Sermon 2
The star-soul of Ayem wound its way to the world, to an unexpected place: the jade-petaled palace of Veloth's king. In an amber-domed pleasure garden slept his least-favourite concubine. And Ayem, who is the shape of mercy, chose this vessel.
Awakening, the concubine found her belly swollen with life everlasting.
"Be not afraid," said the egg-image of Ayem.
And the concubine did wail and gnash her teeth, for rarely do people behave as they should.
Her cries summoned a flock of gem-arrayed eunuchs. They fell before the concubine.
"Mistress Kundali, what troubles you?"
Kundali stood, displaying her belly. The eunuchs twittered, for any concubine bearing the king's child was a sacred thing, a walking chalice.
"We must inform the king at once," said a eunuch.
And Kundali smiled, for petty things pleased her.
"Do not be seduced," said Ayem. "Their applause is empty as the abyss of time which swallows us all."
But Kundali paid no heed, for truth is painful.
Thus the eunuchs did raise their voices in wisp-thin song, and this thread of sound entangled about the palace, till the glass statues in the Hall of Beauty trembled and wept rain.
The eunuchs bore Kundali aloft on a chitin-wrought palanquin, banging cymbals and drums. This aroused the interest of the other concubines. They lined Kundali's procession, hard-eyed, radiant in their rage. They seethed silently, for all knew Kundali to be the least-favourite concubine. She smirked at her false-sisters and they wrenched their lips into the facsimile of smiles, dabbed at ghost-tears. Even though every woman wished to feast on Kundali's heart, they adopted the mask of friend. Thus does propriety conquer the primal urge, the purpose of all civilizations.
Kundali was carried into the Purple Chamber, the womb-room where all true heirs are born in blood. The eunuchs moved their slender limbs in ancient dance, bangles jangling. The jealous concubines began a fertility chant, but they watered the words with bitterness, longing for bad seed. The eunuchs stamped their feet, ankle bells clanging, and laid Kundali upon a bed of spider-silk. They cooled her brow with netch milk, dusted her body with gold and the crushed bones of ancestral tyrants. The concubines chant became a drone which contained the throbbing syllable of universal annihilation. Ayem hummed along, and her mother gasped and quivered, for even as an egg-image Ayem's voice held possibility.
A diamond-pierced eunuch ran into the Purple Chamber.
"The king comes! The king comes!"
And the concubines grew silent. Ayem captured the resonance of their chant and preserved it for a deaf day. The eunuchs assumed the position of submission, grinding jewelled foreheads in the dust. And Kundali writhed and moaned, for she carried not one child but 99-made-one, and all the crystal memories of vanished stars.
The king entered, flanked by banners bearing his imagined lineage. Courtiers pressed around him, plumage immaculate and derivative. Approaching his least-favourite concubine, he frowned at the star-bright sweat stippling her body. He pulled his veil up, and whispered into the scented fabric, "I like her not."
But Ayem heard, and Ayem remembers.
The ending of the words is ALMSIVI.