The Judging eye

Early Spring, 19 New Imperial Year (4132 Year-of-the-Tusk), Southwestern Galeoth

There is no other place. It is as simple as that.

She cannot go back, not to the brothel that is her mother's palace, nor to the brothel that is a brothel. She was sold so very long ago, and nothing-no one-can buy her back.

She pilfers wood from the shed-little more than a wall cobbled from the debris fallen from the upper tower-and watches his slave curse and scratch his woolly head, then strike out to replace it. She makes fires, even though she has nothing to cook or to burn, and she sits before them, poking them like an anthill or staring at them, as though it were a little baby kicking and clawing at an impossible sky. She lets her mule, whom she calls Foolhardy, wander free, thinking or maybe even hoping that it would run away. Each night, she hugs herself in shame and guilt, certain that Foolhardy will be taken down by the wolves or at least spooked into running by their endless howls. But each morning, the brute is still there, standing close enough to be hit by a stone, flicking its ears at flies, staring off in any direction but hers.

She cries.

She continues to watch her fire, gazes at it with a new mother's fascination, gazes at it until her eyes are pinched dry. There is something proper about flames, she thinks. They possess a singularity of purpose that can only be called divine…

Flare. Wax. Consume.

Like a human. Only with grace.

One of the children, the youngest of the girls, creeps down to her to explain they have been forbidden to speak or play with her because she is a witch. Was it true she's a witch?

As a joke Mimara grimaces and croaks, "Yeeaasss!"

After the little girl flees, she sees them from time to time, hiding behind a fence of weeds or the ridged edge of some immense tree trunk, crawling and peering and running with faux-screams whenever they realize that she sees them watching.

She can see the Wards set about the tower, though she can only guess at their purposes. And she notes the scattered signs of more violent, more ephemeral sorceries-a gash in a monstrous elm, scorching across plates of stone, earth cooked to glass-proof that the Wizard has resorted to his prodigious skills. Always and everywhere she sees the ontic plenitude of things-the treeness of trees, the essence of water and stone and mountains-mostly pristine, but sometimes wrecked thanks to Schoolmen and their savage croon. The eyes of the Few were with her always, prodding her onto this path she has chosen, fortifying her resolve.

But more and more the different eye seems to open, one that has perplexed her for many years-that frightens her like an unwanted yen for perversion. Its lid is drowsy, and indeed it slumbers so deep she often forgets its presence. But when it stirs, the very world is transformed.

For moments at a time, she can see them… Good and evil.

Not buried, not hidden, but writ like another colour or texture across the hide of everything. The way good men shine brighter than good women. Or how serpents glow holy, while pigs seem to wallow in polluting shadow. The world is unequal in the eyes of the God-she understands this with intimate profundity. Masters over slaves, men over women, lions over crows: At every turn, the scriptures enumerate the rank of things. But for terrifying moments, the merest of heartbeats, it is unequal in her eyes as well.

It's a kind of madness, she knows. She has seen too many succumb in the brothels to think she is immune. Their handlers were loath to mark the skin, so they punished the soul. She was no exception.

It has to be madness. Even still, she cannot but wonder how Achamian will appear in the light of this more discerning eye.

The morning sun rears from the bulk of the hill and lances across the trees with their limbs like frozen ropes, spilling pools of bright through the thatched gloom. And she watches and watches, until the colours pale into coral evening.

And she thinks the tower was not so tall. It only seems such because it occupies higher ground.

The world hates you…

The thought comes upon her, not with stealth or clamour, but with the presumption of a slave owner, of one who sees no boundaries save their own.

The suffering follows quick upon the heels of her vigil-she had exhausted the last of her provisions before reaching the tower-and something within her rejoices. The world does hate her-she does not need a small brother's tearful confession to know that. "It hurts Momma to even look at you! She wishes she would have drowned you instead of sold you…" Here she sits, starving and shivering, staring and croaking at the inscrutable window beneath the tower's demolished crown. This one thing she wants-to become a witch, to exact what she has paid…

So of course she must be denied.

There is no other place. So why not cast her life across the Whore's table? Why not press Fate to the very brink? At least she will die knowing.

She weeps twice, though she feels nothing of the sorrow that moves her: once glimpsing one of the little girls crouched peeing beneath sun-shot bowers, and again seeing the Wizard's silhouette pacing back and forth across his open window-back and forth. She literally cannot remember the last time she has been at one with her weeping. In her childhood, she supposes. Before the slavers.

