She feels naked now that she is known.
They keep the old Wizard bound and gagged at all times. When they break for meals, either Galian or Pokwas remove the gag while the Captain dandles a Chorae—whether his own or the one he stole from her, she does not know—before the old Wizard’s face. Achamian avoids any glimpse of the Trinket, invariably looks down to his right instead. He says absolutely nothing, even with his gag removed, presumably because Lord Kosoter has told him that any sound, arcane or mundane, would mean his instant death. Periodically, the thick fingers holding the Chorae stray too close, and the Wizard grimaces at the salting of his skin. After several days, a patchwork of scabs and pink skin web his face above his beard.
He reminds her of an ascetic she once saw burned alive in Carythusal when she was still young enough to feel terror for others. The Shrial Priests had marched the old man through the streets, decrying his heretical claims, and bidding onlookers to come witness his fiery cleansing. Where Achamian wears rancid furs, he wore putrid rags. But otherwise, they seem so alike that her gut flutters at the recollection. Knob-knuckled hands bound before them. Gags to stop the danger of their voice. Wild hair and beard, wiry and grey. And the distant look of men condemned long before the thugs had seized them.
The old Wizard stares at her, from time to time. A strange look, ragged, at once hopeless and reassuring. They have always shared an understanding, it seems, one as deep and cold as clay in earth. They have both been broken over the knee of Fate, and as different as their lives and catastrophes have been, their hearts have sheared along similar lines.
Be calm, girl, his eyes seem to say. No matter what happens to me, survive …
Without fail, his looks make her think of the razor hidden beneath her belts.
She only hears Achamian when he’s gagged. On the afternoon of the first day, he begins roaring at the Captain through the spit-soaked cloth, shrieking with such guttural fury that the man pauses in his approach. Nostrils flaring. Eyes glaring with lunatic intensity. He screams about his own retching.
The Captain remains as imperturbable as always, simply gazes and waits until the Wizard’s maniacal ire subsides. Then he cups his palm and cuffs the old man to the ground.
Mimara glimpses the smiling look exchanged between Galian and Pokwas.
Each night they force Qirri upon him.
She receives her measure willingly.
Koll hunches alone in the dusty grass, watches them with dead eyes. She cannot remember when she last heard his voice. Did he even speak Sheyic?
The Stone Hags no longer seem real.
She prays that Soma still follows them—that a skin-spy might save her!—but she has no way of knowing: the Captain now forces her to practise her daily indignities in plain view.
The other scalpers—Galian and Pokwas especially—regard her with forced indifference. They gambled on their lust, thinking the Wizard her only protection. Now, their intentions revealed, they behave like pious thieves, like men wronged for wronging others. They sit and eat without speaking. Aside from the rare hooded glance in her direction, it seems they look only to their hands or the horizon. The mutinous air that had festered ever since Cil-Aujas has become gangrenous. The expedition now seems more a collection of warring tribes than men bound to a singular purpose.
She finds herself stranded with the Captain and Cleric.
The first few nights she lies awake, plotting possibilities more than actions. Her body aches with sensation: the bruising ground, the prick of grasses, the tickle of fleas climbing her scalp. She can see Squirrel jutting from the beggar’s bundle that is his pack. She can sense both her Chorae and the Captain’s beneath his tunic, dark little twins suckling oblivion. She guesses at his slumber, only to be disabused time and again. He invariably lies on his side, his head cradled on a raised arm. But just when she thinks he has fallen into the arms of Orosis, he raises his head and lies rigid, as if probing the surrounding black with his ears. Once she even begins crawling toward him, her thoughts a mad tumble of terror and mayhem. Grab your sword! her thoughts cry through the tumult. Grab your sword! Cut his throat! But she glimpses his hand slide to his waist as she continues her feline creep, sees his fingers settle upon the grime-blackened pommel of his broadsword.
After that she decides he never sleeps. At least not the way humans sleep.
