Everywhere the old Wizard looked, he glimpsed the stain of sorceries, Gnostic rather than Anagogic. To the practised eye, the difference was plain, as if the world had been gored with razors instead of bludgeoned with hammers. Mimara once told him that Kellhus had largely honoured the ancient Mandate monopoly on the Gnosis, granting the secret knowledge only to the witches, the Swayali, as both a promise and a goad for other Schools. So wherever he glimpsed some Gnostic residue, he could not help but think of his erstwhile brothers and wonder why he no longer seemed to care.
“Skinnies!” Sarl cackled from somewhere behind him. “A mobbing like no other! Think of the bales!”
The Captain said nothing. Cleric said nothing. Both walked as if the scene about them were interchangeable with any other landscape, as if mounds of dead surrounded them no matter where they walked. But the others craned their looks this way and that, pointing to various sights of grisly interest.
“He marches against Golgotterath,” Mimara murmured from the old Wizard’s side. “He slaughters Sranc …”
“What do you mean?”
“Kellhus … You still think him a fraud?”
He swept his gaze across the strewn carnage.
“That’s for Ishuäl to answer.”
Ghosts moved in him, ghosts of who he had been. Once, before his exile, he would have celebrated fields such as this with hoots of exultation, tears of joy. An Aspect-Emperor marching against the Consult, bent on preventing the Second Apocalypse: the old him would have laughed in derision had anyone suggested he would live to see such a sight, laughed at the desperation of his longing.
But there was another ghost in him, a memory of who he had been mere months ago, the man who would have been aghast at the sight, not because he did not pray for Golgotterath’s fall—he did with a fervour only a Mandate Schoolman could know—but because he had wagered the lives of innocents in a mad quest to prove the faith of millions wrong, and a lunatic barbarian—a Scylvendi, no less—right …
What had happened? Where had this man gone?
And if he was gone, what did that make of his quest?
He turned to scrutinize Mimara, gazed long enough to spark a curious frown.
She was right … He realized this as if for the first time.
The Qirri.
Flies had inherited the earth.
They crossed fields of detritus, threading the hillocks of dead, stepping over dried-out puddles skinned in cracked blood. Lines and blots of interlocking corpses reached out to knot the distances. Skin tight about grinning skulls. Innumerable hands with sunken palms, fingers drawn into claws. A thousand poses corresponding to a thousand deaths: thrown, struck spinning, flailing in fire. All of them lying inert and breathless in pools of inky shadow.
The reek was overpowering, a mélange of rot and feces. The wind raised it, powdered them in it, yet they did not care.
The Captain called a halt. They prepared camp.
The sun scorched the western horizon. Nearby, hundreds of Sranc had been piled for some unknown reason, forming a heap that had dried into a kind of grisly deadfall. Stripped to his loincloth, Cleric climbed to the summit, his bare feet cracking ribcages like crusts of snow. The sight of him, a Nonman burnished in the bronze and copper of sunset standing upon the compressed remains of Sranc, struck the old Wizard with peculiar force. He sat gawking at Mimara’s side, fumbling with things half-remembered.
Cleric stood with regal inhumanity, his skin gleaming as if greased. “This war,” he began. “This war is older than your tongues and nations …”
The old Wizard found himself wondering where the gruel of rotted memory would lead the Nonman this time. Would he speak of Far Antiquity? The First Apocalypse? Or would he speak of times when the Five Tribes of Men still wandered the wastes of Eänna?
Would he reveal his true identity?
Achamian lowered his gaze, stared blinking at his hands, at his scabbed knuckles, at the grime darkening the whorls of his skin. How long had it been since he last asked this question?
When had he forgotten to wonder?
“Men bled here,” Cleric said from his macabre summit. “Men leaned shouting into their shields.”
How long had it been since he had last cared? Even now he could feel it welling within him, defeat and dissolution, a knee-cracking resignation. And a voice whispered within him, his voice, asking, What is there to care about?
