"Because I know that you want the Empire to fail."

His laughter was curious, as though crazed forces sheered the humour underpinning it.

"And you will trust... what I tell you?" he said, his voice cracked by inexplicable exertions. "The words... of a madman?"

"Yes. If only because I know that Truth is your madness."

A kind of jubilation accompanied these words-one that she immediately repented, knowing her son had already seen it, and fearing he would deny her for simple perversity's sake. Even as a young child, he had always sought to quash whatever was bright within her.

"Inspired words, Mother." His tone was thin and blank, almost as if he mocked his older sister, Theliopa. "The very kind Father has warned you not to trust. You cannot see the darkness that precedes your thoughts, but unlike most souls you know it exists. You appreciate how rarely you are the author of what you say and do..." He raised his shackled hands for a clap that never came. "I'm impressed, Mother. You understand this trick the world calls a soul."

"A trick that can be saved... or damned."

"What if redemption were simply another form of damnation? What if the only true salvation lay in seeing through the trick and embracing oblivion?"

"And what if," Esmenet replied with more than a little annoyance, "these questions could be debated endlessly without hope of resolution?"

In a wink, Theliopa's manner vanished, replaced by a hunched ape, leering and laughing. "Father has been rubbing off on you!"

Perhaps she should have been amused. Perhaps she would have been, despite the utter absence of trust. But her heart had been bludgeoned, her hope battered beyond the possibility of amusement.

"I tire of your games, Inrilatas," she said, speaking a fury that seemed to gather strength in the sound of her voice. "I understand that you can see my thoughts through my voice and face. I understand your abilities as well as anyone without Dunyain blood can. I even understand the predicaments I face in merely speaking to you!"

More laughter. "No, Mother. You most certainly do not understand. If you did, you would have drowned me years ago."

She fairly leapt to her feet, such was the sudden violence of her anger. But she caught herself. "Remember, Esmi," Kellhus had warned her, "never let your passions rule you. Passions make you simple, easy to master. Only by twisting, reflecting upon your reflections, will you be able to slip his grasp..."

Inrilatas had leaned forward from his hunch, his face avid with a shifting melange of contradictory passions, a face like a pick, sorting through tumblers of her soul.

"You lean heavily on Father's advice..." he said, his voice reaching for intonations that almost matched Kellhus's. "But you should know that I am your husband as he really is. Even Uncle, when he speaks, parses and pitches his words to mimic the way others sound-to conceal the inhumanity I so love to flaunt. We Dunyain... we are not human, Mother. And you... You are children to us. Ridiculous and adorable. And so insufferably stupid."

The Blessed Empress of the Three Seas could only stare in horror.

"But you know this..." Inrilatas continued, his gaze fixed upon her. "Someone else has told you this... And in almost precisely the same words! Who? The Wizard? The legendary Drusas Achamian-yes! He told you this in a final effort to rescue your heart, didn't he? Ah... Mother! I see you so much more clearly now! All the years of regret and recrimination, torn between terror and love, stranded with children-such wicked, gifted children!-ones you can never hope to fathom, never hope to love."

"But I do love you!"

"There is no love without trust, Mother. Only need... hunger. I am a reflex, nothing more, nothing less."

Her throat cramped. The tears welled to her eyes, spilled in hot threads across her cheeks.

He had succeeded. At last he had succeeded...

"Damn you!" she whispered, swatting at her eyes. Battered and exhausted-that was how she felt after mere moments with her son. And the words! What he had said would torment her for nights to come-longer. "This was a mistake," she murmured, refusing to glance at his lurid figure.

But just as she turned to signal the slaves to leave, he said, "Father has cut off all communication."

She slumped in her seat, breathing, staring without focus at the floor.

"Yes," she said.

"You are alone, lost in a wilderness of subtleties you cannot fathom."

"Yes..."

At last she raised her gaze to meet his. "Will you do this for me, Inrilatas?"

"Trust. Trust is the one thing you seek."

"Yes... I..." A kind of resignation overwhelmed her. "I need you."

