“What do you mean? How can somebody not be what they are? That makes no sense.”
“Go to sleep.”
He would lay there, his eyes closed to the world, while the image of the Nonman—mundane beauty perpetually at war with his arcane disfiguration—plagued his soul. The old Wizard would curse himself for a fool, ask himself how many watches he had wasted worrying about the Erratic. Cleric was one of the Pharroika, the Wayward. Whatever the Nonman once was, he was no longer—and that should be enough.
If he had ceased pondering Incariol altogether in the days following the battle in the ruins of Maimor, it was because of the skin-spy and what its presence implied. But time’s passage has a way of blunting our sharper questions, of making things difficult to confront soft with malleable familiarity. Of course, the Consult had been watching him, the man who had taught the Gnosis to the Aspect-Emperor, and so delivered the Three Seas. Of course, they had infiltrated the Skin Eaters.
He was Drusas Achamian.
But the further Soma fell into the past, the more Cleric’s presence irked his curiosity, the more the old questions began prickling back to life.
Even his Dreams had been affected.
He had lost his inkhorn and papyrus in the mad depths of Cil-Aujas, so he could no longer chronicle the particulars of his slumbering experience. Nor did he need to.
It almost seemed as if he had become unmoored when he pondered the transformations. First he had drifted from the central current of Seswatha’s life, away from the tragic enormities and into the mundane details, where he had been delivered to knowledge of Ishuäl, the secret fastness of the Dûnyain. Then, as if these things were too small to catch the fabric of his soul, he slipped from Seswatha altogether, seeing things his ancient forebear had never seen, standing where he never stood, as when he saw the Library of Sauglish burn.
And now?
He continued to dream that he and nameless others stood shackled in a shadowy line. Broken men. Brutalized. They filed through a tube of thatched undergrowth, bushes that had grown out and around their passage, forming vaults of a thousand interlocking branches. Over the stooped shoulders of those before him, he could see the tunnel’s terminus, the threshold of some sunlit clearing, it seemed—the spaces beyond were so open and bright as to defeat his gloom-pinched eyes. He felt a dread that seemed curiously disconnected from his surroundings, as if his fear had come to him from a far different time and place.
And he did not know who he was.
A titanic horn would blare, and the line would be pulled stumbling forward, and peering, he would see a starved wretch at the fore, at least a hundred souls distant, stepping into the golden light … vanishing.
And the screaming would begin, only to be yanked short.
Again and again, he dreamed this senseless dream. Sometimes it was identical. Sometimes he seemed one soul closer to the procession’s end. He could never be sure.
Was it the Qirri? Was it the deathless rancour of the Mop, or a cruel whim of Fate?
Or had the trauma of his life at last unhinged him and cast his slumber to the wolves of grim fancy?
For his whole life, ever since grasping the withered pouch of Seswatha’s heart deep in the bowel of Atyersus, his dreams had possessed meaning … logic, horrifying to be sure, but comprehensible all the same. For his whole life he had awakened with purpose.
And now?
“So what was it like?” Achamian asked her as the company filed through the arboreal maze.
“What was what like?”
They always addressed each other in Ainoni now. The fact that only the Captain could comprehend them made it seem daring somehow—and curiously proper, as if madmen should oversee the exchange of secrets. Even still, they took care that he did not overhear.
“Life on the Andiamine Heights,” he said, “as an Anasûrimbor.”
“You mean the family you’re trying to destroy.”
The old Wizard snorted. “Just think, no more running.”
At last she smiled. Anger and sarcasm, Achamian had learned, were a kind of reflex for Mimara—as well as a fortress and a refuge. If he could outlast her initial hostility, which proved difficult no matter how much good humour he mustered, he could usually coax a degree of openness from her.
“It was complicated,” she began pensively.
“Well then, start at the beginning.”
“You mean when they came for me in Carythusal?”
The old Wizard shrugged and nodded.
