The white-luck warrior

Late Spring, 20 New Imperial Year (4132 Year-of-the-Tusk), the "Long Side"

It tracked their blundering flight through the Wilderness. It watched and it hungered and it hated…

How it hated.

It remained in the trees for the most part, running with glee along the dead limbs of the under-canopy. It fed on squirrels, eaten raw, and once upon a wildcat that had tried to feed on it. It supped on the mewling litter afterward, laughed at their miniature hisses and struggles. Their tiny skulls cracked like delicacies.

Days. Weeks.

Over gnarled miles, through rain falling in sheeted fury. It watched them trudge and it watched them sleep. It watched them feud and bicker. Three times it saw them battle the errant children of the Old Fathers, the Sranc, and it crouched, its eyes wide and wondering as tangles of sorcerous light and shadow fluttered through the forest's mangled depths.

And sometimes it dared crawl close, like a serpent worming toward prey. Grinding its phallus against hoary bark, it would watch her, the girl who had saved them in the ancient-old deeps. And it would know lust, malice. It would gaze with a singularity unknown to Men.

The thing called Soma.

Each night it sought some tree greater than the others, a tower among lesser pillars, and it climbed, leaping and swinging through the canopies, from dead to living, following fork and branch to the wiry limit, until it breached the final leafy weave. There, gently creaking side to side in the breeze, it stared across an ocean of arboreal crowns.

It would bend its neck back until its head pressed its spine, and it would scream.

And scream.

Watch after watch, night after night, shrieking in tones that not even dogs could hear. Only rats.

Screaming. Until its mouth filled with blood.

– | The Hags could not keep up.

They would begin complaining around midday-at least at first. Belmorn, the particularly brutish Galeoth who had become their de facto leader, even went so far as to accuse the Skin Eaters of devilry. With a kind of immovable indifference, Achamian watched the Captain stroll up to the arm-waving giant and plunge a knife in his armpit.

"Your lives are mine!" he screamed at the others. "Mine to beat! Mine to torture! Mine to murder!"

That night two of the Hags disappeared-Achamian could not remember their names. Nothing was said of them the next day or any of the days following. Scalpers did not speak of the dead, even ones so despicable as the Stone Hags.

The rains began after that, and below dark skies the world beneath the forest canopies was darker still. Lightning strikes were little more than sparks and glows glimpsed through the gauze of a million leaves, but the thunder crashed undulled through the brachiated gloom. Guttered by the trees, the rainwaters fell in the form of countless hanging rivulets, a pissing army of them, soaking the ground to wheezing muck. And if the way became more arduous for the Skin Eaters with their nightly ration of Qirri, it became harder still for the Hags.

One, a ritually scarred Thunyeri named Osilwas, they lost to a river crossing. With a wound festering in his arm, the man had staggered as much as marched for days. One evening Achamian had watched him cut his hair away, lock by lock-to shed weight, he supposed. Despite the man's condition, the old Wizard had thought Osilwas would survive, perhaps mistaking the gleam of fever in his eyes for the light of determination. One stumble in roiling waters was all it took to sweep him away.

Another, a bow-legged Cepaloran the others called Scroll-apparently because of the elaborate blue tattooing across his limbs-simply began wailing like a madman one night and had to be put down as a sobber. The day after, Erydides, who continually claimed to be a Cironji pirate in the chaotic days preceding the New Empire, developed a limp. No matter how hard he laboured, he fell ever farther behind. Achamian's last memory of him was his grimace: a kind of panicked grin stretched across expressions of abject pain. A look that urged wild effort in the utter absence of strength.

Then there was the dispute between Pokwas and Wulgulu, the strutting Thunyeri who for a time had assumed titular command of his brothers. Achamian did not know what caused the altercation, only that it occurred in the course of dividing a joint of wild boar. Pokwas, in particular, was inclined to heap abuse on the Hags, alternately calling them dogs, wretches, and "mibus"-apparently a mibu was a kind of Zeumi jackal renowned for eating its own kind during the dry season. "Be a good mibu," Achamian had overheard him say on more than one occasion, "and we will feed your dead to you." One moment everything was gloom and milling exhaustion, the next the two men were grappling, their heels kicking up leaves and dirt as they heaved at each other. Pokwas was easily the stronger: the green-eyed giant twisted Wulgulu around, wrenched him to the ground. Then he began pounding the prostrate Thunyeri about the head and face. Again and again, while everyone gnawed and chewed their dinner, their hands and faces gleaming with grease. Nothing was said, and aside from the black giant's laboured breathing, nothing was heard beyond the slapping thud of his fists. Again and again. The Sword-dancer continued striking the man long after he was dead, while Achamian and the others continued watching and eating. Only Mimara turned away.

Afterward Sarl began cackling in his strange, inward way, muttering, "I told you, Kiampas! Eh? Yes!"

Something was happening…

Achamian could feel it in his bones-catch glimpses of it in the eyes of the others. Mimara especially. He had watched a human head hammered into a wineskin, and he had felt nothing more than… curiosity?

It was the Qirri. It had to be. The medicine seemed to numb their conscience as much as it quickened their limbs and stretched their wind. Even as Achamian felt himself becoming closer to Mimara, he found himself caring less for the surviving Skin Eaters and not at all for the wretched Hags.

The old Wizard had enough experience with hashish and opium to know the way drugs could alter the small things, stretch and twist the detailed fabric of life. In the fleshpots of Carythusal, he had seen the way the poppy, especially, could conquer the myriad desires of men, until their hunger for the drug eclipsed even lust and love.

He knew enough to be wary, but the fact was they were moving fast, far faster than Achamian had dared hope. Several days into the rains they had found the ruins of a bridge on the banks of a great river, a bridge that Achamian recognized from his dreams as the Archipontus of Wul, a work famed across the Ancient North in Seswatha's day. That meant they had travelled over half the distance from Maimor to Kelmeol, the ancient capital of the Meori Empire, in the space of two weeks-a spectacular distance. If they could maintain this pace, they would easily reach Sauglish and the Coffers before summer's end.

But it was a pace that was killing the newcomers. More and more the remaining Hags took on the vigilant aspect of hostages, a look at once surly, bewildered, and terrified. They ceased speaking, even among themselves, and as much as the Skin Eaters found their gaze inexorably drawn to Cleric, their eyes continually circled about the Captain and the threat of his discipline. Night would fall, the rains would thread the dark with lines of silver, and the Hags would huddle in shivering clutches, while Galian, Conger, and the others would bare their arms and marvel at their steaming skin.

"Where we going?" the youngest of them, a Galeoth adolescent with the strange name of Heresius, began shrieking one evening. "What madness?" he screamed in broken Sheyic. "What madness you do?" Staring was the most any of the original company could manage, so sudden and crazed was the young man's outburst. Finally, with the same murderous deliberation Achamian had seen many times, the Captain stood. The youth, who was no fool, bolted like a spooked doe into the murk…

Afterward, Galian insisted he had seen something-arms, he thought-hook out of the dead under-canopy and yank the young wretch into oblivion.

No one mourned him. No one, Stone Hag or Skin Eater, so much as spoke his name. The dead had no place in their history. They were scalpers. As much as they feared their mad Captain, none of them disputed his simple and dread logic. Death to sobbers. Death to loafers. Death to limpers, bellyachers, and bleeders…

Death to weakness, the great enemy of enmity.

