendering do I conquer. In so yielding do I seize.

  —Nel-Saripal, Dedication to Monius

  Early Spring, 19 New Imperial Year (4132 Year-of-the-Tusk), Momemn

  When Nel-Saripal, the famed Ainoni poet, finished copying the final revised verses of his epic retelling of the Unification Wars, Monius, he had his body-slave run the manuscript to a specially commissioned galley waiting in the harbour. Seventy-three days later it was delivered to his divine patroness, Anasûrimbor Esmenet, the Blessed Empress of the Three Seas, who grasped it the way a barren woman might grasp a foundling babe.

  Nel-Saripal's epic cycle would be read aloud the following morning with the entire Imperial Court in attendance. "'Momemn,'" the orator began, "'is the fist in our breast, the beating heart.'"

  These words struck Esmenet as surely as a husband's slap. Even the reader, the celebrated mummer Sarpella, faltered at their utterance, they seemed so obviously seditious. Whispers and serpentine glances were traded among those in attendance, and the Blessed Empress fumed behind her painted smile. To say that Momemn was the heart was to say that Momemn was the centre, the capital, something at once factual and laudable. But the word "fist," did that not intimate violence? And to subsequently say that Momemn was the "beating" heart, did that not divide the meaning in troubling ways? Esmenet was no scholar, but after twenty years of rabid reading, she thought she knew something of words and their supernatural logic. Nel-Saripal was saying that Momemn maintained its power through brutality.

  That it was a thug.

  The poet was playing some kind of game—that much was obvious. Nevertheless, the elegance and imagistic splendour of the ensuing story quickly swept her away, and she decided to overlook what was at most a gesture to impertinence. What great artist failed to punish their patron? Afterwards she would decide that the insult was rather clumsy, no more subtle than the slit gowns worn by the Priestess-Whores of Gierra. Had Nel-Saripal been a greater poet, a rival to Protathis, say, the attack would have been more devious, more cutting—and well nigh impossible to punish. Monius would have been one of those deliciously barbed works, cutting those with the fingers to touch, and baffling the palms of all the others.

  But her misgivings continued to plague her. Again and again, during whatever thoughtful lull her schedule permitted, she found herself reciting the line: Momemn is the fist in our breast, the beating heart... Momemn... Momemn... At first she took his reference to Momemn at face value—perhaps because of the way the city and its convolutions encircled her apartments on the Andiamine Heights. Nel-Saripal, she assumed, had restricted his symbolic mischief to the latter half of the formula: The literal Momemn was the metaphoric heart. But the substitutions, she realized, went deeper, the way they always did when it came to poets and their obscure machinations. Momemn wasn't the heart, it was the heart's location. It too was a cipher...

  Momemn was her, she finally decided. Now that her divine husband had taken the field against the Consult, she was the fist in her people's breast. She was the heart that beat them. Nel-Saripal, the thankless ingrate, was calling her a thug. A tyrant.

  "You..." That was how Monius truly began.

  "You are the fist that beats us."

  ***

  That night, tossing alone on the muslin planes of her bed, she found herself running in the manner of dreams, where distance, the jolt of earth, and rushing movement were little more than an inconsistent jumble. She could hear Mimara calling to her on the wind. Closer and closer, until the cries seemed to fall from the stars. But instead of her daughter, she found an apple tree, its branches bowed into skirts by the weight of crimson-shining fruit.

  She fell very still. An aura of whispering sentience enclosed her. The imperceptible sway of branches. The listless flutter of black-green leaves. Sunlight showered down, pressing bright fingertips into the tree's shaded bowers. She could not move. The fallen apples seemed to glare at her, shrunken heads, withered heads, cheeks to the dirt, watching from the shadows with wormhole eyes.

  She screamed when the first of the fingers and knuckles broke earth. They were as cautious as caterpillars at first, scabrous, rotted into spear points, tattered flesh wound like sackcloth about bones. Then blackened arms thrust upward, bearing hands like crabs. The meat of the fruit cracked. Branches were yanked down like fishing rods, then snapped up swishing.

  The dead and their harvest.

  She stood breathless, motionless, her limbs glassed with horror. And she could only think, Mimara... Mimara... A mumbling thought, nebulous with the confusion that hums through all dreams. Mimara...

  Then she was blinking at the grey of night's slow retreat. The tree was gone, as were the arms reaching from earthen pits. But the terrible thought remained, no more clear for the fact of waking.

  Mimara.

  Esmenet wept as though she were her only child. Found, then lost.