At the very end of the heart's exhaustion lies a kind of resignation, a point where resolve and surrender become indistinguishable. Wavering requires alternatives, and she has none. The world is in rout. To leave would be to embark on a flight without refuge, to lead an itinerant existence, aimless, with nothing to credit one far-flung road over another, since despair has become all directions. She has no choice because all her choices have become the same.

A broken tree, as her brothel-master once told her, can never yield.

Two days become three. Three become four. Hunger makes her dizzy, while the rain makes her clay-cold. The world hates you, she thinks, staring at the broken tower. Even here.

The last place.

And then one night he simply comes out. He looks haggard, not just like an old man who never sleeps, but one who never forgives-himself or others, it does not matter. He bears rank wine and steaming food, which she falls upon like a thankless animal. Then he sits opposite her fire and begins talking. "The Dreams," he says with the intensity of someone who has waged long war against certain words.

She stares at him, unable to stop fingering food into her mouth, which she swallows against the sob in the back of her throat. The firelight seems to have grown shining porcupine quills. For a moment, she fears she might swoon for relief.

He speaks of the Dreams of the First Apocalypse, the nightmares that all Mandate Schoolmen share thanks to the derelict memories of their ancient founder, Seswatha, and the long dark horror of his war against the Consult. "Over and over," he mutters, "as if a life can be writ like a poem, torments fashioned into verses…"

"Are they that bad?" she asks in the lame silence. She can scarce see him past the combination of her tears and the fire's glare: an old and rutted face, one that has seen much-too much-and yet has not forgotten how to be tender or honest.

He winks at her before gazing down to fiddle with his pouch and pipe. He stuffs the bowl, his look both pensive and sealed. He picks up a twig from the fire's edge; a small flame twirls from the end of it.

"They used to be," he says, lighting the pipe. He goes cross-eyed, staring at the touch of fire and bowl.

"I don't understand."

He draws deeply on the stem; the bowl glows like a molten coin.

"Do you know," he asks, exhaling a cloud of sweet-smelling smoke, "why Seswatha left us his dreams?"

She knows the answer. Her mother always resorted to talk of Achamian to salve the abrasions between her and her embittered daughter. Because he was her real father, Mimara had always thought. "To assure the School of Mandate never forgets, never loses sight of its mission."

"That's what they say," Achamian replies, savouring his smoke. "That the Dreams are a goad to action, a call to arms. That by suffering the First Apocalypse over and over, we had no choice but to war against the possibility of the Second."

"You think otherwise?"

A shadow falls across his face. "I think that your adoptive father, our glorious, all-conquering Aspect-Emperor, is right." The hatred is plain in his voice.

"Kellhus?" she asks.

An old man shrug-an ancient gesture hung on failing bones. "He says it himself, Every life is a cipher…" Another deep inhalation. "A riddle."

"And you think Seswatha's life is such."

"I know it is."

And then the Wizard tells her. About the First Holy War. About his forbidden love for her mother. About how he was prepared to gamble the very World for the sanctuary of her arms. There is a candour to his telling, a vulnerability that makes it all the more compelling. He speaks plaintively, lapsing time and again into the injured tone of someone convinced others do not believe them wronged. And he speaks slyly, like a drunk who thinks he confides terrible secrets…

Even though Mimara has heard this story many times, she finds herself listening with an almost childish attentiveness, a willingness to be moved, even hurt, by the words of another. He has no idea, she realizes, that this story has become song and scripture in the world beyond his lonely tower. Everyone knows he loved her mother. Everyone knows that she chose the Aspect-Emperor and that Achamian subsequently fled into the wilderness…

The only secret is that he still lives.

With these thoughts her wonder quickly evaporates into embarrassment. He seems overmatched, tragically so, wrestling with words so much larger than himself. It becomes cruel to listen as she does, pretending not to know what she knows so well.

"She was your morning," she ventures.

He stops. For a heartbeat his eyes seem to lose something of their focus, then he glares at her with a kind of compressed fury. He turns to tap his pipe against a stone jutting from the matted leaves.

"My what?"

"Your morning," Mimara repeats hesitantly. "My mother. She used to tell me that… that she was your morning."

He holds the bowl to the firelight for inspection. "I no longer fear the night," he says with an absent intensity. "I no longer dream as Mandate Schoolmen dream." When he looks up, there is something at once flat and decisive in his eyes. The memory of an old and assured resolution.

"I no longer pray for the morning."