So day after day they threw themselves at horizons they could not see, trudged with bottomless vigour into lands obscured and obscure, whether the sky cracked and poured water or the sun shone through sheets of green luminescence. And day after day the Stone Hags dwindled-for they were weak.

As the Skin Eaters were strong.

There was no place for pity, even less for regret, on the slog. And this, as Sarl continually slurred under his breath, was the Slog of Slogs. You could not be wholly human and survive the Long Side, so you became something less and pretended you were more.

In subsequent days Achamian would come to look at this leg of their journey with a peculiar horror, not because he had lived necessary lies, but because he had come to believe them. He was a man who would rather know and enumerate his sins, bear the pain of them, than cocoon himself in numbing ignorance and flattering exculpation.

You can only believe so many lies before becoming one of them.

What began as a remedy in the Cil-Aujan deeps had somehow transcended habit and become sacred ritual. "The Holy Dispensation," Mimara once called it in a pique of impatience.

Each night they queued before the Nonman, awaiting their pinch of Qirri. Usually Cleric would sit cross-legged and wordlessly dip his index finger into his pouch, darkening the pad with the merest smear. One by one the Skin Eaters would kneel before him and take the tip of his outstretched finger into their mouths-to better avoid any waste. Achamian would take his place among the others, kneel as they did when his time came. The Qirri would be bitter, the finger cold for the spit of others, sweet for the soil of daily use. A kind of euphoria would flutter through him, one that stirred troubling memories of kneeling before Kellhus during the First Holy War. There would be a moment, a mere heartbeat, where he would buckle beneath the dark gaze of the Nonman. But he would walk away content, like a starving child who had tasted honey.

Thoughtless, he would sit and savour the slow crawl of vitality through his veins.

The first and only Stone Hag to dare ridicule the act was found dead the following morning. Afterward, the renegade scalpers restricted their opinions to sullen looks and expressions-fear and disgust, mostly.

Sometimes the Nonman would climb upon some wild pulpit, the mossed remains of a fallen tree, the humped back of a boulder, and paint wonders with his dark voice. Wonders and horrors both.

Often he spoke of war and tribulation, of loves unravelled and victories undone. But no matter how the scalpers pressed him with questions, he could never recall the frame of his reminiscences. He spoke in episodes and events, never ages or times. The result was a kind of inadvertent verse, moments too packed with enigma and ambiguity to form narrative wholes-at least none they could comprehend. Fragments that never failed to leave his human listeners unsettled and amazed.

Mimara continually pestered the old Wizard with questions afterward. "Who is he?" she would hiss. "His stories must tell you something!"

Time and again Achamian could only profess ignorance. "He remembers the breaking of things, nothing more. The rest of the puzzle is always missing-for him as much as for us! I know only that he's old… exceedingly old…"

"How old?"

"Older than iron. Older even than human writing…"

"You mean older than the Tusk."

All Nonmen living were impossibly ancient. Even the youngest of their number were contemporaries of the Old Prophets. But if his sermons could be believed, Cleric-or Incariol, Lord Wanderer-was far older still, in his prime before the Ark and the coming of the Inchoroi.

An actual contemporary Nin'janjin and Cu'jara Cinmoi…

"Go to sleep," the Wizard grumbled.

What did it matter who Cleric had been, he told himself, when the ages had battered him into something entirely different?

"You look upon me and see something whole… singular…" the Nonman said one night, his head hanging from his shoulders, his face utterly lost to shadow. When he looked up tears had silvered his cheeks. "You are mistaken."

"What did he mean?" Mimara asked after she and the Wizard had curled onto their mats. They always slept side by side now. Achamian had even become accustomed to the point of absence that was her Chorae. Ever since that first Sranc attack, when she had been stranded with Soma beyond the protective circuit of his incipient Wards, he had been loathe to let her stray from his side.

"He means that he's not a… a self… in the way you and I are selves. Now go to sleep."

"But how is that possible?"

"Because of memory. Memory is what binds us to what we are. Go to sleep."

"What do you mean? How can somebody not be what they are? That makes no sense."

"Go to sleep."

He would lay there, his eyes closed to the world, while the image of the Nonman-mundane beauty perpetually at war with his arcane disfiguration-plagued his soul. The old Wizard would curse himself for a fool, ask himself how many watches he had wasted worrying about the Erratic. Cleric was one of the Pharroika, the Wayward. Whatever the Nonman once was, he was no longer-and that should be enough.

If he had ceased pondering Incariol altogether in the days following the battle in the ruins of Maimor, it was because of the skin-spy and what its presence implied. But time's passage has a way of blunting our sharper questions, of making things difficult to confront soft with malleable familiarity. Of course, the Consult had been watching him, the man who had taught the Gnosis to the Aspect-Emperor, and so delivered the Three Seas. Of course, they had infiltrated the Skin Eaters.

He was Drusas Achamian.

But the further Soma fell into the past, the more Cleric's presence irked his curiosity, the more the old questions began prickling back to life.

Even his Dreams had been affected.

He had lost his inkhorn and papyrus in the mad depths of Cil-Aujas, so he could no longer chronicle the particulars of his slumbering experience. Nor did he need to.

It almost seemed as if he had become unmoored when he pondered the transformations. First he had drifted from the central current of Seswatha's life, away from the tragic enormities and into the mundane details, where he had been delivered to knowledge of Ishual, the secret fastness of the Dunyain. Then, as if these things were too small to catch the fabric of his soul, he slipped from Seswatha altogether, seeing things his ancient forebear had never seen, standing where he never stood, as when he saw the Library of Sauglish burn.

And now?

He continued to dream that he and nameless others stood shackled in a shadowy line. Broken men. Brutalized. They filed through a tube of thatched undergrowth, bushes that had grown out and around their passage, forming vaults of a thousand interlocking branches. Over the stooped shoulders of those before him, he could see the tunnel's terminus, the threshold of some sunlit clearing, it seemed-the spaces beyond were so open and bright as to defeat his gloom-pinched eyes. He felt a dread that seemed curiously disconnected from his surroundings, as if his fear had come to him from a far different time and place.

And he did not know who he was.

A titanic horn would blare, and the line would be pulled stumbling forward, and peering, he would see a starved wretch at the fore, at least a hundred souls distant, stepping into the golden light… vanishing.

And the screaming would begin, only to be yanked short.

Again and again, he dreamed this senseless dream. Sometimes it was identical. Sometimes he seemed one soul closer to the procession's end. He could never be sure.

Was it the Qirri? Was it the deathless rancour of the Mop, or a cruel whim of Fate?

Or had the trauma of his life at last unhinged him and cast his slumber to the wolves of grim fancy?

For his whole life, ever since grasping the withered pouch of Seswatha's heart deep in the bowel of Atyersus, his dreams had possessed meaning… logic, horrifying to be sure, but comprehensible all the same. For his whole life he had awakened with purpose.

And now?

"So what was it like?" Achamian asked her as the company filed through the arboreal maze.

"What was what like?"

They always addressed each other in Ainoni now. The fact that only the Captain could comprehend them made it seem daring somehow-and curiously proper, as if madmen should oversee the exchange of secrets. Even still, they took care that he did not overhear.

