But he is a teacher most of all.
“The Qirri,” he says to her one evening. “It sharpens the memory, makes it seem as if … you know everything you know.”
“It makes me happy,” she replies, resting her cheek on her raised knees.
A beaming smile splits his beard. “Yes … sometimes.”
A momentary frown clenches his brow.
He shakes it into another smile.
The plains pass like a dream.
She sits with herself in the high grasses, thinking, Could I be this beautiful?
She finds herself fascinated by the line of her jaw, the way it curves like a chalice to the soft hook of her earlobe. She understands the pleasure that mirrors hold for the beautiful. She knows vanity. In the brothel, they endlessly primped and preened, traded fatuous compliments and envious gazes. Beauty may have been the coin of their subjugation, but it was the only coin they possessed, so they prized it the way drunks prize wine and liquor. Take away enough and people will treasure their afflictions … If only to better accuse the world.
“I know what you’re doing,” she whispers to the thing called Soma.
“And what am I doing?”
There are differences to be sure. It wears the rags that were once Soma’s gowns, for one. And the thing is filthier than she—something she would have not thought possible before encountering it here, away from the others. Especially about the face and neck, where the remains of multiple raw feedings have sheathed and stained its skin …
Her skin.
“Surrogation,” she says. “Consult skin-spies typically begin with a servant or a slave—someone who allows them to study their real target, learn their mannerisms, voice, and character. Once they’ve learned enough, they begin transforming themselves, sculpting their flesh, moulding their cartilage bones, in preparation for the subsequent assassination and replacement of the target.”
It has even replicated the lean, starved look that has begun to afflict them all.
“Your father has told you this?”
“Yes.”
And the growing curve of her lower belly …
“You think this is what I’m doing?”
“What else could you be doing?” A sudden sharpness pokes through her manner. She will show this thing … this beautiful thing.
“Declaring your beauty,” it replies.
“No, Soma. Do not play games with me. Nothing human passes through your soul because you have no soul. You’re not real.”
“But I speak. How could I speak if I had no soul?”
“Parrots speak. You are simply a cunning parrot.”
“I fear I am far more.”
“I can even prove it to you.”
“Can you now?”
Now she’s playing games, she realizes, games when she has so many burning questions—ones crucial to their survival. Every night she rehearses them, but for some reason they no longer seem … pertinent. If anything, they suddenly feel absurd, bloated with unreality, the kinds of questions fat priests might ask starving children. Even the central question, when she thinks of it, leaves her leaden with reluctance …
And yet she needs to ask it, to lean heedless into the thing’s menace and demand an answer, to blurt, “What do you mean, the Nonman is trying to kill us?”
But she cannot.
And it has become as proper as proper can be, avoiding things troubling and obvious. To play games with inhuman assassins.
“A man comes to you saying,” she begins with a sly smile, “‘Do not believe anything I say, for I am liar …’” She pauses to allow the words to resonate. “Tell me, thing, why is this a paradox?”
“Because it’s strange for a liar to say such things.”
The response occasions a small flare of triumph. It’s remarkable, really, witnessing things learned in the abstract happen in actuality—and yet further proof of her stepfather’s divinity. She can even see the Aspect-Emperor’s luminous face, smiling and gentle, saying, “Remember, Mimara … If you fear, simply ask this question …”
The thing before her truly possesses no soul. But as dread as the fact is, it seems … a farce.
“There. That is my proof.”
“Proof? How?”
She feels as if she pretends the water has boiled even though the fire has long since guttered, as if everyone raises stone-cold bowls, smacks their lips, and spouts some homily about the way tea warms the soul even as they shudder at the chill lining their collective gut.
“Only a soul can hold a paradox,” she explains. “Since the true meaning of paradox escapes you, you can only grasp non-paradoxical approximations. In this case, ‘strange.’ Only a soul can comprehend contradictory truths.”
“If I’m not a soul, then what am I?”
How? How has everything become such a farce?
“An abacus crafted of skin, flesh, and bone. A monstrous, miraculous tool. A product of the Tekne.”
“That too is something special, is it not?”
Something is wrong, she realizes. Their voices have waxed too loud. And the Wizard, she knows, will be peering into the darkness after her, wondering. Worrying.
“I must go … I’ve tarried too long.”
Cleric saw it first, scooped along distant tentacles of wind. A scarf of white and gold—the colours of the Thousand Temples—floating, coiling and uncoiling. The first sign of humanity they had encountered since passing the last of the Meori ruins weeks previous.
Of course Achamian was among the last to pick it out against the dun monotony of the distance. “There,” Mimara repeated time and again, pointing. “There …” At last he glimpsed it, twisting like a worm in water. He clenched his teeth following its meandering course, balled his fists.
The Great Ordeal, he realized. Somewhere on this very plain, the host of Kellhus and his Believer-Kings marched the long road to Golgotterath. How close would they pass?
But this worry, like so many other things, seemed uprooted, yet another scarf floating across parched ground. Everything seemed to float lately, as if yanked from its native soil and carried on a slow flood of invisibility.
