The stench had been unbearable, toward the end.

She paused on the second floor, peering and blinking. She breathed deep, tasted the earthen rot that soaks into mortar and burnt brick-and felt young, unaccountably young. Of the four doors she could discern, one stood ajar, throwing a lane of grey light across the dirty floor.

She found herself creeping toward it. Despite the crude cloth of her cloak, a kind of fastidious reluctance overcame her, the worry of staining what was fine and beautiful. What was she thinking? She couldn't do this... She had to flee, to race back to the Andiamine Heights. Yes...

She wasn't appropriately dressed.

Yet her legs carried her forward. The door's outer edge drew away like a curtain, revealing the room beyond.

The assassin stood staring out the window, but from the centre of the room, where he could scarce hope to see anything of interest. Indirect light bathed his profile. Aside from a certain solemn density in his manner, nothing about him suggested deceit and murder. The line of his nose and jaw was youthful to the point of appearing effeminate, yet his skin possessed the year-brushed coarseness of someone hard beyond his years. His jet hair was cropped short, which surprised her, since she had thought the assassin-priests always wore their hair long, as long as an Ainoni caste-noble's, but without the braids. His beard was trim, as was the present fashion among certain merchants-something she knew only because fanatical interests in the Ministrate had petitioned her to pass beard laws. His clothing was nondescript. Brown stains marred his earlobes.

She paused at the threshold. When she was a child, she and several other children would often swim in the Sumni harbour. Sometimes they made a game of holding heavy stones underwater and walking across the mud and debris of the bottom. She had the same sense stepping into the room, as if some onerous weight gave her traction, that she would pop from the floor otherwise, breach the surface of this nightmare...

And breathe.

The man did not turn to regard her, but she knew he scrutinized her nonetheless.

"My Exalt-Captain frets below," she finally said, her voice more timid than she wished. "He fears you will murder me."

"He loves you," the Narindar replied, jarring her with memories of her husband. Kellhus was forever repeating her thoughts.

"Yes..." she replied, surprised by a sudden instinct to be honest. To enter into a conspiracy is to commit a kind of adultery, for nothing fosters intimacy more than a shared will to deceive. What does clothing matter, when all else is shrouded? "I suppose he does."

The Narindar turned to regard her. She found his gaze unnerving. Rather than latching upon her, his focus seemed to float over and through her. The result of some ritual narcotic?

"Do you know what I want?" she asked, joining him in the indeterminate light. Her breath had climbed high and tight in her breast. She was doing this. She was seizing fate.

"Murder. To seek the Narindar is to seek murder."

He smelled of mud... mud cooking in the sun.

"I will be plain with you, assassin. I appreciate the peril I represent. I know that even now you hedge, knowing that only something... something extraordinary, could deliver a woman of my exalted station to a man... a man... such as you. But I want you to know, it is honesty that has brought me here, alone... to you. I am simply not willing to see another damned for sins that are my own. I want you to know that you can trust that honesty. No matter what happens, I appreciate that you have placed your very soul upon the balance. I will make you a prince, assassin."

If her words possessed effect, his gaze and expression betrayed none of it.

"Warm blood is the only gold I would hoard, Your Glory. Sightless eyes the only jewels I would covet."

This had the sound of a catechism believed.

"Maithanet," she said on a pent breath. "The Shriah of the Thousand Temples... Kill him, and I shall compel princes-Do you hear me? Princes!-to kneel before you!"

It seemed utter madness, now that the words hung in the air between them. She almost expected the man to cackle aloud, but he grasped his bearded chin and nodded instead.

"Yes," he said. "An extraordinary sacrifice."

"So you will do it?" she asked in unguarded astonishment.

"It is already done."

She recalled what Lord Sankas had said about the Narindar carving events along different joints-the way this very meeting would be of a piece with raising the knife.

"But..."

"There is nothing more to be said, Your Glory."

"But how will I... I..."

