From the look of the links curled across the floor, they had afforded him two lengths or so of mobility-enough both to relieve and to embolden the boy. Inrilatas usually howled and raged without some modicum of slack.
At first, Kelmomas thought him absolutely motionless, but he was not.
He sat making faces… expressions.
Not any faces, but those belonging to the slave who bent to and fro with his mop a mere toss away, scrubbing away urine and feces with a perfumed astringent. Periodically the deaf-mute would cast a terrified glance in his prisoner's direction, only to see his face reflected back to him.
"Most of them flee," Inrilatas said. Kelmomas knew he addressed him even though he did not so much as glance at the boy. "Sooner or later, they choose the whip over my gaze."
"They are simple fools," Kelmomas replied, too timid to press open the door, let alone cross the threshold.
"They are exactly what they appear to be."
The shaggy mane turned. Inrilatas fixed the young Prince-Imperial with wild and laughing blue eyes. "Unlike you, little brother."
Save for his long face, Inrilatas looked utterly unlike the brother Kelmomas remembered from his infancy. His growth had come, gilding his naked form in a golden haze of hair. And years of warring against his iron restraints had strapped his frame in luxurious muscle. A beard stubbed his chin and the line of his jaw but had yet to climb his cheeks.
His voice was deep and beguiling. Not unlike Father's.
"Come, little brother," Inrilatas said with a comradely grin. He leapt toward the entrance so suddenly that the deaf-mute fumbled the handle of his mop and tripped backward. He landed at a point just shy of where the chains would bring him up short.
Kelmomas watched his brother squat and defecate, then retreat to his previous position. Still smiling, Inrilatas waved his little brother forward. He possessed a man's wrists now: the hands of a thick-fingered warrior.
"Come… I want to discuss the shit between us."
With anyone else, Kelmomas would have thought this a mad joke of some kind. Not so with Inrilatas.
The boy pressed the door inward, strode into the stench, pausing but two steps from the coiled feces. The slave glimpsed Kelmomas in his periphery, wheeled in sudden alarm. But the man was quick to resume his cleaning when he recognized him. Like so many palace slaves, terror kept him welded to the task before him.
"You show no revulsion," Inrilatas said, nodding at the feces.
Kelmomas did not know what to say, so he said nothing.
"You are not like the others, are you, little brother? No… You … are like me."
Remember your face, the secret voice warned. Only Father possesses the Strength in greater measure!
"I am nothing like you," the little Prince-Imperial replied.
It seemed strange, standing on the far side of the Door. And wrong
… So very wrong.
"But you are," Inrilatas chuckled. "All of us have inherited our Father's faculties in some mangled measure. Me… I possess his sensitivities, but I utterly lack his unity… his control. My natures blow through me-hungers, glorious hungers! — unfettered by the little armies of shame that hold the souls of others in absolute captivity. Father's reason mystifies me. Mother's compassion makes me howl with laughter. I am the World's only unbound soul…"
He raised his shackled wrists as he said this, gestured to the polluted floor before him.
"I shit when I shit."
A ringing filled the boy's ears, such was the intensity of his older brother's gaze. He began to speak, but his voice caught as though about a hook in his throat.
Inrilatas grinned. "What about you, little brother? Do you shit when you shit?"
He sees me… the secret voice whispered. You have become reckless in Father's abse "Who?" Inrilatas laughed. "The shadow of hearing moves through you-as it so often does when no one is speaking. Who whispers to you, little brother?"
"Mommy says you're mad."
"Ignore the question," his older brother snapped. "State something insulting, something that will preoccupy, and thus evade a prickly question. Come closer, little brother… Come closer and tell me you do not shit when you shit."
"I don't understand what you mean!"
He knows you lie…
"Of course you know… Come closer… Let me peer into your mouth. Let me listen to this whisper that is not your voice. Who? Who speaks inside of you?"
Kelmomas fell backward a step. Inrilatas had managed to creep forward somehow, to steal slack from his chains without the boy noticing.
"Uncle is coming to see you!"
A heartbeat of appraising silence.
"Again you ignore the question. But this time you state a truth, one that you know will intrigue me. You mean Uncle Holy, don't you? Uncle Holy is coming to visit me? I smell Mother in that."
The boy found strength in her mere mention.
"Y-yes. Mother wants you to read his face. She fears that he plots against Father-against us! She thinks only you can see."
"Come closer."
"But Uncle has learned how to fool you."
Even as he spoke the words, Kelmomas cursed them for their clumsiness. This was an Anasurimbor crouched before him. Divinity! Divinity burned in Inrilatas's blood as surely as in his own.
"Kin," Inrilatas crowed. "Blood of my blood. What love you possess for Mother! I see it burn! Burn! Until all else is char and ash. Is she the grudge you bear against Uncle?"
But Kelmomas could think of nothing else to say or do. To answer any of his brother's questions, he knew, was to wander into labyrinths he could not hope to solve. He had to press forward…
"He has learned to disguise his disgust as pity, Uncle Holy. His treachery as concern!"
There was no other way through the monstrous intellect before him.
This is a mistake…
"The whisper warns you!" Inrilatas laughed, his eyes bright, not for the twin flames they reflected, but something more incendiary stilclass="underline" apprehension. "You do not like sharing… Such a peevish, devious little soul! Come closer, little brother."
He sees me!
"You cannot let him fool you!" the boy cried, trying to goad a pride that did not exist.
"I see him — the one you hide, oh yes! The other one, the whisperer. I seeeeeeeee him," Inrilatas crooned. "What does he tell you? Is he the one who wants Uncle Holy dead?"
"You will want to kill him, Brother, when he comes. I can help you!"
More laughter, warm and avuncular, at once teasing and protective. "And now you offer the beast candy. Come closer, little brother. I want to stare into your mouth."
"You will want to kill Uncle Holy," Kelmomas repeated, his thoughts giddy with sudden inspiration. "Think, brother… The sum of sins."
And with that single phrase, the young Prince-Imperial's dogged persistence was rescued-or so he thought.
Where his brother had fairly radiated predatory omniscience before, his manner suddenly collapsed inward. Even his nakedness, which had been that of the rapist-lewd, virile, bestial-lapsed into its chill and vulnerable contrary. He actually seemed to shrink in his chains.
Suddenly Inrilatas seemed as pathetic as the human shit breathing on the floor between them.
The young man's eyes flinched from the boy's gaze, sought melancholy reprieve in the shadowy corners of his cell's ceiling.