She leans back to pluck another log for the fire. It lands with a rasping thump, sends a train of sparks twirling up through the smoke. Watching their winking ascent to avoid his gaze, she hugs her shoulders against the chill. Somewhere neither near nor far, wolves howl into the bowl of the night. As though alarmed, he glances away into the wood, into the wells of blackness between the variant trunks and limbs. He stares with an intensity that makes her think that he listens as much as he hears, to the wolves and to whatever else-that he knows the myriad languages of the deep night.

It is then that he tells his tale in earnest…

As though he has secured permission.

Her mother had waited for him like this, so very long ago.

Over the days and nights since Mimara's arrival, Achamian had told himself many things. That he was angry-how could he reward such impudence? That he was prudent-what could be more dangerous than harbouring a fugitive Princess-Imperial? That he was compassionate-she was too old to master the semantics of sorcery, and the sooner she understood this, the better. He told himself many things, acknowledged many passions, save the confusion that was the truth of his soul.

Her mother, Esmenet, had waited for him on the banks of the River Sempis over twenty years previous. Not even word of his death could turn her from her vigil, so obstinate, so mulish was her love. Not even sense could sway her.

Only Kellhus and the appearance of honesty.

Even before Mimara began her watch-or siege, as it sometimes seemed-Achamian knew that she shared her mother's stubbornness. It was no small feat travelling alone from Momemn the way she had; his skin prickled at the thought of it, this small woman daring the Wilds to find him, spending night after night alone in the scheming dark. So even before he had shut his doors against her, commanded his slaves to avoid her, he knew she would not be so easily driven away. Even that night when he had struck her in the rain.

Something more was needed. Something deeper than sense.

He told himself that she was mad enough to do it, that she would literally waste to nothing waiting for him to climb down from his tower. He told himself he needed only to be honest, to confess the truth in all its mangled detail, and that she would see, realize that her vigil could win only the destruction of two souls. He told himself these things because he still loved her mother, and because he knew that one never stood still, even while waiting. That sometimes the sheathed knife could cut the most throats of all.

So he came in kindness, with the food she so obviously needed, and with an openness that itched because of its premeditation. He certainly hadn't anticipated losing himself in story and conversation. It had been so long since he had truly spoken. For nigh twenty years, his words had always skipped without sinking.

"I'm not even sure when it began happening, let alone why," he said, pausing to draw a palsied breath. "The Dreams began to change… in strange, little ways at first. Mandate Schoolmen claim to relive Seswatha's life, but this is only partially true. In fact, we dream only portions, the long trauma of the First Apocalypse. All we dream is the spectacle. 'Seswatha,' the old Mandate joke goes, 'does not shit.' The banalities-the substance of his life-is missing… The truth of his life is missing."

All the things that were forgotten, he realized.

"In the beginning, I noticed a change in the character, perhaps, but nothing more. A slight difference in emphasis. When the dreamer is remade, won't the dreams change also? Besides, the dread spectacle was simply too overwhelming to care all that much. When thousands are screaming, who pauses to count bruises on an apple?

"Then it happened: I dreamed of him-Seswatha-stubbing his toe… I fell asleep, this world folded in on itself the way it always does, and his world rose into its place. I was he, crossing a gloomy room racked with what seemed to be thousands of scrolls, mumbling, lost in thought, and I stubbed my toe on the bronze foot of a brazier… It was like a fever dream, the ones that travel like a cart in a circle, happening over and over. Seswatha stubbing his toe!"

Without thinking, he had leaned forward and clutched the tip of his felt-slippered foot. The leather was fire hot. Mimara simply stared at him, her eyes placid above fine-boned cheeks, looking for all the world like the past, like her staring out over the smoke of a harsher fire. Another abject listener. Either she remained silent out of irritation-perhaps he had spoken too long or too hard-or she kept her counsel, understanding that his story was a living thing, and as such could only be judged as a whole.

"When I awoke in the morning," he continued, "I had no idea what to make of it. It didn't strike me as a revelation of any kind, only a curiosity. There are always anomalies, you see. If this were Atyersus, I could show you whole tomes cataloguing the various ways in which the Dreams misfire: the inversions, substitutions, alterations, corruptions, and on and on. More than a few Mandate scholars have spent their lives trying to interpret their significance. Numerological codes. Prophetic communications. Ethereal interferences. It's an easy obsession, considering the suffering involved. They convince nobody save themselves in the end. As bad as philosophers.

