The motion was singular, abrupt with elegance. The skewer tip entered the sentry’s right tear duct and slipped into the centre of his head. The ease of penetration was almost alarming, like poking a nail into soft garden soil. Using the bone along the inner eye socket for leverage, Kelmomas wrenched the buried point in a precise circle. There was no need, he thought, to mutilate geometry as well.

He stepped to the side, his arm held high while the man toppled. The sentry’s face lolled to the left and turned almost upright as his weight yanked his skull clear the gleaming skewer. He twitched opened-eyed on the carpet, his fingers pawing the fabric like a purr-drunk kitten—but only for a heartbeat or two.

Kelmomas tugged the man’s knife from its sheaf.

The brass-strapped door was unlocked.

Cloth had been drawn over the windows, so that the light creaking in from the hallway was the room’s only illumination. “Hello?” somebody called—one of the body-slaves sleeping on the floor of the antechamber. The others awoke, leaned forward into the bar of light. Four altogether, blinking. At first, they seemed little more than disembodied faces, then, when he stepped among them, levitating howls. He hacked at them, striking along the interstices between flailing shadow-limbs. No game, it seemed, had ever been so thrilling. To not be tagged by skin or soiled by blood. To walk the cracks between heartbeats. To kill as though a wind, without any trace of passing.

The faces fell one by one, gushing like slashed wineskins.

The Matriarch was quite awake by the time the little boy slipped into her bedroom. “Tweet!” he trilled. “Tweet-tweet!” His giggling was uncontrollable …

Almost as much as her shrieking.

Anasûrimbor Esmenet casually dismissed the four Shrial Knights they found standing rigid in the hallway, looked around sourly at the ostentatious decor—anything but the dead Yatwerian sentry slumped across the carpet. In the Ikurei days, guests had been housed within the Andiamine Heights, something that simply wasn’t possible given the greater administrative demands of the New Empire. The Guest Compound was one of the Holy Dynasty’s first works, raised in the heady days before the fall of Nilnamesh and High Ainon, when Kellhus seemed to hold the world’s own reins within his haloed fists. The marble, with its distinctive blue bruising, had been transported all the way from quarries in Ce Tydonn. The towering panels, each depicting heroic scenes from the Unification Wars in relief, had been drafted by Niminian himself and carved by the most renowned Nansur stonemasons.

All to the glory of the Aspect-Emperor.

She had no desire to revisit the carnage beyond the threshold. Esmenet had witnessed her fair share of death, perhaps more than any woman in the Three Seas, but she had no stomach for murdered faces.