“So frail, so mortal,” the ancient Ishroi continued, “yet they cast themselves before the scythes of happenstance, yielded their souls to the perversities of Fate.”
All the world seemed a burned-out pyre. All the glory gone, roaring into the hiss of failing coals. All the hope twisting into smoky oblivion.
“Dogs scavenge,” the Nonman called. “Wolves chase the foaling mother, the aged, and the weak. Even the lion shies from clawed prey. Only you and I know the madness that is war. Man and Nonman. Only we pursue what lions flee.”
And who was he, Drusas Achamian, to think he could grapple Fate, pin Her to the floor of his hateful aspiration?
“We die for what we know,” the Nonman boomed, “and we know nothing! Generations heaped upon generations, tossing lives after self-serving guesses, murdering nations in the name of ignorance and delusion.”
Seswatha? Was that who he thought he was? The incarnation of an ancient hero?
“We call our greed justice! We call our soiled hands divine! We strike in the name of avarice and vanity, and the—!”
“Enough!” the Captain shouted at the high-shining figure. Aside from Cleric, he alone stood, wind whipped and insane. “Some wars are holy,” he grated in blood-raw tones. “Some wars … are holy.”
The Nonman regarded him from his summit, blinked once before turning from his furious aspect. He climbed from the heaped Sranc, making a stair of heads and torsos, then leapt to the dust with leonine grace. The shadows of the dead crowded his naked legs.
“Yes,” he said, drawing his shoulders back to stand tall. “Enough.”
The sky darkened. The reek of dust and death tumbled through the air. The Nonman reached for the leather pouch where it lay against his bare hip.
Yes! something cried within the old Wizard, something that leaned forward with his own shoulders, flooded his mouth with his own spit. An affirming urgency.
Yes! This is all that matters. The worries will go away. They. Will. Go. Away. And if not, clarity will come—yes! Clarity. Clarity will come, the clarity needed to honestly consider these questions. Come. Come, old man! Out of the muck!
Animal spirits inhabit every soul, which is why a man could attend to one thing while remaining vigilant for another, why he could converse with his neighbour while lusting after his wife. In that moment, Cleric was all that existed. Incariol, wild and dark and, yes, even holy. The word upon which creation’s own prayer seemed to turn. The Nail of Heaven gleamed across his scalp, a crown that only the Hundred could bestow. And it was as proper as it was inevitable, for he ruled the way the moon ruled the tides, the way the sun ruled the fields …
Absolute. As a father among his children.
One by one he ministered to the sitting scalpers, and Achamian watched, leaning in envy and anticipation. There is closeness in ritual. There is touch. There is an intimacy that approached coupling, an iron faith that the nearing hands would not strike or throttle. Achamian watched the near-naked form loom above Mimara beside him, watched her raise her lips in eager acquiescence. The blackened finger slipped along the chute of her tongue, pressed deep into her mouth. She went rigid, pulled her shoulders back in bliss. For the first time he noticed the bow of her belly …
Pregnant? Was she pregnant? But …
Yes! his soul’s voice cried. Simplicity! You need simplicity to honestly ponder complications!
Cleric loomed over him, his shoulders brushing the violet clouds, his face blank with inhuman serenity. Achamian watched his finger, still glistening with Mimara’s saliva, dip into the fox-mouth opening o
f his pouch. A delicious moment, magical in the way of small miracles, the little pins from which all life hangs. He watched the finger reappear, tip blackened as with soot … ashes …
Cû’jara Cinmoi.
Mimara … pregnant?
Who? Who are you?
Yes! Honesty. Simplicity! Raise your lips—yes!
The finger rose before him, its tip a tingling black. The old Wizard bent back his face, opened his mouth …
“The next time you come before me,” the hated voice called out over fawning masses, “you will kneel, Drusas Achamian …”
Kellhus.
A coldness smoked through Achamian. The finger hesitated. He raised his eyes to the Nonman’s black-glittering gaze.