They had slackened their pace enough to fall behind the others, even the dour file of Stone Hags, who stole longing glances as Mimara drifted past. Despite the chorus of birdsong, a kind of silence reared about them, the hush of slow growth and decay. It felt like shelter.
“You have to understand,” she said hesitantly. “I didn’t know that I had been wronged. The brutalities I endured … But I was a child … and then I was a brothel-slave—that’s what I was … Something made to be violated, abused, over and over, until I grew too old or too ugly, and they sold me to the fullery. That was just the … the way … So when the Eothic Guardsmen came and began beating Yappi … Yapotis … the brothel master, I didn’t understand. I couldn’t understand …”
Achamian watched her carefully, saw a rare strand of sunlight flash across her face. “You thought you were being attacked instead of saved.”
A numb nod. “They took me away before the killing began, but I knew … I could tell from the soldiers’ manner, cold, as merciless as any of these scalpers. I knew they would kill anyone who had a hand in my … my fouling …”
She had the habit of slipping into Tutseme when she became upset, the rough dialect peculiar to menials and slaves from Carythusal. The clipped vowels. The singsong intonations. Achamian would have teased her for sounding like an Ainoni harlot, had the subject matter been less serious.
“They brought me to a ship—you should have seen them! Stammering, bowing and kneeling, not the soldiers, but the Imperial Apparati who commanded them. They asked me—begged me!—for some kind of request, for something they could do, for my health and my ease, they said. For my glory. I’ll never forget that! My whole life my only prize had been the lust my form incited in men—the face of an Empress, the hips and slit of a young girl—and there I stood, the proud possessor of what? Glory? So I said, ‘Stop. Stop the killing!’ And they looked at me with long faces and said, ‘Alas, Princess, that is the one thing we cannot do.’ ‘Why?’ I asked them …
“‘Because the Blessed Empress has commanded it,’ they said …
“So I stood on the prow and watched … They had moored on the high river, on the quays typically reserved for the Scarlet Spires—you know those?—so I could see the slums rise to the north, all the Worm laid out for inspection. I could see it burn … I could even see souls trapped on their roofs … Men, women, children … jumping …”
The old Wizard watched her, careful to purge any hint of pity from his frown. To be a child-whore one moment and a Princess-Imperial the next. To be plucked from abject slavery and hurtled to the heights of the greatest empire since Cenei. And then to have your old world burned down around you.
Esmenet, he understood, had tried to undo her crime with the commission of another. She had mistook vengeance for reparation.
“So you understand,” Mimara continued, swallowing. “My first years on the Andiamine Heights were hateful … shameful, even. You understand why I did everything I could to punish Mother.”
Achamian studied her for a moment before nodding. The company had crested a gradual slope and now descended, using webs of bared roots as steps. A rare glimpse of the sun flashed above, making silhouettes of shagged leaves.
“I understand,” he said as they picked their way down, feeling the raw weight of his own story, his own grievances, press through the tone of his reply. They were both victims of Esmenet.
They walked in silence, their strides as thoughtless as they were quick.
; “Thank you,” Mimara said after a time, fixing him with a curious gaze.
“For what?”
“For not asking what all the others ask.”
“Which is?”
“How I could have stayed all those years. How I could have allowed myself to be used as I was used. Apparently everyone would have run away, slit their master’s throat, committed suicide …”
“Nothing makes fools of people quite like a luxurious life,” Achamian said, shaking his head and nodding. “Ajencis says they confuse decisions made atop pillows for those compelled by stones. When they hear of other people being deceived, they’re certain they would know better. When they hear of other people being oppressed, they’re certain they would do anything but beg and cringe when the club is raised …”
“And so they judge,” Mimara said sourly.
“They certainly picked the wrong woman in your case!”
This coaxed another smile—another small triumph.