Invisible things boiled through the heartbeats that followed. Portents. Ruminations. Lusts.

"There can only be three of us..." Inrilatas finally said. Once again, unnameable passions creaked through the seams of his voice.

The Blessed Empress blinked more tears, this time for relief. "Of course. Just your uncle and myself."

"No. Not you. My brothers..." A heaving breath swallowed his voice.

"Brothers?" she asked, more alarmed than curious.

"Kel..." he said with a bestial grunt, "and Sammi..."

The Holy Empress stiffened. If Inrilatas had been seeking a fatal chink, he had discovered it. "I don't understand," she replied, swallowing. "Sammi is... Sammi, he..."

But the figure she spoke to was scarce human anymore. Anasurimbor Inrilatas rose with a dancer's slow deliberation, then threw himself forward, his arms and legs outstretched, straining against the limits of his chains. He stood there, all spittle and squint-eyed passion, his naked limbs heaving, trembling with veins and striations. Her shield-bearers, Esmenet could not help but notice, had shrunk behind the wicker screens meant for her.

"Mother!" her son shrieked, his eyes shining with murder. "Mother! Come! Closer!"

Something of her original imperviousness returned. This... This was her son as she knew him best.

The beast.

"Let me see your mouth, Mother!"

- - IOTHIAH.

The woman called Psatma Nannaferi was brought before the Padirajah and his loutish court the same as all the other notable captives, stripped naked and shackled in iron. But where other attractive women had been greeted with lascivious hoots and calls-humiliation, Malowebi had realized, was as much as part of the proceedings as the Padirajah's judgment-a peculiar silence accompanied Psatma Nannaferi's short march to the floor below Fanayal. Rumours of this woman, the Mbimayu sorcerer decided, had spread quickly among the desert men. The fact that he had not heard these rumours simply served to whet his curiosity, as well as to remind him that he remained an outsider.

Fanayal had seized one of the few temples not burned, a great domed affair that abutted the Agnotum Market-the ironic point of origin for many luxury goods that found their way to Zeum. The altar had been broken down with sledges and hauled away. The tapestries with panels drawn from the Tractate and the Chronicle of the Tusk had been burned. Those representing the First Holy War, Malowebi was told, had been carted out of Iothiah to line the horse stalls seized by Fanayal's growing army. The frescoes had been defaced, and graven images everywhere had been smashed. Several green-and-crimson banners bearing the Twin Scimitars of Fanimry had been roped and tacked across the walls. But the Tusks and Circumfixes were simply too ubiquitous to be completely blotted. No matter where his eye strayed, along the columns, over the cornices and vaults of the flanking architraves, Malowebi glimpsed unscathed evidence of the Aspect-Emperor and his faith.

Nowhere more so than the dome itself-whose height and breadth alone were a kind of miracle to Malowebi, hailing as he did from a nation without arches. A great wheel of frescoes hung in the high gloom above the unbelievers, five panels representing Inri Sejenus in some different pose, his face gentle, his hands haloed in painted gold, his silvered eyes glaring endlessly down.

Fanayal's desert Grandees betrayed no discomfort that the Second Negotiant could see. But then Malowebi always found himself surprised by men's general blindness to irony and contradiction. If the Kianene had looked vicious and impoverished before, they looked positively absurd now, decked in the eclectic spoils of a great imperial city. The desert mob seethed with jarring mixtures of clothing and armour: the high conical helms from Ainon, black Thunyeri hauberks, a couple of silk gowns that Malowebi suspected belonged to a woman's wardrobe, and in one case, the baggy crimson pantaloons typically worn by caste-slave eunuchs. One man even sported a Nilnameshi feather-shield. Most of them, Malowebi knew, had spent the bulk of their lives hunted like animals across the desert wastes. Until now, they had counted sips of water and shelter from sun and wind as luxury, so it made sense they would feast in all ways possible, given the crazed rewards Fate had heaped upon them.

Even still, they looked more a carnival of dangerous fools than a possible ally of High Holy Zeum.