"Life on the Andiamine Heights," he said, "as an Anasurimbor."

"You mean the family you're trying to destroy."

The old Wizard snorted. "Just think, no more running."

At last she smiled. Anger and sarcasm, Achamian had learned, were a kind of reflex for Mimara-as well as a fortress and a refuge. If he could outlast her initial hostility, which proved difficult no matter how much good humour he mustered, he could usually coax a degree of openness from her.

"It was complicated," she began pensively.

"Well then, start at the beginning."

"You mean when they came for me in Carythusal?"

The old Wizard shrugged and nodded.

They had slackened their pace enough to fall behind the others, even the dour file of Stone Hags, who stole longing glances as Mimara drifted past. Despite the chorus of birdsong, a kind of silence reared about them, the hush of slow growth and decay. It felt like shelter.

"You have to understand," she said hesitantly. "I didn't know that I had been wronged. The brutalities I endured… But I was a child… and then I was a brothel-slave-that's what I was… Something made to be violated, abused, over and over, until I grew too old or too ugly, and they sold me to the fullery. That was just the… the way… So when the Eothic Guardsmen came and began beating Yappi… Yapotis… the brothel master, I didn't understand. I couldn't understand…"

Achamian watched her carefully, saw a rare strand of sunlight flash across her face. "You thought you were being attacked instead of saved."

A numb nod. "They took me away before the killing began, but I knew… I could tell from the soldiers' manner, cold, as merciless as any of these scalpers. I knew they would kill anyone who had a hand in my… my fouling…"

She had the habit of slipping into Tutseme when she became upset, the rough dialect peculiar to menials and slaves from Carythusal. The clipped vowels. The singsong intonations. Achamian would have teased her for sounding like an Ainoni harlot, had the subject matter been less serious.

"They brought me to a ship-you should have seen them! Stammering, bowing and kneeling, not the soldiers, but the Imperial Apparati who commanded them. They asked me- begged me! — for some kind of request, for something they could do, for my health and my ease, they said. For my glory. I'll never forget that! My whole life my only prize had been the lust my form incited in men-the face of an Empress, the hips and slit of a young girl-and there I stood, the proud possessor of what? Glory? So I said, 'Stop. Stop the killing!' And they looked at me with long faces and said, 'Alas, Princess, that is the one thing we cannot do.' 'Why?' I asked them…

"'Because the Blessed Empress has commanded it,' they said…

"So I stood on the prow and watched… They had moored on the high river, on the quays typically reserved for the Scarlet Spires-you know those? — so I could see the slums rise to the north, all the Worm laid out for inspection. I could see it burn… I could even see souls trapped on their roofs… Men, women, children… jumping…"

The old Wizard watched her, careful to purge any hint of pity from his frown. To be a child-whore one moment and a Princess-Imperial the next. To be plucked from abject slavery and hurtled to the heights of the greatest empire since Cenei. And then to have your old world burned down around you.

Esmenet, he understood, had tried to undo her crime with the commission of another. She had mistook vengeance for reparation.

"So you understand," Mimara continued, swallowing. "My first years on the Andiamine Heights were hateful… shameful, even. You understand why I did everything I could to punish Mother."

Achamian studied her for a moment before nodding. The company had crested a gradual slope and now descended, using webs of bared roots as steps. A rare glimpse of the sun flashed above, making silhouettes of shagged leaves.

"I understand," he said as they picked their way down, feeling the raw weight of his own story, his own grievances, press through the tone of his reply. They were both victims of Esmenet.

They walked in silence, their strides as thoughtless as they were quick.

"Thank you," Mimara said after a time, fixing him with a curious gaze.

"For what?"

"For not asking what all the others ask."

"Which is?"

"How I could have stayed all those years. How I could have allowed myself to be used as I was used. Apparently everyone would have run away, slit their master's throat, committed suicide…"

"Nothing makes fools of people quite like a luxurious life," Achamian said, shaking his head and nodding. "Ajencis says they confuse decisions made atop pillows for those compelled by stones. When they hear of other people being deceived, they're certain they would know better. When they hear of other people being oppressed, they're certain they would do anything but beg and cringe when the club is raised…"

"And so they judge," Mimara said sourly.

"They certainly picked the wrong woman in your case!"

This coaxed another smile-another small triumph.

She began talking about her younger siblings, haltingly at first, then with more confidence and detail. She seemed surprised by her own reminiscences, and troubled. She had foresworn her family-he knew that much. But watching and listening to her describe the embittered object of her anger, he came to suspect she had gone so far as to deny her family, to tell herself that she was in fact alone, without the guy ropes of kith and kin to prop her.

Small wonder she had been so reluctant to tell him anything. People are generally loathe to describe what they need to forget, especially the small things, the loving things that contradict their precious sense of injustice.

She started with Kayutas, the child Esmenet had carried in her womb the day Achamian had repudiated her before the assembled Lords of the Holy War. He would have seemed a kind of god to her, she said, had her stepfather not been Kellhus-a real God. "He is the very image of his father," she said, nodding as if agreeing with her own description. "Not so remote, certainly… More…"

"Human," the old Wizard said, scowling.

She then turned to Moenghus, whom she described as the most normal and difficult of her younger siblings. Apparently he was quite the terror as a youth, given to episodes of inconsolable anger and continually brooding, if not sulking. Esmenet regularly left the boys in her care-with the hope of fostering some tenderness for her younger siblings, Mimara presumed. She despised the swimming expeditions most of all.

Apparently Moenghus enjoyed diving under the water and not reappearing for the longest time. The first incident was the worst-she even called on their bodyguards to help her, only to watch Moenghus's head break the flashing water several spans away. He ignored her commands and curses, and repeated the stunt again and again. Each time she would tell herself he was simply playing, but her heart would continue counting beats, and the panic would well higher and higher-until she was fairly beside herself with fear and fury. Then his head would magically pop into sight, his black hair glazed in white sunlight, and he would glare at her shouting antics before descending again. Finally she turned on his brother, demanding an explanation.

"Because," Kayutas said with a detachment that clammed her skin, "he wants people to think him dead."

The old Wizard responded with a nodding snort. When he asked her whether anyone knew about his true parentage, she merely frowned and said, "Questioning our holy parentage is sacrilege."

Lies, Achamian mused. Deceit heaped atop deceit. In the early days of his exile, he would sometimes lie awake at night, convinced that sooner or later someone would see through Kellhus and his glamour, that the truth would win out, and all the madness would come crashing down…

That he could come home and reclaim his wife.

But as the years passed he came to see this for the rank foolishness that it was. He-a student of Ajencis, no less! Truths were carved from the identical wood as were lies-words-and so sank or floated with equal ease. But since truths were carved by the World, they rarely appeased Men and their innumerable vanities. Men had no taste for facts that did not ornament or enrich, and so they wilfully-if not knowingly-panelled their lives with shining and intricate falsehoods.

