To accommodate the Circumfix Throne, a deep marble recess shelved the stepped slope to Kelmomas's left, blue-white stone trimmed with bands of black diorite. A scale replica of the Circumfix as it had hung in Caraskand, including his father hanging spread-eagled and upside down, rose in sinuous gold from the throne's back. His mother's chair and Thelli's had been cut into the marble tier immediately below it, their simple design concentrating the glory of the throne above. Some thirty identical seats had been set into the steps rising opposite, one for each of the Great Factions, whose interests governed the New Empire.
The floor lay well below all the seats, forcing those who walked it to continually crane their heads up and around to meet the gaze of their interlocutors. It was a narrow strip of bare floor, no bigger than several prison cells set end to end. Kelmomas had heard several functionaries refer to it-and with no little dread-as the Slot.
Because the man who now paced its length was so fat, Cutias Pansulla, the Nansur Consul, it looked even more narrow than usual. He had been strutting back and forth for several moments now, long enough for dark stains to bloom from his armpits.
"But I must… I must dare speak it!" he cried, his shaved jowls trembling. "The people are saying that the Hundred are against us!"
The Imperial Synod, his mother had told Kelmomas, was a kind of boiled-down version of the Greater Congregate, what other kings in other lands often called a privy council, the place where representatives of the New Empire's most important interests could confer with their divine ruler. Of course, he always pretended to forget this explanation when he spoke to his mother and to always whine as he accompanied her to the sessions, but he secretly adored the Synod and the games within games it invariably revealed-at least when his father failed to attend them. Elsewhere, the words always seemed to be the same, glory this and glory that, and the lofty tone seemed to drone on and on and on. It was like watching men dual with bars of iron. But in the Synodine, both the words and the voices were honed to a cutting edge.
Real disputes instead of pantomime. Real consequences instead of heavenly petitions. Lives, sometimes in the thousands, were decided in this place as in no other. The young Prince-Imperial could almost smell the smoke and blood. This was where real cities were burned, not ones carved of balsa.
"Ask yourself," Mother cried to the assembled men. "Who will you be when the scripture of these days is written? The craven? The weak-kneed doubter? All of you- All of you! As the trial deepens, and the trial always deepens, all of you will be judged. So stop thinking of me as his weaker vessel!"
Kelmomas jammed his mouth into his forearms to conceal his smile. Though his mother angered often, she only rarely expressed it as anger. The boy wondered whether the fat Consul below understood the peril of his situation.
He certainly hoped not.
"Holy Empress, please!" Pansulla exclaimed. "This… this talk… it does not answer our fears! At the very least you must give us something to tell the people!"
The Prince-Imperial sensed the power in these words, even though he did not fully understand their import. He certainly could see the indecision in Mother's eyes, the realization she had erred…
That one, the secret voice whispered.
Pansulla?
Yes. His breathing offends me.
Ever keen to exploit weakness, the round-bellied Consul pressed his advantage. "All we ask, Most Holy Empress, is for the tools to work your will…"
Mother glared at him for a moment, then glanced nervously across the assembly. She seemed to flinch from the gravity of their regard. At last she waved a loose-wristed hand in weariness and capitulation. "Read The Sagas…" she began but without breath. She paused to firm her voice. "Read The Sagas, the history of the First Apocalypse, and ask yourself, Where are the Gods? How can the Hundred allow this?"
And the little boy could see the craft behind his mother's manner and words. Silence had seized the Imperial Synod, such was the force of her question.
"Thelli…" his mother said, gesturing to her daughter who sat gowned in absurd intricacy at her side. Dreadfully thin, she looked like a bird stranded between too many crumbs and the inability to choose. "Tell them what the Mandate Schoolmen say."
"The Gods are-are finite," Theliopa declared in a voice that contradicted the stark angularity of her frame. "They can only apprehend a finite por-portion of existence. They fathom the future-future, certainly, but from a vantage that limits them. The No-God dwells in their blind spots, follows a path-path they are utterly oblivious to…" She turned, looking from man to man with open curiosity. "Because he is oblivion."
Mother rested her hand atop Thelli's in a thoughtless gesture of thanks. Behind the panels of his box, the young Prince-Imperial fairly cut open his palms for balling his fists.
She loves me more! he thought.
Yes, the voice agreed, she loves you more.
The Empress spoke with renewed confidence. "There is a world, my Lords, a world concealed, a world of shadow that the Gods cannot see…" She looked from Consul to Consul. "I fear we now walk that world."
A wall of bewildered looks greeted her. Even Pansulla seemed taken aback. Kelmomas almost chirped in glee, so proud was he of his mother.
"And the Hundred?" old Tutmor, the Consul for King Hoga Hogrim of Ce Tydonn croaked, his eyes rimmed with real fear. Alarmed voices clamoured in his wake.
Their Empress graced them all with a sour smile. "The Gods chafe, because like all souls, they call evil what they cannot comprehend."
More astounded silence. Kelmomas found himself squinting in hilarity. Why anyone should fear the Gods was quite beyond him, let alone fools as privileged and powerful as these.
Because they are old and dying, the secret voice whispered.
Pansulla still held the Slot. He now stood directly beneath his Empress.
"So…" he said, looking to the others with a strategically blank face. "So it is true, then? The Gods…"-his gaze wandered-"the almighty Gods… are against us?"
Disaster. It fairly slapped the blood from Mother's painted face. Her lips retreated, the way they always did during such moments, into a thin line.
He offends me… the secret voice cooed. The fat one.
"Now…" she began, only to halt to master the emotion in her voice. " Now… Pansulla, is the time for care. Heretical superstition will be the end of us all. Now is the time to recall the God of Gods and his Prophet."
The threat was clear-enough to trigger another exchange of whispers among the tiered men. Smiling with greasy insincerity, Pansulla knelt to the floor, so big and so floridly gowned that he looked more a heap of laundry than a man.
"But of course, Holy Empress."
For the slightest instant, his mother's hatred lay plain on her face.
"Courage, Pansulla," she said. "And you too, loyal Tutmor. You must find courage, not in the Hundred, but, as Inri Sejenus and my divine husband have taught, in their sum."
The Nansur Consul struggled back to his feet.
"Indeed, Empress," he said, smoothing his silk robes. " Courage… Of course…" His eyes strayed to the others. "We must remind ourselves that we know better… than the Gods."
Kelmomas grappled with the squeal of joy clawing at his throat. He so loved his mother's fury!
We've never killed someone so fat before.
"Not 'we,' Cutias Pansulla. Not you, and certainly not me. Your Holy Aspect-Emperor. Anasurimbor Kellhus."
The young Prince-Imperial understood what his mother was trying to achieve with these appeals to his father. Always using him as a goad. Always trying to vanish into the might of his name. But he could also see, with a kind of child-cunning, how this undermined her authority.
Once again the obese Consul nodded in jowl-quivering exaggeration. "Ah, yes-yes… When the Cults fail us, we must turn to the Thousand Temples." He glanced up as if to say, How could I be such a fool? He made of a show of turning to Maithanet's vacant seat, then looked to his Empress with mock confusion. "But when can we hope to hear our Holy Shriah's most wise couns-?"