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?”

A pause that tugged a pang from the back of Sorweel’s throat. “No,” Ezsiru said, his voice pitched high through phlegm and sobbing.

“Love him, Ezsiru. Honour him. And always remember that old age is rod enough.”

Onward the Aspect-Emperor moved, floating no more than a length before pausing before another Lord of the Ordeal, this one Nilnameshi. “Avarartu … hetu kah turum pah—”

On and on it continued, each exchange at once momentary and interminable, as though the timelessness of the consequences had somehow soaked backward into the act. And in each case, nothing more than some human truth was summoned forth, as though the Anasûrimbor need only look into the face of one who stumbled to set every man in attendance upon sure footing. How the loss of a wife exempted you from the laws of manliness. How shame at being thought a fool made fools of us all in the end. How cruel natures corrupted piety into excuses to indulge their evil.

Truth. Nothing more than truth.