"So I decided the toe-stubbing dream was my own. Seswatha never stubbed his toe, I told myself. I stubbed my dream toe while dreaming that I was Seswatha. After all, it was my toe that ached all morning! It never happened, I told myself. Not really…

"And of course the next night it was back to the Dreams as I knew them. Back to the blood and the fire and the horror. A year passed, maybe more, before I dreamed another banality: Seswatha scolding a student on a veranda overlooking the Library of Sauglish. I dismissed this one the same as the first.

"Then two months after that, I dreamed yet another trivial thing: Seswatha huddled in a scriptorium, reading a scroll by the light of coals…"

He trailed, though whether to let the significance settle in or to savour the memory, he did not know. Sometimes words interrupted themselves. He pinched the hem of his cloak, rolled the rough-sewn seam between thumb and forefinger.

Mimara ran the blade of her hand across the bowl's interior curve to scoop out the last of her gruel-like any slave or caste-menial. It was strange, Achamian noted, the way she alternately remembered and forgot her jnanic manners. "What was the scroll?" she asked, swallowing.

"A lost work," he replied, absent with memories. He blinked. "Gotagga's Parapolis… The title means nothing to you, I know, but for a scholar it's nothing short of… well, a miracle. The Parapolis is a lost work, famous, the first great treatise on politics, referenced by almost all the writers of Far Antiquity. It was one of the greater treasures lost in the First Apocalypse and I dreamed of reading it, as Seswatha, sitting in the cellars of the Library…"

Mimara paused for one last pass of her tongue along the bowl's rim. "And you don't think you invented this?"

Irritation marbled his laugh. "I suppose my tongue is sharp enough to count me clever, but I'm no Gotagga, I assure you. No. No. There was no question. I awoke in a mad haste, searching for quill, hide, and horn so I could scratch down as much as I could remember…"

Her meal forgotten, Mimara watched him with same shrewd canniness that had so honed her mother's beauty. "So the dreams were real…"

He nodded, squinting at the memory of the miracle that had been that morning. What a wondrous, breathless scramble! It was as though the answer was already there, wholly formed, as clear as the steam rolling off his morning tea: He had started dreaming outside the narrow circle of his former Mandate brothers. He had begun dreaming Seswatha's mundane life.

"And no one," she asked, "no Mandate Schoolman, has ever dreamed these things before?"

"Bits maybe, fragments, but nothing like this."

How strange it had been, to find his life's revelation in the small things; he who had wrestled with dying worlds. But then the great ever turned upon the small. He often thought of the men he'd known-the warlike ones, or just the plain obstinate-of their enviable ability to overlook and to ignore. It was like a kind of wilful illiteracy, as if all the moments of unmanly passion and doubt, all the frail details that gave substance to their lives, were simply written in a tongue they couldn't understand and so needed to condemn and belittle. It never occurred to them that to despise the small things was to despise themselves-not to mention the truth.

But then that was the tragedy of all posturing.

"But why the change?" she asked, her face a delicate oval hanging warm and motionless against the black forest deeps. "Why you? Why now?"

He had inked these questions across parchment many times.

"I have no idea. Perhaps it's the Whore-fucking Fate. Perhaps it's a happy consequence of my madness-for one cannot endure what I've endured day and night without going a little mad, I assure you." He made her laugh by blinking his eyes and jerking his head in caricature. "Perhaps, by ceasing to live my own life, I'd began living his. Perhaps some dim memory, some spark of Seswatha's soul, is reaching out to me… Perhaps…"

Achamian blinked at the crack in his voice, cleared his throat. Words could soar, dip, and dazzle, and sometimes even cross paths with the sun. Blind and illuminate. But the voice was different. It remained bound to the earth of expression. Not matter how it danced, the graves always lay beneath its feet.

On the back of a heavy breath, he said, "But there is a far greater question."

She hugged her knees before the pop and swirl of the fire, blinking slowly, her expression more careful than impassive. He knew how he must look, the challenge in his glare, the defensiveness, the threat of punishing surrogates. He looked like a venomous old man, balling up his reasons in uncertain fists-he knew as much.

But if there were judgment in her eyes, he could detect nothing of it.

"My stepfather," she said. "Kellhus is the question."

He imagined he must be gaping at her, gawking like a stump-headed fool.

He had spoken to her as if she were a stranger, an innocent, when in point of fact she was joined to him at the very root. Esmenet was her mother, which meant that Kellhus was her stepfather. Even though he had known this, the significance of that knowing had completely escaped him. Of course she knew of his hatred. Of course she knew the particulars of his shame!

