"Do you ever wonder, Kel, why it is I do what I do?"
"No," the boy answered honestly.
Inrilatas glanced at his brother, then down to the floor. Breathing deep, he smiled the sad smile of someone lost in a game pursued too far for too long. Too long to abandon. Too long to continue.
"I do it to heap damnation upon myself," he said as if making an absurd admission.
"But why?" the boy asked, genuinely curious now.
Be wary… the secret voice whispered.
"Because I can think of no greater madness."
And what greater madness could there be, exchanging a handful of glorious heartbeats for an eternity of anguish and torment? But the boy shied from this question.
"I… I don't understand," he said. "You could leave this room… anytime you wished! Mother would release you-I know it. You just need to follow the rules."
His brother paused, looked to him as if searching for evidence of kinship beyond the fact of their blood. "Tell me, little brother, what rules the rule?"
Something is wrong… the voice warned.
"The God," the boy said, shrugging.
"And what rules the God?"
"Nothing. No one."
He breaths as you breathe, the secret voice whispered, blinks as you blink-even his heartbeat captures your own! He draws your unthinking soul into the rhythms of his making. He mesmerizes you!
Inrilatas nodded in solemn affirmation. "So the God is… unconstrained."
"Yes."
Inrilatas stood with sudden grace, walked to the limit of chains. He seemed godlike in the gloom, his hair falling in flaxen sheets about his shoulders, his limbs bound in veined muscle, his phallus laying long and violet in a haze of golden down. He placed his foot upon his feces, and using his toes, smeared it in a foul arc across the floor below him.
"So the God is like me."
And just like that, the boy understood. The senseless sense of his brother's acts. The miraculous stakes of his mad exchange. Suddenly this little room, this shit-stained prison cell hidden from the light of shame, seemed a holy place, a temple to a different revelation, the nail of a darker heaven.
"Yes…" the boy murmured, lost in the wisdom-the heartbreaking wisdom! — of his brother's constant gaze.
And it seemed his brother's voice soaked into the surrounding walls, cupped everything that could be seen. "The God punishes us according to the degree we resemble him."
Inrilatas towered before him.
"And you resemble him, little brother. You resemble…"
What was this trap he had set for him? How could understanding, insight, capture?
"No!" the boy cried. "I am not mad! I am not like you!"
Laughter, warm and gentle. So like Mother when she is lazy and wishes only to tease and cuddle her beautiful little son. "Look," Anasurimbor Inrilatas commanded. "Look at this heap of screams you call the world, and tell me you would not add to them-pile them to the sky!"
He has the Strength, the secret voice whispered.
"I would…" Anasurimbor Kelmomas admitted. "I would." His limbs trembled. His heart hung as if plummeting through a void. What was this crashing within him? What was this release?
The Truth!
And his brother's voice resonated, climbed as if communicating up out of his bones. "You think you seek the love of our mother, little brother-Little Knife! You think you murder in her name. But that love is simply cloth thrown over the invisible, what you use to reveal the shape of something so much greater…"
Memories tumbled into his soul's eye. Memories of his Whelming, how he had followed the beetle to the feet of the Grinning God, the Four-horned Brother, how they had laughed when he had maimed the bug-laughed together! Memories of the Yatwerian priestess, how she had shrieked blood while the Mother of Fertility stood helpless…
And the boy could feel it! An assumption of glory. A taking possession of a certainty that had possessed him all along-possessed him in ignorance… Yes!
Godhead.
"Come closer," Inrilatas said in a whisper that seemed to boom across all creation. He nodded to the arc smeared across the floor between them. "Wander across the line others have etched for you…"
The young Prince-Imperial watched his left foot, small and white and bare, step forward But a gnarled hand caught him, held him with gentle insistence. Somehow the deaf-mute Attendant had circled around without the boy noticing. The man wagged his face in alarm and horror.
Inrilatas began laughing.
"Flee, little brother," he said, passion fluting through his voice. "I can feel the…" He dandled his tongue on his lips as if savouring his own sweetness, even as his eyes widened in animal fury. A coital shudder passed through him. "I feel the rage!" he roared to the stone vaults. "The furies!" He seized the slack chains, wrenched them savagely enough to make the links screech for biting one another. Saliva swung from his mouth when he jerked his face back to Kelmomas. "I can feel it come… come upon me…" His phallus climbed into a grinning arc.
"Diviniteeeeeee!"
The boy stood astounded. At last he yielded to the Attendant and his shoulder-tugging hands, allowed the wretch to pull him from his brother's cell…
He knew Inrilatas would find the little gift he had left for him, lying along the seam between floor-stones.
The small file he had stolen from the palace tinker… not so long ago.
| Iothiah
Fire, fierce enough to sting the skin from paces away. Smoke, rolling in oily sheets, acrid enough to prick the eyes, needle the throat. Screams, violent enough to cramp the heart. Screams. Too many screams.
Dizzy and nauseated, Malowebi rode close beside Fanayal ab Kascamandri as the Padirajah toured the streets, some raucous, others abandoned. The Second Negotiant had never witnessed the sacking of a village, let alone a city as vast and mighty as Iothiah. It reminded him that High Holy Zeum, for all its high holy bluster, knew very little about war. The Men of the Three Seas, he had come to realize, warred without mercy or honour. Where the dynastic skirmishes his Zeumi kinsmen called war were bound by ancient code and custom, Fanayal and his men recognized no constraints that he could see, save that of military expediency and exhaustion.
They fought the way Sranc fought.
The Mbimayu sorcerer saw entire streets carpeted in bodies. He saw several rapes, the victims either vacant or shrieking, and more summary executions than he cared to count. He saw a pale-skinned Columnary holding a squalling babe in one arm while trying to battle two laughing Kianene with the other. He saw an old man jumping from a rooftop, his clothing afire.
Perhaps glimpsing something of his dismay, Fanayal was at pains to describe the atrocities suffered by his own people during the First Holy War and the subsequent Wars of Unification. A kind of madness warbled through his outrage as he spoke, condemnation spoken in the tones of divine revelation, as if nothing could be more right and true than the slaughter and rapine about them. The Bloodthirsty Excuse, the sage Memgowa had called it. Retribution.
"But there is more to this than crude vengeance," Fanayal explained, as if suddenly recalling the learning of the man he addressed. The Padirajah was proud of his own youthful education, Malowebi knew, but found the posture difficult to recover after decades of brutality and fugitive insurrection. "You make an example of the first," the man continued, "then you show mercy to the second. First, you teach them to fear you, then you earn their trust. Nirsi shal'tatra, we call it. The Honey and the Goad."
Malowebi could not but reflect on how easily the whip and the honey became confused. Everywhere they rode, the Kianene turned from their sordid labours and called out to their lord in exultation and gratitude-cheered as if famished guests at a sumptuous feast.
Savages, Cousin. You have sent me out among savages.