“What does he me—?” Sorweel began asking the sorcerer, but the flash of warning in the man’s eyes silenced him. Scowling, Eskeles nodded toward the Aspect-Emperor. There … his expression said.

Look only there.

A breathless intensity slipped about the neck of the proceedings, a mingling of hope and anxiousness that Sorweel felt only as fear. Without exception, the assembly turned to the Anasûrimbor, so that all eyes reflected the white points of his otherworldly light. Only the twin demon heads, bound by their hair to the Anasûrimbor’s girdle, stared off in contrary directions.

The Aspect-Emperor floated out over the Table of Potentates, his legs still crossed, his simple white cassock the one thing gleaming to a fixed light. He moved so slowly that at first Sorweel blinked at the unreality of it. The Lords of the Ordeal followed his passage, angling their faces with near perfection, so that no shadows marred their features. Soft light combed through their beards and moustaches, shimmered across their finery. Something, a sub-audible rumbling, accompanied his movement, a noise like slow-sailing thunderheads.

Sorweel almost coughed with relief when the impossible figure veered to the opposite side of the pavilion. Soon the Anasûrimbor hung luminous before the shadowy Men, no more than two lengths away, scrutinizing them as he followed the tier’s line at a beetle’s crawl. Sorweel saw faces squint as though expecting a sudden blow. But most stared back with lunatic poise—some rejoicing, others proclaiming, and still others confessing—confessing above all.

Tear-scored cheeks shimmered in the passing light. Grown men, warlike men, wept in the wake of their sovereign’s divine passage …

The Aspect-Emperor paused.

The man beneath his gaze was an Ainoni, or so Sorweel guessed from the styling of his square-cut beard, ringlets about flattened braids. He sat on one of the lower tiers, and rather than descend, the Aspect-Emperor simply tilted in his floating posture to study him. The rings of light about his head and hands gilded the man’s face and shoulders with a patina of gold. The caste-noble’s dark eyes glittered with tears.

“Ezsiru,” the Aspect-Emperor began in a voice that seemed to coil about Sorweel’s ears, “ghusari histum mar—”

Leaning until his beard brushed Sorweel’s shoulder, Eskeles whispered, “Ezsiru, since your father, Chinjosa, kissed my knee during the First Holy War, ever has House Musammu been a bastion of the Zaudunyani. But the feud between you and your father has festered too long. You are too harsh. You do not understand the difference between the infirmities of youth and the infirmities of age. So you play father to your father, punish his weaknesses the way he once punished yours …”

One of the demon heads began opening and closing its white mouth like a fish. Horrified, Sorweel saw the glimmer of needle-teeth.

“Ezsiru, tell me, is it right that the father take the rod to the child?”

A throaty answer. “Yes.”

“Is it right that the child take the rod to the father?”