They rarely speak to each other, Cleric and the Captain. They almost never address her. For the entirety of their journey, a part of her has wondered at their relationship. The Captain’s advantage seems plain enough: a scalper’s kill is a scalper’s profit, and she can scarce imagine a killer more formidable than Cleric. But what could induce a Nonman, an Ishroi no less, to submit to a mortal’s will—even a will so preternatural as Lord Kosoter’s? She fixates on this mystery, even becomes jealous of it, thinking that at the very least this one question will be answered. But as the days pass, as she watches them from their very midst, the relationship becomes more enigmatic if anything.
A week into the Wizard’s captivity she is awakened by the sound she finds inexplicable at first until, blinking, she spies Cleric sitting cross-legged on the far side of the Captain’s slumbering form. He weeps. She lies motionless across the hard ground, feeling the stamp of flattened weeds through her blanket. She battles a sudden terror of breathing. Cleric sits with his arms stretched across his knees, his head hanging so low that she can see the sinews roping the back of his neck, the humps of his spine. His breath is dog rapid, horse deep. He moans—a sound as bottomless as Cil-Aujas. He mumbles or murmurs—words she cannot decipher. Random tremors seem to fly through him, afflicting first this hand, then that shoulder, as if the ghost of some bird battles to escape him. A sense of heroic melancholy seems to emanate from him, as onerous and grand as the ages that have birthed it …
A sorrow that would crack a human soul.
“Kosoter …” he rasps.
This is the first time she has heard Cleric refer to the Captain by name. It prickles her skin for some reason. The Captain draws himself to a seated position opposite the Nonman. She can only see the man’s back, the play of starlight across the battered lines of his splint hauberk. Funnelled down the centre of his back, his hair hangs in a tangle about the rope of his caste-noble braid.
She already knows that Cleric’s sanity is not a constant thing, that it ebbs and flows according to its own disordered rhythm. But she has only guessed at the role played by the Captain.
A shudder passes through the Nonman’s frame. “I … I struggle.”
“Good.” There is an uncharacteristic softness to the Captain’s voice, one borne more out of a greed for secrecy than any tenderness.
“Who … Who are these people?”
“Your children.”
“What? What is this?”
“You are preparing.”
The Nonman lowers his bald head back into shadow.
“Preparing? What is this tongue I speak? Where did I learn this tongue?”
“You are preparing.”
“Preparing?”
“Yes. To remember.”
Cleric raises his face to the grim figure sitting before him. Then without warning, his black gaze clicks over the Captain’s shoulder, finds Mimara where she pretends to sleep.
“Yes …” the white lips say, full in the play of blackness and starlight. “They remind me …”
The Captain turns to follow his gaze, reveals his savage profile for no more than an instant before turning away. “Yes … They remind you of someone you once loved.”
Lord Kosoter stands, shouldering the light of the stars, then draws Cleric into the windy dark.
This exchange alarms her, but more like news of growing famine overseas than any immediate threat. She recalls Achamian’s description of Nonmen Erratics, how their memories of mundane life fade first, leaving only archipelagos of spectacle and intensity, the confusion of a soul hanging without foundation. And how their redemptive memories gradually follow, st
randing them more and more with disconnected episodes of torment and pain, until their life becomes a nightmare lived through mist, until all love and joy sink into oblivion, become things guessed at through the shadows cast by their destruction.
This, she realizes. This is the prize the Captain has cast upon the balance of their transaction. Cleric yields up his power, and Lord Kosoter offers him memory. Men to love. Men to destroy …
Men to remember.
And yet Lord Kosoter is Zaudunyani—one of her stepfather’s fanatics. Why else would he protect her from the bent lusts of the others? And if he is Zaudunyani, then he would never deliver his expedition into destruction unless … Unless his Aspect-Emperor has commanded it.
The deal he has struck with Incariol, she realizes, could be a false one. If so, the Captain plays a most deadly game.