How could he be so oblivious? The Dыnyain was her father! The Dыnyain.

Did this not instantly make her an instrument of some kind? A witting or unwitting spy? Achamian had watched an entire army-a holy war-succumb to his dread influence. Slaves, princes, sorcerers, fanatics-it did not matter. Achamian himself had surrendered his love-his wife! What chance could this mere girl have?

How much of her soul was hers, and how much had been replaced?

He gazed at her, tried to scowl away the slack from his expression.

"He sent you, didn't he?"

She looked genuinely confused, dismayed even. "What? Kellhus?" She stared at him, her mouth open and wordless. "If his people find me, they would drag me home in chains! Throw me at the feet of my fucking mother-you have to believe that!"

"He sent you."

Something, some mad note in his voice perhaps, rocked her backward. "I'm not ly-lying…" Tears clotted her eyes. A strange half-crook bent her face to the side, as though angling it away from unseen blows. "I'm not lying," she repeated with a snarling intensity. A twitch marred her features. "No. Look. Everything was going so well… Everything was going so well!"

"This is the way it works," Achamian heard himself rasp in an utterly ruthless voice. "This is the way he sends you. 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."

"I don't know what you're talking about! He-he's always been kind-"

"Did he ever tell you to forgive your mother?"

"What? What do you mean?"

"Did he ever tell you the shape of your own heart? Did he ever speak salving words, healing words, words that helped you see yourself more clearly than you had ever seen yourself before?"

"Yes-I mean, no! And yes… Please… Things were going so-!"

There was a grinding to his aspect, an anger that had become reptilian with age. "Did you ever find yourself in awe of him? Did something whisper to you, This man is more than a man? And did you feel gratified, gratified beyond measure, at his merest tenderness, at the bare fact of his attention?"

He was shaking as he spoke now, shaking at the memories, shaking at the nakedness of twenty years stripped away. It seemed to hang about the edges of his vision, the lies and the hopes and the betrayals, the succession of glaring suns and uproarious battles.

"Akka…" she was saying. So like her whore-mother. "What are you talki-?"

"When you stood before him!" he roared. "When you knelt in his presence, did you feel it? Hollow and immovable, as if you were at once smoke and yet possessed the bones of the world? Truth? Did you feel Truth?"

"Yes!" she cried. "Everyone does! Everyone! He's the Aspect-Emperor! He's the Saviour. He's come to save us! Come to save the Sons of Men!"

Achamian stared at her aghast, his own vehemence ringing in his ears. Of course she was a believer.

"He sent you."

It was too late, he realized, staring at the image of Mimara across the fire. It had already happened. Despite all the intervening years, despite the waning violence of the Dreams, she had returned him to the teeth of yesterday. To simply gaze upon her was to taste the dust and blood and smoke of the First Holy War.

He understood her look-how could he not when he so readily recognized it as his own? Too many losses. Too many small hopes denied. Too many betrayals of sell. The look of someone who understands that the World is a peevish judge, forgiving only to render its punishments all the more severe. She had suffered a moment of weakness when she had seen him clambering down the slopes with food; he could see that now. She had let herself hope. Her soul had taken her body's gratitude and made it its own.

He believed her. She was not a willing slave. If anything she reminded him of the Scylvendi, of a soul at once strong and yet battered beyond recognition. And she looked so much like her mother…

She was precisely the kind of slave Kellhus would send to him. Part cipher. Part opiate.

Someone Drusas Achamian could come to love.

"Did you know I was there when he first arrived in the Three Seas," he said, broaching the silence of dark forests and rustling flames. "He was no more than a beggar claiming princely blood-and with a Scylvendi as his companion no less! I was there from the very first. It was my back he broke climbing to absolute power."

He rubbed his nose, breathed deep as though preparing for the plunge. It never ceased to strike him as strange, the fits and starts of the body and its anxieties.

"Kellhus," he said, speaking the name in the old way, with the intonations of familiarity and wry trust. "My student… My friend… My prophet… It was my wife he stole…

"My morning."

He glared, challenging her to speak again. She simply blinked, wriggled as though to adjust her position. He could see her swallow behind the line of her lips.

"The only thing," he continued, his voice wrung ragged with conflicting passions. "The only thing I took with me from my previous life was a simple question: Who is Anasыrimbor Kellhus? Who?"

Achamian stared at the bed of coals pulsing beneath the blackened wood, paused to allow Mimara fair opportunity to respond, or so he told himself. The truth was that the thought of her voice made him wince. The truth was that his story had turned into a confession.

