The only wheel she could not turn in concert with the others was the Thousand Temples. But soon, very soon, she would have a resolution to that dilemma.
She gazed out across the dark landscape of Momemn, slowly stalking the perimeter of the veranda. She thought about how all the jumbled structures were in fact hollow, how their walls seemed little more than parchment when viewed from so far. She thought of all the thousands slumbering like miniature, innumerable larva, soft in their crisp cocoons. And she plotted their survival.
"We walk the Shortest Path," her divine and heartless husband had told her the last time she had seen him, "the Labyrinth of the Thousandfold Thought. This is the burden the God has laid upon us, and the burden the Gods begrudge…"
Expediency would be her rule. As ruthless as it was holy.
Kelmomas, she knew, would be awake and waiting when she returned-he always was. Simply because she was so busy, she allowed him to sleep with her in her bed.
Save for those nights she called for Sankas or Imhailas to comfort her.
The day itself seemed daring. The wind was constant and thin. The sky was nearly empty, the horizon scraped clean. The Meneanor Sea was stone-coast dark beneath the sunlight sparking across its perforations.
She sat at a small table with Theliopa at her side, watching the Shriah of the Thousand Temples step from the shadow of the Imperial Audience Hall into the glare of the veranda. Anasurimbor Maithanet. Because of the innumerable golden slivers-tusks-woven up and down its length, his white robe twinkled gold with every step. His hair piled high and rich upon his head, the same improbable black as his braided beard.
"This is madness, Esmi," he called. "The Empire burns, yet you spurn my counsel?"
She hoped she looked as impressive, with her stark grey gown beneath an ankle-long vest of gold rings. And of course, she had her smoke-hazed city as her mantle, an intricate mottling of white and grey that reached to the horizon. But she was sure it would be her porcelain mask, glazed white with features as fine and as beautiful as her own, that would most weigh against his eyes.
"And now you wear a mask? An Ainoni mask?"
She had long pondered how he would begin. Before conferring with Inrilatas, she had thought he would be conciliatory, that he would use wise and self-effacing words to move her. "Do this, Esmi. Confidence awaits…" But she had reconsidered in the light of what her crazed son had told her. He would affect injury and outrage, she eventually decided, thinking her native doubts would grease his way.
And she had been right.
"This is about Sharacinth…" he continued in the same indignant tones, his voice striking resonances that seemed to warble about her heart. "You think I was involved in her murder!"
She did not reply simply because she did not trust her voice. She could only speak when she felt the "cold" within her-as Theliopa had instructed.
He took the seat waiting for him in apparent fury. Even out of doors the scent of him, myrrh and a kind of musk, bloomed invisible.
"Or has the loss-?"
He paused as if catching himself, but the implication was clear.
"Or has the loss of your son driven you mad…"
He had not meant, she realized, to say this only to halt out of some compassionate instinct. He had meant for her to complete the thought… Her! Then he could commiserate, and slowly pry open her trust the way he had so many times in the past.
But she had already decided the path this conversation would take.
She peeled a section of flat-cake, used it to grasp a pinch of spice-shredded pork. She dipped both into the cinnamon and honey, then passed it to him, searching for any sign of hesitation.
There was none.
He had not extended her any of the traditional greetings or honorifics, so neither would she. "Proyas…" she said, taking heart in the coldness she felt beneath the clarity of her voice. "Shortly after Carythusal fell, he took me hunting kanti, a kind of antelope, on the Famiri… Have I ever told you that story, Maitha?"
He gazed at her with unsettling intensity. "No."
The mask tingled against her cheeks. She found herself wondering if this was how skin-spies felt behind the digits of their false faces. Safe.
"This was after the conquest of Ainon," she said. "We had tracked a mother and her foal for the better part of an afternoon. But when we finally sighted them, we discovered we weren't the only hunters. Wolves. Wolves had tracked them as well. We had climbed a shallow ridge, so we could see it all, the kanti mother and her child watering at a black stream… and the wolves closing about her…" She glimpsed the predators in her soul's eye, sleek as fish, tunnelling through the grasses. "But the cow either heard them or caught their scent on the wind. She bolted before the noose could be knotted-bolted directly toward us! It was astonishing enough to watch from a distance. She backed her foal against the earthen drop-immediately below us-turned to battle her pursuers. The wolves flew at her, but kanti are strong, like vicious horses, and she kicked and stamped and butted, and the wolves veered away. I almost cried out for jubilation, but Proyas clutched my arm and pointed directly down…"
She paused to lick her lips behind the porcelain.
"The wolves, Maitha. The wolves had known what she would do, even where she would run. So even as the cow seemed to frighten off the pack, two others, who had concealed themselves in the thickets at the ridge's base, leapt upon the foal and tore out its throat. The mother shrieked, chased them away, but it was too late. The pack simply waited until she abandoned her child's body."
Esmenet really had no idea how much he could infer from the sliver of her voice. She had rehearsed this story to baffle his penetration. She had struggled to purge all sign of the passions that moved beneath her voice and intent-but how does one conceal what is already hidden?
"Do you understand, Maitha? I need to know you aren't a wolf waiting in the thicket."
For a heartbeat, anger and compassion seemed to war for the high ground of his gaze. "How could you think such a thing?" he exclaimed.
She breathed deep. How had she come by her suspicions? So often the past seemed a cistern sloshing with dissolved voices. Inrilatas had said she feared Maithanet because she despised herself. How could he not try to save the Empire from her incapacity? But something in her balked at the possibility. Her entire life, it seemed, she had fended fears without clear origin.
Just a tactic… she told herself. An attempt to engage me morally — make me defensive. She tapped the Ainoni mask with a lacquered nail-a gesture meant for herself as much as for him.
"How?" she replied. "Because you are Dunyain."
This occasioned a long silence between them. Watching his pained look lapse into blank scrutiny, Esmenet could not shake the nagging sense that her brother-in-law actually considered murdering her there and then.
"Your husband is Dunyain," Maithanet finally said.
"Indeed."
She wondered if it would be possible to count all the unspoken truths that hung between them, all the devious grounds for their mistrust. Was there ever a family so deranged as theirs?
"If I condescend to this, this test, it will be only to reassure you, Esmi," he finally said. His tone was devoid of pride or resentment, a fact that simply made him more inhuman in her eyes. "I am your brother. Even more, I am your husband's willing slave, no different than you. We are bound together by blood and faith."
"Then do this for me, Maitha. I will apologize if I'm wrong. I will wash your feet on the Xothei steps-anything! Wolves pursue me…"
It was all a game for them, she realized. No word, no expression, simply was. Everything was a tool, a tactic meant to further some occult and devious goal.