Once again Fanayal alone embodied the elegance and reserve that had once so distinguished his people. A wooden chair had been set behind the forward ridge of the altar's shattered base, where the Padirajah sat, agleam even in temple gloom, wearing a coat of golden mail over a white silk tunic: the armour and uniform of the Coyauri, the famed heavy cavalry he had commanded as a young man during the First Holy War.

Meppa stood at his right hand, his cowl drawn back, his eyes hidden as always behind the silver band about his head. The Cishaurim's serpent rose like a black iron hook from his neck, tasting the air with its tongue, wagging from voice to voice.

Malowebi had been assigned the shadows behind and to the left of the Padirajah, where he had watched perhaps a hundred naked women and men dragged beneath Fanayal and his vengeful whims, a piteous train of them, some proud and defiant, but most abject and broken, wheezing and weeping for a mercy that was never shown. The captive men, no matter what their station, where asked whether they would curse their Aspect-Emperor and embrace the truth of the Prophet Fane. Those who refused were dragged off for immediate execution. Those who agreed were taken away to be auctioned as slaves. As far as the Mbimayu sorcerer could tell, the women-the bereaved wives and orphaned daughters of the caste-nobility-were simply brought out to be divided as spoils.

On and on the proceedings continued, becoming more sordid and more farcical, it seemed, with the passing of every doomed soul, dull enough for an old scholar to ponder the perversities of faith, long enough for an old man's feet to ache and itch.

Something about Psatma Nannaferi, however, instantly dispelled his boredom and discomfort.

The guardsmen threw her to the prayer tiles beneath the Padirajah. But where they had delighted in wicked little flourishes with the others, they did so this time with mechanical reluctance-as if trying to hide behind their function.

Fanayal leaned forward, petted his braided goatee as he studied the captive. This too was unprecedented.

"My Inquisitor has told me a most interesting tale..."

The woman slowly pulled herself upright, graceful despite her iron shackles. She betrayed neither fear for her future nor shame for her captive nudity. She was not without a certain, diminutive beauty, Malowebi thought, but there was a hardness to her that belied the soft brown curves of her skin. And there was something about her posture and her squint that suggested the habits of someone older-far older-than her apparent thirty years.

"He says," Fanayal continued, "that you are Psatma Nannaferi, the Mother-Supreme of the Yatwerian Cult."

A grim and condescending smile. "I am."

"He also says you are the reason we found these lands afire when we arrived."

She nodded. "I am but a vessel. I pour only what has been poured."

Even after so few words, Malowebi knew her for a formidable woman. Here she stood, naked and manacled, yet her gaze and bearing communicated a confidence too profound to be named pride, a majesty that somehow upended the stakes between her and the famed Bandit Padirajah.

"And now that your Goddess has betrayed you?"

"Betrayed?" she snorted. "This is not a sum. This is not a wager of advantages over loss. This is a gift! Our Mother Goddess's will."

"So the Goddess wills the destruction of her temples? The torment and execution of her slaves?"

The longer Malowebi gazed at the woman, the more a weight seemed to press against his brow. Her eyes seemed bright with moist vulnerability, her body fetching in the lean way of peasant virgins. And yet watching her, an impression of something hoary, hard, and old continued to plague him. Even the downy curve of her sex... She seemed a kind of visible contradiction, as if the look and promise of virgin youth had eclipsed the sight of a hag but not the corona of meaning that hung like a haze about it.

So even now, as she glared at Fanayal, it seemed something reptilian peered through her peering, the look of something vicious and remorseless with age, flashing from the gaze of a woman, flushed and breathless and so very inviting.

"We take such gifts that come," she crooned. "We suffer this worldly trifle, and She will save us! From oblivion! From those demons our iniquities have awakened! This is but the arena where souls settle eternity. Our suffering is dross compared to the glory to come!"

Fanayal laughed, genuinely amused. But his humour cut against the obvious unease of his court.

"So even your captivity... You think this a gift?"

"Yes."

"And if I were to deliver you to the lust of my men?"

"You will not."

"And why is that?"

