He felt a tickle in his throat. How long had it been since their last visitor?
In the beginning, when it had just been him and Geraus, only the Sranc had come. He had lost count of how many times he had lit up the hillside with the Gnosis, sending the vile creatures howling back into the forest deeps. Every tree within bowshot carried some scar of those mad battles: A sorcerer poised on the edge of a half-ruined tower, raining brilliant destruction down on fields of what looked like raving, white-skinned apes. Geraus still suffered nightmares. Afterwards, with the end of the Unification Wars, it had been the Scalpoi, the innumerable Men—Galeoth, Conriyans, Tydonni, Ainoni, even Kianene—who had come to collect the Aspect-Emperor’s bounty on Sranc scalps. For years it seemed some blood-mad camp of theirs lay within a day’s distance of them. And on more than a few occasions, Achamian had to resort to the Gnosis to cut short their drunken depredations. But even they moved on after time, hunting their vicious prizes into the wilderness’s truly primeval deeps. Periodically a troop of them would happen upon the tower, and if they were hungry or otherwise broken by the horrors of their trade, some kind of woe was certain to follow. But then even they ceased coming.
So what had it been? Five, maybe six years since the last visitor had climbed to the foot of their tower?
It had to be. That long at least. There had been those two starving Scalpoi who had come shortly after Geraus had taken Tisthanna for his wife, but after? Certainly not since the last of the children had been born.
No matter, the rule had been simple over the years: Visitors meant grief, the Gods and their laws of hospitality be damned.
Holding hands with one of the girls, the nameless woman came to a friendly stop before Tisthanna, bowed her head in greeting—precisely how far Achamian couldn’t tell because of an obscuring tree limb, though it seemed the inclination proper to caste-menials. He could see her boots through a brace of budding twigs, the toe of her left absently scuffing the winter-flat leaves; they were every bit as fine as her ermine-trimmed cloak.
Perhaps she was only equipped like a caste-noble.
Craning his head, he leaned out perilously far, to the point of breaking out in a cold sweat, but to no effect. He heard Tisthanna’s whinnying laugh, and it relieved him—somewhat. Tisthanna was nothing if not sensible.
Then the two women were walking side by side into the clearing that encircled the tower’s foundation, talking loudly enough to be overheard, but in that close, feminine tone that seemed to baffle masculine ears. Nodding at something, Tisthanna, her blonde hair stacked upon her apple-round face, looked up and gestured to him in the window. Achamian, who leaned stooped out like yard and tackle, tried to pull himself into a more dignified posture. His left foot slipped. The sill-stone beneath his left palm cracked free the rotten mortar—
He nearly followed it clacking down.
Tisthanna let loose an involuntary “Ooop!” then chortled as Achamian, his long white beard dragging along the stones, carefully palmed his way back to safety.
“Mast-Master Akka!” the children called out in a broken chorus.
The stranger looked up, her delicate face bemused and open and curious …
And something in Achamian suffered a greater fall.
There is a progression to all things. Madness, miracles, even dreams broken into their most feverish extremes follow some thread of association. The unexpected, the astonishing, are always the effect of ignorance, no matter how absolute they may seem. In this world, everything has its reasons.
“So,” she said, her tone balanced between many things, hope and sarcasm among them, “the Great Wizard.”
There was a strangeness to her, something like the stare of children with ill-mannered smiles.
“What are you doing here?” Achamian snapped.
He had sent Tisthanna and the children away and now stood with the woman in the sunlight to the lee of the tower, on the broad white stone the children called the Turtle Shell. For years they had been drawing on it with the tips of burnt sticks: grotesque faces, oddly affecting pictures of trees and animals, and, lately, the letters Achamian had taught them to write. There was an order to the drawings, with the steadier lines of symbol and verisimilitude struck across the pale remnants of fancy, like the record of the soul’s long, self-erasing climb.
She had instinctively sought out the highest point—something that inexplicably irritated him. She was short, obviously lithe beneath her leather and woollens. Her face was dark, beautiful, with the colour and contours of an acorn. Save for the green irises and a slight elongation of the jaw, she was exactly as he remembered her …
Except that he had never seen her in his life.
Was she the reason why Esmenet had betrayed him? Was she why his wife—his wife!—had chosen Kellhus over a sorcerer, a broken-hearted fool, all those years ago?
Not because of the child she carried, but because of the child she had lost?
The questions were as inevitable as the pain, the questions that had pursued him beyond civilization’s perfumed rim. He could have continued asking them, he could have yielded to madness and made them his life’s refrain. Instead he had packed a new life about them, like clay around a wax figurine, then he had burned them out, growing ever more decrepit, ever more old, about their absence—more mould than man. He had lived like some mad trapper, accumulating skins that were furred in ink instead of hair, the lines of his every snare anchored to this silent hollow within him, to these questions he dared not ask.
And now here she stood … Mimara.
The answer?
“I wondered if you would recognize me,” she said. “I prayed you would, in fact.”
