R. Bakker - The Judging eye

At such a remove, so far from the gutters of living truth, how could she not be a tyrant? Not matter how balanced, thoughtful, or sincerely considered her judgments, how could they not crack like clubs or pierce like spears?

Exactly as Nel-Saripal had implied, the wretch.

Without warning, a small voice piped through the officious murmur. "Thelli! Thelli! Theliopa found another one!" Esmenet saw her youngest, Kelmomas, barrelling through the secretaries, then around the grand table. He ran across his reflection to throw his arms around her waist. She hugged him, laughing.

"Sweetling… What do you mean?"

At times his beauty struck her breathless, his features avid beneath a mop of lavish blond curls. But when he surprised her like this, the bouncing perfection of him fairly hummed through her, made her throat thicken for pride. With Kelmomas she could almost believe the Gods had relented.

"A skin-spy, Momma. Among the new slaves for the stables-Theliopa found another one!"

Esmenet involuntarily stiffened. Captain Imhailas appeared on the heel of these words, fairly swinging through the entrance to fall onto his knees. "Your Glory!"

"Leave us," Esmenet commanded Ngarau. The old Imperial Seneschal clapped his hands in dismissal, and a retreating commotion descended on the chambers.

"How is it my son bears this news to me?" she asked, gesturing for the Exalt-Captain to take his feet.

"I beg mercy, your Glory." Imhailas was extraordinarily attractive in a way that only Norsirai men could be. It seemed to render his embarrassment all the more ludicrous. "I set out to inform you immediately! I have no idea how-!"

"Can I seeee, Momma? Please!"

"No, Kel. You certainly may not!"

"But I need to see these things, Momma. I need to know. Someday I'll need to know!"

Scowling, she looked from the boy to the Captain, who stood armour agleam in the broken light. Through the propped doors, she could see the last of the functionaries fleeing into the palace's polished depths. One of the laggards stumbled on the hem of his robes, and for an instant, she glimpsed the tar-black bottoms of his silk slippers.

She blinked, focused on the Exalt-Captain. "What do you think?"

Imhailas hesitated for a moment, then with an air of quotation said, "Calloused hands suffer no tender eyes, your Glory."

Esmenet frowned at the hackneyed quote. Only an idiot, she found herself thinking, asks an idiot for advice. But her dismissal caught in her throat when she looked at Kelmomas. Squares of light graphed his clothes and skin, bright and oblong where not undone entirely by the compact curves of his body. For an instant, he seemed so very soft, the world's most vulnerable thing, and her heart heaved with the dwarfing confusion that mothers call love. Mere months had passed since his Whelming-since the assassination attempt on the Scuari Campus. All she wanted was to protect him. She would will herself into a cocoon if she could, an impervious and eternal shield…

But she knew that she could not. And she was wise enough not to confuse her want for her world.

"Please, Momma," he said, his blue eyes glittering with teary eagerness. The sun seemed to shine through his flaxen curls. "Please."

She composed her face and looked back to Imhailas. "I think…" she said with a heavy sigh. "I think you're quite right, Captain. The time has come. Both my sweet cherries should see Thelli's latest discovery."

Another skin-spy in the court. Why now, after so many years?

"Both boys, your Glory?"

She ignored this, the way she ignored all the tonal differences that seemed to colour references to Kelmomas's twin, Samarmas. In this one thing, she would refuse the world its inroads.

With Kelmomas in tow-he had become much more reluctant at the mention of his brother-Esmenet set off in search of her other darling, Samarmas. The galleries at the summit of the Andiamine Heights were not so very large, but they had the habit of becoming labyrinthine whenever she needed to find someone or something. Of course she could have dispatched slaves to search for him-even now her train of attendants followed at a discrete distance-but she was wary of delegating too much in the way of trivial tasks: It seemed madness enough to be dressed by strange hands in the morning, let alone never having to hunt for her own children. Power, she had come to realize, had the insidious habit of inserting others between you and your tasks, rendering your limbs little more than decorative mementoes of a more human past. Her only organs remaining, it sometimes seemed, were those belonging to statecraft: a tongue attached to a devious soul.

She paused at the juncture of every corridor, the instinctive way parents do not so much look for their children as make themselves visible. Each time figures fell to their faces down the length of the marble shafts, the slaves like hairless dogs, the functionaries like piles of lavish fabric. Gilded corbels gleamed. Decorative columns shone with lines curved to the positioning of lanterns or ceiling apertures.

Not much had changed since the days when the Ikurei Dynasty had presided over the Andiamine Heights. Certainly, the palace had grown in measure with the Empire-or her hips, as it sometimes seemed. Momemn had been one of the few Three Seas cities with wisdom enough to throw itself upon the mercy of her husband. There had been no smoke on the wind, no blood on the flagstones, when she had first walked these halls. And what a wonder it had seemed then, that people could encase themselves in such glorious luxury. Marbles looted from Shigeki ruins. Gold beaten into foils, cast into figures both human and divine. The famed frescoes, such as the Blue Hubris by the suicide, Anchilas, or the anonymous Chorus of the Seas in the Mirullian Foyer. The white-jade censers. The Zeьmi tapestries. The carpets so long, so ornate, that lifetimes had been spent weaving them…

All it had lacked was power.

A kind of mute inattention dogged her as she walked. She found herself turning down the hall almost without realizing, though she had been able to hear the screams for some time. His screams, Inrilatas. One of her middle children, youngest save for the twins.

She paused before the great bronze door to his room, stared with distaste at the Kyranean Lions stamped into its panels. Even though she passed it several times every day, it always seemed larger than she remembered. She ran her fingertips along the greening rims. She could feel nothing of his cries in the cool metal. No warmth. No hum. The frantic sound seemed to rise more from the cold floor at her feet.

Kelmomas leaned against her thigh, mooning for her attention. "Uncle Maithanet thinks you should have him sent away," he said.

"Your uncle said that?" An itch always accompanied references to Maithanet, a premonition too indistinct to be called a worry. Because he was so much like Kellhus, she supposed.

"They're frightened of us, aren't they, Mommy?"

"Them?"

"Everybody. They're all afraid of our family…"

"Why would that be?"

"Because they think we're mad. They think father's seed is too strong."

Too strong for the vessel. Too strong for me.

"You've heard… them… talking?"

"Is that what happened to Inrilatas?"

"It's the God, Kel. The God burns strongly in all of you. With Inrilatas he burns strongest of all."

"Is that why he's mad?"

"Yes."

"Is that why you keep him here?"

"He is my child, Kel, as much as you. I will never abandon my children."

"Like Mimara?"

An unearthly sound burrowed from the polished stone, a shriek meant to pass sharp, cutting things. Esmenet flinched, certain he was there, Inrilatas, just on the other side of the door, his lips mashed against the portal's marmoreal frame. She thought she could hear teeth gnawing at the stone. She looked from the door to the slender cherub that was her other son. Kelmomas. Godlike Kelmomas. Healthy, loving, devoted to the point of comedy…