Few men returned the same after months or years of travel—Achamian knew this as well as anyone. Sheer exposure to different sights, different customs, different peoples, was enough to alter a man, sometimes radically. But in Achamian’s estimation, the real impetus, what really changed men, was the simple act of walking and thinking, day after day, week after week, month after month. Innumerable thoughts flitted through the soul of the long traveller. Kith and kin were condemned and pardoned. Hopes and beliefs were considered and reconsidered. Worries were picked to the point of festering—or healing. For those who could affirm the same thoughts endlessly, men like the Captain, the trail typically led to fanaticism. For those with no stomach for continuous repetition, men like Galian, the trail led to suspicion and cynicism, the conviction that thought was never to be trusted. For those who found their thoughts never quite repeating, who found themselves continually surprised by novel angles and new questions, the trail led to philosophy—to a wisdom that only hermits and prisoners could know.
Achamian had always considered himself one of the latter: a long-walking philosopher. In his younger days, he would even take inventory of his beliefs and scruples to better judge the difference between the man who had departed and the man who had arrived. He was what the ancient Ceneian satirists called an aculmirsi, literally, a “milestone man,” one who would spend his time on the road forever peering at the next milestone—a traveller who could not stop thinking about travelling.
But this journey, arguably the most significant of his long life … was different somehow. Something was happening.
Something inexplicable. Or something that wanted to be …
His Dreams had changed as well.
The night they had camped atop the Heilor, he once again found himself one of many captives chained in an ever-diminishing line, still toothless for scarce-
remembered beatings, still nameless for the profundity of what he suffered—and yet everything was different. He glimpsed the flash of memories when he blinked, for one, images of ghastly torment, obscenities too extreme to be countenanced. The glimpse of Sranc hunched in frenzied rutting. The taste of their slaver as they arched and drooled across him. The stench of their black seed …
Degradations so profound that his soul had kicked free his body, his past, his sanity.
So he pinned his eyes wide in false wakefulness, stared over the wretches before him with a kind of mad glaring, toward the opening that marked his destination. Where scrub and brush had enclosed the file before, he now saw gleaming bulkheads and curved planes of gold: a corridor of metal, canted as though part of an almost toppled structure or some great boat dragged ashore. Where the tunnel had ended in a clearing of some kind, he now saw a chamber, vast in implication, though he could see naught but the merest fraction, and illuminated with a kind of otherworldly light, one that rinsed the walls in watery arrhythmia, and sickened for staring.
The Golden Room, he called it. And it was the sum of all horrors.
The unseen horn would blare, scraping across intonations no human ear was meant to suffer. Shadows would rise from the threshold, and the procession would be heaved staggering forward—two steps, never more. He would listen to the shrieks, infant in their intensity, as the Golden Room devoured yet another damaged soul.
Thinking, Please … Let it end here.
The trees, he had realized upon awakening. The Dream had been refracted through their lethargic wrath, distorted. A forest tunnel. A forest clearing. Now the barked skin of the Mop had fallen away, revealing the true locus of his dream captivity, one that he recognized instantly, yet was long in admitting …
The Dread Ark. Min-Uroikas. He now dreamed the experiences of some other soul, a captive of the Consult, shuffling to his doom in the belly of wicked Golgotterath.
And yet, despite the mad significance of this latest transformation, despite all the care and scrutiny he had heaped upon his Dreams over the years, he found himself dismissing these ethereal missives with an inexplicable negligence. Even though their horror actually eclipsed his old dreams of the Apocalypse, they simply did not seem to matter … for some reason … for some reason …
The old Wizard laughed sometimes, so little did he care.
Seventeen days into the Istyuli Plains, the day following the scarf, Mimara suddenly asked him why he had fallen in love with her mother.
Mimara was forever talking about the ‘“Empress,” as she called her, always describing her in ways that lampooned and criticized. Often she would adopt her mother’s tone and voice—lips pulled into a line, eyelids wary and low, an expression that strove to look impervious yet seemed brittle instead. It was a habit that amused and alarmed the old Wizard in equal measure.
Although Achamian was forever defending Esmenet, as well as chiding Mimara for her lack of charity, he had always managed to avoid revealing his true feelings. His instinct was to keep his counsel when talking mothers to their children—even when adult. Motherhood, it seemed, meant too much to be trusted to something as sordid as truth.
So he would tell her pleasant lies, the kind of polite observations designed to discourage further discussion. If she insisted or, worse yet, pestered him with direct questions, he would bark and bristle until she relented. Too much pain, he would tell himself. And besides, he had become quite fond of acting the crabby old Wizard.
But this time he did neither.
“Why?” she asked. “Out of all the women you had lain with, why love her?”
“Because she possessed a sharp wit,” he heard himself reply. “That was why I … why I returned, I think. That and her beauty. But your mother … She was always asking me questions about things, about the world, the past—even my Dreams fascinated her. We would lie in her bed sweating, and I would talk and talk, and she would never lose interest. One night she interrogated me until dawn gilded the cracks of her shutters. She would listen and …”
He trailed into the marching silence, not so much stymied by the difficulty of what he wanted to say as astonished by the fact he spoke at all. When had confession become so easy?