Kellhus. The Aspect-Emperor.
“No,” the old Wizard said. “No more.”
She falls asleep troubled by the wordless uproar of the evening. Her own half-hearted attempt to refuse the Qirri the previous week had occasioned little more than curiosity, it seemed to her. Who knew a women’s fickle ways? But when the Wizard had refused, a strange species of alarm had gripped the company. Dread prickled the silence. She could sense the scalpers watching at angles to their eyes. Wariness quickened their movements as they went about otherwise thoughtless tasks. The Captain, especially, possessed the air of waiting.
“Akka …” she whispered in the dark. “Something is wrong.”
“Many things are wrong,” he replied, his voice clipped, his eyes fogged with turmoil.
He was at war, she realized.
“I’ve been a drunkard before,” he muttered—but not to her, it seemed. “I’ve even hung from the hooks of the poppy …” Momentary clarity sparked in his eyes. “The burden that Mandate Schoolmen bear … Many of us are compelled to seek low pleasures.”
At war with the earthly residue of Cû’jara Cinmoi.
Her fear is a novelty to her, so long have her passions slipped into oblivion at the merest distraction. She struggles to keep hold of it, but she is too weary. She drifts into unsettled sleep.
She dreams of Cil-Aujas, of white throngs scratching through the black. She dreams that she runs with them, the Sranc, chasing her own waifish figure ever deeper into the earth.
A cry awakens her, grunts and earth-scuffing struggle.
She blinks, sucks waking air. The sounds are near—very near.
Dawn rims a blackened world. Two figures crouch over the Wizard … The Captain and Cleric.
What?
The Wizard kicks and pedals.
“What are you doing?” she asks with bleary curiosity. No one acknowledges her. The Wizard gags, jerks, and struggles like a landed fish.
“What are you doing!” she cries.
Heedless, she scrambles to her feet, throws herself across the Nonman’s hunched back. He shrugs her away. “Hold her!” the Captain barks at shadows standing in the dark. Callused hands clamp about her wrists: Galian, restraining her from behind. “There, pretty!” he grunts, dragging her back. He twists her arms against the small of her back, thrusts her to her knees. She hears herself howling in fury. “No! Nooooo!” All she can see of the Wizard is his legs kicking. Crude laughter slouches from the dark—Sarl. A hand closes about the back of her neck. Her face is slammed into the dust, the wiry remains of weeds. Other hands seize the waist of her breeches. She knows what comes next.
But the Captain has turned from the struggling Wizard, sees what has happened to her. He flies to his feet, savagely kicks one of her unseen assailants. Stabs another—she sees Wonard stumble kicking to the dust. The hands vanish and she finds herself on all fours.
“Touch her,” Lord Kosoter grates to the unseen shadows behind her, “and your soul is forfeit!”
She glimpses Wonard convulsing, puking blood into his beard. She scrambles forward with an instinct borne of desperation. She seizes Squirrel from her meagre belongings, draws it retreating, trips over the beehive carcass of a Sranc.
Dawn is but a corona of slate and blue across the horizon. The night sky rises black and infinite, oblivion littered with countless stars. The scalpers are naught but hunched shadows, their heads and their shoulders stuck in pale starlight. They approach her, wary and weaponless.
Achamian screams.
“Nooo!” she shrieks. “Stop this! Stop!”
The Captain draws his blade. The rasp draws chills across her skin. He strides toward her as if she were nothing more than wood to kindle. Light soaks the horizon behind him, renders him black. She can see the murderous glint of his eyes beneath his hood of wild hair. They seem to glow for the black lines tattooed about them.
“What are you doing?” she cries. “What madness is this?” Her voice cuts the back of her throat, such is her terror. This is how it happens, she realizes. The brothel taught her as much, but she has forgotten in all the intervening years. Your doom always outruns you. You grow complacent, fat in the company of peace, then awaken to find all safety, all hope, overthrown.