Like all of the Few, she is accustomed to ignoring her arcane sight. But Cleric bears his mark so deeply, the residue of ages of sorcerous practice. Occult ugliness blasts him, the scars of his innumerable crimes against creation. Add to this the sheer beauty of his mundane form—the contradiction—and it sometimes seems as if the merest glance will pry her eyes from their sockets. Even if she had not seen him warring through the sewered depths of Cil-Aujas or beneath the clawed bowers of the Meorn Wilderness, she would have known he was a power—a great power.
If he were to choose to annihilate the Skin Eaters …
Only Achamian could possibly hope to stand against him—were he free to speak.
The company continues its lonely walk, dwarfed by the confluence of never-ending land and sky. What features the landscape possesses are slavish and melancholy, as if they were mountains beaten into ruddy heaps and long-wandering flanges. Wild clouds feather the sky, slow-sailing immensities that promise rain that is never delivered. She often gazes into them while she walks, probing the precipices and the plummets, wondering at the way they form floating plates that seem to wheel in competing directions, pinching deep glimpses of blue into white oblivion.
The Wizard stumbles along, bound and gagged, glaring hate at everyone save her.
Survive, Mimara! Forget me!
More days pass before she is able to piece things together. Sarl, especially, provides her with pivotal insights. He tells her how Lord Kosoter, famed for his cruelty and marshal zeal, had come to the Aspect-Emperor’s attention during the Unification Wars. How he had been promised a special Shrial Remission by none other than her uncle, Maithanet, for founding a scalper company and remaining in the vicinity of Hûnoreal—where he could regularly check on the Wizard.
“He is born of Hell,” the madmen tells her, his face squished into I-knew-all-along glee. “He is born of Hell, the Captain. And he knows it—oh-ho! He knows it. He thinks your gurwikka, there, will pay his toll …” His squint pops open in mock alarm. “Deliver him to paradise!”
“But how?” she protests.
“Because of him!” the madman cackles. “Him! The Aspect-Emperor knows all …”
She herself had seen the yield of the Wizard’s twenty years alone in the wilderness. After Achamian absconded for Marrow, she fought her way past his slaves and broke into his tower room. Part of her had expected to be blasted, to die screaming in sorcerous fire. She could sense the residue of something arcane. But there had been no incipient Wards protecting the room, nothing … Because of his slaves’ children, she knew.
At first she could see little save the sunlight outlining the shuttered window where she had first seen him. The smell was rancid but curiously dry and inviting. Finally she saw the wolf-pelts warming the walls and ceiling. The crude-hewn bed. And then the issue of his decades-long labour.
Pages. Scattered. Stacked into teetering piles. Scrolls piled like bones, tumbling into shadow. Dream after dream, scratched in ink and numbered—everything numbered. Pattern after pattern. Theory after theory. Seswatha this. Seswatha that. A horde of details she could never hope to decode, let alone remember.
Out of all the scribbles she peered at, only one would live on in her memory, what seemed the old Wizard’s final entry, the one that would spur her to pursue him.
She has returned. Of all people! I am awake at last.
She, he had written. She … Esmenet.
Mother.
If she could simply walk into the old Wizard’s room, Mimara reasons, then so too could her stepfather. She can even see him in her soul’s eye, the Aspect-Emperor stepping from a point of blue-white light. She can see his face, always so remote, always so terrifying, slowly scan the slovenly gloom. What would a god think, she wonders, looking upon the low belongings of his old teacher, the obsessive issue of his wife’s first abiding love?
Nothing human, she is certain.
She laughs in the course of these ruminations, loud and hard enough to draw more than one questioning look from the others. Part of her blames the Qirri, which she adores even as she hates. It continues to leach her soul, to draw water from her previous concerns. Now and again she even catches herself thinking her captivity an honest and advantageous trade … so long as Cleric continues to plumb her mouth with his cool and bitter finger.