Mimara's eldest sister, Theliopa, would be the only one of her siblings to occasion a true smile. According to Mimara, the girl was almost incapable of expressing passion of any sort and was oblivious-sometimes comically so-to all but the most obvious social graces. She was also dreadfully thin, famine thin, and had to be continually cajoled and bullied to eat. But her intellect was nothing short of a miracle. Everything she read, she remembered, and she read voraciously, often to the point of forgetting to sleep. Her gifts were so prodigious that Kellhus made her an Imperial Adviser at the tender age of twelve, after which she became a continual presence in her mother's entourage: pale, emaciated, decked in absurd gowns of her own design and manufacture.

"It's hard not to pity her," Mimara said, her gaze flat with memories, "even as you marvel…"

"What do people say?"

"Say?"

"About her… peculiarities. What do they think caused them?" Few things inspired more malicious speculation than deformities. Conriya even had a law-back before the New Empire, anyway-rendering misshapened children the property of the King. Apparently the court diviners thought a careful reading of their deformations could reveal much about the future.

"They say my stepfather's seed is too heavy for mortal women to bear," Mimara said. "He took other wives, 'Zikas' they call them, after the small bowls they pass out for libations on the Day of Ascension. But of those who became pregnant, none carried to term-either that or they died… Only Mother."

Achamian could only nod, his thoughts roiling. Kellhus had to have known this, he realized. From the very beginning he had known Esmenet possessed the strength to survive him and his progeny. And so he had set out to conquer her womb as one more tool-one more weapon — in his unceasing war of word, insight, and passion.

You needed her, so you took…

Regarding her sister Serwa, Mimara said very little, save that she was cold and arrogant.

"She's the Grandmistress of the Swayali, now. Grandmistress! I don't think Mother ever forgave Kellhus for sending her away… I saw very little of her, and when I did my teeth fairly cracked for envy. Studying with the Sisters! Attaining the only thing I truly desired!"

Inrilatas, on the other hand, she discussed for quite some time, partly because Esmenet had sought to involve her in the boy's upbringing. According to Mimara, none of her siblings possessed more of their father's gifts-or more of their mother's all too human weaknesses. Speaking long before any infant should. Never forgetting. And seeing deeper, far deeper, than any human could… or should.

His subsequent madness, she said, was inevitable. He was perpetually at a loss, perpetually overwhelmed by the presence of others. Unlike his father, he could only see the brute truths, the facts and lies that compelled the course of lives, but these were quite enough.

"He would look into my eyes and say impossible things… hateful things…"

"How do you mean?"

"He told me once that I punished mother not to avenge my slavery, but because… because…"

"Because what?"

"Because I was broken inside," she said, her lips set in a grim and brittle line. "Because I had suffered so much so long that kindness had become the only cruelty I could not endure-kindness! — and so suffering would be all I… all I would ever know…"

She trailed, turned her face away to swat at the tears clotting her eyes.

"So I told him," she continued, avoiding Achamian's gaze. "I told him that I had never known kindness because everything-everything! — I had been given had been just another way to take-to steal! 'You cannot stroke a beaten dog,' he replied, 'because it sees only the raised hand…' A beaten dog! Can you believe it? What kind of little boy calls his grown sister a beaten dog?"

A Dunyain, the old Wizard thought in unspoken reply.

She must have glimpsed something of his sorrow in his eyes: the outrage in her expression, which had been helpless in the face of memory, turned in sudden fury upon him.

"You pity me?" she cried, as if her pain were something with its own outrage and volition. "Pity?"

"Don't, Mimara. Don't do this…"

"Do what? What? "

"Make Inrilatas true."

This smacked the fury from her expression. She stared at him speechless, her body jerking as her legs carried her thoughtlessly forward, her eyes wide with a kind of desolate horror.

"What about the others?" the old Wizard asked, snipping all memory of her outburst from his tone. The best way to retrieve a conversation from disaster, he often found, was to speak as if the disaster had never happened. "I know there's more-the twins. Tell me about them."

She marched in silence for a time, collecting herself, Achamian supposed. The footing had become even more treacherous: a stream had gullied the forest floor, cutting away the loam beneath the feet of several massive elms so that roots hung in tentacled sheets to their right. Achamian could see the rest of the party below, picking their way under a toppled giant with the same haste that was taking such a toll on the Hags. He glimpsed Cleric behind the Captain, white and bald and obviously not human. Even from a distance, his Mark blotted out his inhuman physical beauty, stained him with gut-wrenching ugliness.

The stream glittered, a ribbon of liquid obsidian in the gloom. The air smelled of clay and cold rot.

"They were the only ones, really…" she finally said. "The twins. I was there, you know… there from the beginning with them. I saw them drawn squalling from Mother's womb…" She paused to watch her booted feet pick steps across the ground. "I think that was the only moment I truly… truly loved her."

"You've never stopped loving her," Achamian said. "You wouldn't care to hate her otherwise."

Anger shrouded her eyes once again, but to her credit she managed to purge it from her voice. She was trying, the old Wizard realized. She wanted to trust him. Even more, she wanted to understand what he saw when he looked upon her-perhaps too desperately. "What do you mean?"

"No love is simple, Mimara." Something hooked his voice while saying this, something like weak eyes and a burning throat. "At least no love worth the name."

"But…"

"But nothing," he said. "Far too many of us confuse complexity for impurity-or even pollution. Far too many of us mourn what we should celebrate as a result. Life is unruly, Mimara. Only tyrants and fools think otherwise."

She frowned in a mock here-we-go-again manner. "Ajencis?" she asked, her eyes bright and teasing.

"No… Just wisdom. Not everything I say is borrowed, you know!"

She walked in silence for a time, her smile fading into a look of puzzled concentration. Achamian paced her in silence.

She resumed her account, describing the Imperial twins, Kelmomas and Samarmas. The latter was indeed an idiot, as Achamian had heard. But according to Mimara, the Imperial Physicians had feared both children were idiots in the beginning. Apparently the two infants would simply stare into each other's eyes, day after day, month after month, then year after year. If separated, they ceased to eat, as if they shared but one appetite between the two of them. It was only after Esmenet contracted a celebrated physician from Conriya that their two souls were finally pried apart and the idiocy of Samarmas was revealed.

"It was a wonder," Mimara exclaimed, as if reliving the memories of their cure in a rush. "To be so… so strange, and then to waken as, well, beautiful little boys, normal in all respects."

"You were fond of them."

"How could I not be? They were innocents born into a labyrinth-a place devious beyond compare. The others could never see it, no matter how much they complained and clucked, they could never see the Andiamine Heights for what it was."

"And what was that?"

"A prison. A carnival. And a temple, a temple most of all. One where sins were counted according to harms endured rather than inflicted. It was no place for children! I told Mother as much, told her to take the twins to one of the Refuge Estates, some place where they could grow in the light of the sun, where things were… were…"

They had stooped to make their way beneath the fallen tree he'd seen earlier, so he supposed she had trailed to better concentrate. The limbs of the giant had folded and snapped, either bending back or prying deep into the earth. Dead leaves hung in rasping sheets. Finding passage was no easy task.

"Where things were what?" he asked when it became apparent she did not care to continue.

"Simple," she said dully.

Achamian smiled in his wise old teacher way. The thought occurred to him that she had sought to protect the memory of her own childhood as much as the innocence of her two little brothers. But he said nothing. People rarely appreciate alternative, self-serving interpretations of their conduct-especially when suffering ruled the balance of their lives.