The morning breeze sifted through the dark edges of her hair. After so much time spent in the company of Norsirai women, Achamian found himself struck by memories of his mother and sisters: the warmth of their olive cheeks, the tangle of their luxurious black hair.
He rubbed his eyes, dragged fingers through his unkempt beard. Shaking his head, he said, “You look like your mother … Very much.”
“So I’m told,” she said coolly.
He held out a hand as though to interrupt her, then lowered it just as quickly, suddenly conscious of its knob-knuckled age. “But you never answered me. What are you doing here?”
“Searching for you.”
“That much is obvious. The question is why.”
This time the anger shone through, enough to make her blink. Achamian had never stopped expecting the assassins, whether sent by the Consult or the Aspect-Emperor. But even still, the world beyond the horizon’s rim had grown less and less substantial over the years. More abstract. Trying to forget, trying not to hear when your deepest ears were continually pricked was almost as difficult as trying to hate away love. At first nothing, not even holding his head and screaming could shut out the murderous bacchanal. But somehow, eventually, the roar had faded into a rumble, and the rumble had trailed into a murmur, and the Three Seas had taken on the character of a father’s legendary exploits: near enough to be believed, distant enough to be dismissed.
He had found peace—real peace—waging his strange nocturnal war. Now this woman threatened to overthrow it all.
He fairly shouted when she failed to answer. “Why?”
She flinched, looked down to the childish scribble at her feet: a gaping mouth scrawled in black across mineral white, with eyes, nose, and ears spaced across its lipless perimeter.
“B-because I wanted …” Something caught her throat. Her eyes shot up, as though requiring an antagonist to remain focused. “Because I wanted to know if …” Her tongue traced the seam of her lips.
“If you were my father.”
His laughter felt cruel, but if was such, she showed no sign of injury—no outward sign.
“Are you sure?” she asked, blank in voice and expression.
“I met your mother sometime after …”
In a blink Achamian had seen it all, written in a language n
ot so different from the charcoal scrawlings beneath their feet. It was inevitable that Esmenet would do this, that she would use all her power as Empress to recover the child she had forbidden him to mention all those years ago … To find the girl whose name she would never speak.
“You mean after she sold me,” the girl said.
“There was a famine,” he heard himself reply. “She did what she did to save your life, and forever wrecked herself as a result.”
He knew these were the wrong words before he finished speaking. Her eyes suddenly became old with exhaustion, with the paralysis that comes from hearing the same hollow justifications over and over again.
The fact that she refused to reply to them said it all.
Esmenet had recovered her some time ago—that much was obvious. Her manner and inflection were too studied, too graceful, not to have been honed over years in the court. But it was just as obvious that Esmenet had found her too late. The damaged look. The rim of desperation.
Hope was ever the great foe of slavers. They beat it from your lips, then they pursued it past your skin. Mimara, Achamian knew, had been hunted to the ground—many, many times.
“But why do I remember you?”
“Look—”
“I remember you buying me apples—”
“Child. It wasn’t—”
“The street was busy, loud. You were laughing because I kept smelling mine instead of biting. You said that little girls shouldn’t eat through their nose, that it wasn’t—”
“It wasn’t me!” he exclaimed. “Look. The daughters of whores …”
She flinched once again, like a child startled by a snapping dog. How old would she be? Thirty summers? More? Nonetheless, she looked like the little girl she said she remembered, joking about apples on a crowded street.
“The daughters of whores …” she repeated.
Achamian gazed at her, filled to his fingertips, suffused by an anxious prickle.
“Have no fathers.”
He had tried to say this as gently as he could, but in his ears his voice had grown too harsh with age. The sun limned her in gold, and for a moment she seemed a native of the morning. She lowered her face, studied the lines scraped about them, etched in burnt black. “You said that I was clever.”
He ran a slow hand across his face, exhaled, suddenly feeling ancient with guilt and frustration. Why must everything be too big to wrestle, too muddy to grasp?
“I feel sorry for you, child—I truly do. I have some notion of what you must have endured …” A deep breath, warm against the bright cool. “Go home, Mimara. Go back to your mother. We have no connection.”
He turned back toward the tower. The sun instantly warmed his shoulders.
“But we do,” her voice chimed from behind him—so like her mother’s that chills skittered across his skin.
He paused, lowered his head to curse his slippered feet. Without turning, he said, “It’s not me you remember. What you believe is your affair.”
“But that’s not what I mean.”
Something in her tone, the windy suggestion of a snicker or a laugh, forced him to look back. Now the sun drew a line down her centre, violated only by the creases of her clothing, whose contours smuggled light and dark this way and that. The wilderness rose behind her, far more pale but likewise divided.
“I can distinguish between the created and uncreated,” she said with something between embarrassment and pride. “I am one of the Few.”
Achamian whirled, scowling both at her and the brightness.
“What? You’re a witch?”
A deliberate nod, made narrow by a smile.
“I didn’t come here to find my father,” she said, as though everything until now had been nothing but cruel theatre. “Well … I thought you might be my father, but I really didn’t … care … that much, I think.” Her eyes widened, as though turning from the inner to the outer on some invisible swivel.