“And what?”
“And she … she believed me …”
“Your stories, you mean. About the First Apocalypse and the No-God.”
He glanced about, as though wary about being overheard, when in truth he really did not care.
“That … But it was more, I think. She believed in me.”
Could it be so simple?
And so he continued. He heard himself explaining things he never knew he understood, how doubt and indecision had so ruled his soul and intellect that he could scarce act without lapsing into endless recriminations. Why? Why? Always why? He heard himself explaining the horrors of his Dreams, and how they had frayed his nerves to the quick. He heard himself telling her how he had come to her mother weak, a man who would sooner hatch plots in his soul than take any real action …
How Drusas Achamian, the only Wizard in the Three Seas, had been a cringer and a coward.
The strange thing is that he found himself actually yearning for those days—missing not so much the fear, perhaps, as the simple anguish of needing another. Living with her in Sumna while she continued taking custom, sitting and waiting in the bustling agora, watching the to and fro of innumerable Sumnites while images of her coupling with strangers plagued him gut and soul. Perhaps this explained what happened later, when she had climbed into Kellhus’s bed, believing that Achamian had perished in the Sareotic Library. If there was any fact from his past that caused Achamian to both flinch and marvel, it was the way he had continued to love both of them after their joint betrayal. Despite the years, he never ceased balling his fists at the pageant of memories, his awe of Kellhus and the godlike ease with which he mastered the Gnosis, and his impotent fury when the man retired … to lie with his wife—his wife!
Esmenet. Such a strange name for a whore.
“Fear …” the old Wizard said in resignation. “I was always afraid with your mother.”
“Because she was a whore,” Mimara said with more eagerness than compassion.
She was right. He had loved a whore and had reaped the wages accordingly. Perhaps the final days of the First Holy War simply had been a continuation of those early days in Sumna. The same hurt, the same rage, only yoked to the otherworldly glamour that was Anasûrimbor Kellhus.
“No …” he said. “Because she was so beautiful.”
It seemed a proper lie.
“What I don’t understand,” Mimara exclaimed with the air verbalizing something she had long debated in silence, “is why you refuse to hold her accountable. She was a caste-menial, not sold into slavery like me. She chose to be a whore … just as she chose to betray you.”
“Did she?” It seemed that he listened to his voice more than he spoke with it.
“Did she what? Choose? Of course she did.”
“Few things are so capricious as choice, girl.”
“Seems simple to me. Either she chooses to be faithful or she chooses to betray.”
He glared at her. “And what about you? Were you chained to your pillow in Carythusal? No? Does that mean you chose to be there? That you deserved everything you suffered? Could you not have jumped off the ship when the slavers she sold you to put out to sea? Why blame your mother for your wilful refusal to run away?”
Her look was hateful but marred by the same hesitation that seemed to dog all of their heated conversations of late, that moment of searching for the proper passion, as if willing away some reptilian fragment of self that simply did not care. Mimara, part of him realized, was injured because he had said something injurious, not because she felt any real pain. That capacity, it seemed, had been lost in the dark bowels of Cil-Aujas.
“There are chains,” she said dully, “and then there are chains.”
“Exactly.”
A kind of humility haunted her manner after that, but one that seemed more motivated by weariness than any real insight. Even so, he welcomed it. Arrogance is ever the patron of condemnation. Though most all men lived in total ignorance of the ironies and contradictions that mortared their lives, they instinctively understood the power of hypocrisy. So they pretended, laid claim to an implausible innocence. To better sleep. To better condemn. The fact that everyone thought themselves more blameless than blameworthy, Ajencis once wrote, was at once the most ridiculous and the most tragic of human infirmities. Ridiculous because it was so obvious and yet utterly invisible. Tragic because it doomed them to unending war and strife.
There is more than strength in accusation, there is the presumption of innocence, which is what makes it the first resort of the brokenhearted.
During the first years of his exile, Achamian had punished Esmenet in effigy innumerable times in the silent watches before sleep—too many times. He had accused and he had accused. But he had lived with his grievances too long, it seemed, to perpetually condemn her for anything she might have done. No one makes the wrong decisions for reasons they think are wrong. The more clever the man, as the Nroni were fond of saying, the more apt he was to make a fool of himself. We all argue ourselves into our mistakes.
And Esmenet was nothing if not clever.
So he forgave her. He could even remember the precise moment. He had spent the bulk of the day searching his notes for the specifics of a certain dream, one involving a variant of Seswatha’s captivity in Dagliash—he could no longer remember why it was important. Furious with himself, he had decided to climb down from his room to assist Geraus with his wood chopping. The odd blister, it seemed, helped focus his thoughts as well as steady his quill. The slave was doggedly hacking away at one of the several shorn trunks he had drawn to the crude hutch where they stored their wood. Grabbing what turned out to be the dull axe, Achamian began chopping as well, but for some bizarre reason he could not strike the wood without sending chips spinning up into Geraus’s face. The first one went unmentioned. The second occasioned a frowning smile. The third incited outright laughter and a subsequent apology. The fifth chip caught the man in the eye, sent him to the water-bucket blinking and grimacing.