She began talking about her younger siblings, haltingly at first, then with more confidence and detail. She seemed surprised by her own reminiscences, and troubled. She had foresworn her family—he knew that much. But watching and listening to her describe the embittered object of her anger, he came to suspect she had gone so far as to deny her family, to tell herself that she was in fact alone, without the guy ropes of kith and kin to prop her.
Small wonder she had been so reluctant to tell him anything. People are generally loathe to describe what they need to forget, especially the small things, the loving things that contradict their precious sense of injustice.
She started with Kayûtas, the child Esmenet had carried in her womb the day Achamian had repudiated her before the assembled Lords of the Holy War. He would have seemed a kind of god to her, she said, had her stepfather not been Kellhus—a real God. “He is the very image of his father,” she said, nodding as if agreeing with her own description. “Not so remote, certainly … More …”
“Human,” the old Wizard said, scowling.
She then turned to Moënghus, whom she described as the most normal and difficult of her younger siblings. Apparently he was quite the terror as a youth, given to episodes of inconsolable anger and continually brooding, if not sulking. Esmenet regularly left the boys in her care—with the hope of fostering some tenderness for her younger siblings, Mimara presumed. She despised the swimming expeditions most of all.
Apparently Moënghus enjoyed diving under the water and not reappearing for the longest time. The first incident was the worst—she even called on their bodyguards to help her, only to watch Moënghus’s head break the flashing water several spans away. He ignored her commands and curses, and repeated the stunt again and again. Each time she would tell herself he was simply playing, but her heart would continue counting beats, and the panic would well higher and higher—until she was fairly beside herself with fear and fury. Then his head would magically pop into sight, his black hair glazed in white sunlight, and he would glare at her shouting antics before descending again. Finally she turned on his brother, demanding an explanation.
“Because,” Kayûtas said with a detachment that clammed her skin, “he wants people to think him dead.”
The old Wizard responded with a nodding snort. When he asked her whether anyone knew about his true parentage, she merely frowned and said, “Questioning our holy parentage is sacrilege.”
Lies, Achamian mused. Deceit heaped atop deceit. In the early days of his exile, he would sometimes lie awake at night, convinced that sooner or later someone would see through Kellhus and his glamour, that the truth would win out, and all the madness would come crashing down …
That he could come home and reclaim his wife.
But as the years passed he came to see this for the rank foolishness that it was. He—a student of Ajencis, no less! Truths were carved from the identical wood as were lies—words—and so sank or floated with equal ease. But since truths were carved by the World, they rarely appeased Men and their innumerable vanities. Men had no taste for facts that did not ornament or enrich, and so they wilfully—if not knowingly—panelled their lives with shining and intricate falsehoods.
Mimara’s eldest sister, Theliopa, would be the only one of her siblings to occasion a true smile. According to Mimara, the girl was almost incapable of expressing passion of any sort and was oblivious—sometimes comically so—to all but the most obvious social graces. She was also dreadfully thin, famine thin, and had to be continually cajoled and bullied to eat. But her intellect was nothing short of a miracle. Everything she read, she remembered, and she read voraciously, often to the point of forgetting to sleep. Her gifts were so prodigious that Kellhus made her an Imperial Adviser at the tender age of twelve, after which she became a continual presence in her mother’s entourage: pale, emaciated, decked in absurd gowns of her own design and manufacture.
“It’s hard not to pity her,” Mimara said, her gaze flat with memories, “even as you marvel …”
“What do people say?”
“Say?”
“About her … peculiarities. What do they think caused them?” Few things inspired more malicious speculation than deformities. Conriya even had a law—back before the New Empire, anyway—rendering misshapened children the property of the King. Apparently the court diviners thought a careful reading of their deformations could reveal much about the future.
“They say my stepfather’s seed is too heavy for mortal women to bear,” Mimara said. “He took other wives, ‘Zikas’ they call them, after the small bowls they pass out for libations on the Day of Ascension. But of those who became pregnant, none carried to term—either that or they died … Only Mother.”