But the humour is real. From the very beginning she had dismissed the old Wizard’s fears regarding her stepfather. “This is the way he sends you,” Achamian said. “This is the way he rules—from the darkness in our own souls! If you were to feel it, know it, that would simply mean there was some deeper deception …”
She had discounted him with a smirk, with the grimace she reserved for fools. She, an Anasûrimbor by marriage, who had lived in his divine presence, who had sat riven, skinned in goose-pimples, as her stepfather merely crossed the room. Like so many she confused absence with impotence. The Andiamine Heights seemed so distant. Now she knows: the Aspect-Emperor transcends distance. Anasûrimbor Kellhus is everywhere.
Exactly as the old Wizard feared.
With this realization comes a new understanding of her power. She finds herself scrutinizing the Captain, guessing at the warring scales within him, the precarious balance of piety and bloodlust. She represents an infuriating complication, Mimara decides, the wrinkle marring the long silk of his ambition. He feels no worldly terror, she decides, because his fear of damnation eclipses all. Too warlike to find redemption in the Gods of Compassion. Too miserly and too cruel to secure the favour of War or the Hunter …
Only the Aspect-Emperor. Only he can make a virtue out of his bloodlust. Only he can deliver him to Paradise.
She is the variable, she thinks, remembering the algebra she learned at the knee of Yerajaman, her Nilnameshi tutor. She is the value he cannot calculate.
What Lord Kosoter does, she finally decides, depends on what he thinks his lord and master, his god, desires.
“I am with child,” she tells him.
A flinch passes across the implacable face.
“Are you not curious?” she asks.
His glare does not waver. Never has a man so terrified her.
“You know …” she presses. “Don’t you?”
She has spent her life, it seems, staring into the faces of bearded men, guessing at the line of their jaw, feeling their hair chafe the bare skin of her neck. She has childhood memories of bare-faced priests and caste-nobles in Sumna. Some of the older Nansur who populated the Imperial Court still clung to their womanish cheeks. But it seems that for as long as she can remember, men meant beards. And the more they adorned them, the higher their station.
Lord Kosoter looks like little more than a cutthroat to her—a beggar, even. Think of him as that! she cries wordlessly. He is less than you! Less!
“Know what?” he grates.
“Who the father is …”
He says nothing.
“Tell me, Captain,” she says, her voice pinched shrill. “Why do you think I fled the Andiamine Heights?”
Even his blink seems a thing graven, as if mere flesh were too soft to contain such a gaze.
“Why does any girl flee her step
father’s home?” she asks.
The lie is a foolish one: he need only guess at the length of her term to realize there is no way she could have been impregnated in Momemn. But then, what would a man such as him know of pregnancy, let alone one borne of a divine violation? Her mother had carried all her brothers and sisters far beyond the usual term.
“You understand, don’t you? You realize what I bear …”
A god … I carry a god in my belly. It seems she need only tell herself this for it to be true …
Another gift of the Qirri.
And she sees it sparking in his eyes. Wonder and horror both. She almost cries out in jubilation. She has cracked his face. At last she has cracked his face!
His lunge is so sudden, so swift, she scarcely knows what has happened until she slams across the turf. He pins her. His right hand clamps her mouth, so large it all but engulfs the lower half of her face. A kind of wild monkey rage shines from his glare. He leans close enough for her to smell rotting teeth.
“Never!” he says in a roaring whisper. “Never speak of this again!”
Then she is free, her head spinning, her lips and cheeks numb.
He turns away from her, back toward the watching Nonman. There is nothing to do, it seems, but to sit and weep.
Despair fills her after this last foolish gambit. These were scalpers. Implacable. These were the kind of men who never paused to reflect, who asked questions of women only so they might show them the proper answer. Even without the Qirri, they were forever trapped at the rushing edge of passion and thought, believing utterly what they needed to see their hungers appeased. Where some were set aflutter by the mere suspicion of slight, nothing but outright calamity could throw these men back into themselves. Only blood—their blood—could incite them to question.
What was, for these men, was. Lord Kosoter was a fanatical agent of the Aspect-Emperor. Drusas Achamian was his prisoner. They marched to plunder the Coffers.