Only Samarmas could be...
Trusted.
Recoiling from these thoughts,
she turned to the others and pronounced the customary greeting, "Reap the
morrow." She felt Kelmomas's small fingers squeeze her palm.
"Reap the morrow,"
they intoned in response. Phinersa jumped to his feet with bandy-legged
alacrity. He was a brilliant but nervous man, one who could bloom and wilt in
the course of speaking a single sentence. He was one of those men who were far
too conscious of their own eyes. They had the habit of darting around the point
of your own, but more ritually than randomly, as though they followed some
formal rule of avoidance, rather than any instinctive antipathy to the prick of
contact. Those rare times he did manage a level gaze, it was with a penetration
and intensity that boiled away to nothing in a matter of heartbeats and left
you feeling at once superior and strangely exposed.
She found herself bending to
assist old Vem-Mithriti, the Grandmaster of the Imperial Saik, to his feet. He
smiled and murmured shamefaced thanks, more like a shrinking-voiced adolescent
than one of the most powerful Exalt-Ministers in the New Empire. Sometimes
Kellhus chose people for their wit and strength, as was the case with Phinersa,
and sometimes for their weakness. She often wondered whether old Vem was his
Gift to her, since Kellhus himself had no difficulty handling the wilful and
ambitious.
Maithanet, her brother-in-law
and the Shriah of the Thousand Temples, towered next to the two
Exalt-Ministers, dressed in a plain white tunic. The oiled plaits of his beard
gleamed like jet in the lantern light. His height and force of presence never
failed to remind Esmenet of her husband—the same light, only burning through
the sackcloth of a human mother.
"Thelli found it during a
surprise inspection of the new slaves," he said, his voice so deep and
resonant that it somehow blotted out the memory of the others. With a broad
gesture, he drew her eyes out over the balustrade to the iron apparatus several
lengths below...
Where it hung naked in a pose
reminiscent of the Circumfix: the skin-spy.
Slicked in perspiration, its
black limbs flexed against the iron brackets that clamped each of its
joints—wrists, elbows, shoulders, waist. Even so immobilized, it seemed to seethe somehow, as though reflexively testing various points of leverage. The
rusty grind and creak of the apparatus spoke to its ominous strength. Muscle
twined like braided snakes.
A single gold pin had been
driven into its skull, which, according to the arcane principles of
Neuropuncture, had forced the thing to unclench its face. Masticating limbs
waved where features should have been. They hooked the air like a dying crab,
some flanged with disconnected lips, others bearing a flaccid eyelid, a hanging
nostril, a furred swatch of brow. Perpetually shocked eyes glared from the
pulpy shadows between. Teeth glistened from bared gums.
Esmenet clenched her teeth
against the bile rising into her throat. Even after so many years, there was
something about the creatures, some violation of fundamentals, that struck her
to the visceral quick. As a reminder of the threat that loomed over her and her
family, she kept one of their skulls in her personal apartments. It had a great
hole where the eyes of a human would hang over the bridge of the nose. The rim
of the hole possessed sockets for each unnatural finger. And the fingers, which
some artisan had wired into a semblance of their natural pose, folded together
in elaborate counterpoise, some curved and interlocking across the forehead,
others bent into complex signs about the eyes, mouth, and nose. Every morning
she glanced at it—and found herself not so much afraid as convinced .
It had long since become an
argument for suffering her husband.
And now, here was another one,
wrapped in shining meat. One of the Consults most lethal weapons. A skin-spy. A
living justification. The
Trusted.
Recoiling from these thoughts,
she turned to the others and pronounced the customary greeting, "Reap the
morrow." She felt Kelmomas's small fingers squeeze her palm.
"Reap the morrow,"
they intoned in response. Phinersa jumped to his feet with bandy-legged
alacrity. He was a brilliant but nervous man, one who could bloom and wilt in
the course of speaking a single sentence. He was one of those men who were far
too conscious of their own eyes. They had the habit of darting around the point
of your own, but more ritually than randomly, as though they followed some
formal rule of avoidance, rather than any instinctive antipathy to the prick of
contact. Those rare times he did manage a level gaze, it was with a penetration
and intensity that boiled away to nothing in a matter of heartbeats and left
you feeling at once superior and strangely exposed.
She found herself bending to
assist old Vem-Mithriti, the Grandmaster of the Imperial Saik, to his feet. He
smiled and murmured shamefaced thanks, more like a shrinking-voiced adolescent
than one of the most powerful Exalt-Ministers in the New Empire. Sometimes
Kellhus chose people for their wit and strength, as was the case with Phinersa,
and sometimes for their weakness. She often wondered whether old Vem was his
Gift to her, since Kellhus himself had no difficulty handling the wilful and
ambitious.
Maithanet, her brother-in-law
and the Shriah of the Thousand Temples, towered next to the two
Exalt-Ministers, dressed in a plain white tunic. The oiled plaits of his beard
gleamed like jet in the lantern light. His height and force of presence never
failed to remind Esmenet of her husband—the same light, only burning through
the sackcloth of a human mother.
"Thelli found it during a
surprise inspection of the new slaves," he said, his voice so deep and
resonant that it somehow blotted out the memory of the others. With a broad
gesture, he drew her eyes out over the balustrade to the iron apparatus several
lengths below...
Where it hung naked in a pose
reminiscent of the Circumfix: the skin-spy.
Slicked in perspiration, its
black limbs flexed against the iron brackets that clamped each of its
joints—wrists, elbows, shoulders, waist. Even so immobilized, it seemed to seethe somehow, as though reflexively testing various points of leverage. The
rusty grind and creak of the apparatus spoke to its ominous strength. Muscle
twined like braided snakes.
A single gold pin had been
driven into its skull, which, according to the arcane principles of
Neuropuncture, had forced the thing to unclench its face. Masticating limbs
waved where features should have been. They hooked the air like a dying crab,
some flanged with disconnected lips, others bearing a flaccid eyelid, a hanging
nostril, a furred swatch of brow. Perpetually shocked eyes glared from the
pulpy shadows between. Teeth glistened from bared gums.
Esmenet clenched her teeth
against the bile rising into her throat. Even after so many years, there was
something about the creatures, some violation of fundamentals, that struck her
to the visceral quick. As a reminder of the threat that loomed over her and her
family, she kept one of their skulls in her personal apartments. It had a great
hole where the eyes of a human would hang over the bridge of the nose. The rim
of the hole possessed sockets for each unnatural finger. And the fingers, which
some artisan had wired into a semblance of their natural pose, folded together
in elaborate counterpoise, some curved and interlocking across the forehead,
others bent into complex signs about the eyes, mouth, and nose. Every morning
she glanced at it—and found herself not so much afraid as convinced .
It had long since become an
argument for suffering her husband.
And now, here was another one,
wrapped in shining meat. One of the Consults most lethal weapons. A skin-spy. A
living justification. The
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