"Everyone knows the answer to that question," she ventured, speaking with a delicacy that confirmed his fears. "He's the Aspect-Emperor."

Of course she would say this. Even if she hadn't been Kellhus's adoptive daughter, she would have said precisely the same thing. They so wanted it to be simple, believers. "It is what is!" they cried, sneering at the possibility of other eyes, other truths, overlooking their own outrageous presumption. "It says what it says," spoken with a conviction that was itself insincerity. They ridiculed questions, for fear it would make their ignorance plain. Then they dared call themselves "open."

This was the iron habit of Men. This was what shackled them to the Aspect-Emperor.

He shook his head in slow deliberation. "The most important question you can ask any man, child, is the question of his origin. Only by knowing what a man has been can you hope to say what he will be." He paused, brought up short by an old habit of hesitation. How easy it was to hide in his old pedantic ruts, to recite rather than talk. But no matter how woolly, his abstractions always became snarled in the very needling particularities he so unwittingly tried to avoid. He had always been a man who wanted to digress, only to find himself bleeding on the nub.

"But everyone knows the answer to that question," she said with same care as before, "Kellhus is the Son of Heaven." What else could he be? her over-bright eyes asked.

"Yet he is flesh and blood, born of a father's seed and a mother's womb. He was reared. He was taught. He was sent out into the world…" He raised his eyebrows as though speaking something crucial but universally overlooked. "So tell me, where did all this happen? Where?"

For the first time, it seemed, he glimpsed real doubt gnawing her gaze. "They say he was a prince," she began, "that he comes from Atrith-"

"He does not come from Atrithau," Achamian snapped. "I know this on a dead man's authority."

The Scylvendi. Cnaiьr urs Skiцtha. As always, the man's words came back to him: "With every heartbeat they war against circumstance, with every breath they conquer! They walk among us as we walk among dogs, and we yowl when they throw out scraps, we whine and whimper when they raise their hand… They make us love!"

They. The Dыnyain. The Tribe of the Aspect-Emperor.

"But what about his bloodline?" Mimara asked. "Are you saying his name is false as well?"

"No… He is an Anasыrimbor, I grant you that-the coincidences would be stacked too high were it otherwise. That is our only clue."

"How so?"

"Because it means the question of his birthplace is the question of where the Line of Anasыrimbor could have survived."

She seemed to consider this. "But if not Atrithau, then where? The North is more than ruined, more than wilderness-or so my tutors always say. How could anyone survive with… them?"

Them. The Sranc. Achamian thought of the multitudes, clawing the earth in frustration, throwing up gouts of dirt in the absence of warding limbs, stamping and howling, stamping and howling across the endless tracts.

"Exactly," he said. "If the Line were to survive, it had to be within a refuge of some kind. Something secret, hidden. Something raised by the Kыniьric High Kings, ere the First Apocalypse…"

"Then listen!" the Scylvendi cried. "For thousands of years they have hidden in the mountains, isolated from the world. For thousands of years they have bred, allowing only the quickest of their children to live. They say you know the passing of ages better than any, sorcerer, so think on it! Thousands of years… Until we, the natural sons of true fathers, have become little more than children to them."

"A sanctuary."

Achamian knew he was speaking too desperately now, even though he measured his words the way hungry mothers dolloped out butter. Such words could not come slow enough. The Aspect-Emperor a liar? Her face was blank in the way of those grievously offended, whose retort remained bottled by the fear of unstopping too many passions. His soul's eye and ear cried out for her: Jealous old fool! He stole her, Esmenet! That is the sum of your pathetic case against him. He stole the only woman you've loved! And now you lust only for his destruction, to see him burn, though all the world is tinder…

He breathed deeply, leaned back from the fire, which suddenly seemed to nip him with its heat. He resolved to refill his pipe, but could only clench his fists against the tremors.

My hands shake.

His voice grows more shrill. His gesticulations become wilder. His discourse develops a pinned-in-place savagery that makes him difficult to watch and impossible to contradict.

Her heart rejoices at first, certain that he has relented. But the tone of his voice quickly tells her otherwise. The excitement. The wry delivery of his observations, as though to say, How many times? The way people speak is a bound thing, as far from free as a slave or a horse. Place binds it. Occasion binds it. But other people rule it most of all; the shadow of names lies hidden in every word spoken. And the longer he talks, the more Mimara realizes that he is speaking to someone other than her…

To Esmenet.