“I came to find my teacher. I came to learn the Gnosis.”
There it was, her reason.
There is a progression to all things. Lives, encounters, histories, each trailing their own nameless residue, each burrowing into a black, black future, groping for the facts that conjure purpose out of the cruelties of mere coincidence.
And Achamian had had his fill of it.
She sees his face slacken, despite the matted wire of his beard. She sees his complexion blanch, despite the sun’s morning glare. And she knows that what her mother once told her is in fact true: Drusas Achamian possesses the soul of a teacher.
So the old whore didn’t lie.
Almost three months have passed since her flight from the Andiamine Heights. Three months of searching. Three months of hard winter travel. Three months of fending against Men. She travelled inland as much as possible, knowing that the Judges would be watching the ports, that their agents would be ranging the coastal roads, hungry to please her mother, their Holy Empress. It seems a miracle whenever she recalls it. That time in the high Cepalor when the wolves paced her step for weary step, little more than feral ghosts through the soundless snowfall. The mad ferryman at the Wutmouth crossing. And the brigands, who tracked her only to turn away when they saw the caste-noble cut of her clothes. There was fear in the land, fear everywhere she turned, and it suited her and her needs well.
She spent innumerable watches lost in revery during this time, her soul’s eye conjuring visions of the man she secretly named her father. When she arrived, it seemed that everything was the way she imagined it. Exactly. A lonely hillside spilling skyward, trees scarred with sorcery’s dread murmur. An even lonelier stone tower, a makeshift roof raised across its collapsed floors, grasses growing from rotten-mortar seams. Stacked-stone outbuildings, with their heaped wood, drying fish, and stretched pelts. Slaves who smiled and talked like caste-menials. Even children skipping beneath great-boughed maples.
Only the sorcerer surprises her, probably because she has expectations aplenty of him. Drusas Achamian, the Apostate, the man who turned his back on history, who dared curse the Aspect-Emperor for love of her mother. True, he seemed entirely different in each of the lays sung about him, even in the various tales told by her mother, by turns stalwart and doubt-ridden, learned and hapless, passionate and cold-handed. But it was this contradictory nature that had so forcefully stamped his image in her soul. In the cycle of historical and scriptural characters that populated her education, he alone seemed real.
Only he isn’t. The man before her seems to mock her soft-bellied imaginings: a wild-haired hermit with limbs like barked branches and eyes that perpetually sort grievances. Bitter. Severe. He bears the Mark, as deep as any of the sorcerers she has seen glide through the halls of the Andiamine Heights, but where they drape silks and perfume about their stain, he wears wool patched with rancid fur.
How could anyone sing songs about such a man?
His eyes dull at the mention of the Gnosis—the inward look of concealed pity, or so it seems. But when he speaks, his tone is almost collegial, except that it’s hollow.
“Is it true, what they say, that witches are no longer burned?”
“Yes. There’s even a new School.”
He does not like the way she says that word, “School.” She can see it in his eyes.
“A School? A School of witches?”
“They’re calling themselves the Swayal Compact.”
“Then what need do you have of me?”
“My mother will not allow it. And the Swayali will not risk her Imperial displeasure. Sorcery, she says, leaves only scars.”
“She’s right.”
“But what if scars are all you have?”
This, at least, gives him pause. She expects him to ask the obvious question, but his curiosity seems bent in a different direction.
“Power,” he says, glaring at her with an intensity she does not like.
“Is that it? You want to feel the world crumble beneath the weight of your voice.”
r /> She knows this game. “Was that how it was for you in the beginning?”
His glare seems to falter over some inner fact. But it means less than nothing, winning arguments. The same as with her mother.
“Go home,” he says. “I would sooner be your father than your teacher.”
There is set manner to the way he turns his back this time, one that tells her that no words can retrieve him. The sun pulls his shadow long and profound. He walks with a stoop that says he has long outlived the age of bargaining. But she hears it all the same, the peculiar pause of legend becoming actuality, the sound of the crazed and disjoint seams of the world falling flush.
He is the Great Teacher, the one who raised the Aspect-Emperor to the heights of godhead. Despite his words to the contrary.
He is Drusas Achamian.
That night she builds a bonfire not because she means to, but because she cannot overcome the urge to burn down the Wizard’s tower. Since this is impossible, she begins—quite without thinking—to burn it in effigy. After throwing each hewn branch, she stands so that the walls appear to rise miniature from the crackling incandescence, crouching just enough for the flames to garland the little window where she thinks he sleeps.
When she’s finished, she stands in its blazing presence, takes comfort in the stink of her exertions, and tells herself the fire is in fact a living thing. She does this quite often: pretends that worldly things are magic, even though she knows otherwise. It reminds her that sorcery is something she can see.
That she is a witch.
She scarcely notices the first drops of rain. The fire seems to beat them into steam, to lap them from her clothing and skin with invisible tongues. Lightning flashes, so bright the flames become momentarily invisible. Then the black heavens open up. The surrounding forest lets loose a vast white roar.