The Judging Eye (44 page)

The Eöthic Guards, on the other
hand, were a different matter. A relic of the old Ikurei Dynasty, they
patrolled the grounds beyond the Holy Palace, the Imperial Precincts. Kelmomas
imagined they would recognize him close up, his face held to torchlight; the
problem lay in the inordinate skill and number of their bowmen. Every summer,
Coithus Saubon, one of his father's two Exalt-Generals, sponsored archery
contests across the Middle-North, with purses awarded to the runners-up and a
tenure as a Guardsman granted to the winners. With the exception of the Galeoth
Agmundrmen, they were the most celebrated archers in the Three Seas. And though
the
risk
of being stuck like some quail or straw-stuffed target appealed
to Kelmomas, the possibility most certainly did not.

It was no easy task, culling
risks from possibilities.

Slinking from rooftop to
rooftop, the Prince-Imperial climbed down the seaward faces of the Andiamine
Heights, careful to always eel his way along interior corners and abutments,
wherever fortune and architecture piled the shadows deep. He kept his belly
snake-low. He avoided windows tumescent with light.

He warred against the savagery
of his grin the entire way.

But how could he not exult? Here
and there he passed solitary Guardsmen, creeping on fingers and toes with nary
a sound, gliding on a dark benediction, with a grace malevolent and unseen. He
watched them, the men he eluded, studied their armoured forms in the moonlight,
all the while riven with a duping glee.
Here I am!
he cackled in his
thoughts.
Here I am in the dark behind you!

One sentry almost saw him, a
restive Pillarian who paced back and forth and sent routine looks sliding to
the shadows. Kelmomas was forced to hang motionlessness no less than five
times, to trust utterly the dark line that he followed. It was a curious,
bodily faith, an intoxicating rush of terror and certainty, something animal
and original, as alive as anything could be. He shook with excitement
afterwards, had to bite his lip to keep from howling aloud.

But the rest of the Guardsmen,
Pillarian or Eöthic, stared out in utter ignorance of their ignorance, their
expressions flattened by a hapless indifference to the oblivion that encircled
them. It was as though they guarded a world where Kelmomas didn't exist and so
could act with reckless abandon. It was good, the Prince-Imperial decided, that
he
tested
them the way he did. What if he were a skin-spy? What then? In
a moment of pious fury, he even settled on the lesson they had failed to learn.
The darkness, he wanted to tell them, was not empty.

It was never empty.

He spent some time huddled in
the crook formed by the chimney on the roof of the Lesser Stables, staring
across the Batrial Campus at the monumental facade of the Guest Compound. No
shafts had come whistling out of the darkness, no alarms had been raised, and
it seemed that this was at once impossible and inevitable, as though he had
cracked the world in two with his subterfuge. One capricious, the other to be
disposed with as he pleased.

And on this night, only the
latter was to be believed.

Immediately below him, in the
light of poled torches, several slaves harnessed a horse to a wain loaded with
what appeared to be empty casks and bushels. A group of drunken cavalrymen,
Kidruhil, heckled them from a table that had been dragged into the cobbled
yard. "Do you hear thunder?" one of them called out, raising a storm
of laughter from his fellows.

Kelmomas lowered himself over
the roof's edge, then dropped as softly as silken rope. He circled behind the
ridge of freshly heaped hay that the slaves, according to the soldier's
catcalls, were clearing room for in the stables. He burrowed into the loose
thatch at the pile's terminus, several paces down from the wain, then waited
for the slaves to embark. He breathed deep the smell of chaff and the dust of
dried-out life.

Peering through a straw skein,
he watched one of the slaves, a balding man with a panicked face, climb the
bench and urge the harnessed horse, a sturdy black, forward with a low whistle
and flick of the reins. The Kidruhil paused in their laughter, as though struck
by this moment of common mastery. Wielding pitchforks, the other slaves were
already heaving great manes of hay into the air. The torches coughed and
sputtered.