"Let me guess," he ventured. "Your mother refused, said that they would need to learn the perils and complexities of statecraft to survive as Princes-Imperial."

"Something like that," she replied.

"So you trusted him. Kelmomas, I mean."

"Trusted?" she cried with open incredulity. "He was a child! He adored me-to the point of annoyance!" She fixed him with a vexed look, as if to say, Enough, old man… "He was the reason I ran away to find you, in fact."

Something troubled the old Wizard about this, but as so often happens in the course of heated conversations, his worries yielded to the point he hoped to press home. "Yes… But he was a child of Kellhus, an Anasurimbor by blood."

"So?"

"So, that means he possesses Dunyain blood. Like Inrilatas."

They had sloshed across the stream and were now climbing the far side of the gully. They could see the rest of the company above them, a string of frail forms labouring beneath the monumental trunks.

"Ah, I keep forgetting," she said, huffing. "I suppose he simply must be manipulative and amoral…" She regarded him the way he imagined she had regarded countless others on the Andiamine Heights: as something ridiculous. "You've been cooped in the wilds too long, Wizard. Sometimes a child is just a child."

"That's all they know, Mimara. The Dunyain. They're bred for it."

She dismissed him with a flutter of eyelids. She had no inkling, he realized-like everyone else in the Three Seas. For her, Kellhus was simply what he appeared to be.

In the first years of his exile, the hardest years, Achamian had spent endless hours revisiting the events of the First Holy War-his memories of Kellhus and Esmenet most of all. The more he pondered the man, the more obvious the Scylvendi's revelatory words came to seem, until it became difficult to remember what it was like living within the circuit of his glamour. To think he had still loved the man after he had lured Esmenet to his bed! That he had spent sleepless hours wrestling with excuses-excuses! — for him.

But even still, after so many years, the appearances continued to argue for the man. Everything Mimara had described regarding the preparations for the Great Ordeal-even the scalpers accompanying him! — attested to what Kellhus had claimed so many years previous: that he had been sent to prevent the Second Apocalypse. Achamian had suffered that old sense several times now while feuding with Mimara, the one that had plagued him as a Mandate Schoolman travelling the courts of the Three Seas arguing the very things Kellhus had made religion (and there was an irony that plucked, if there ever was one). The anxious urge to throw words atop words, as if speaking could plaster over the cracked expressions that greeted his claims. The plaintive, wheedling sense of being disbelieved.

Maybe you need it, old man… Need to be disbelieved.

He had seen it before: men who had borne perceived injustices so long they could never relinquish them and so continually revisited them in various guises. The world was filled with self-made martyrs. Fear goads fear, the old Nansur proverb went, and sorrow, sorrow.

Perhaps he was mad. Perhaps everything-the suffering, the miles, the lives lost and taken-was naught but a fool's errand. As wrenching as this possibility was, and as powerful as the Scylvendi's words had been, Achamian would have been entirely prepared to accept his folly. He was a true student of Ajencis in this respect…

Were it not for his Dreams. And the coincidence of the Coffers.

The old Wizard continued on in silence, mulling the details of Mimara's tale. The picture she had drawn was as fascinating as it was troubling. Kellhus perpetually distracted, perpetually absent. His children possessing a jumble of human and Dunyain attributes-and half-mad for it, apparently. Games heaped upon games, and sorrow and resentment most of all. Esmenet had fetched her broken daughter from the brothel only to deliver her to the arena that was the Andiamine Heights-a place where no soul could mend.

Not hers, and certainly not her daughter's.

Was this not a kind of proof of Kellhus? Pain followed him, as did tumult and war. Every life that fell into his cycle suffered some kind of loss or deformation. Was this not an outward sign of his… his evil?

Perhaps. Perhaps not. Suffering had ever been the wages of revelation. The greater the truth, the greater the pain. No one understood this quite so profoundly as he.

Either way, it was proof of Mimara. Our words always paint two portraits when we describe our families to others. Outsiders cannot but see the small peeves and follies that wrinkle our relationships with our loved ones. The claims we make in defensive certainty-that we were the one wronged, that we were the one who wanted the best-cannot but fall on skeptical ears since everyone but everyone makes the same claims of virtue and innocence. We are always more than we want to be in the eyes of others simply because we are blind to the bulk of what we are.

Kellhus had taught him that.

Mimara had wanted him to see her as a victim, as a long-suffering penitent, more captive than daughter, and not as someone embittered and petulant, someone who often held others accountable for her inability to feel safe, to feel anything unpolluted by the perpetual pang of shame…

And he loved her the more for it.

Later, as the murk of evening steeped through the forest galleries, she slowed so that he could draw abreast, but she did not return his questioning gaze.

"What I told you," she eventually said, "that was foolish of me."

"What was foolish?"

"What I said."

This final exchange left him sorting through melancholy thoughts of his own family and the wretched Nroni fishing village where he had been born. They seemed strangers, now, not simply the people who inhabited his childhood memories, but the passions as well. The doting love of his sisters… Even the tyranny of his father-the maniacal shouts, the wordless beatings-seemed to belong to some soul other than his own.

This, he realized… This was his true family: the mad children of the man who had robbed him of his wife. The New Anasurimbor Dynasty. These were his brothers and sisters, sons and daughters. And this simply meant that he had no family… that he was alone.

Save for the mad woman trekking beside him.

His little girl…

Back when he had been a tutor in Aoknyssus, he took up the antique Ceneian practice of considering problems while walking-peripatetics, the ancients had called it. He would trudge down from his apartment by the Premparian Barracks, through the wooded pathways of the Ke, and down to the port, where the masts made a winter forest of the piers. There was this defunct temple where he would always glimpse the same beggar through a breach in the walls. He was one of those unravelled men, unkempt and withered, slow-moving and speechless, as if dumbfounded at where the years had delivered him. And for some reason it always knocked Achamian from his stride seeing him. He would pass gazing, his walk slowing to a numb saunter, and the beggar would simple stare off, beyond caring who did or did not watch. Achamian would forget whatever problem he had set off to ponder and brood instead about the cruel alchemy of age and love and time. A fear would clutch him, knowing that this, this, was true solitude, to find yourself the feeble survivor, stranded at the end of your life, your loves and hopes reduced to remembered smoke, hungering, suffering…

And waiting. Waiting most of all.

His mother was dead, the old Wizard supposed.

Making water or mud has always been an irritating challenge for her. She cannot simply retreat behind a tree as the others might, not for the sake of modesty-a sentiment that had been pummelled from her in childhood-but out of a keen awareness of men and their lustful infirmities. She has to plunge deeper, beyond the possibility of craning looks. "A glimpse is a promise," the brothel masters used to say. "Show them what they would steal, and they will spend- spend! "

She squats, her breeches crowded about her knees, stares up into the veined complexities of the canopy as she relieves herself. She follows the dark lines of silhouetted limbs scrawling across foliated stages, ragged screen set across ragged screen, each brighter than the next. She doesn't see the figure… not at first.

But then its shape is unmistakable: human limbs clutched and hanging about arboreal. Unlike other forests, where trees branch and thicken according to their exposure to the sun, the trees of the Mop fork into the low nethers, as though begrudging all open space. The creature hangs from the lowermost skein, unnaturally still, intent with scrutiny and malice.

The thing called Soma.

