When Kiampas and Feather concluded their business, the tall chieftain reached out to clasp forearms with Lord Kosoter. It struck Achamian as a formidable moment, two storied Scalpoi, each with their own aura of assassination, each garbed in tattered parodies of their nation’s battledress. It was the first time he had witnessed the Captain extend anything so precious as respect. With an enigmatic gesture, the chieftain returned to the trail, followed by the long line of his men. His manic blue eyes scraped across Achamian as he passed.
“They plan on camping on the low slopes,” Kiampas was saying to Lord Kosoter, “hunting, foraging …”
“What’s the problem?” Achamian asked.
Kiampas turned to him, his eyes smiling in an otherwise guarded expression, the triumphant look of a man who kept fastidious count of wins and losses. “A spring blizzard in the mountains,” he said. “We’re stuck here for at least two weeks, probably more.”
“What are you saying?” Achamian looked to the glaring Captain.
Kiampas was only too happy to respond. “That your glorious expedition has come to an end, Wizard. We can wait or we can hump round the Osthwai’s southern spur. Either way we’ve no hope of reaching Sauglish by summer’s end.” There was no mistaking the relief in his eyes.
“The Black Halls,” someone said in the tone of contradiction.
It was the Nonman, Cleric. He had his broad back turned to them, his cowl facing east, toward the nearest of the mountains to their right. His voice pimpled the skin, as much for its import as for its inhuman resonances. “There is another way through the mountains,” he continued, twisting his unseen face toward them. “A way that I remember.”
Achamian held his breath, understanding instantly what the Nonman was suggesting but too dismayed to truly consider the implications. Sarl snorted, as if hearing a joke beneath even his vulgar contempt.
Lord Kosoter studied his Nonman lieutenant, stared into the black oval with cryptic intensity.
“Are you sure?”
A drawn silence, filled by the guttural banter of the Thunyeri trudging behind them.
“I lived there,” Cleric said, “on the sufferance of my cousins, long ago … Before the Age of Men.”
“Are you sure you remember?”
The cowl bent earthward.
“They were … difficult days.”
The Ainoni nodded in grim deliberation.
“Captain?” Kiampas exclaimed. “You know the stories … Every year some fool leads his compa—”
Lord Kosoter had not looked at the sergeant until he mentioned the word fool. His eyes were interruption enough.
“The Black Halls it is, then!” Sarl exclaimed in a smoky cackle, the one he always used to blunt his Captain’s more murderous inclinations. He seemed to wheeze and laugh at each man in turn. “Kiampas! Can’t you see, Kiampas? We’re Skin Eaters, man—Skin Eaters! How many times have we talked about the Black Halls?”
“And what about the rumours?” the Nansur officer snapped, though with the wariness of a struck dog.
“Rumours?” Achamian asked.
“Bah!” Sarl cackled. “Men just can’t countenance mystery. If companies get eaten, they have to invent a Great Eater, no matter what.” He turned to Achamian, his face wrinkling in incredulity. “He thinks a dragon hides in the Black Halls. A Dragon!” He jerked his gaze back to Kiampas, red face thrust forward, knobby fists balled at his side. “Dragon, my eye! It’s the skinnies that get them. It’s the skinnies that get us all in the end.”
“Sranc?” Achamian asked, even though fire-spitting monstrosities heaved in his soul’s eye. How many Wracu had roared through his ancient dreams? “How can you be sure?”
“Because their clans make it through the mountains somehow,” Sarl replied, “especially in the winter. Why do you think so many scalpers risk the Black Halls in the first place?”
“I told you,” Kiampas persisted. “I met those two from Attrempus, survivors of the High Shields. I’m no fool when it comes—”
“Poofs!” Sarl spat. “Moppers! Trying to soak you for a drink! The High Shields were massacred on the long side of the mountains. Kiampas. Kiampas! Everyone knows that! The Long Side!”
The two sergeants glared at each other, Sarl in entreaty, like the son who always placates his father for his brother’s sake, and Kiampas in incredulous resentment, like the sole sane officer in a host of madmen—which was, Achamian reflected, not all that far from the case.
