R. Bakker - The Judging eye

So unlike the others.

Please let it be.

Her smile seemed proper to the tears in her eyes. "Like Mimara," she said.

She couldn't even think the name without a series of inner cringings, as though it were a weight that could be drawn only with ill-used muscles. Even now she had her men scouring the Three Seas, searching-searching everywhere except the one place where she knew Mimara would be.

Keep her safe, Akka. Please keep her safe.

Inrilatas's shriek trailed into a series of masturbatory grunts. On and on they continued, each sucking on the one prior, all possessing a hairless animality that made her clutch Kelmomas's shoulder. She knew this was something no child should hear, especially one as impressionable as Kelmomas, but her honor immobilized her. There was something… personal in the jerking sounds-or so it seemed. Something meant for her and her alone.

The cry of "Momma!" snapped her from her trance.

It was Samarmas. He burst from his nursemaid's grasp, identical to Kelmomas in every respect, save for the slack pose of his face and the outward bulge of his eyes, so like those on ancient Kyranean statuary.

"My boy!" Esmenet cried, scooping the boy into her arms. With an "Ooof!" she swung him onto her hip-he was getting too big! — beamed mother-love into his idiot gaze.

My broken boy.

The nursemaid, Porsi, had followed in his stomping wake, eyes to the ground. The young Nansur slave knelt, face to the floor. Esmenet should have thanked the girl, she knew, but she had wanted to find Sammi herself, perhaps even to spy for a bit, in the way of simpler parents watching through simpler windows.

Inrilatas continued screaming through polished stone-forgotten.

Stairs. Endless stairs and corridors, from the reserved splendour of the summit, to the monumental spectacle of the palace's lower, more public reaches, thence to the raw stone of the dungeons, with troughs worn into the floor stones for the passage of innumerable prisoners. In one courtyard they crossed, Samarmas hugged the backs of everyone who fell to their faces. He was always indiscriminate with his loving gestures, particularly when it came to slaves. He even kissed one old woman on her nut-brown cheek-Esmenet's skin pimpled at the sound of her joyous sobbing. Kelmomas babbled the entire way, reminding Samarmas in his stern big brother way that they must be warriors, that they must be strong, that only honour and courage would earn the love and praise of their father. Listening, Esmenet found herself wondering at the Princes-Imperial they would become. She found herself fearing for them-the way she always feared when her thoughts were bent to the future.

As they descended the final stair, Kelmomas began describing skin-spies. "Their bones are soft like a shark's," he said, his voice lilting in wonder. "And they have claws for faces, claws they can squeeze into any face. They could be you. They could be me. At any second they could strike you down!"

"Monsters, Mommy?" Samarmas asked, his eyes aglow with tears. "Sharks?" Of course he already knew what skin-spies were: She herself had regaled him with innumerable stories about their sinister role in the First Holy War. But it was part of his innocence to respond to everything as though encountering it for the very first time. Repetition, as she had discovered on many cross-eyed occasions, was a kind of drug for Samarmas.

"Kel, that's quite enough."

"But he needs to know too!"

She had to remind herself that his cleverness was that of a normal child, and not like that of his siblings. Inrilatas, in particular, had possessed his father's… gifts.

She wished she could put these worries to rest. For all her love, she could never lose herself in Kelmomas the way she could Samarmas, whose idiocy had become a kind of perverse sanctuary for her. For all her love, she could not bring herself to trust the way a mother should.

Not after so many… experiences.

As she feared, a carnival of personages great and small clotted the corridors leading to the Truth Room. The whole palace, it seemed, had found some excuse to see their latest captive. She even saw her cook, a diminutive old Nilnameshi named Bompothur, pressing toward the door with the others. The voice of Biaxi Sankas, one of the more powerful members of the Congregate, reverberated across the hooded stone spaces. "Let me pass, you caste-menial fool!"

The scene troubled her perhaps more than it should. To be Empress of the Three Seas was one thing, to be the wife of the Aspect-Emperor was quite another. In his absence, absolute authority fell to her-but how could it not bruise and break when the fall was so far? Even where one would expect her rule to be absolute-such as her own palace-it was anything but. In Kellhus's absence, the Andiamine Heights seemed nothing so much as a squabbling mountain of bowing, scraping, insinuating thieves. The Exalt-Ministers. The caste-nobles of the High Congregate. The Imperial Apparati. The visiting dignitaries. Even the slaves. It sickened her the way they all lined up moist-eyed with awe and devotion whenever Kellhus walked the halls, only to resume their cannibalistic rivalries the instant he departed-when she walked the gilded halls. Word has it, Blessed Empress, that so-and-so is questioning the slave reforms, and in the most troubling manner… On and on, back and forth, the long dance of tongues as knives. She had learned to ignore most of it, the palace would be on the brink of revolt if even a fraction of what was said was true. But it meant that she would never know if the palace were about to revolt, and she had read enough history to know that this was every sovereign's most mortal concern.

She cried out, "Imhailas!"

Whether it was her or some perverse trick of the stone, the ringing of her voice had the character of a screech. A herd of apprehensive faces turned to her and the twins. There was a comical scuffle as they all struggled to kneel in the absence of floor space. She could not but wonder at what Kellhus would say about this lack of discipline. Who would be punished and how? There was always punishment where the Aspect-Emperor was involved…

Or as he pretended to call it, education.

"Imhailas!" she cried again. She squeezed Samarmas's hand in reassurance, smiled at him. He had a tendency to cry whenever she raised her voice.

"Yes, your Glory," the Exalt-Captain called from the blockaded threshold.

"What are all these people doing here?"

"It's been some time, your Glory. Almost two years since the last-"

"This is foolish! Clear everyone out save your guards and the pertinent ministers."

"At once, your Glory."

Of course Imhailas scarce needed to utter a word: Everyone had heard her anger and her rebuke.

"They're more afraid of Father," young Kelmomas whispered at her side.

"Yes," Esmenet replied, at a loss as to how to respond otherwise. The insights of children were too immediate, too unfiltered not to be unwelcome. "Yes, they are."

Even a child can see it.

She drew the boys to the wall to make way for the file of men-a parade of seditious souls draped in ingratiating skins, or so it seemed. She acknowledged their anxious and perfunctory bows as they scurried past, wondering how she could possibly rule when her instruments so sickened her. But she had been too political for far too long not to recognize an opportunity when she saw one. She stopped Lord Sankas as he made to pass, asked him if he would assist her with the twins. "They've never seen a skin-spy before," she explained. She wondered how she could have forgotten how tall he was-even for a caste-noble. Her own height had always been a source of shame for her, given the way it shouted her caste-menial origins.

"Indeed," he said with a gloating smile. Most men were only too eager to embrace evidence of their importance, but when they were as old as Sankas, it seemed more unseemly for some reason. He looked down, winked at her sons. "The horrors of the world are what make us men."