Her fear falls short of reason. If it had wanted to kill her, she would already be dead. If it had wanted to steal her, she would already be missing.

No. It wants something.

She should cry out, she knows, send it fleeing into the sepulchral depths, chased by the crack and thunder of sorcerous lights. But she does not. It wants something, and she needs to know what. Slowly, deliberately, she stands and draws up her leggings, winces at her own humid reek.

Its face hangs down just far enough to be discernable in the murk. Soma, as if glimpsed through a veil of black gauze. The canopy's high-hanging glow paints his edges with traceries of green.

"He's killing you," it coos. "The Nonman."

She stares up, breathless, immobile. She knows this thing, she reminds herself, knows it as surely as scalpers know Sranc. Assassins. Deceivers. Sowers of resentment and mistrust. Discord arouses them. Violence spills their cup. They are, as her mother once told her, the consummate union of viciousness and grace.

"Then I shall kill him first," she says, shocked by the resolute tenor of her voice. Her whole life she has been surprised by her ability to appear strong.

This is not the reply it was expecting. She's not sure how she knows this: its hesitation, perhaps, or the click of indecision that passes like smoke across its false expression. Regardless, she knows that it does not want the Nonman dead… at least not yet.

"No…" it whispers. "Such a thing is beyond your power."

"My fath-"

"He too would certainly perish."

She glares upward, peering, trying to discern the folding digits that compose its face. She cannot.

"There is only one way to save yourself," it rasps.

"And how is that?"

"Kill the Captain."

– | She rejoins the company as if nothing has happened. She should tell Achamian. She knows this without wanting to know. Her reflex is to hide and to hoard-a product of the brothel, no doubt. Too much had been stolen.

Soma came to me…

She circles this thought, stalks it, returns to it the way she continually reaches for her Chorae where it hangs about her neck. As troubled as she is, as frightened as she is, a part of her soul exults-in the mystery of it, certainly, but also because it had chosen her before any of the others.

Why had it saved her during the Stone Hag attack? At the cost of revealing itself, no less!

Why was it following them in the first place?

And why was it reaching out to her?

After the nightmare of Maimor, Achamian spent long miles verbally pondering the skin-spy and its presence among the Skin Eaters. From the outset he made assumptions, forgivable assumptions: that the skin-spy had infiltrated the Skin Eaters immediately after he had contracted them. That he, the outcast inheritor of their ancient and implacable enemy, Seswatha, was the motive for the infiltration. That it was charged with killing him, lest he discover something too decisive… And so on.

More than anything else, what prevents her from telling the old Wizard is the fear that he is wrong — utterly and catastrophically. The suspicion that the Consult has sent the skin-spy, not to assassinate Achamian or to sabotage the expedition, no. Her fear is that the Consult has sent it to assist them… to ensure they reach Sauglish and the Coffers.

And why not, when Drusas Achamian is the enemy of their enemy? According to her mother, the Consult waited months before finally attacking Kellhus during the First Holy War. "The only thing they found more terrifying than your stepfather," she said, "was the possibility there could be more like him."

The possibility of Ishual.

The origin of the Aspect-Emperor. As much as Achamian desires this knowledge to judge Anasurimbor Kellhus, would not the Unholy Consult covet it even more?

She has seen the Wizard with the Judging Eye-seen his damnation. At the time she simply assumed that sorcery was the cause, that contrary to her stepfather's claims, sorcery remained the unpardonable sin. And this seemed to lend credence to Achamian and his desperate case against the man who had stolen his wife. But what if this wasn't the case? What if this very quest was the ground of his damnation? There is poetry in the notion, as perverse as it is, and this more than anything else is what hones her fear to a cutting edge. To strike out in the name of love, only to inadvertently unleash the greatest terror the world has ever seen. When she mulls the possibility, it seems to smell of the Whore through and through… at least from what she has seen of Her.

This is what makes telling the Wizard all but impossible. What was she supposed to say? That his life and the lives of all those his deceptions have killed have been in vain? That he is a tool of the very apocalypse he hopes to prevent?

No. She will not speak what cannot be heard. Soma would have to remain her secret, at least for the immediate future. She needs to discover more before going to the Wizard…

Kill the Captain…

She knows this creature. She can number the bones in its false face. She even knows the questions that will confuse it, hint at the absence that is its soul. It stands upon a different field of battle, vast and spectral and devious with a thousand years of patient calculation. And for some reason, it needs Lord Kosoter to be a casualty of that cryptic battle.

Kill the Captain. Understand this command, she realizes, and she will understand Soma's design.

She has watched the slow transformation of loyalties and rivalries within the company. She has seen the glint of sedition in Galian's eyes. She has noticed the way Achamian has come to accept, even prize, the Captain and his ruthless methods. Lord Kosoter will deliver them to the Library of Sauglish-despite all the perils and uncertainties. He is simply one of those men, possessed of a will so cruel, so domineering, that the world could not but yield.

He was the Captain. The harsh shadow, bloodthirsty and pitiless, forever standing in her periphery.

She has always watched, and her eyes are nothing if not critical, but she has never probed, never tested. According to Soma something was happening, something that would eventually imperil their lives. According to Soma things transpired that neither she nor the old Wizard could see.

So she will squint against the glare of the obvious, peer into the gloom of implication. She will pretend to sleep while pondering possibilities and assembling questions. She will solve this one mystery…

She will become a spy.

So far the Mop has climbed and conquered every terrain they have encountered, scaffolding the sides of hills, braiding the heights above rivers, pillaring broad plains. She has peered through the green murk and trod across root-heaved earth for so long that sometimes she forgets the arid smell of open places, the flash of sunlight, and the kiss of unobstructed wind. All is humid and enclosed. She feels like a mole, forever racing beneath the thatch, always wary of flying shadows. When she thinks of the Stone Hags who have fallen in exhaustion, they are already buried in her soul's eye.

Finally they come to a stone formation jutting like a great fractured bone from the earth. Scrub clings to its scarped shelves, but nothing else, and peering up they actually catch ragged glimpses of sky where its bulk breaches the canopy. Standing aloof from their curious peering, the Captain bids them to find a way to the summit. Though hours of daylight remain, they will camp.

The sun glares. The air chills. The Mop tosses on and on, an endless ocean of swaying crowns. Whatever relief they hope to find in wind and sunlight is snuffed when they look to one another. Squinting. Eyes glittering from blackened faces. Ragged like beggars. In the gloom below, they seemed as true to their surroundings as the moss or the humus. Here on the heights, there is no overlooking either their straits or their desperation.

They look like the damned. Achamian, in particular, given the Mark.

They make camp on the formation's rump, where enough soil has accumulated to sustain a thin wig of foliage. They sit in scattered clots, watching the setting sun fall crimson into distant canopies. The Mop seems to mock and to beckon in turn, a susurrus unlike any she has heard, a horde of a million million leaves rattling in the dying breeze.

Opposite their camp, the formation rears into a promontory, stone horned like a bent-back thumb. The Captain stands in the dying light, beckons Cleric to follow him. Mimara pretends not to watch them vanish about the treacherous ledges. She counts fifty heartbeats, then strikes out along the opposite face, where they have designated their latrine. She continues past the putrid smell, literally risks life and limb scaling a serrated pitch. Then she creeps forward in a crouch, moving toward the sound of muttered voices.

