Anger had saved her. Anger at her husband for stranding her. Anger at her servants for failing her and for doubting her-doubting her most of all.
Anger and the love of dear little Kelmomas.
She had taken to stalking the palace halls those nights that sleep eluded her. Twice now she had caught guardsmen throwing number-sticks, and once, slaves making love in the Hepatine Gardens-sins she knew her husband would have punished but that she feigned to overlook. Almost inevitably, she found herself padding alone through the cavernous heart of the Imperial Audience Hall. She would gawk as she walked, crane her neck like the caste-menial she was, thinking of all the peoples behind the panoply of symbols hanging between the polished pillars. She would climb the dais, run her fingers across the arm of her husband's great throne, then sashay out onto the veranda beyond, where she would gaze across the labyrinthine expanse of her capital.
How? How did a low and mean whore, the kind who would sell her daughter in times of famine, become the Blessed Empress of all the Three Seas? This, she had always thought, was the great question of her life, the remarkable fact that historians would ponder in future generations.
She had been the rut, the track long mudded, and now she found herself the charioteer.
There was a mystery and a beauty in great inversions. This was the genius and the power of the Circumfix, the paradox of the God Almighty hanging naked from an iron ring. All men are born helpless, and most men simply grow into more complicated forms of infancy. And yet, since they are the only summit they know, they constantly find themselves looking down even as they grovel at the knees of the mighty. "All slaves become emperors," Protathis had written with canny cynicism, "the instant the slaver looks away."
Her rise-as impossible, as miraculous, as it had been-expressed a conceit native to all men. And so the wild anomaly of her life had become a kind of human beacon. For the caste-nobility, long used to beating aspiration from their slaves, her mere existence triggered an instinct to punish. For slaves and menials, long accustomed to eating their imperious judgments, her rise reminded them of their daily indignity.
But their question was essentially the same. Who was she to be exalted so?
This. This was the real question of her life, the one the historians would never think to ask. Not how could a whore become Empress, but how could a whore be an Empress.
Who was she to be exalted so?
She would show them.
She had laboured tirelessly since word of Iothiah's fall had reached her. Emergency sessions with Caxes Anthirul, her Home Exalt-General, as well as the ever-irascible Werjau, Prime Nascenti of the Ministrate. Apparently activity along the Scylvendi frontier, which had surged in previous weeks, had now dwindled to nothing, a fact that at once heartened her, because of the redeployment it allowed, and troubled her. She had read The Annals, and though Casidas had died long before the Scylvendi sacked Cenei, she could not but recall throughout that reading how all the far-flung glory he described had been swept away by the People of War.
Mercurial. Merciless. Cunning. These were the words that best described the Scylvendi. She knew this because she had known Cnaiur urs Skiotha, and because she had raised his son, Moenghus, as her own.
Though her generals had eyes only for the prospect of avenging their fellows in Shigek, she knew stripping the Scylvendi frontier was a risk-a mad risk. Despite denuding the Empire otherwise, Kellhus had left three crack Columns to guard the Gap, and for no small reason.
But Fanayal and the cursed Yatwerians had left her no choice. The plan was to garrison Gedea as best as they could while the Imperial Army of the West assembled at Asgilioch. Hinnereth could be supplied by sea. General Anthirul assured her that they would have five full Columns ready to retake Shigek by summer's end. Though everyone present understood what Fanayal intended, none dared speak it in her presence. The Bandit Padirajah had not so much attacked the Empire as her legitimacy.
He would suffer for that. For the first time in Esmenet's life, she actually found herself gloating over the prospect of destroying another. And it did not trouble her in the slightest, even though she knew her former self would recoil in horror from such malevolent passions. Fanayal ab Kascamandri would scream for her mercy before all was said and done. Nothing could be more simple.
She also met regularly with both her Master of Spies, Phinersa, and her Vizier-in-Proxy, Vem-Mithriti. She had feared that Phinersa, who always seemed brittle for his nervous intensity, would fold under the extraordinary demands she made of him. But if anything the man thrived. Within a week of Iothiah's fall, Phinersa had almost entirely rebuilt their network of spies throughout Shigek. When she asked him for pretexts she could use to arrest Cutias Pansulla, he had the man imprisoned by the following evening, allowing her to install Biaxi Sankas in his place in the Imperial Synod.
Likewise, she had feared that Vem-Mithriti would literally die, so feeble did he seem. But he too flourished, organizing cadres of Schoolmen, students, and those, like Vem-Mithriti, too frail to participate in the Great Ordeal, for the defence of the Empire. All the world had thought the Cishaurim exterminated by the First Holy War. The stories of their return had sparked a new, almost fanatical, resolve in those Schoolmen who remained.
It seemed miraculous, when she paused to think about it, the way her husband's ministers rallied about her. From the outset, she had understood that the greatest strength of an empire, its size, was at once its greatest weakness. So long as its population believed in its power and purpose, an empire could bring almost limitless resources to bear against its foes, be they internal or external. But when that belief waned, its tendency was to dissolve into warring tribes. The very resources that had been its strength became its enemy.
This was what made the fall of Iothiah so disastrous. Yes, Fanayal had cast all of Shigek into lawless turmoil. Yes, he had cut the western Empire in half. But Shigek was but one province out of many, and the links between north and south had always been maritime thanks to the Great Carathay. Strategically, the loss of Iothiah was little more than a nuisance.
Symbolically, however…
The crisis she faced was a crisis in confidence, nothing more, nothing less. The less her subjects believed in the Empire, the less some would sacrifice, the more others would resist. It was almost arithmetic. The balance was wobbling, and all the world watched to see which way the sand would spill. Anasurimbor Esmenet had made a resolution to act as if she believed to spite all those who doubted her as much as anything else, and paradoxically, they had all started believing with her. It was a lesson Kellhus had drummed into her countless times and one she resolved never to forget again.
To know is to have power over the world; to believe is to have power over men.
With belief then, belief and craft, she would heave on the great chain of empire and haul the balance to the benefit of her children. Esmenet had no more illusions. She understood that if she failed, her sons and daughters would all be doomed.
And she simply would not-could not! — tolerate another…
Another Samarmas.
As always, her Seneschal, Ngarau, proved indispensable. The longer she had been involved in the New Empire's administration, the more she had come to realize that it possessed its own codes and dialects-and the more she had understood not only why men such as Ngarau were so indispensable, but also why Kellhus, no matter how bloody his conquests, never failed to spare the functionaries of each nation he conquered. Everything required translation. The more fluent the Apparati, the fewer the misinterpretations, the quicker the findings, the more decisive the Empire's actions.