“Please,” the Mandate Grandmaster said, his smile revealing teeth that were far too even. He spoke, Achamian could not help but think, like a man struggling to awaken. “Things will go better if we speak plainly.”
It boggled to think, but decades had passed since he had last suffered the company of the wise. There’s a difference that learning makes, a manner the vulgar are apt to distrust, even despise. Apperens Saccarees, the old Wizard very quickly realized, was enduring him.
The old Wizard pursed his lips, exhaled. Everything, it seemed, reeked of tragedy—and hope.
“A shadow lies across this place.”
The Grandmaster shrugged as if at errant absurdity. “We make preparations to assault Golgotterath, recall.”
“No. Something ails you. Something ails all of you.”
Saccarees looked down to his thumbs.
“Think of the ground you stand upon, Wizard.”
Achamian frowned scoffing. “You’ve slept upon this ground every night of your life.”
“Yes, but we quite literally marched across the World to get here this time, didn’t we?”
Achamian blinked away images of himself swatting the fool.
“Why has Proyas been condemned to die?”
Had he learned something? Had he seen through Kellhus somehow?
Again the Grandmaster hesitated. Despite his urgency, Achamian found himself conceding that Saccarees was, when all was said and done, a good man …
For it was plain that shame had conquered something in him.
The Grandmaster flattened his expression. “How is it, do you think,” he asked, speaking to an abstract point to the right, “that so many Men have managed to journey so far?”
The old Wizard scowled, understanding the riddle, but resenting the misdirection.
“They walked … same as me.”
The sneer of someone who has hung from his limits for too long. “And what, pray-tell did you use to nourish your steps?”
Achamian had frequented enough opium dens during his years in Carythusal to know well the expression that lay cold as a claw upon his face. He had seen it many times on many addicts, the look, the one that raises fury and outrage to a perilous height, then dares others to risk the truth.
“What,” the Mandate Grandmaster pressed, “did you eat?”
Cu’jara Cinmoi …
“Forage.”
Then Nil’giccas.
“And what forage, do you think, the Great Ordeal had available?”
So it came to the old Wizard at last, the doom he and Mimara had tripped into.
Two eunuchs minister to her. Both are damned.
She had been pampered as a slave, cosseted and beaten. She had been pampered as an Anasûrimbor, coddled and spurned. Perfume and silk and fussing hands had hung upon her every whim, maddening her from time to time, but comforting her far more. Even now, seeing the Judgment dwelling within all things, glimpsing demons clawing the false smiles and anxious looks, she takes refuge in the absurdity of other hands doing what her hands could plainly do.
She is waiting, she realizes.
Waiting for the Judging Eye to close.
It refuses.
Apparently water was in short supply, so they cleanse her with wetted cloth. Save for the odd murmured instruction, the eunuchs do not speak, leaving the air to the supple sounds of water and fabric. They have a stunned, astonished air about them, a desperation that has wrung all routine from their task. They do what they do with a religious intensity.
As they should, given the outrages they have committed.
With clean hands and soiled hearts, they daub and wipe the filth from her skin. She marvels at her nudity in the lantern-light, at the great sphere of her belly. After a muttered exchange in some Buskritic dialect, they elect to garb her in a silk tunic—belonging, no doubt, to her stepfather—embroidered white upon white with innumerable thorn-sized tusks. It fairly drapes to her ankles. An overrun fraction of her soul mourns the tent pitched by the mound of her belly, but only for a heartbeat. It is proper that she wear white.
One of them produces a silvered shield in lieu of a mirror, but she turns her face aside, not for the bulbous and elongated character of her reflection, but for the blinding glare of holiness. She bids them fetch her ensorcelled hauberk, her belt and Emilidic blade, her Chorae, and of course, the pouch containing Nil’giccas. She can smell her journey on these things, the tang of Lord Kosoter and the Skin-Eaters, the dank of Cil-Aujas and the Mop, the sweet reek of Ishuäl and the Library of Sauglish.
She avoids looking into their faces. She feels neither remorse nor pity.