She trailed in flustered indecision. How could the world be so greased, so rounded, that matters this weighty could be discharged with such fugitive ease? The Narindar had turned to gaze through the slotted window. She reflexively followed his gaze, saw pillared smoke rising above the motley roofs to the east. Something was happening...

More riots?

She made to leave, but something intangible hooked her at the battered door, turned the tether of her gaze. He stood as if waiting for this very occurrence. He looked both old and young, as if time had lacked the tools to properly craft the clay of his skin. She wondered how she must look to him, furtive beneath her sack-cloth cloak and hood. An Empress cowering from her own Empire.

"What is your name?"

"Issiral."

"Issiral..." she repeated, struggling to recall the meaning of the Shigeki word. "Fate?" she asked, frowning and smiling. "Who named you this?"

"My mother."

"Your mother was cruel, to curse you with such a name."

"We take such gifts as she gives."

Something about this, and about the man's demeanour more generally, had blown terror into her anxiousness. But she reasoned that men who kill for hire-assassins-should be frightening.

"I thought Narindar were devotees of the Four-Horned Brother..."

"Devotion? The Brother cares not for our cares, only that we murder in His Name."

The Blessed Empress of the Three Seas swallowed. That the World could accommodate such men, such designs. That even murder could become worship...

"The Brother and I have that much in common," she said.

- - THE UNARAS SPUR.

Spaceless space... hanging.

Glimpses of slave-girls, shining black and naked save for a single ostrich feather between their thighs. Towering eunuchs, their ceremonial shackles gleaming in the humid gloom. Great beams of wood and bulbous pillars of marble and diorite. Pillows tossed negligently through the pleasure gardens...

The Palace of Plumes.

Soundless sound. Voiceless voice...

"Tell him, Cousin. Tell the cunning Son of Kascamandri. If he succeeds, High Holy Zeum will be as a brother to Kian. We will strike as he strikes, bleed as he bleeds!"

Even as he replied, Malowebi could feel himself toppling backward, plummeting into himself, so much had he dreaded these words. "Yes, Great Satakhan."

The aging Mbimayu sorcerer blinked and coughed, found the infinite nowhere replaced by the squalid confines of his tent-if the wretched thing the Fanim had given him could be called such. He sat cross-legged, the twin mahogany figurines-the fetishes that made possible the Iswazi Cant-squeezed tight in his knobbed fists. He braced his elbows against his knees, buried his face in his hands.

Tomorrow, he decided. He would tell the Padirajah tomorrow.

Tonight he would groan and complain in his canvas cage, toss and obsess-do everything but sleep.

How Likaro would laugh. The ingrate.

After the Zaudunyani conquest of Nilnamesh, Malowebi and his senior Mbimayu brothers had burned whole urns of lantern oil scrutinizing and arguing the madness that was the Aspect-Emperor and the Great Ordeal. Even if their Satakhan had not demanded it, they would have set aside all things to ponder it. For years they had believed that Anasurimbor Kellhus was simply a kind of contagion. For whatever reason, the Three Seas seemed particularly prone to prophets and their tricks. Where Zeum had remained faithful to the old Kiunnat ways, albeit in their own elliptical fashion, the Ketyai-the Tribe entrusted with the Holy Tusk, no less!-seemed bent on tearing down their ancient truths and replacing them with abstraction and fancy. "To better measure their ages," Wobazul had quipped in one of their discussions. Anasurimbor Kellhus, Malowebi and his fellow Mbimayu had assumed, was simply another Inri Sejenus, another gifted charlatan bent on delivering even more of his kinsmen to damnation.

But the man's successes. And the reports, both from Zeum's spies and the Mbimayu's contact with the Schools. The Aspect-Emperor was more than a gifted demagogue, more than a cunning general or sorcerer or tyrant-far more.

The question was what?