Kelmomas focused on the horse,
timed the clopping tempo of his legs, closer, closer, until its bobbing head
blotted the image of the driver. Shod hooves falling like hammers. Knuckled
legs trotting, bending stiff and tensile like unstrung bows. Closer.

Kelmomas leapt into the
thundering clatter, reached—

His hands hooked to the harness's
nethers, he pressed himself against the veined belly, willed himself into the
animal's torpid heat. The whole world rumbled. The great body floating above
him, flexing to and fro. The cobbles rushing beneath, falling into the rapping
wheels. The young Prince-Imperial laughed aloud, knowing the racket would
swallow his every sound.

They rattled across the Batrial
Campus, and as they passed the Guest Compound at a tangent, Kelmomas released
and twisted, landing face down on his palms and toes. He was sprinting the
instant the wain's box cleared him, a shadow flitting toward the succession of
arches along the ground-floor portico.

Then he was in the Guest
Compound.

Her scent was clear now, a
bitter old woman smear, like the trail a worm might make. He followed it up to
the third floor, paused before turning down the hall that led to her suites. He
heard yet another guard's heartbeat.

He looked then hid in a single
motion, one eye daring the wall's edge. A blink was all he needed. The details
he could safely consider in the light of his soul's eye: a lantern-lit corridor
ornate with a faux colonnade and marble mouldings. A long length of carpet,
trimmed with white vining, the blue so deep that most would think it black. A
single sentry, neither Pillarian or Eöthic, standing rigid before the smell of
her door.

No noise, save the lanterns and
their endless glowing exhalation.

Kelmomas turned the corner and
began stomping down the hall, sob-crooked lips, a peevish, mucus-filled moan,
tears and a look of ruinous self-pity. The sentry smiled in a manner that
confirmed his fatherhood, and so his familiarity with little-boy-tantrums. He
leaned in tsk-tsk commiseration, the Golden Sickle of Yatwer emblazoned on his
black-leather cuirass.

Kelmomas stepped into the fan of
his multiple shadows.

"Come, now, little
man—"

The motion was singular, abrupt
with elegance. The skewer tip entered the sentry's right tear duct and slipped
into the centre of his head. The ease of penetration was almost alarming, like
poking a nail into soft garden soil. Using the bone along the inner eye socket
for leverage, Kelmomas wrenched the buried point in a precise circle. There was
no need, he thought, to mutilate geometry as well.

He stepped to the side, his arm
held high while the man toppled. The sentry's face lolled to the left and
turned almost upright as his weight yanked his skull clear of the gleaming
skewer. He twitched opened-eyed on the carpet, his fingers pawing the fabric
like a purr-drunk kitten—but only for a heartbeat or two.

Kelmomas tugged the man's knife
from its sheaf.

The brass-strapped door was
unlocked.

Cloth had been drawn over the
windows, so that the light creaking in from the hallway was the room's only
illumination. "Hello?" somebody called—one of the body-slaves
sleeping on the floor of the antechamber. The others awoke, leaned forward into
the bar of light. Four altogether, blinking. At first, they seemed little more
than disembodied faces, then, when he stepped among them, levitating howls. He
hacked at them, striking along the interstices between flailing shadow-limbs.
No game, it seemed, had ever been so thrilling. To not be tagged by skin or
soiled by blood. To walk the cracks between heartbeats. To kill as though a
wind, without any trace of passing.

The faces fell one by one,
gushing like slashed wineskins.

The Matriarch was quite awake by
the time the little boy slipped into her bedroom.
"Tweet!"
he
trilled.
"Tweet-tweet!"
His giggling was uncontrollable...

Almost as much as her shrieking.