In a twinkling, she became coy and whorish. She even glanced down at her breasts, which were firm with improbable youth. "Because I have been reborn as black earth, as rain and sweating sun," she said. "The Goddess has cast me in Her image, as sweet, sweet Fertility. You will not allow other men to trade me, so long as your loins bur-"

"My loins?" Fanayal cried out with forced incredulity.

Malowebi gazed and blinked. She literally tingled with nubile promise, yet still she carried the air of old stone. Something... Something was wrong...

"Even now," she said, "your seed rises to the promise of soft earth deeply ploughed."

Masculine laughter rumbled through the chamber, only to falter for want of breath. Even old Malowebi could feel a tightness in his chest and a matching thickness crawling across his thighs...

With no little horror the Mbimayu sorcerer realized the Goddess was among them. There was peril, here-great peril. This woman walked with one foot on the Outside...

He opened his mouth to call out in warning but caught himself on the very hinge of his voice.

He was no friend to these savage people. He was an observer, interpreter. The question was whether Zeum's interests would be served if Fanayal were alerted. Ally or not, the fact remained that the man was a fanatic of the worst kind, a believer in a creed, Fanimry, that made devils out of the Gods and hells out of the Heavens. To strike an alliance that earned the enmity of the Mother of Birth would be a fool's exchange. The Zeumi might not pray to the Hundred, given their intercessory faith, but they certainly revered and respected them.

"'Soft earth deeply ploughed,'" Fanayal repeated, gazing upon her form with frank hunger. He turned to the lean and warlike men of his court. "Such are the temptations of evil, my friends!" he called, shaking his head. "Such are the temptations!"

More laughter greeted these words.

"Your sisters are dead," the Padirajah continued as if immune to her wiles. "Your temples are pulled down. If these are gifts, as you say, then I am in a most generous mood." He paused to make room for a few frail guffaws from his assembled men. "I could give you a noose, say, or a thousand lashes. Perhaps I will have Meppa show you what kind of prison your body can be."

Malowebi found himself wondering whether the woman had even blinked, so relentless was her gaze. The fact that Fanayal weathered it with such thoughtless ease actually troubled the Mbimayu sorcerer. Was the man simply oblivious or did he possess a heart every bit as hard as her own?

Either possibility would not bode an alliance well.

"My soul has already left and returned to this body," she said, her girlish voice scratched with the harsh intonations of a crone. "There is no torment you could inflict upon me."

"So hard!" Fanayal cried laughing. "Stubborn! Devil-worshipping witch!"

Again the desert court rumbled with laughter.

"I would not ply your body," Meppa said without warning. So far he had stood silent and motionless at his sovereign's side, his face directed forward as always. Only the asp, which curved like an onyx bow across his left cheek, faced the lone woman.

Psatma Nannaferi regarded the Cishaurim with a sneer. "My soul is beyond your devilry, Snakehead. I worship the Dread Mother."

Never had Malowebi witnessed an exchange more uncanny, the blinded man speaking as if to a void, the shackled woman as if she were a mad queen among hereditary slaves.

"You worship a demon."

The Mother-Supreme laughed with the bitter hilarity. The cackle rang across distant walls, echoed through the high crypt hollows, gelding all the humour that had come before it. Suddenly the assembled men were nothing but ridiculous boys, their pride swatted from them by the palm of a shrewd and exacting mother.

"Call her what you will!" Psatma Nannaferi exclaimed. "Demon? Yes! I worship a demon!-if it pleases you to call her such! You think we worship the Hundred because they are good? Madness governs the Outside, Snakehead, not gods or demons-or even the God! Fool! We worship them because they have power over us. And we-we Yatwerians-worship the one with the most power of all!"

Malowebi squelched another urge to call out, to urge the Fanim to spare her, to set her free, then to burn a hundred bulls in Yatwer's honour. The Mother was here! Here!

"Gods are naught but greater demons," the Cishaurim said, "hungers across the surface of eternity, wanting only to taste the clarity of our souls. Can you not see this?"

The woman's laughter trailed into a cunning smile. "Hungers indeed! The fat will be eaten, of course. But the high holy? The faithful? They shall be celebrated!"