So they debated, and debated, as is the wont of wise men pondering questions without obvious answers. Nganka'kull was often criticized for his patience and leniency, but eventually even he tired of their endless delays and demurrals. Finally he summoned his cousin, demanding to know the substance of their disagreements.

"We have considered everything of note," Malowebi reported on a heavy breath. "There is but one clear lesson..."

The Satakhan had perched his chin on his fist, such was the weight of the battle-wig-an heirloom from his beloved grandfather-that he wore. "And what is that?"

"All those who resist him perish."

Word that Imperial Columnaries had occupied the ruins of Auvangshei arrived later that very night-such was the perversity of Fate. The ancient fortress meant very little to Three Seas Men, Malowebi had since discovered. But for the Zeumi, it was nothing less than the sacred threshold of their nation. The one gate in the great wall the World itself had raised about High Holy Zeum.

The Zaudunyani missionaries began arriving shortly afterward, some of them little more than paupers, others disguised as merchants. Then, of course, there was the infamous Embassy of Suicides. And during all this time, Auvangshei was rebuilt and expanded, the provinces of Nilnamesh reorganized along military lines. Their spies even reported the construction of numerous granaries in Soramipur and other western cities.

A kind of war was being waged against them, they realized. At every point of connection between Zeum and the Three Seas-mercantile, diplomatic, geographical-the Aspect-Emperor was preparing in some way.

"He fights us with pins rather than swords!" Nganka'kull exclaimed.

Malowebi had read The Compendium by this time. The book found its way to High Domyot more by accident than anything-or what amounted to the same, the Whore's whim. An Ainoni spice merchant named Parmerses had been seized under suspicion of spying, and the manuscript was discovered among his belongings. Of course, the man was summarily executed once his captors discovered the falsity of the charges against him, long before the importance of the work was understood, so questions regarding the book's provenance remained unanswered.

But once it was read, it was quickly traded among the wise and mighty. Malowebi had been gratified to learn that he was the sixth person to read The Compendium-no less than seven people before that fool, Likaro!

Drusas Achamian's revelations occasioned more than several sleepless nights. The wry humility of the tome, as well as the numerous references to Ajencis, convinced him the exiled Mandate Schoolman was a kindred intellect. The difficulty lay in the sheer audacity of what the Wizard alleged about the Aspect-Emperor: the idea of a man so quick, so cunning, that he, Malowebi, among the foremost sorcerers of his age-greater than Likaro by far-was nothing but a child in comparison. It was a thing too strange to credit. In all of the Kuburu, the accumulated legends of Zeum, the hero's exalted trait was always strength, skill, or passion-never intellect. A miraculously accurate archer. A miraculously ardent lover...

Never a miraculously penetrating thinker, one who used truth as his primary instrument of deception.

But why? Malowebi found himself asking. It was a puzzle that deepened as more and more of his brothers expressed their skepticism of The Compendium. "A cuckold's fancy," Likaro had sneered, thus confirming its veracity in Malowebi's more discriminating eyes.

Why should the notion of a Thought-dancer rest so uneasy in the souls of Men?

Because, the Mbimayu sorcerer realized, they made what they already believed the measure of what others believed. Not the World, and certainly not Reason. This was what rendered them blind to a being such as Anasurimbor Kellhus, one who could play on innumerable strands of thought and weave that agreement into designs of his making. It reminded him of a passage from Ajencis, a thinker he secretly esteemed more than Memgowa: "The world is a circle that has as many centres as it has men." For someone who assumed he was the centre of his world, the thought of a man who occupied the true centre, who need only walk into a room to displace all those present within it, had to be as odious as it was incomprehensible.

Was the Aspect-Emperor a prophet as he claimed? Was he a demon as Fanayal believed-Kurcifra? Or was he inhuman in a more mundane sense, the harbinger of a new race, the Dunyain, dreadful for the symmetry between their strength and human frailty...

A race of perfect manipulators. Thought-dancers.