***

Anasûrimbor Esmenet casually
dismissed the four Shrial Knights they found standing rigid in the hallway,
looked around sourly at the ostentatious decor—anything but the dead Yatwerian
sentry slumped across the carpet. In the Ikurei days, guests had been housed
within the Andiamine Heights, something that simply wasn't possible given the
greater administrative demands of the New Empire. The Guest Compound was one of
the Holy Dynasty's first works, raised in the heady days before the fall of Nilnamesh
and High Ainon, when Kellhus seemed to hold the world's own reins within his
haloed fists. The marble, with its distinctive blue bruising, had been
transported all the way from quarries in Ce Tydonn. The towering panels, each
depicting heroic scenes from the Unification Wars in relief, had been drafted
by Niminian himself and carved by the most renowned Nansur stonemasons.

All to the glory of the
Aspect-Emperor.

She had no desire to revisit the
carnage beyond the threshold. Esmenet had witnessed her fair share of death,
perhaps more than any woman in the Three Seas, but she had no stomach for
murdered faces.

"We'll wait here," she
told the two men who had taken up positions on either side of her. As always,
Phinersa's look seemed to flitter about the outskirts of her form. Captain
Imhailas, on the other hand, was a study in contrast. He could stare with
decisive constancy—too decisive, Esmenet sometimes thought. The man always
seemed to be communicating urges he scarcely knew he possessed. Sometimes an
arrogant curiosity would creep into his look, and he would press his manner to
the very brink of transgression, standing almost too close, speaking in a way
that was almost too familiar, and smiling at thoughts to which only he was
privy. And as every prostitute knew, the only thing more threatening than eyes
that had too many qualms were eyes that had too few. What had the strength to
seize also had the strength to choke.

Moments afterwards, Maithanet
appeared in the doorway, stepping carefully to avoid the clotted threads and
buttons of blood. He was dressed plainly: no felt-shouldered vestments, no hems
swaying with stitched gold, only a tunic possessing the satin gloss of a horse
on parade. Ochre-coloured, it etched the contours of his limbs and torso in
detail, revealing the kind of chest and shoulders that stirred some feminine
instinct to climb. For the first time, it seemed, Esmenet realized how much the
intimation of sheer physical strength contributed to his sometimes overawing
presence.

The Shriah of the Thousand
Temples was a man who could break necks with ease.

Both Phinersa and Imhailas fell
to their knees, bowed as low as jnan required of them.

"I came as soon as I
heard," he said. To better cultivate the distinction between the political
and the spiritual organs of the Empire, Maithanet always resided in the Cmiral
temple-complex, never the Imperial Precincts, when he stayed in Momemn.

"I knew you would,"
Esmenet replied.

"My brother—"

"Gone," she snapped.
"Shortly before word of... of
this
... arrived. I ordered the area
sealed as soon as I heard of it. I knew you would want to see for
yourself."

His look was long and
penetrating. It seemed to concede her worst fears.

"How, Maitha? How could
they reach so deep? A
mere Cult
. The Mother of Birth, no less!"

The Shriah scratched his beard,
glanced at the two men flanking her. "The Narindar, perhaps. They possess
the skills... perhaps."

The Narindar. The famed Cultic
assassins of yore.

"But you don't believe as
much, do you?"

"I don't know what to
believe. It was a shrewd move, that much is certain. Figurehead or not,
Sharacinth was our royal road, our means of seizing control of the Yatwerians
from within, or at the very least setting them at war from within..."

Phinersa nodded appreciatively.
"She has become their weapon now."

Esmenet had concluded as much
almost the instant she had stepped into the blood-spattered antechamber earlier
that night.
She
was going to be blamed for this. First the rumours of
the White-Luck Warrior, then the Yatwerian Matriarch herself assassinated while
a guest of the Empress. The bumbling preposterousness of it mattered not at
all. For the masses, the outrageousness of the act would simply indicate her
fear, and her fear would suggest that she believed the rumours, which in turn
would mean the Aspect-Emperor
had to be a demon
...

This had all the makings of a
disaster.

"We must make sure no word
of this gets out," she heard herself saying.

Each of the men save the Shriah
averted their gaze.

She nodded, tried to press her
snort of disgust into a long exhalation. "I suppose that's too
late..."