The irony stings for some reason. She had taken him to be her father, and now he takes her to be her mother. He's mad… Mad the same as me.

The Wizard is not so much her father, she realizes, as her brother. Another child of Esmenet, almost as broken, and every bit as betrayed.

She has been wrong about him in every way, not simply with regard to demeanour and appearance. Her mother styled him a scholar and a mystic, someone who spent his exile lost in arcane researches. Mimara has read enough about sorcery to know the importance of meanings, that semantic purity is a Schoolman's perennial obsession. And yet nothing could be further from the case. As he explains to her, he cares nothing for the Gnosis, not even as a tool. He has retired from the Three Seas for heartbreak-this much is true. But the reason, the rule that makes his life rational in his own eyes, is simple vengeance.

The truth of Anasыrimbor Kellhus, he insists, was to be found in the secret of his origins-in the secret of something called the Dыnyain. "The Scylvendi was his mistake!" Achamian cries, his eyes wild with unkempt passions. "The Scylvendi knew what he was. Dыnyain!" And the secret of the Dыnyain, he claims, though Mimara understands instantly that this is little more than a hope, was to be found in the detail of Seswatha's life.

His Dreams. His Dreams had become the vehicle for his vengeance. Here, on the very edge of the wilderness, he has bent all his efforts to decoding their smoky afterimages. Twenty years he has laboured, mapping, drawing up meticulous inventories, sifting through the debris, the detritus of a dead sorcerer's ancient life, searching for the silver needle that would see his wrongs avenged.

It's more than a fool's errand; it is a madman's obsession, on a par with those ascetics who beat themselves with strings and flint, or who eat nothing but ox-hides covered in religious writings. Twenty years! Anything that could consume so much life simply has to be deranged. The hubris alone…

His hatred of Kellhus she finds understandable, though she herself bears no grudge against her stepfather. She barely knows the Aspect-Emperor, and those rare times she found herself alone with him on the Andiamine Heights-twice-he seemed at once radiant and tragic, perhaps the most immediate and obvious soul she had ever encountered.

"You think you hate her," he once said-referring to her mother, of course.

"I know I do."

"There's no knowledge," he had replied, "in the shadow of hate."

Now, watching and listening to this old man, she thinks she understands those words. Cooped in his desolate tower, trapped between the banks of his soul, how could Achamian not bring the two great currents of his life together? His Dreams and his Hatred. Contained too long in too little space, how could they not become entangled in a single turbulent stream? To resent is to brood in inaction, to pass through life acting in a manner indistinguishable from those who bear no grudges. But hatred hails from a wilder, far more violent tribe. Even when you cannot strike out, you strike nonetheless. Inward, if not outward, as if such things have direction. To hate, especially without recourse to vengeance, is to besiege yourself, to starve yourself to the point of eating your own, then to lay wreaths of blame at the feet of the accused.

Yes, she decides. Drusas Achamian is her brother.

"So all this time," she says, daring to speak into one of the few silences he affords her, "you've been dreaming his life, cataloguing it, searching for clues as to my stepfather's origin…"

"Yes."

"What have you found?"

The question shocks him; that much is plain. He draws clawed fingers through his great and grizzled beard. "A name," he finally says with the sullen resentment of those forced to admit the disproportion between their boasts and their purse.

"A name?" She nearly laughs.

A long sour glare.

She reminds herself to take care. Her instinct, given all that she has endured, is to be impatient with the conceits of others. But she needs this man.

An inward look of concentration, then he says, "Ishuдl."

He almost whispers it, as though it were a jar containing furies, something that could be cracked open by a careless tongue.

"Ishuдl," she repeats, simply because his tone seems to demand it.

"It's derived from a Nonman dialect," he continues. "It means 'Exalted Grotto,' or 'High Hidden Place,' depending on how literal the translation."

"Ishuдl? Kellhus is from Ishuдl?"

It troubles him, she can tell, to hear her refer to her stepfather as such-as someone familiar.

"I'm certain of it."

"But if it's a hidden place…"

Another sour glare. "It won't be long," he mutters with old man dismissiveness. "Not now. Not any more. Seswatha… His life is opening… Not just the small things, but the secrets as well."

A life spent mining the life of another, pondering glimpses of tedium through the lense of holy and apocalyptic portent. Twenty years! How can he hope to balance the proportions? Grub through dirt long enough and you will prize stones.

"Like he's yielding," she forces herself to say.

"Exactly! I know I sound mad for saying it, but it's almost as if he knows."