“We take the Low Road,” Lord Kosoter grated. “We enter the Black Halls.”
His tone seemed to condemn all humanity, let alone the petty dispute before him. The Nonman continued to stare off into the east, tall and broad beneath his mottled cowl. The mountain climbed the climbing ground beyond him, a white sentinel whispering with altitude and distance.
“Cleric says he remembers.”
Achamian returned to find Mimara fairly surrounded by Skin Eaters, most of them Bitten. She stood childlike in the looming presence of Oxwora and Pokwas, her look one of guarded good humour. She was careful to keep her face and posture directed toward the trail, as though she expected to leave their company at any moment, as well as to not look at any one of them for more than a heartbeat. He could tell she was frightened, but not in any debilitating way.
“So you’re Ainoni, then?”
“Small wonder the Captain’s smitten …”
“Maybe he’ll stop undressing us with his cursed eyes!”
The laughter was genuine enough to make Mimara smile, but utterly unlike the raucous mirth that was their norm. Soldiers, Achamian had observed, often wore thin skins in the presence of women they could neither buy nor brutalize. A light and careless manner, a gentle concern for the small things, stretched across a sorrow and an anger that no woman could fathom. And these men were more than soldiers, more than scalpers, even. They were Skin Eaters. They were men who led lives of uncompromising viciousness and savagery. Men who could effortlessly forget the dead rapist that had been their bosom friend.
And they would try to woo what they could not take.
“It’s as I thought,” Soma said as Achamian joined them. His look was amiable enough but with an edge that advised no contradictions. “She’s one of the Bitten as well!”
The smell of contrivance hung about all their looks. They had planned this, Achamian realized, as a way of luring the prize to their fire. The question was one of how far the covenant went.
“The Ochain Passes are closed,” he said. “Blizzard.”
He watched their faces struggle to find the appropriate expressions. There was comedy in all sudden reversals, a kind of immaterial nudity, to find your designs hanging, stripped of the logic that had been their fundament. Their carnal plots depended on the expedition, and the expedition depended on the Passes.
“The decision has been made,” he said, trying hard not to sound satisfied.
“We brave the Black Halls of Cil-Aujas.”
CHAPTER NINE
Momemn
A beggar’s mistake harms no one but the beggar. A king’s mistake, however, harms everyone but the king. Too often, the measure of power lies not in the number who obey your will, but in the number who suffer your stupidity.
—TRIAMIS I, JOURNALS AND DIALOGUES
Early Spring, 19 New Imperial Year (4132 Year-of-the-Tusk), Momemn
Her face seemed numb for tingling.
“Does he hear us, Mommy? Does he know?”
Esmenet clutched Kelmomas’s little hand so tight she feared she might hurt him. “Yes,” she heard herself say. The stone of the Ashery snared her words, held them close and warm, as though she spoke into a lover’s neck. “Yes. He’s the son of an earthly god.”
According to Nansur custom, the mother of a dead male child had to mark her face with her son’s ashes each full moon after the cremation: two lines, one down each cheek. Thraxami, they were called, tears-of-the-pyre. Only when her tears no longer darkened them could the rite cease. Only whe
n the weeping ended.
Even now, she could feel his residue across her cheeks, burning, accusing, as though transmuted, Samarmas had become antithetical to his mother, a kind of poison that her skin could not abide.
As though he had become wholly his father’s.
The tradition was too old, too venerated, to be contradicted. Esmenet had seen engravings of women marked with thraxami dating back to the early days of ancient Cenei, trains of them marching like captives. And in the ritual dramas the temples put on during Cultic festivals, mummers used black lines down a white-painted face to represent desolate women the way they used red horizontal lines, wurrami, to depict rage-maddened men. For the Nansur, thraxami were synonymous with mourning.
