She stands dumbstruck, watches as he gains on the fleeing horsemen, then rains brilliant destruction down upon them. Dust steams and plumes, the mark of tumult on the horizon.
The others scarce seem interested. A quick glance reveals that almost all of them are intact, save for Conger, who sits in the dust grimacing, his hands clutched about a crimson welling knee. He watches his Captain’s approach with dull horror. The shadow of Lord Kosoter’s sword hangs across his face for a breathless heartbeat, then Conger is no more.
“No limpers!” the Captain grates, his eyes at once starved and bright.
And that is the sum of their plunder. It seems sacrilege, for some reason, to don the possessions of others—things so clean they can only be filthy. The old Wizard returns on weary foot, framed by seething curtains of smoke. He has set the plains afire.
“I’m damned already,” is all he says in reply to Mimara’s look.
He stares at the ground and says nothing for the next three days.
His continuing silence does not trouble her so much as her own indifference to it. She understands well enough: in running down the Tydonni, the old Wizard has murdered in the name of rank speculation. But she knows his guilt and turmoil are as much a matter of going through the motions as is her compassion. His silence is the silence of falsehood, and as such, she sees no reason why she should care.
She has the weight of her own murder to bear.
The morning of the third day passes like any other, save that the tributaries they cross have all dried to dust and their skins have grown flabby enough for the Captain to institute rationing. When the old Wizard finally chooses to speak, he does so without spit.
“Have you ever seen Kellhus with it?”
Kellhus. Hearing the name pricks her for some reason, so much so she resists the urge to make one of the signs of warding she learned in the brothel. Before Achamian, she had never heard anyone refer to her stepfather in the familiar before, not even her mother, who always referred to him as “your father.” Not once.
“Seen my stepfather?” she asked. “You mean with my … other eyes?”
She can tell by his hesitation that this is a question he had feared to ask for a long time.
“Yes.”
Absolution, she realizes. He killed the Tydonni to prevent any word of their expedition from reaching the Great Ordeal. Now he seeks to absolve himself of their deaths through the righteousness of his cause. Men murder, and men excuse. For most the connection is utterly seamless: those killed simply have to be guilty, otherwise why would they be dead? But Achamian, she knows, is one of those rare men who continually stumble over the seams in their thought. Men for whom nothing is simple.
“No,” she replies. “You must believe me when I tell you I’ve only seen him a handful of occasions. Prophets have scarce the time for real daughters, let alone the likes of me.”
This is true. For most of her years on the Andiamine Heights, the Aspect-Emperor was scarce more than a dread rumour, an unseen presence that sent hoards of perfumed functionaries scurrying this way and that through the galleries. And in a manner, she realizes with a peculiar numbness, very little has changed. Was he not the hidden tyrant of this very expedition?
For the first time, it seems, she sees things through Drusas Achamian’s eyes: a world bound to the machinations of Anasûrimbor Kellhus. Looking out, she has a sudden sense of loads borne and stresses diffused, as if the world were a wheel spoked with mountains, rimmed with seas, one so vast that the axle lay perpetually over the horizon—perpetually unseen. Armies march. Priests tally contributions. Ships leave and ships arrive. Emissaries howl in protest and wriggle on their bellies …
All at the pleasure of the Holy Aspect-Emperor.
This is the world the old Wizard sees, the world that frames his every decision: a singular thing, a living thing, nourished by the arteries of trade, bound by the sinew of fear and faith …
A leviathan with a black cancer for a heart.
“I believe you,” he says after a time. “I was just … just wondering.”
She ponders this image of the Aspect-Emperor and his power, this hellish seal. It reminds her of the great Nilnameshi mandala that hangs in the Allosium Forum below the Andiamine Heights. For more than a thousand years, the artisan-sages of Invishi sought to capture creation in various symbolic schemes, resulting in tapestries of unparalleled beauty and manufacture. The Allosium Mandala, her mother had told her once, was famed for being the first to use concentric circles instead of nested squares to represent the hierarchies of existence. It was also notorious for containing no image whatsoever in its centre, the place typically reserved for the God of Gods …
Innovations that, her mother explained, saw the artisan stoned to death.
Now Mimara sees a mandala of her own manufacture in her soul’s eye, one more temporal than cosmological but every bit as subversive in its implications. She sees the million-panelled extremities, the tiny lives of the mob, each enclosed in ignorance and distraction. And she sees the larger chambers of the Great Factions, far more powerful but just as oblivious given their perpetual scramble for prestige and dominance. With terrifying clarity she sees it, apprehends it, a symbolic world thronging with life yet devoid of nerves, utterly senseless to the malignancy crouched in their absent heart …
A dark world, one battling a war long lost.
As thin as her passions have become, it seems she can feel it: the impotence, the desolation, the gaping sense of hopelessness. She walks for a time, tasting, even savouring, the possibility, as if doom were a kind of honey-cake. A world where the Aspect-Emperor is evil …
And then she realizes that the opposite could just as easily be true.
“What would you have thought,” she asks the old Wizard, “if I had told you he was wreathed in glory when I saw him, that he was, without any doubt, the Son of Heaven?”