If he were a prophet, then he and Mandate Schoolmen were right: the Second Apocalypse, despite what all the oracles and priests claimed, was evident, and Zeum should enter into an alliance with him. If he were a demon, then Zeum should arm for immediate war, now, before he achieved his immediate goals, for demons were simply Hungers from the abyss, insatiable in their pursuit of destruction.

And if he were Dunyain?

Malowebi did not believe in prophets. You must first believe in Men before you could do that, and no serious student of Memgowa or Ajencis could do that. Malowebi most certainly believed in possessing demons-he had seen them with his own eyes. But demons, for all their cunning, were never subtle, certainly not to the degree of the Aspect-Emperor. No demon could have written the magisterial lies told in the Novum Arcanum.

Dunyain... whatever that meant. The Aspect-Emperor had to be Dunyain.

The problem, the Mbimayu sorcerer had realized, was that this conclusion in no way clarified the dilemma facing his nation and his people. Would not a Dunyain bend all his effort and power to prevent his own destruction? Even without Drusas Achamian and his allegations, one could easily argue that Anasurimbor Kellhus was among the greatest intellects to walk the earth. What could induce such a man to tip the bowl of the entire Three Seas, drain it to its dregs, in the name of warring against a nursemaid's cruel tale?

Could these truly be the first days of the Second Apocalypse?

Nonsense. Madness.

But...

When his family first yielded him to the Mbimayu, the Pedagogue of the School had been an ancient soul named Zabwiri, a legendary scholar, and a rare true disciple of Memgowa. For whatever reason, the old man had chosen him to be his body-servant for his final, declining years-a fact that some, like Likaro, begrudged him still. An intimacy had grown between them, one that only those who care for the dying can know. The pain had become increasingly difficult for the old man to manage, toward the end. He would sit in his little garden, shivering in the sunlight, while Malowebi hovered helpless about him. "Question me!" he would bark with amiable fury. "Pester me with your infinite ignorance!"

"Master," Malowebi once asked, "what is the path to truth?"

"Ah, little Malo," old Zabwiri had replied, "the answer is not so difficult as you think. The trick is to learn how to pick out fools. Look for those who think things simple, who abhor uncertainty, and who are incapable of setting aside their summary judgment. And above all, look for those who believe flattering things. They are the true path to wisdom. For the claims they find the most absurd or offensive will be the ones most worthy of your attention."

Without fail the Mbimayu sorcerer's heart caught whenever he recalled these words: because he had loved Zabwiri, because of the way this answer embodied the wry, upside-down wisdom of the man. And now, because of the direction they pointed him...

The Aspect-Emperor a genuine prophet? The myths of the No-God's resurrection true?

These were the claims that Likaro found the most absurd and offensive. And in all the world there was no greater fool.

- - Horns were clawing the sky by the time she tripped clear of the tenement's gloom. Imhailas stood motionless in the middle of the street, his face raised in the blind way of those who peered after sounds.

The horns did not belong to either the Army or the Guard-yet she knew she had heard them before. They blared, climbed high and long enough to flush her heart with cold.

"What happens?" she asked her Exalt-Captain, who had not seen her, such was the intensity of his concentration.

He turned-looked at her with a fear she had never before seen in his face. A soldier's fear, not a courtier's.

"The horns..." he said, obviously debating his words. "The signals... They belong to the Shrial Knights."

Several heartbeats separated her soul from her dread. At first, all she could do was stare up into the man's beautiful face. She thought of the way his eyebrows arched just before he reached his bliss. "What are you saying?" she finally managed to ask.

He looked to what sky they could see between the dark facades looming to either side of them.

"They sound like they're coming from different parts of the city..."

"What are they signalling?"

He stood rigid. Beyond him, she could see several others down the winding length of the street, mulling and listening the same as they did.

"Imhailas! What are they signalling?"

He looked to her, sucked his lips tight to his teeth in an expression of deliberation.