A Pillarian wearing tatters of green, filth, and gold is waiting for her beyond the chamber flap: Meerskatu, Exalt-Captain of the Pillarians. He bites his lip like a disordered child, leads her without explanation down the leather-panelled corridor. He presses open a flap branded with elaborate scenes drawn from the Tusk and the First Holy War. She glimpses her step-father hanging from the Circumfix in Caraskand.
She thinks of Achamian, suffers a pang of worry.
Meerskatu gestures for her to enter. “Truth shines,” he says, working his mouth peculiarly. The Eye glimpses the groins his teeth have savaged.
She gazes at him in horror, unable to speak for revulsion. He fairly flees from her presence, somehow sensing, knowing.
She presses past the images of things dead and holy, finds herself in an antechamber of some kind. A second flap stamped with similar motifs lies opposite. A single lantern peers through the gloom, illuminating a haphazard tangle of Imperial baggage. Her skin tingles. To be cleansed, she thinks, is to be less real.
Light gleams across a thatch of golden thread, drawing her eye to what appears to be a heavy blanket crumpled across a cot—a kind of field settee to her right. She walks toward it, savouring the feeling of fabric beneath her toes. A terror leaps upon the summit of her breath. Her throat aches.
She clutches the blanket, draws it out like a matron inspecting wares in the market. For a time she draws no breath whatsoever.
The blanket is actually a small ornamental tapestry, supple for the extraordinary quality of the weave. The tapestry itself she has seen before, she realizes. It once hung in the Sartorials, the imperial feast hall near the summit of the Andiamine Heights. But the image … that she has seen much more recently.
It seems she can even smell it, the moss and rotting bark, the air choked of all motion—the Mop.
A dank socket between trees. A rare shaft of moonlight. Her own reflection across a black pool … only transformed by the Eye into the very image she now holds in her hands …
A pregnant woman, her cropped hair all the more black for the plate of brilliant silver about her head.
Blessed.
She hears the whisk and ruffle of the far flap—freezes.
“Who are you?”
A feminine voice, husky for disuse, too exhausted to be alarmed.
Her extremities tingle. She cannot bring herself to turn. She cannot bear to look …
A curse, Achamian said so very long ago. The Eye is a curse.
At last she understands.
“Mim?”
Her hands wring the fabric. The air buzzes about her ears, daring her to breathe.
Breath drawn, as if at a sudden cut. “Mimara?”
She turns, though all her will clamours against it. She turns, the very hinge of absolute judgment, a little girl pitched to sorrow’s sobbing edge.
“Momma …”
More gasp than voice.
There she stands before her, Anasûrimbor Esmenet, the Blessed Empress of the Three Seas. Haggard. Palace-pale. A rose-silk sheet clutched to her breast …
Dark with the writhing, straining shadows of countless carnal transgressions.
Glowing with the promise of paradise.
Tears … An inarticulate cry.
Tears.
Sorweel wasn’t sure when she had slipped into the squalid interior of his tent,
but then he himself had no recollection of entering. Anasûrimbor Serwa stooped to the bellied slope of the canvas, bound in her Swayali billows, carved in the ink and gold of his solitary lantern.
“Zsoronga was your friend,” she said, peering with the same impervious mien as her elder brother. But he no longer feared her scrutiny. At long last he trusted that she would see what was required of her.
“My father murdered him.”
The otherworldly density of her presence disoriented, especially in such base surroundings.
“Executed,” the youth emended, “in accordance with the terms of the treaty struck between Zeum and the Empire.” He glanced at the wild old hermit over his shoulder, sobbing and raving as he did.
She crouched, her knees pinned tight by her gown, clutched his shoulders, and he jolted (as he had always jolted) at the shock of her touch, the miracle of her proximity. The scent of cinnamon.
She clutched his shoulders, and he leapt in his skin.
“How can you say this?” she demanded.
“I will die to protect you …” Mu’miorn whispered, wiping away tears.