The air is windless, chill. Lord Kosoter lunges at her. He hacks with a violence that notches her blade, wrenches her wrists. She retreats. She is quick enough, skilled enough to parry his strikes. She is trained. He sweeps and swings his broadsword, brings it clanking down. His caste-noble braid swings like sodden rope.
With a kind of wonder she realizes that he isn’t trying to kill her. The future towers dark and shrieking in her soul’s eye. Images of torment and violation, of brutalities only scalpers could commit.
Her cries become a wail. She throws herself at him, fighting the way her brothers have taught her, nimble and light, pitting craft against strength. He grunts in surprise, swatting at Squirrel. He relinquishes a single step, a hoary shadow thrown onto its heels.
Gold bursts across the horizon. He sidesteps, leans, angles his shadow to her side. Sunlight crashes into her squint. She blinks, hesitates. Her sword spins from fingertips she cannot feel. A fist of stone strikes her to the ground. It’s happening, she thinks. After enduring so much, surviving so much, her death is happening.
“Akka …” she gasps, scrambling back. Sunlight splices her tears. Blood runs hot across her lips.
And nothing happens. No hand clamps about her throat. No knife pares away her rags.
Out of instinct she falls motionless, breathless.
The Judging Eye, which had remained sealed for so long, opens.
And she sees them standing in a ragged arc, demons on the plain. Their hides charred, the hair of their few redeeming deeds the only light threading them. And the darkest, the most fearsome by far, lies directly before her … kneeling. The Captain.
“Princess-Imperial,” it croaks, glaring from eyes of fiery tar. “Save us from damnation.”
“I am Anasûrimbor Mimara,” she cries. “Princess-Imperial, daughter of the Holy-Empress, wife-daughter of the Aspect-Emperor himself! On pain of death and damnation I command you to release the Wizard!”
They have Achamian bound and gagged, trussed like a corpse about to be raised to the pyre.
“You are apostate,” the Captain says. “A runaway.”
They have her sword, poor Squirrel.
“No! No! I am on a … a …”
They have her Chorae … her Tear of God.
“Foolish girl. Did you think your disappearance went unnoticed?”
They have her.
“You presume? You presume to command me?”
“You are a captive. Thank your gods you are not more.”
And she recalls as much as realizes that he is completely unlike her—that in soul and sentiment he is as alien as the Nonman, if not more. There is a wholeness to him, a singularity of act, aspect, and intention. She can see it in his look, in his face: the utter absence of warring pieces.
For some reason this calms her. There is relief to be found in futility. She knew this once.
“So what? You’re going to bring me back to Mother then?”
His gaze has strayed from her to the dawn. Crimson light illuminates his
face, paints the wilder strands of his beard in tones of blood.
“We march to the Coffers … Same as before.”
“Why? What has my father commanded?”
He draws his knife, begins shaving the calluses about his fingernails.
“Why?” she cries. “I demand you tell me why.”
He looks up from his trivial labour, gazes with a flat intensity that sets her thoughts quailing. He has always frightened her, Lord Kosoter. The threat of violence has always kindled his manner. For him, atrocity was simply one more thoughtless faculty—one more base instinct. Kindness, she knows, is mist to him, something not entirely real. The honed edge is one of only two boundaries he respects.
The other is faith … Faith in her mother’s husband. Even after running so far, deep into the savagery beyond the New Empire’s rim, she remains caught in the Aspect-Emperor’s nets. And knowing this has made the Captain even more fearsome. The thought that he is Zaudunyani …
She does not ask again.
She rifles through the Wizard’s satchel, finds only five sheaves of parchment, the writing across them illegible for some river soaking—evidence of the Qirri in that, she supposes. And a small razor, scabbed with rust, which she conceals beneath her belt.
She wants to weep as they resume their course. She wants to scream, to run, to scratch out the Captain’s eyes. She slouches instead, stares at her feet for as long as boredom allows. She avoids looking at the scalpers, consigns them to her periphery, where they seem apiece with the desolate plains, little more than leering shadows.