Achamian could only nod, his thoughts roiling. Kellhus had to have known this, he realized. From the very beginning he had known Esmenet possessed the strength to survive him and his progeny. And so he had set out to conquer her womb as one more tool—one more weapon—in his unceasing war of word, insight, and passion.
You needed her, so you took …
Regarding her sister Serwa, Mimara said very little, save that she was cold and arrogant.
“She’s the Grandmistress of the Swayali, now. Grandmistress! I don’t think Mother ever forgave Kellhus for sending her away … I saw very little of her, and when I did my teeth fairly cracked for envy. Studying with the Sisters! Attaining the only thing I truly desired!”
Inrilatas, on the other hand, she discussed for quite some time, partly because Esmenet had sought to involve her in the boy’s upbringing. According to Mimara, none of her siblings possessed more of their father’s gifts—or more of their mother’s all too human weaknesses. Speaking long before any infant should. Never forgetting. And seeing deeper, far deeper, than any human could … or should.
His subsequent madness, she said, was inevitable. He was perpetually at a loss, perpetually overwhelmed by the presence of others. Unlike his father, he could only see the brute truths, the facts and lies that compelled the course of lives, but these were quite enough.
“He would look into my eyes and say impossible things … hateful things …”
“How do you mean?”
“He told me once that I punished mother not to avenge my slavery, but because … because …”
“Because what?”
“Because I was broken inside,” she said, her lips set in a grim and brittle line. “Because I had suffered so much so long that kindness had become the only cruelty I could not endure—kindness!—and so suffering would be all I … all I would ever know …”
She trailed, turned her face away to swat at the tears clotting her eyes.
“So I told him,” she continued, avoiding Achamian’s gaze. “I told him that I had never known kindness because everything—everything!—I had been given had been just another way to take—to steal! ‘You cannot stroke a beaten dog,’ he replied, ‘because it sees only the raised hand …’ A beaten dog! Can you believe it? What kind of little boy calls his grow
n sister a beaten dog?”
A Dûnyain, the old Wizard thought in unspoken reply.
She must have glimpsed something of his sorrow in his eyes: the outrage in her expression, which had been helpless in the face of memory, turned in sudden fury upon him.
“You pity me?” she cried, as if her pain were something with its own outrage and volition. “Pity?”
“Don’t, Mimara. Don’t do this …”
“Do what? What?”
“Make Inrilatas true.”
This smacked the fury from her expression. She stared at him speechless, her body jerking as her legs carried her thoughtlessly forward, her eyes wide with a kind of desolate horror.
“What about the others?” the old Wizard asked, snipping all memory of her outburst from his tone. The best way to retrieve a conversation from disaster, he often found, was to speak as if the disaster had never happened. “I know there’s more—the twins. Tell me about them.”
She marched in silence for a time, collecting herself, Achamian supposed. The footing had become even more treacherous: a stream had gullied the forest floor, cutting away the loam beneath the feet of several massive elms so that roots hung in tentacled sheets to their right. Achamian could see the rest of the party below, picking their way under a toppled giant with the same haste that was taking such a toll on the Hags. He glimpsed Cleric behind the Captain, white and bald and obviously not human. Even from a distance, his Mark blotted out his inhuman physical beauty, stained him with gut-wrenching ugliness.
The stream glittered, a ribbon of liquid obsidian in the gloom. The air smelled of clay and cold rot.
“They were the only ones, really …” she finally said. “The twins. I was there, you know … there from the beginning with them. I saw them drawn squalling from Mother’s womb …” She paused to watch her booted feet pick steps across the ground. “I think that was the only moment I truly … truly loved her.”
“You’ve never stopped loving her,” Achamian said. “You wouldn’t care to hate her otherwise.”
Anger shrouded her eyes once again, but to her credit she managed to purge it from her voice. She was trying, the old Wizard realized. She wanted to trust him. Even more, she wanted to understand what he saw when he looked upon her—perhaps too desperately. “What do you mean?”