But where others kept their child’s remains in their household shrine, little Samarmas, as a Prince-Imperial, had been interred in the High Royal Ashery of the Temple Xothei. So once again, what was tender and private for others became rank spectacle for her. Thousands had mobbed the gates of the Imperial Precincts, and thousands more the foundations of mighty Xothei, a seething carnival of mourning and anticipation, mothers casting dust skyward and rending their hair, slaves loafing and gawking, boys jumping to snatch glimpses over grown shoulders, and many more. Even here, deep in the temple’s mazed bowel, she thought she could hear their anxious hum.
What would they say when they saw that her cheeks were dry? What would they make of an Empress who could not weep for the loss of her dearest child?
Illuminated only by the rare lamp, the walls of the Ashery seemed to hang in a greater black. Each of the niches spoke to the sensibilities of different ages and families. Some were garish with gilding and ornament, while others, like the adjacent niches of Ikurei Xerius and his nephew Ikurei Conphas, were simply chiselled into the raw stone, bereft of the marble facing that graced so many of the others. She tried not to ponder the irony of her son resting so close to Conphas, who had been the Nansurium’s last Emperor before the ascension of Kellhus. She likewise ignored the guttered votives and small bowl of grain that had been left on the sill of his niche.
Someday, she thought, all her children would rest in this immobile gloom. Static. Speechless. Someday, she would reside here, cool dust encased in silver, gold, or perhaps Zeümi jade—something cold, for all the substances that Men coveted were cold. Someday the heat of her would leach into the world, and she would be as dirt to the warm fingers of the living.
Someday she would be dead.
The relief that accompanied the thought was so sudden, so violent, that she almost audibly gasped. A confusion descended upon her, robbing her of memory and volition. She swayed, raised a hand to her blinking eyes. Then she found herself on the floor, sitting in a way that would have horrified her vestiaries it was so common, so undignified—no better than a whore hanging her legs from a window. She saw Kelmomas watching her, tried to smile reassurance. She leaned her head against the unyielding marble, the image of him lingering in her soul’s eye. Small. Defenceless. The very image of his dead twin.
She heard his voice.
“Mommy? Does he hear us?”
She simply could not stop seeing him, Samarmas, his blood clotting the grass, his body as small as a dog, slowly relaxing about the spear that pierced it, slowly drifting asleep. Every time she blinked.
Every time she looked upon this other son.
“I told you …”
“No … I mean when we think.” He was crying now, a desperate kind of hitching that made him bare his teeth. “D-does Sammy hear us when we think?”
She opened her knees and he fell into her arms, burned her neck with a muffled wail. And she saw—with grievous clarity, it seemed—that Samarmas’s death had sundered her soul in two, the one part numb and wondering, the other clinging to this child, this replica, as though trying to absorb his shudders.
How could she protect him? And if she could not, how could she love?
She laid her head across his scalp, blew at the hairs that stuck to the seal of her lips. Her cheeks were wet, but whether the tears were her own she could not tell. No matter. The mob would be appeased. Her Exalt-Ministers would be relieved, for the Yatwerian matter had become far more than a Cultic nuisance. Who would raise voice or hand against a bereaved mother? And Kellhus …
She was so tired. So weary.
“The dead hear everything, Kel.”
Iothiah …
A life lived, now forgotten.
And in its place …
A breeze as dry as hot ash. An airy room, clean with tile and paint, the floor canted to drain storm-waters. A woman in a simple linen shift, wedding young, her hair raven-dark, suckling an infant, smiling, asking something sweet and curious. Her head tipped, almond eyes flashing, poised to laugh at something soon to be said, a warm and gentle wit.
Peach-coloured walls trimmed in vining green.
A life forgotten …
Concern clouding her dark eyes. A quick glance at the infant against her breast, then again the question.
“Love? Are you okay?”
You look like you’re dreaming …
A doorway, open onto a vista of tan and blue—pale and soft and oceanic. A blue that does not hang close behind the nodding palms, but opens and opens to the white ribs of heaven. A blue like billowing cotton.
The threshold crossed. Then a courtyard where gnarled old slaves chase chickens. A young scullery girl staring, immovable save for her tracking gaze, her skin as brown as her broom handle.
The gate. The street.
The infant wailing now, swung from a frantic hip, the woman scolding, weeping, crying out: “What are you doing? What has happened?”