  ***

  The following afternoon sunlight streamed through the fretted walls behind her, embossing the table and its sheets of parchment with brilliant white squares. The secretaries, deputations from a number of different offices, uniformly squinted as they approached with the documents that required her seal. Brocaded tusks and circumfixes shimmered from their sleeves. Grids of light rolled across their backs as they bent to kiss the polished wood of the kneeling floor.

  As bored as she was, Esmenet listened attentively to their petitions, typically this or that minor legislative declaration: a clarification of the Slaver Protocols, a revised order of precedence for the Chamber of Excises, and on and on. The New Empire, she had long since learned, was a kind of enormous mechanism, one that used men as gears, thousands upon thousands of them, their functions determined by the language of law. The inevitable maintenance required ever more language, all of it underwritten by the authority of her voice.

  As always, she relied heavily on Ngarau, who had been Grand Seneschal since the days of the extinct Ikurei Dynasty, to interpret the import of the requests. They had developed a comfortable rapport over the years, eunuch and Empress. She would ask brief questions, and he would respond either by answering to the best of his ability or by interrogating the petitioning functionary in his turn. If the request was granted—and the vetting process required to reach her penultimate level assured that most of them were—he would dip his ladle in the bowl of molten lead that continually warmed her left side and pour the flashing metal for her to stamp with her Seal. If, as was sometimes the case, some kind of influence peddling or bureaucratic infighting was suspected, the petitioners would be directed to the Judges down the hall. The New Empire tolerated no corruption, no matter how petty.

  Mankind was at war.

  Several emergency funding requests from Shigek, "tokens of the Empress's generosity," proved tricky to parse. For whatever reason, the rumours that Fanayal ab Kascamandri and his renegade Coyauri prowled the deserts about the River Sempis refused to die. Aside from this, the session had proved uneventful—thankfully. The chill air carried the promise of renewal, and the repetitive nature of the suits made her decisions seem trivial. Though she knew full well that lives turned on her every breath, she welcomed the opportunity to pretend otherwise.

  For twenty years she had been Empress. For almost as long as she could read.

  Sometimes the unmapped immensity of it all would come crashing through the tedium. The mundane circuit would peel open, the matter of course would evaporate into the hollow of a million mortal obligations. Women. Children. Wilful men. A crazed anxiousness would seize her. If she were walking, she would reel like a drunk, clutch at her vertigo with outstretched hands. If she were talking, she would trail into silence, avert her face and simply breathe, as though that were the endangered thread. I am Empress, she would think, Empress, and the title would speak not to the glory, but to the horror and the horror alone.

  But typically the combination of routine and abstractions kept her afloat. To condense all the administrative details into the "Ministrate" or all the ecclesiastical confusion into the "Thousand Temples" was a powerful and a comforting thing. She would consult the appropriate officials and that was that. Yes, I understand. Do your best. Sometimes it even felt simple, like a library with all the books inventoried and titled—all she need do was make the proper entries. Of course, some crisis would quickly remind her otherwise, that she was simply confusing the handle for the pot, as the caste-menials would say. The details would always come leaking through—in their multitudes.

  Part of her would even laugh, convinced that it was simply too absurd to be real. She, Esmenet, a battered peach from the slums of Sumna, wielding an authority that only Triamis, the greatest of the Ceneian Emperors, had known. Souls in the millions traded coins with her profile. Oh what was that, you say? Thousands are starving in Eumarna. Yes-yes, but I have an insurrection to deal with. Armies, you see, simply must be fed. People? Well, they tend to suffer in silence, sell their children and whatnot. So long as the lies are told well.

  At such a remove, so far from the gutters of living truth, how could she not be a tyrant? Not matter how balanced, thoughtful, or sincerely considered her judgments, how could they not crack like clubs or pierce like spears?

  Exactly as Nel-Saripal had implied, the wretch.

  Without warning, a small voice piped through the officious murmur. "Thelli! Thelli! Theliopa found another one!" Esmenet saw her youngest, Kelmomas, barrelling through the secretaries, then around the grand table. He ran across his reflection to throw his arms around her waist. She hugged him, laughing.

  "Sweetling... What do you mean?"

  At times his beauty struck her breathless, his features avid beneath a mop of lavish blond curls. But when he surprised her like this, the bouncing perfection of him fairly hummed through her, made her throat thicken for pride. With Kelmomas she could almost believe the Gods had relented.

  "A skin-spy, Momma. Among the new slaves for the stables—Theliopa found another one!"

  Esmenet involuntarily stiffened. Captain Imhailas appeared on the heel of these words, fairly swinging through the entrance to fall onto his knees. "Your Glory!"

 

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