The breeze or the play of echoes across chaotic stone fools her, for she almost blunders upon them. Only some instinct to freeze saves her from discovery. She breathlessly shrinks behind the cover of a tortoise-humped outcropping.

" They remind you…"

The Captain's voice. It shocks her as surely as a knife point pressed against the back of her neck.

She creeps along the outer circuit of the tortoise stone, nearer, nearer… As shallow as it is, her breath burns against the tightness of her high chest. Her heart thumps.

"What's happening?" the Nonman says. "I don't… I don't understand…"

"You are truly a blasted idiot."

She steps from behind the rising shell of rock, finds herself standing almost entirely exposed. Only the direction of their gazes prevents them from seeing her. Cleric sits in a pose of dejected glory, at once beautiful and grotesque for the blasted depths of his Mark. The Captain stands over him, a vision of archaic savagery, his Chorae so close to the Nonman that she can see a faint husk of salt rising across his scalp.

"Tell me!" Incariol cries in hushed tones. "Tell me why I am here!"

A moment of glaring impatience. "Because they remind you."

"But who? They remind me of who?" Even as Cleric says this his glittering black eyes wander toward her.

"Someone you once knew," the Captain grates. "They remind you of someone you once-"

He whirls toward her. His hair swings in broken sheets of black and grey.

"What are you doing?" he barks.

"I–I…" she stammers. "I think I need more… more Qirri."

A moment of murderous deliberation, then something like a grin hooks his eyes. He turns wordlessly to the Nonman, who remains seated as before.

"No," Cleric says with a strange solemnity. "Not yet. I apologize… Mimara."

This is the first time he has spoken her name. She retreats, flinching from the Captain's manic glare, her skin buzzing with the shame of her exposure. Afterward she remembers the Nonman's lips more than his voice, their fulsome curves, white tinged with too-long-in-the-water blue. She sees them moving to the rhythm of consonant and vowel.

Mim… araa…

Like a kiss, she thinks, her arms bundled against a curious sense of chill.

Like a kiss.

She keeps to herself the following day. The Wizard seems only too happy to oblige her. The trail has its rhythms, its own ebb and flow. Sometimes everyone seems to be engaged in low conversation, while other times everyone appears sullen and wary or simply lost in their own labouring breaths, and naught can be heard above the whistling chorus of birdsong. Their descent back into the Mop has replaced their anxiousness with melancholy.

She is quite lost in thought when Cleric comes alongside her, senseless ruminations, more a collage of recriminations and pained memories than anything meaningful.

She smiles at her shock. The unearthly beauty of his face and form unsettles her, almost as much as the horrid depth of his Mark. Something wrenches at the inner corners of her eyes whenever she allows her gaze to linger. He is contradiction incarnate.

"Is it true," he inexplicably asks, "that being touched by another and touching oneself are quite distinct sensations for Men?"

The question bewilders and embarrasses her, to the point of drawing even more heat to her flushed face. "Yes… I suppose…"

He walks in silence for a time, eyes tracking the ground before his booted feet. There is something… overwhelming about his stature. The other men, with the possible exception of Sarl, exude the same aura of physical strength and martial brutality as had so many warlike men on the Andiamine Heights. But Cleric possesses a density beyond intimations of force and threat, one that reminds her of her stepfather and the way the world always seemed to bow about his passage.

She thinks of all the skinnies he has killed, the legions incinerated in the existential thunder of his voice. And he seems hardened for the multitudes that flicker shrieking before her soul's eye-in Cil-Aujas, on Maimor, across the Mop-as if murder draws flesh to stone. She wonders what it would be like, dying beneath his black-glittering eyes.

Beautiful, she decides.

"I think I once knew this," he finally says. At first she cannot identify the passion twining through his voice. Achamian has told her much about the Nonmen, how their souls often move in ways counter to the tracks of human passion. She wants to say sorrow, but it seems more somehow…

She wonders if tragedy could be a passion.

"Now you know it again," she says, smiling at the frigid gaze.

"No," he replies. "Never again."

"Then why ask?"

"There is… comfort… in rehearsing the dead motions of the past."

She finds herself nodding-as if they were peers discussing common knowledge. "We are alike in this way."

"Mimara," he says, his tone so simple with astonishment that for an instant he seems a mortal man. "Your name is… Mimara…" He turns to her, his eyes brimming with human joy. She shudders at the glimpse of his fused teeth-there is something too dark about his smile. "Ages have passed," he says wondering, "since I have remembered a human name…"

Mimara.

Afterward, her thoughts racing, she ponders the absurdity of memory, the fact that so simple a faculty can make a being so powerful so pathetic in its faltering. But the Wizard has been watching, of course. He's always watching, it seems. Always worried. Always… trying.

Like Mother.

"What did he want?" he rasps in heated Ainoni.

"Why do you fear him?" she snaps in return. She is never sure where this instinct comes from, knowing how to throw men on their heels.

The old Wizard walks and scowls, frail against a murky background of colossal trunks and mossed deadfalls. Trees growing in a graveyard of trees.

"Because I'm not sure that I could kill him when the time comes," he finally says. He speaks as much to the matted ground as to her, his beard crowded against his breastbone, his eyes unfocused in the manner of men making too-honest admissions.

"When the time comes…" she says in mocking repetition.

He turns to her profile, studies her.

"He's an Erratic, Mimara. When he decides he loves us, he will try to kill us."

The words she overheard the previous night seem to clutch with their own fingers, to scratch with nails like quills…

"But who? They remind me of who?"

"Someone," the Captain replies in his grinding voice, "you once knew…"

She composes her face into the semblance of boredom. "How can you be so sure?" she asks the Wizard.

"Because that is what Erratics do. Kill those they love."

She holds his gaze for an instant, then looks down to her trudging feet. She glimpses the skull of some animal-a fox, perhaps-jutting from the humus.

"To remember."

She doesn't mean this as a question, and apparently understanding, the old Wizard says nothing in reply. He always seems preternaturally wise when he does this.

"But his memory…" she says. "How could he be more powerful than you when he can barely follow the passage of days?"

Achamian scratches his chin through the wiry mat of his beard. "There's more than one kind of memory… It's events and individuals he forgets, mostly. Skills are different. They don't pile on the same way across the ages. But like I told you, sorcery depends on the purity of the meanings. What makes magic so difficult for you to learn turns on the same principle that makes him so powerful-even if he has forgotten the bulk of what he once knew. Ten thousand years, Mimara! The purity that escapes you, the purity that I find such toil, is simply a reflex for the likes of him."

He stares at her the way he always does when trying to press home some crucial point: his lips slightly parted, his eyes beseeching beneath a furrowed brow.

"A Quya Mage," she says.

"A Quya Mage," he repeats, nodding in relief. "Few things in this world are more formidable."

She tries to smile at him but looks away because of the sudden threat of tears. Worry and fear assail her. Over Cleric and the Captain, over the skin-spy and what it has insinuated. She draws a deep breath, risks looking at the old man. He grins in melancholy reassurance, and suddenly it all seems manageable, standing here at his gruff and tender side.

Akka. The world's only sorcerer without a School. The only Wizard.

"Akka…" she murmurs. A kind of gentle beseeching.

