They were the fools here, not because they dared stand in the company of kneelers, but because being a fool consisted of no more than being thought so by others.
The chorus trailed into ringing silence.
His head bowed beneath a nimbus of gold, the Aspect-Emperor hung in a honey glow.
"Ishma tha serara!" one of the Nascenti, little more than a black silhouette before the image of his master, hollered to the darkest pockets of canvas. "Ishma tha-"
"Raise your faces," Eskeles hissed almost inaudibly, apparently recalling his interpretive duties. "Raise your faces to the gaze of our Holy Aspect-Emperor."
"What does he me-?" Sorweel began asking the sorcerer, but the flash of warning in the man's eyes silenced him. Scowling, Eskeles nodded toward the Aspect-Emperor. There… his expression said.
Look only there.
A breathless intensity slipped about the neck of the proceedings, a mingling of hope and anxiousness that Sorweel felt only as fear. Without exception, the assembly turned to the Anasыrimbor, so that all eyes reflected the white points of his otherworldly light. Only the twin demon heads, bound by their hair to the Anasыrimbor's girdle, stared off in contrary directions.
The Aspect-Emperor floated out over the Table of Potentates, his legs still crossed, his simple white cassock the one thing gleaming to a fixed light. He moved so slowly that at first Sorweel blinked at the unreality of it. The Lords of the Ordeal followed his passage, angling their faces with near perfection, so that no shadows marred their features. Soft light combed through their beards and moustaches, shimmered across their finery. Something, a sub-audible rumbling, accompanied his movement, a noise like slow-sailing thunderheads.
Sorweel almost coughed with relief when the impossible figure veered to the opposite side of the pavilion. Soon the Anasыrimbor hung luminous before the shadowy Men, no more than two lengths away, scrutinizing them as he followed the tier's line at a beetle's crawl. Sorweel saw faces squint as though expecting a sudden blow. But most stared back with lunatic poise-some rejoicing, others proclaiming, and still others confessing-confessing above all.
Tear-scored cheeks shimmered in the passing light. Grown men, warlike men, wept in the wake of their sovereign's divine passage…
The Aspect-Emperor paused.
The man beneath his gaze was an Ainoni, or so Sorweel guessed from the styling of his square-cut beard, ringlets about flattened braids. He sat on one of the lower tiers, and rather than descend, the Aspect-Emperor simply tilted in his floating posture to study him. The rings of light about his head and hands gilded the man's face and shoulders with a patina of gold. The caste-noble's dark eyes glittered with tears.
"Ezsiru," the Aspect-Emperor began in a voice that seemed to coil about Sorweel's ears, "ghusari histum mar-"
Leaning until his beard brushed Sorweel's shoulder, Eskeles whispered, "Ezsiru, since your father, Chinjosa, kissed my knee during the First Holy War, ever has House Musammu been a bastion of the Zaudunyani. But the feud between you and your father has festered too long. You are too harsh. You do not understand the difference between the infirmities of youth and the infirmities of age. So you play father to your father, punish his weaknesses the way he once punished yours…"
One of the demon heads began opening and closing its white mouth like a fish. Horrified, Sorweel saw the glimmer of needle-teeth.
"Ezsiru, tell me, is it right that the father take the rod to the child?"
A throaty answer. "Yes."
"Is it right that the child take the rod to the father?"
A pause that tugged a pang from the back of Sorweel's throat. "No," Ezsiru said, his voice pitched high through phlegm and sobbing.
"Love him, Ezsiru. Honour him. And always remember that old age is rod enough."
Onward the Aspect-Emperor moved, floating no more than a length before pausing before another Lord of the Ordeal, this one Nilnameshi. "Avarartu… hetu kah turum pah-"
On and on it continued, each exchange at once momentary and interminable, as though the timelessness of the consequences had somehow soaked backward into the act. And in each case, nothing more than some human truth was summoned forth, as though the Anasыrimbor need only look into the face of one who stumbled to set every man in attendance upon sure footing. How the loss of a wife exempted you from the laws of manliness. How shame at being thought a fool made fools of us all in the end. How cruel natures corrupted piety into excuses to indulge their evil.
Truth. Nothing more than truth.
And the sheer clarity of it bewildered Sorweel, shook him as deeply as anything since the death of his father and the humiliation of his people. Truth! The Anasыrimbor spoke only truth. How? How could a demon do such a thing? What demon would?
And how? How could such a thing be…
Be miraculous?
Sorweel's heart began pacing the Aspect-Emperor's arcane transit once he reached the apex of the horseshoe and began moving toward them. Dread cinching his chest, he watched the expressions of those who believed, upturned and rapt, brightening as he soundlessly passed, then falling into shadow. The floating figure drew closer and closer, as inexorable as an equation, as bright as a prison window, until Sorweel's heart seemed to be beating against him. Finally, the Aspect-Emperor slowed, came to a hissing stop no more than two lengths away. He tilted back on an invisible axis to regard someone on the highest tier.
"Impalpotas, habaru-"
"Impalpotas," Eskeles said with a quaver, "tell me, how long has it been since you were dead?"
A collective intake of breath. The man called Impalpotas sat four people abreast of Sorweel-three of Eskeles-and two rows higher. The young King of Sakarpus found himself peering against the shining proximity of the Anasыrimbor: The Inrithi had the clean-shaven look of a Nansur but seemed different in dress and hair. A Shigeki, Sorweel guessed. Like Porsparian.
"Impalpotas…" the Aspect-Emperor repeated.
The man smiled like a rake caught wooing a friend's daughter-an expression so at odds with the circumstances that Sorweel's stomach reeled as if pitched from a cliff.
Impalpotas leapt-no, exploded-from the tiers, sword out and flashing in divine light. A crack of voice greeted him in the interval, a word shouted beneath the skins of all present. Bald and searing light flooded the pavilion to the seams. Sorweel blinked against the glare, saw the Shigeki hanging before the Anasыrimbor, pinned to nothing, encased in a calligraphy of blinding lines. Impalpotas's sword had dropped from nerveless fingers and now lay upright between the feet of a Conriyan on the bottom tier, its point buried into carpet and turf the depth of a palm.
The assembly broke out in roaring commotion. Like fire across desert scree, outrage leapt from face to face, a wrath too feral to be called manly. Beards opened about howls. Swords were brandished across the rows, like shaking teeth.
The Anasыrimbor's voice did not so much cut through the din as harvest it-the uproar collapsed like wheat about the scythe of his declaration. "Irishi hum makar," he said, continuing to scrutinize those seated before him. Save for his tongue and lips, he had not moved.
Eskele's stunned and stammering voice was several heartbeats in translating. "Be-behold our foe."
The Shigeki assassin had sailed out around the Aspect-Emperor and now floated behind his haloed head, a brighter beacon. The light that tattooed his skin and clothes flared, and his limbs were drawn out and away from his body. He hung, a different kind of proof, revolving like a coin in open space. He panted like an animal wrapped in wire, but his eyes betrayed no panic, nothing save glaring hate and laughter. Sorweel glimpsed the curve of his erect phallus through his silk breeches, looked away to his sigil-wrapped face, only to be more appalled…