She clutched his shoulders, and he clawed at the brutal hand about his throat, swatted and convulsed for the pummelling hips, the jetting seed, looping cursive upon his skin …
He stared at the white point, light conjured from the fat of skinnies, awaiting her arrival. He looked up, and saw her kneeling before him, beseeching—as far as the daughter of any demon could beseech.
“Sorweel? How is it you still believe?”
He knew not her motive. He knew not whether she entertained suspicions or genuinely cared for his well-being. He knew only that she saw the face the Dread Mother had prepared for her …
The expression of a Believer-King.
The details of her beauty arrested him, the saddle of freckles about the bridge of her nose, the whitening of her brows from dark roots, the profile of the Empress on the Kellic …
The sunburnt pallor of the Accursed Aspect-Emperor.
“Does it matter, Serwa?”
The Son of Harweel gazed into her imploring face, watched the openness of it tumble as from a parapet, falling into Imperial obscurity. He started at her clutch, the heat of her palms. He watched her bolt from the squalid confines.
“To shield what is weak,” Mu’miorn cooed.
The assurance of a kiss, her face so close, then pitching back and away, dwindling, vanishing into the nocturnal nations. The scent of cinnamon. He sat, so very far from alone. He squinted for sunlight. He peered across the assembled Believer-Kings and their vassals, the battered glory of the Three Seas. He turned and saw her singing, luminance flaring from eyes rounded by horror. He smiled, stepped into the glittering violence of her lights …
While all around the darkling World heaved and danced, the Southron Kings howling at the pillar of salt that had been her father.
Do you see, my sweet?
Skinnies. The Great Ordeal had consumed their foe. Sranc.
He should have run screaming to find Mimara, but the Grandmaster’s story, when he began it, compelled him, held him riven with dismay. Dagliash. The Scalding. The Scalded.
“But you were there!” Achamian finally cried. “You could have counselled them! Told them what was happening!”
Laughter, sneering not so much out of condescension as self-loathing. “We all thought ourselves Seswatha! Mandati. Swayali … Any who had clasped the Heart!”
And so he learned of the Meat and the nightmare that was Agongorea—how the Sranc had very nearly conquered the Men of the Ordeal from within. He listened blank with incredulity as the Mandate Grandmaster, his voice harrowed, described the crimes he and his brothers had committed. Saccarees’ second mention of the Scalded occasioned a long silence.
“What are you saying?”
A long exhalation. A grimace for a smile.
“We fell upon them, Wizard … Proyas commanded it, claimed that it was the will of our Holy Aspect-Emperor! ‘What Hell hath cooked for us!’ he cried. I remember it … like another mad Dream, I remember. ‘We must eat what Hell hath cooked for us!’”
A shudder wracked the Grandmaster. He glared at nothing for one heartbeat … two.
“We fell upon them, the leprous wretches, the Scalded. We fell upon them the way … the way … Sranc would fall—and worse! We-we … feasted … Gloried in … obscenities … degradations …”
The man snorted in sudden, convulsive disgust, thumbed the tears from his eyes.
“That is why Proyas dies.”
The little Prince-Imperial asphyxiated for dismay. How? Here of all places …
You should have killed her!
And now of all times!
Kelmomas had lain next to his mother in the pretense of sleep, probing the leather-chambered complexity of the Umbilicus with his hearing. As far back as he could remember, his impulse was to own the detail of his circumstances, to know the ways, the souls, and the objects that populated his surroundings. He had known that someone had arrived, someone significant enough to send ripples of activity throughout the Umbilicus—and to command the reverence belonging to him and his family. He had heard the incredulity the arrival had evoked. He had even caught wayward tones of disapproval …
But for all that the newcomer had refused to speak.
He had lain listening and waiting, and waiting, but nothing, not a word, nothing that would betray identity. He decided it couldn’t be Kayûtas—his elder brother was far too fond of testing his voice. It could very well be Moënghus, who was given to long, sullen silences, but his fearsome aspect would have cast a wary shadow across the voices of those tending to him. That left his sister, Serwa, who had always unnerved him, not so much for her native penetration as her scrying attitude. Where others forever glossed their surroundings, she had a habit of peering at things near …
She was like him, that way.