This is it, she realizes. The rat that hides in his gut, gnawing and gnawing …
“Hard questions, girl. You have a talent for them.”
The overthrowing fear.
“Yes. But the dilemmas remain yours, don’t they?”
He glares at her, and for the merest heartbeat, she glimpses hatred. But like so much else, it drops away without residue. Simply another passion too greased with irrelevance to be clutched in the hands of the present.
“Strange …” he replies distantly. “I see two sets of footprints behind me.”
There is this sense of unravelling.
A sense of threads worn and abraded, until snipped by their own tension. A sense of things hanging, as if they were nothing more than fluff skipping across the wind. A sense of things tying, of newborn anchors, novel tautnesses yanked across old seams, old straps, as if they were spiderwebs become kites, soaring high and free, batted by falcon winds, pinned to the earth by a singular string …
Qirri.
Qirri the holy. Qirri the pure.
Each night they queue before the Nonman, suck from the teat that is his finger. Sometimes he clasps their cheek with his free hand, gazes long and melancholy into their eyes, while his finger probes their tongue, their gums and teeth.
And it is right and proper to taste the spittle of another.
They have found a new Tusk to guide them, a new God to compel their hearts and to bend their knees. Qirri, as rationed and apportioned by its prophet, Incariol.
During the day they walk, utterly absorbed in the blessed monotony. Like beetles, they walk with their faces to the earth, step after step, watching their boots hooking through haloes of dust.
During the night they listen to Cleric and his incoherent declarations. And it seems they grasp a logic that binds disjointed absurdities into profound wholes. They revel in a clarity indistinguishable from confusion, an enlightenment devoid of claim or truth or hope …
And the plains pass like a dream.
“The Qirri …” she finally manages to blurt. “It’s beginning to frighten me.”
>
The Wizard’s silence has the character of a breach. She senses his alarm, the effort of will it takes for him to stifle his rebuke. She knows the words warring for control of his voice because they are the same words that continue to nag and accuse the corners of her thought. Fool. Why throw stones at wolves? Everything is as it must be. Everything will turn out fine …
“How so?” he says coldly.
“In the brothel …” she hears herself reply and is amazed because she is usually so loathe to speak of the place. “Some of the girls, the one’s who broke, mostly … They would feed them opium—force them. Within weeks they would … would …”
“Do whatever they needed to get more,” the Wizard says dully.
Trudging silence. Coughing from somewhere ahead of them.
“Could that be what the Nonman is doing to us?”
Speaking this question is like rolling a great stone from her chest. How could it be so difficult to stand square in the light of what was happening?
“Why?” the Wizard asks. “Has he been making … making demands?”
“No,” she answers. Not yet.
He ponders the ground, his stride, and the resulting exhalations of dust.
“We have nothing to fear, Mimara,” he finally says, but there is something false in his manner, as if he were a frightened boy borrowing the assured tone and posture of a priest. “We’re not the same as the others. We understand the dangers.”
She does not know how to reply, so she simply continues pacing the Wizard in silent turmoil. Yes! something cries within her. Yes! We know the danger. We can take precautions, refuse the Qirri anytime we wish! Anytime!
Just not now.
“Besides …” he eventually continues, “we need it.”
She has anticipated this objection. “But we’ve travelled so far so fast already!”
Why so harsh? a voice—her voice—chides her. Let the man speak at the very least.
“Look at the Stone Hags,” he replies. “Men bred for the slog, eaten up in the matter of weeks. How well do you think an old man and a woman would fare?”
“Let the others go ahead then. Or even better, we could steal away in the heart of night!”
Or best of all, it occurs to her, just take the Nonman’s pouch … Yes! Steal it! This makes so much sparkling sense to her that she almost laughs out loud—even as a more sober part of her realizes that one does not take anything from a Quya Mage—ever. As quick as her smile leaps to her lips, her eyes tear in frustration.
“No,” the old Wizard is saying. “There’s no breaking the covenant we’ve struck with these men. They would hunt us down, and well they should, given what they’ve sacrificed.”
He is warming to the ingenuity of his rationalizations—as is she.
“Maybe we should confront Cleric,” she offers. “Drag the issue before the whole company.” Even as she utters this, she can feel her resolution leach away. See? Why bother?
You never had the heart for this …
Achamian shakes his head as if at a truth so old and fat it cannot but be weary. “I don’t trust Galian. I fear the Qirri is the only thing keeping him here …”
“Let him leave then.” Her shrug is directed more at her words than at the man, it seems.
“If Galian leaves,” Achamian replies, his self-assurance relentless now, “he will take Pokwas and Xonghis with him. We need Xonghis. To eat as much to find our way.”
Though they smile at each other, their gazes are too slicked with apprehension to truly lock. And so it ends, a conversation that began so real it sent burning coals skidding through her gut, become a pantomime, a shadow-play of numbing words and self-serving reasons.
As she had hoped all along.
They walk, the nine, their backs bent to an exhaustion only the remaining Stone Hag can feel. Mimara actually cries, softly, so that the others cannot hear above the wind batting their ears. She sobs, once, twice, so profound is her relief. Her thighs blush and her mouth waters at the thought of the coming darkness …
And of the soot smudged across the tip of Cleric’s white finger.