Wake up, please! You’re scaring me!
A slender clutch knocked aside by a strong, wide-waving arm. Steps taken. Distances rolled up into oblivion. A tugging from spaces unseen. The woman shrieking, “My love! My love, please!”
What have I done?
Two hundred and fifty-seven years before, a Shigeki builder had saved twenty-eight silver talents by purchasing burnt brick from farther up the River Sempis, where the clay was riddled with sand. Aside from the tan hue, the tenement he raised was indistinguishable from the others. Over the course of the following centuries, the flood-waters had twice risen high enough to lave the southernmost pylons. Though the damage appeared minimal, sheets of material had fallen from the base of the outermost support, lending it a gnawed look, which for some reason, seemed to attract urinating dogs.
It toppled exactly when it should, drawing with it an entire quadrant, collapsing four floors of apartments and crushing all the unfortunates within. There was a roar, a collective peal of screams punched into silence. Afterwards, dust sweeping out and up. The earthen clap and tinkle of raining bricks. Then streets packed with shouting passers-by.
The woman and the infant were gone.
A life forgotten …
The streets. Miraculous numbers. Miraculous movement, like threads of sand falling into and through one another without collision or redirection.
The alleyways. The rainbow awnings, cooling the dust, shielding the walking files, dimming the sun to a threaded glare.
The great agora.
A peacock walking holy and unmolested through a parting crowd, iridescent eyes shimmering from its plumage, blessing all those who took care not to match them. A man barking, his face bent low and dangerous, then slapping the boy who walked with him. The click of teeth in paste. Two old men scratching their heads and laughing, lips drawn across gums, over teeth like pieces of broken pottery. A distempered dog limping up the temple steps, crooning low through half-open jaws.
A life…
She sat in the dust with the other wretches, a listless row of them in the shade of a temple wall, palms raised to catch rain, infirmities folded beneath tattered cloth or festering in the haze of dust. Indecent with age, threshed of all compassion, she sat begging. She did not look at the passing to and fro of miserly shadows.
One thousan
d four hundred and twenty-two years before, a Scylvendi marauder had raped a Ceneian woman who had not the courage to take her life as was the tradition. She fled her family, fearing they would kill her to preserve their honour, and bore her child, a son, on the banks of the Great River Sempis. Now a descendant of that son tossed a halved coin exactly when he should, but carelessly, so that the bitten point spun from the outer edge of her thumb, causing her to look out and up …
An old woman’s paper blink.
Bent knees. The ground rising tidal. Strong hands reaching out for her wrist, drawing it up. Unseen lips against the heat of her palm. The smell of copper and skin.
An ancient look suddenly infantile with wonder.
“My name,” she whispered, “is Psatma Nannaferi.”
The pulse and fork of blood. A voice so close the speaker could not be seen. The pulse and fork of blood behind this place …
“I am the White-Luck … I walk. I breathe.”
“Yes,” she gasped, shaking her wizened head in affirmation. A soul, wrought of iron and cruelty, quivering like a maiden in the flower of her first bleeding. “W-we are siblings, you and I.”
Praise be our Mother.
“Siblings …”
A trembling hand held out to an unseen cheek. The pads of calloused fingers, touching nothing, spanning out as though across grease or paint. Tears cleansing an old woman’s eyes.
Tears for a life forgotten.
“So beautiful.”
Tears for what stood in its place.
Momemn …
Esmenet was standing before her great silvered mirror when she first glimpsed Kelmomas mooning in the shadowy corners of her dressing room, almost small enough to go unnoticed.
Morning light showered through the unshuttered balcony, so bright it seemed to render her apartments blinking dim beyond the glare it cast across the floor. She appraised her image with the negligent attention of those who spend too much time before mirrors, her thoughts far too occupied with points of strategy to care about her appearance. Maithanet and Phinersa had withdrawn but moments earlier, leaving her with innumerable “suggestions” on how to best disarm, overawe, or even intimidate Hanamem Sharacinth. She was due to meet with the Yatwerian Matriarch within the watch.