As things stood, it was only a matter of time. He would grow as his brothers and sisters had grown, and he would drift, as his brothers and sisters had drifted, from Mother's loving tutelage to Father's harsh discipline. And one day Father would peer deep into his eye and see what no one else had seen. And that day, Kelmomas knew, would be his doom…
But what if Father had abandoned them? Even better, what if he were dead?
He has the Strength, the voice whispered. So long as he lives, we are not safe…
Mother raised a finger to scoop tears from either eye. This, the young Prince-Imperial realized. This was why she had struck him the previous day! This was why the fat fool, Pansulla, had so easily goaded her, and why the tidings from Shigek had so dismayed her…
If Father is gone… the secret voice dared whisper.
"It would appear so," she said, speaking about a crack in her voice. "I fear it has something to do with your uncle."
Then we are finally safe.
"Maithanet," Thelli said.
The Empress mastered her feelings with a deep breath. "Maybe this is a… a test of some kind. Like the fable of Gam…"
Kelmomas recalled this from his lessons as well. Gam was the mythical king who faked his own death to test the honour of his four sons. The boy wanted to shout this out, to bask a moment in Mother's pride, but he bit his tongue. For the briefest of instants, he thought he saw his sister glance at him.
"It need not have anything to do with Uncle," Theliopa said. "Maybe the Consult has discovered some way of eavesdropping on our communications…"
"No. It has something to do with Maithanet. I can feel it."
"I can rarely fathom Father," Theliopa admitted.
"You?" the Empress cried with pained hilarity. "Think about your poor mother!"
Kelmomas laughed precisely the way she wanted.
"Ponder it, Thelli. Your father assuredly knows about the strife growing between us, his wife and his brother, so then why would he choose this moment to strand us each with the other?"
"That much is simple-simple, at least," Thelli replied. "Because he believes the best solution will be the one you find on your-your own."
"Exactly," Mother said. "Somehow he thinks my ignorance will serve me in this…" Her voice trailed into pensive thought. For several moments she let her gaze wander across points near and far within the Sacral Enclosure, then shook her head in sudden outrage and disgust.
"Damn your father and his machinations!" she cried, her voice loud enough to draw looks from the nearby Pillarian Guardsmen. She glanced skyward, her eyes rolling with something like panic. "Damn him!"
"Mother?" Theliopa asked.
The Empress lowered her head and sighed. "I am quite all right, Thelli." She spared her daughter a rueful look. "I don't give a damn what you think you see in my face…" She trailed, her mouth hanging on these words. Kelmomas held his breath, so attuned had he become to the wheel of his mother's passion.
"Thelli…" She began, only to hesitate for several heartbeats. "Could… Could you read his face?"
"Uncle's? Only Father has that-that ability. Father and…"
"And who?"
Theliopa paused as if weighing the wisdom of honest answers. " Inrilatas. He could see… Remember Father trained-trained him for a time…"
"Father trained who?" Kelmomas cried, the way a jealous little brother might.
"Kel-please."
"Who?"
Esmenet raised two fingers to Theliopa, turned to Kelmomas, her manner cross and adoring. "Your older brother," she explained. "Your father hoped teaching him to read passions in others would enable him to master his own." She turned back to her daughter. "Treachery?" she asked. "Could Inrilatas see treachery in a soul so subtle as Maithanet's?"
"Perhaps, Mother," the pale girl replied. "But the real-real question, I think, is not so much can he, as will he."
The Holy Empress of all the Three Seas shrugged, her expression betraying the fears that continually mobbed her heart.
"I need to know. What do we have to lose?"
Since Mother had to attend special sessions with her generals, the young Prince-Imperial dined alone that evening-or as alone as possible for a soul such as his. He was outraged even though he understood her reasons, and as always he tormented the slaves who waited on him, blaming his mother for each and every hurt he inflicted.
Later that night he pulled the board from beneath his bed and resumed working on his model. Since his uncle's treachery had loomed so large that day, he decided to work on the Temple Xothei, the monumental heart of the Cmiral temple complex. He began cutting and paring miniature columns, using the little knives that Mother had given him in lieu of a completed model. "What a man makes," she had told him, "he prizes…" Unerringly, without the benefit of any measure, he carved them, not only one identical to another, but in perfect proportion to those structures he had already completed.
He never showed his work to Mother. It would trouble her, he knew, his ability to see places just once, and from angles buried within them, yet to grasp them the way a bird might from far above.
The way Father grasped the world.
But even worse, if he showed his little city to her, it would complicate the day when he finally burned it. She did not like the way he burned things.
Bugs, he thought. He needed to fill the streets of his little city with bugs. Nothing really burned, he decided, unless it moved.
He thought of the ants in the garden.
He thought of the Pillarian Guardsmen patrolling the Sacral Enclosure. He could even hear their voices on the evening breeze as they whiled away the watches with fatuous talk…
He thought about the fun he could have, sneak-sneaking about them, more shadow than little boy.
He thought about his previous murders and the mysterious person he saw trapped in the eyes of the dying. The one person he loved more than his mother-the one and only. Convulsing, bewildered, terrified, and beseeching… beseeching most of all.
Please! Please don't kill me!
"The Worshipper," he declared aloud.
Yes, the secret voice whispered. That's a good name.
"A most strange person, don't you think, Sammi?"
Most strange.
"The Worshipper…" Kelmomas said, testing the sound. "How can he travel like that from body to body?"
Perhaps he's locked in a room. Perhaps dying is that room's only door…
"Locked in a room!" the young Prince-Imperial cried laughing. "Yes! Clever-clever-cunning-clever!"
And so he slipped into the gloom-gloomy hallways, dodging and ducking and scampering. Only the merest shiver in the shining lantern-flames marked his passing.
Finally he arrived at the Door… the high bronze one with seven Kyranean Lions stamped into its greening panels, their manes bent into falcon wings. The one his mother had forbidden the slaves to polish until the day it could be safely opened.
The door to his brother Inrilatas's room.
It stood partially ajar.
Kelmomas had expected, even hoped to find it such. The slaves who attended to his brother generally did so whenever lulls in his tantrums permitted. During his brother's calm seasons, however, they followed an exact schedule, cleansing and feeding Inrilatas the watch before noon and the watch before midnight.
The boy mooned in the corridor for several moments, alternately staring at the stylized dragons stitched in crimson, black, and gold across the corridor's carpet and stealing what glimpses the narrow slot provided of the cell's bare floor interior. Eventually his curiosity mastered his fear-only Father terrified him more than Inrilatas-and he pressed his face to the opening, peering past the belt of brushed leather that had been tacked to the door's outer rim to better seal in the sound and smell of his mad brother.
He could see an Attendant to his left, a harried-looking Nilnameshi man soaping the walls and floor with a rake-mop. He saw his brother sitting hunched like a shaved ape to the right of the room, his edges illuminated in the light of a single brazier. Each of his limbs were shackled to a chain that ran like an elongated tongue from the mouth of a stone lion head, one of four set into the far wall, two with their manes pressed against the ceiling, two with their chins across the floor. A winch-room lay beyond that wall, Kelmomas knew, with wheels and locks for each of the chains, allowing the Attendants to pull his brother spread-eagled against the polished stone, if need be, or to grant him varying degrees of freedom otherwise.