Then the guardsmen showed the newcomer to their chambers, and upon hearing the quaver in the Exalt-Captain’s voice—the horror that was guilt and awe—Kelmomas knew instantly and irrevocably that someone other than Serwa had been delivered to them—someone impossible. He had lain reeling, so preoccupied with outrage that he failed to sense Mother stir. He almost cried out when she climbed upright, pulled herself to groggy feet. Instead, he lay slack in the pretense of slumber, knowing that she regarded him, blinking at the bleary turmoil that so disordered her heart. A pang of adoration throttled by grief and monstrous disbelief … he could almost smell it.
See! She still loves!
He would have exulted, twitched and cooed as if suffering some onerous nightmare, affected the semblance of a child not so much bent by birth as afflicted by happenstance. For everything he had done, he had done out of love for her. Even Father had seen it, attested to it!
She would see! She had to!
She turned on an audible shiver, and trotted from the chamber as if across cold floors. She needed to make water, the young Prince-Imperial realized.
He heard her press the flap aside, knew that she ducked her head out of some old instinct. Then she vanished into soundlessness …
And somehow Anasûrimbor Kelmomas knew.
“Who are you?”
His mother’s voice, raw for loss and survival.
“Mim?”
A long moment.
“Mimara?”
Kelmomas lay transfixed, impaled by spears of catastrophic consequence. Never … Never had he heard such wonder, such crazed surrender, in her voice. It was ridiculous—obscene even! She was whole! She ended at her skin—like everyone else! Why? Why play half a soul?
“Momma …”
More breath than voice, remote in the manner of forgotten gods, and yet more near than near …
It was stamped into him, that voice, down to the merest nuance. He need only hear it once to make it his own. But it was too late—far too late! They embraced, mother and daughter, slumped to their knees, keened and sobbed. And he lay raging, fu
ming, weeping. Here? Now? How could it be? He clawed the sheets. How much? What must he do? How much must he endure?
You should have killed her!
Shut-up! Shut-up!
Filthy slit! Crazed whore!
He pressed through the stamped leather, saw them, snivelling, mewling. He had no recollection of leaping from the mattress. He simply found himself standing, staring, breathing.
The two women clutched one another, balling fabric in fists. Mimara faced him, her cheek mashed into her mother’s neck and shoulder, her face pinched about a thousand passions. “I was so afraid,” Mother hissed, her voice cracked and muffled.
Mimara’s eyes fluttered open, glittered for tears in white lantern-light. She somehow failed to see him, stared at what seemed to be Eternity instead. It sickened him, how much she looked like Mother.
“I’m sorry, Momma,” she whispered through a shudder. “I’m so-so sorry!”
She blinked tears, peered as if through a sudden gloom, then with a perplexed air gazed directly at him.
“Mim!” Mother cried. “Oh, sweet-sweet Mim!”
Kelmomas saw the old, familiar tenderness crest his sister’s expression, the insipid compassion that made her such a rank fool—as well as his most galling foe. Mimara smiled through her grimace … smiled at him.
Something kicked bile into the back of his throat.
Mother’s hand had roamed her daughter’s shoulder and arm, as if confirming reality. Now it paused upon the bulge of her belly. “How, sweetness?” she asked, pressing her head back the merest degree. “What … What—?”
Mimara beamed at him. Kelmomas felt his face reciprocate, grin, even as murderous urges romped wild through his veins.
“Just hold me, Momma …”
“Pregnant whore!” Kelmomas heard himself cry.
The joy simply dropped from Mimara’s face, like a burden bound to be jettisoned with ease.
He could spit for the outrage of her impersonation.
Mother went rigid, slowly pressed herself from her daughter’s embrace—then whirled, flew at him. He could have blinded her, or crushed her throat, watched her choke on the meat of her own neck. Instead, he stood numb, motionless. She seized his arm, struck him full across his mouth and cheek with a clawed hand. He allowed the force to draw his head back and to the side, nothing more.