On my knees, I offer you that which flies in me. My face to earth, I shout your glory to the heavens. In so surrendering do I conquer. In so yielding do I seize.

—NEL-SARIPAL, DEDICATION TO MONIUS

Early Spring, 19 New Imperial Year (4132 Year-of-the-Tusk), Momemn

When Nel-Saripal, the famed Ainoni poet, finished copying the final revised verses of his epic retelling of the Unification Wars, Monius, he had his body-slave run the manuscript to a specially commissioned galley waiting in the harbour. Seventy-three days later it was delivered to his divine patroness, Anasûrimbor Esmenet, the Blessed Empress of the Three Seas, who grasped it the way a barren woman might grasp a foundling babe.

Nel-Saripal’s epic cycle would be read aloud the following morning with the entire Imperial Court in attendance. “‘Momemn,’” the orator began, “‘is the fist in our breast, the beating heart.’”

These words struck Esmenet as surely as a husband’s slap. Even the reader, the celebrated mummer Sarpella, faltered at their utterance, they seemed so obviously seditious. Whispers and serpentine glances were traded among those in attendance, and the Blessed Empress fumed behind her painted smile. To say that Momemn was the heart was to say that Momemn was the centre, the capital, something at once factual and laudable. But the word “fist,” did that not intimate violence? And to subsequently say that Momemn was the “beating” heart, did that not divide the meaning in troubling ways? Esmenet was no scholar, but after twenty years of rabid reading, she thought she knew something of words and their supernatural logic. Nel-Saripal was saying that Momemn maintained its power through brutality.

That it was a thug.

The poet was playing some kind of game—that much was obvious. Nevertheless, the elegance and imagistic splendour of the ensuing story quickly swept her away, and she decided to overlook what was at most a gesture to impertinence. What great artist failed to punish their patron? Afterwards she would decide that the insult was rather clumsy, no more subtle than the slit gowns worn by the Priestess-Whores of Gierra. Had Nel-Saripal been a greater poet, a rival to Protathis, say, the attack would have been more devious, more cutting—and well nigh impossible to punish. Monius would have been one of those deliciously barbed works, cutting those with the fingers to touch, and baffling the palms of all the others.