"These tricks, Inrilatas. These tactics… They only work when they are hidden. I see these things the same as you."
"Strange, isn't it, Uncle? The way we Dunyain, for all our gifts, can never speak?"
"We are speaking now."
Inrilatas laughed at this, lowered his beard-hazed cheek to his knees once again. "But how can that be when we mean nothing of what we say?"
"You conf-"
"What would they do, you think, if Men could see us? If they could fathom the way we don and doff them like clothes?"
Maithanet shrugged. "What would any child do, if they could fathom their father?"
Inrilatas smiled. "That depends upon the father… This is the answer you want me to speak."
"No. That is the answer."
More laughter, so like the Aspect-Emperor's that goose-pimples climbed across the boy's skin.
"You really believe that we Dunyain differ? That, like fathers, some can be good and some bad?"
"I know so," Maithanet replied.
There was something coiled about his brother, Kelmomas decided. The way he lolled his head, flexed his wrists, and rocked on his heels created an impression of awkward, effeminate youth-a false impression. The more harmless he seemed, the young Prince-Imperial understood, the more lethal he became.
All of this, the secret voice warned, is simply for show.
And that was the joke, Kelmomas realized: Inrilatas truly meant nothing of what he said.
"Oh, we have our peculiarities, I grant you that," the adolescent said. "Our hash of strengths and weaknesses. But in the end we all suffer the same miraculous disease: reflection. Where they think, one thought following hard upon the other, tripping forward blindly, we reflect. Each thought grasps the thought before it-like a starving dog chasing an oh-so meaty tail! They stumble before us, reeling like drunks, insensible to their momentary origins, and we unravel them. Play them like instruments, plucking songs of love and adoration that they call their own!"
Something was going to happen.
Kelmomas found himself leaning forward, such was his hanker. When? When?
"We all deceive, Uncle. All of us, all the time. That is the gift of reflection."
"They make their choices," Maithanet said in a head-shaking tone.
"Please, Uncle. You must speak before me the way you speak before Father. I see your lies, no matter how banal or cunning. No choices are made in our presence. Ever. You know this. The only freedom is freedom over."
"Very well then," the Holy Shriah replied. "I tire of your philosophy, Inrilatas. I find you abhorrent, and I fear this entire exercise simply speaks to your mother's failing reason."
"Mother?" his older brother exclaimed. "You think Mother arranged this?"
A heartbeat of hesitation, the smallest crack in Maithanet's false demeanour.
Something is wrong, the voice whispered.
"If not her, then who?" the Shriah of the Thousand Temples asked.
Inrilatas at once frowned and smiled, his expression drunk with exaggeration. His eyebrows hooked high, he glanced down at his little brother…
"Kelmomas?" Maithanet asked, not with the incredulity appropriate to a human, but in the featureless voice belonging to the Dunyain.
Inrilatas gazed at the young Prince-Imperial as if he were a puppy about to be thrown into a river…
Poor boy.
"A thousand words and insinuations batter them day in and day out," the youth said. "But because they lack the memory to enumerate them, they forget, and find themselves stranded with hopes and suspicions not of their making. Mother has always loved you, Uncle, has always seen you as a more human version of Father-an illusion you have laboured long and hard to cultivate. Now, suddenly, when she most desperately needs your counsel, she fears and hates you."
"And this is Kelmomas's work?"
"He isn't what he seems, Uncle."
Maithanet glanced at the boy, who stood as rigid as a shield next to him, then turned back to Inrilatas. Kelmomas did not know what he found more terrifying: the unscalable surfaces of his uncle's face or his brother's sudden betrayal.
"I have suspected as much," the Shriah said.
Say something… the voice urged.
Inrilatas nodded as if ruing some tragic fact. "As mad as all of us are, as much heartbreak we have heaped upon our mother, he is, I think, the worst of us."
"Surely you-"
"You know he was the one who killed Samarmas."
Another crack in his uncle's once-impervious demeanour.
It was all the young Prince-Imperial could do to simply stand and breathe. All his crimes, he had committed in the shadow of assumption. Were his Uncle to suspect him capable-of murdering Samarmas, Sharacinth-he would have quickly seen his guilt, such were his gifts. But for all their strength, the Dunyain remained as blind to ignorance as the world-born-and as vulnerable.
And now… Never in his short life had Kelmomas experienced the terror he now felt. The sense of flushing looseness, as if he were a pillar of water about to collapse in a thousand liquid directions. The sense of binding tension, as if an inner winch cranked at every thread of his being, throttled him vein by vein…
And he found it curious, just as he found this curiosity curious.
"Samarmas died playing a foolish prank," Maithanet said evenly. "I was there."
"And my little brother. He was there also?"
"Yes."
"And Kelmomas, does he not share our gift for leading fools?"
"He could… in time."
"But what if he were like me, Uncle. What if he were born knowing how to use our gifts?"
Kelmomas could hear all three of their hearts, his beating with rabbit quickness, his uncle's pounding as slow as a bull's-his brother's dancing through the erratic in-between.
"You're saying he murdered his own brother?"
Inrilatas nodded the way Mother nodded when affirming unfortunate truths. "And others…"
"Others?"
Kelmomas stood, immobilized by astonishment. How? How? How could everything turn so quickly?
"Turn to him, Uncle. Use your portion. Gaze into his face and ask him if he is a fratricide."
What was the mad fool doing? His uncle was the one! He was the one who needed to be humiliated- destroyed!
The Shriah of the Thousand Temples turned to the boy, not as a human might, frowning, questioning, but with the glint of void in his eyes. As a Dunyain.
"The sum of sins," Inrilatas continued. "There is nothing more godly than murder. Nothing more absolute."
And for the first time Kelmomas found himself trapped within the dread circuit of his Uncle's scrutiny.
Hide! the secret voice cried. He glimpses… glimpses!
"Come now, Kelmomas," his mad brother cackled. "Show Uncle Holy why you should be chained in my place."
"Liar!" the boy finally shrieked in blubbering denial. "Lies!"
"Kelmomas!" the Shriah shouted, his voice yanking on every string of authority, from parental to religious. "Turn to me! Look to me and tell me: Did you murd-"
Two clicks, almost simultaneous. Two screeches-a noise as small as mice trampled underfoot. The whirr of flying iron. Links snapping. File-weakened links snapping. One chain whooshed over the boy's head, while the other hooked behind his uncle…
They intersected, lashed in opposing directions about the post of Uncle Holy's neck. Wound like whips.
Kelmomas had scarcely torn his eyes away from his uncle, when his brother heaved, throwing his arms out and back like wings, his spine arched like a bow. Maithanet flew headlong to his feet.
Then Inrilatas had him, pulled him, for all his stature, like a child, against his chest. He roared in bestial exultation, wrenched at the chains again and again…
And Kelmomas watched the Shriah of Thousand Temples strangle.
Maithanet was on his knees, his face darkening, frantic hands grubbing at the chains. His silken sleeves had dropped down, revealing the fine-wrought beauty of his vambraces.