She finds nodding difficult, as though pity has seized the hinge of her neck and skull. What reservoirs of determination would it take? To spend so long immersed in a task not only bereft of any tangible profit, but without any appreciable measure of progress-how much would it require? Year after year, wrestling with the imperceptible, wringing hope out of smoke and half-memory. What depths of conviction? What kind of perseverance?

Certainly not any the sane possess.

Faces. All conduct is a matter of wearing the appropriate faces. The brothel taught her that, and the Andiamine Heights simply confirmed the lesson. It's as though expressions occupy various positions, a warning here, a greeting there, with the distance between measured by the difficulty of forcing one face from the other. At this moment nothing seems so difficult as squeezing pity into the semblance of avid interest.

"No other Mandate Schoolman has ever experienced anything like this?" She has asked this already, but it bears repeating.

"Nothing," he replies, his face and posture true to his frailty. He has shrunk into the husk of hides that clothe him. He seems as lonely as he is, and even more isolate. "What can it mean?"

She blinks, strangely offended by this open display of weakness. Then it happens.

The Mark already blasts him, renders him ugly in the manner of things rent and abraded, as though his inner edges have been pinched and twisted, pinched and twisted, his very substance worried from the fabric of mundane things. But suddenly she sees more, the hue of judgment, as though blessing and condemnation have become a wash visible only in certain kinds of light. It hangs about him, bleeds from him, something palpable… evil.

No. Not evil. Damnation.

He is damned. Somehow she knows this with the certainty with which children know their hands. Thoughtless. Complete.

He is damned.

Another blink, the different eye closes, and he is an old Wizard once again. The illuminated surfaces are as impervious as before.

Sorrow wells through her, at once abstract and tidal, the resignation one feels when losses outrun numbers. Clutching her blanket, she presses herself to her feet, scuttles to sit on the cold ground beside him. She looks at him with the eyes she knows so well, the gaze that promises to roam wherever. She knows that he is hopeless, the wreck of what was once a mighty man.

But she also knows what she needs to do-to give. Another lesson from the brothel. It's so simple, for it's what all madmen yearn for, what they crave above all things…

To be believed.

"You have become a prophet," she says, leaning in for the kiss. Her whole life she has punished herself with men. "A prophet of the past."

The memory of his power is like perfume.

The recriminations come later, in the darkness. Why is there no place so lonely as the sweaty slot beside a sleeping man?

And at the same time, no place so safe?

Bundling a blanket about her nakedness, she crawls to the dim bed of coals, where she sits, rocking herself between clutched arms and rough folds, trying to squeeze away the memory of skidding skin, the wheezing of old man exertions. The dark is complete, so much so the forest and the stoved-in tower seem painted in pitch. The warmth of the gutted fire only sharpens the chill.

The tears do not come until he touches her-a gentle hand across her back, falling like a leaf. Kindness. This is the one thing she cannot bear. Kindness.

"We have made our first mistake together," he says, as though it were something significant. "We will not make it again."

No forest slumbers in silence, even in the dead of a windless night. The touch of twigs and leaves, the press of forking branches, the sweep of limbs endlessly interlocking, incorporating more and more skirted trunks, creating a labyrinth of hollows, with only sudden scarps to interrupt them. Somehow it all conspired to create a whispering dark.

The coals tinkle like faraway glass.

"Am I broken?" she sobs. "Is that why I run?"

"We all bear unseen burdens," he replies, sitting more behind her than beside. "We are all bent somehow."

"You mean you," she says, hating herself for the accusation. "The way you are bent!"

But the hand does not retreat from her back.

"The way I must be… I must discover the truth, Mimara. More than my spite turns upon what I do."

Her snort is convulsive, phlegmatic. "What difference will it make? Golgotterath will be destroyed within the year. Your Second Apocalypse will be over before it even begins!"

His fingertips draw away.

"What do you mean?" he says, his tone both light and brittle.

"I mean that Sakarpus will have already fallen." Why does she suddenly hate him? Was it because she seduced him, or because he failed to resist? Or was it because laying with him made no difference? She gazes at him, unable or unwilling to hide the triumph her eyes. "The plans were afoot before I fled the cursed Heights. The Great Ordeal marches, old man."

Silence. Remorse comes crashing in.

Can't you see? something shrieks within her. Can't you see the poison I bring? Strike me! Strangle me! Pare me to the core with your questions!

But she laughs instead. "You have shut yourself away for too long. You have found your revelation too late."