There is a vastness to the wind on the nocturnal plain, a sense of heaven-spanning enormities, one drawn roughly across the other. All things are seized. All things are lifted and bent. And when the gusts are violent enough, all things kneel—or are broken.
She has crept from the others into the night. Gusts scour the ground, galloping like the outriders of an infinite horde. She turns her face away from the prick of flying sand, gazes without surprise at herself wearing the tattered rags that had once belonged to Soma.
It seems she had known she would find it here waiting—the Consult skin-spy. The company had continued marching past dusk, stopping only when they found the protection of a meagre depression. She set out the way she always set out, instinctively choosing the line of sight and wind most favourable to a stalking predator …
And found one.
“How?” she hisses. There is something frantic within her, something that would fly into pieces were it not for her skin. “How is the Nonman killing us?”
The thing mimics her crouching posture. It seems at once harmless, nothing more than an image without depth, a mere reflection, and as deadly as a bolt cocked in a ballistae. Fear tickles her, but she feels it with a stranger’s skin.
“Tell me!”
It smiles with the same condescension she has felt across her face innumerable times. One both beautiful and infuriating.
“Your Chorae,” it says with her voice. “Give it to me and I can save you.”
What? She clasps the pouch where it hangs between her breasts.
“No! No more games! Tell me how!”
Her vehemence surprises both of them. She watches her eyes click to the darkness of the camp behind her, her face imperceptibly bent to the needs of a sharper ear.
Then she hears it herself. The mutter of sorcery, effortlessly stepping around the buffeting wind, climbing up out of the substance of dust and earth.
“The Qirri …” the other her says. The other spy. “Ask him what it is!”
Then the thing is gone, leaping high and deep into the darkness and running like no human can run. Yanking her head about, Mimara sees the old Wizard scaling the gusting heights, his eyes and mouth alight with brilliant meaning. His voice echoes deep across the angles and surfaces of a different plane. Lines of blinding light needle the dark, carving trails of white across plain. She glimpses fire and exploding earth, swathes of ground clawed into black by the shadow of grasses.
She glimpses herself running with gazelle beauty, leaping with serpentine grace. Then the spewing dust sweeps up to obscure him and so secure his escape.
Koll. The last of the Stone Hags.
She stares at him while the Wizard rails at her.
“What? What were you doing so far away?”
The man sits hunched, the only one not watching her and her father. He was a large man, a powerful man, when they had rescued the surviving Stone Hags in the Mop. Now he is scarce more than a knob-jointed rack. He has long ceased caring about his war-knot, so his hair falls in mats about his face and shoulders. Whatever armour he possessed, he has lost to the trail—and were it not for the Captain, he would have cast away his broadsword as well, she imagines. His beard is matted with grime, making a sphincter of his mouth, which hangs perpetually open. His eyes stare down, always down, but even still they possess the glint of desperation.
“It just came to me,” she lies, for in truth, she came to it. “It had my face …”
“You could have been killed! Why? Why would you wander so far?”
Koll. Only Koll. Of all his brother Hags, only he has yet to succumb to the rigours of the trail. He is, she realizes, the last pure thing in their mad company.
The measure, the cubit of their depravity. The only one who has not tasted Qirri.
“It meant to replace you!”
As she watches, the man’s shaggy head jerks a
s if to a gnat’s sting. The bleary eyes squint and struggle, as if trying to sort shadows from the darkness …
He can’t see, she realizes. Not because his eyes fail him, but because it is a moonless night and clouds obscure the Nail of Heaven. He can’t see because his eyes remain human …
Unlike theirs.
“Fool! Fool of a girl! It would have strangled you. Stripped and replaced you!”
At last she turns to look up at the Wizard. He stands with his back to the wind so the edges of him—rotted hide and tangled hair—seem to fly toward her.
“What is it?” she asks in Ainoni.
He blinks, and even though his fury continues to animate him, she somehow knows that a kernel of him simply does not care, that a hunger lies balled like a greased marble in his soul, waiting for the watches to pass and for the pouch to be drawn again.
“What is what?” he cries. He is troubled, she knows, because she has spoken in Ainoni, the tongue of their conspiracy. “I’m talking to you, girl!”
In her periphery she can see the hoary aspect of the Captain, his hair and caste-noble braid lashing the air above his right shoulder, his eyes as bright as Seleukaran steel. His knife slumbers in its scabbard, hanging high on his girdle, but she sees its curve glint above his bloodstained knuckles nonetheless.
“Nothing,” she says to the Wizard, knowing that he does not know.
Qirri is Qirri …
The desire that forever slips the leash of your knowing. The hunger that leaves no trace in your trammelled soul.
“Water before food,” Xonghis says to them.
They walk an undeviating line now that their water-skins are empty. Nothing can be more simple, it seems, than walking straight across never-ending flatness. And yet all is turmoil and confusion, not the kind that quickens hearts or wrings hands, but the kind that simply hangs like a chrysalis in her soul, suspended, motionless. Everything, it seems—her voice, her scissoring step, her expression—is as assured as it has ever been, save that the world they confront has become a dream.