She understands now why her mother still loves him-even after so many years, even after sharing her bed with a living God. The uniform teeth behind his smile. The sheen of compassion that softens even his most hostile glare. The heart and simple passion of a man who, despite all his failings, is capable of risking everything-life and world-in the name of love.

"What?" he asks, his voice querulous, his eyes twinkling.

An unaccountable shyness climbs into her face. He is, she realizes, the first man to have ever made her feel safe.

"May our dooms be one," she says with curt nod.

The old Wizard smiles. "May our dooms be one, Mimara."

The pebble it throws is round and chipped, drawn down from the high mountains, its surface cracked and polished by ages of blasting water and migrating gravel. It threads the sieve of dead branches, climbing its low-thrown arc, before sailing into the midst of supine company, over the slumbering form of Pokwas, into the tangle of hair about her head.

She awakens instantly, knows instantly.

Soma.

She recoils from the thought, knowing that Soma, the real Soma, lies dead somewhere near Marrow-that what awaits her in the black has no name because it has no soul.

She wanders from the camp, following a rare lane of low light, beyond the first ring of towering sentinels, beyond the reach of any incipient Wards. She feels more than sees the shadow atop the blunt limb above her. Breathless, she looks up…

The shadow leans down and forward, and she sees it, staring at her with wide, expectant eyes…

Her own face.

"I can smell the fetus within you…" she hears her voice say.

"Kill the Captain, and it will be saved."

No. No. No.

Deceit! Devilry and deceit!

All her life she has thought in whispers. A habit of slaves, who must practise within what will save them without.

But her heart shouts as she tries to find her way back to sleep.

Lie. This is what they do, skin-spies. Uncertainty is their contagion; fear and confusion are their disease. "They seduce," her mother once told her. "They play on your fears, your vulnerabilities, use them to craft you into their tool."

But what if…

Coupling. It was something she did… A kind of blankness rose within her, an absence where human feeling should have been. Men always wanted her, and she almost always despised them for it. Almost always. Sometimes, when she needed things or when she simply wanted to feel dead, her body answered their want, and she took them into her. She held them while they laboured and trembled, she bore them as a burden upon her back. And she almost never thought about it afterward, simply continued running through her running life.

She had endured innumerable suitors while on the Andiamine Heights, an insufferable parade of dandies and widowers, some cruel, others despondent, all of them hungry for the peach of Imperial power. To a man she had spurned them, had even managed to provoke a handful of formal protestations. One, the Patridomos of House Israti, even brought a suit before the Judges, claiming that she should be forced to marry him as punishment for her slander. Mother had seen to that fool.

But she had been bedded nonetheless. And despite years of carrying a whore-shell, despite the chaos of her menstrual cycle, pregnancy was not impossible. The strong seed forces the womb…

Her mother was proof of that.

Three, she tells herself. There are only three occasions she can think of that would make the accursed creature true. There was the darling body-slave-little more than a boy-who attended to her ledgers before her flight. As absurd as it is, she owns estates across the Three Seas-as does everyone in the Imperial Family. There was Imhailas, the vain Captain of the Eothic guard, who helped her escape in exchange for a taste of her peach.

Then there was Achamian, who yearned so for the mother she so resembled. She had yielded and he had taken-their "first mistake together," he had called it-in exchange for a sorcery she no longer desired.

Three, she tells herself, when in fact there is only one.

She dwells on the skin-spy and its revelation, makes adversaries of its words and an arena of her soul.

"I can smell the fetus within you…"

She battles it with unvoiced denunciations. Liar! she rails within. Obscene deceiver! But hers is a treacherous heart, forever miring what should be simple with unwanted implications. So she hears the Wizard speaking in rejoinder…

"The Judging Eye is the eye of the Unborn…"

Trying to explain away the horror of her accursed sight.

"The eye that watches from the vantage of the God."

On and on the voices tangle, until it seems they are one and the same, the sorcerer and the spy.

"Kill the Captain, and it will be saved."

No, she tells herself. No. No. No. The brothel has taught her the power of pretense, the way facts will sometimes fade into oblivion, if you deny them with enough ferocity.

This is what she will do.

Yes. Yes. Yes.

Several days pass without sign of the thing called Soma. She tells herself she is relieved, yet she lingers in the lonely dark nonetheless, gazing up through the dead branches, listening to the blackness croak and creak.

One night she finds a small pool bathed in a miraculous shaft of moonlight. She crouches beside it, stares up through the hanging tunnel to consider the moon. She gazes at her image poised between floating leaves and finds herself troubled. The skin-spy, she realizes, was the last time she saw her own face. She wants to fret over her appearance in the old way, to primp and preen, but it all seems so foolish, life before this, the Slog of Slogs.

Then, in the empty interval between breaths, the Judging Eye opens.

For a time she gazes in stupefaction, then she weeps at the transformation.

Her hair cropped penitent short. Her clothing fine, but with the smell of borrowed things. Her belly low and heavy with child…

And a halo about her head, bright and silver and so very holy. The encircling waters darken for its glow.

She convulses about breathless sobs, falls clutching her knees for anguish…

For she sees that she is good — and this she cannot bear.

The old Wizard pesters her with questions when she returns. He wonders at her swollen eyes-worries. She withdraws the way she always withdraws when dismay overwhelms her ability to think clearly. She can see the hurt and the confusion in the Wizard's eyes, knows that he has treasured the gradual intimacy that has grown between them-that he truly has come to think of her as his daughter…

But this can never be, for fathers do not lie with their daughters.

So she spurns him, even as she allows him to curl about her.

To shelter.

Weeks pass. Weeks of marching gloom and touches of Qirri. Weeks of battling clans of Sranc.

Weeks of tracing the line of her stomach in the murk.

At last they walk clear of the Mop, and it seems like climbing, setting foot on land open to the sun. They gather in a line across a low ridge, thirteen of them including the Hags, their skin and clothes black from sleeping across mossy earth, the splint and chainlinks of their armour rusted for rain and torn for battling Sranc. The Skin Eaters remain intact, but the Hags have dwindled to three: the Tydonni thane, Hurm, who remains as hale as any; the Galeoth freeman, Koll, whose body seems to be wasting about his will; and the deranged Conriyan, Hilikas-or Grinner, as Galian calls him-who seems to draw sustenance from madness.

The ground collapses into broad skirts of rock and gravel below the company's feet. A smattering of trees cling to the base, hedged by surging nettles and sumac, a tangle of stem and colour that abruptly ends in blue-green swathes of reed, a kind of papyrus, hazy miles cut by black-water channels. Salt marshes. The Cerish Sea forms a featureless plate across the northern horizon, iron dark save where the sun silvers its faraway swells.

They watch ripples of lighter green sweep over the marshes-the apparition of the wind across the rushes. And then they see it, the bones of once-mighty walls, the scapular remains of a gate, and the fields beyond clotted with ruins. She gazes in silent wonder, watches the shadow of a cloud soundlessly soak the distances grey and blue.

"Behold!" the old Wizard calls out from her side. "Ancient Kelmeol. Home to the Sons of Meori. The Far Antique capital of these wastes ere the First Apocalypse."

She gazes at him, unaware of the palm that has strayed to her belly.

Your father.

She bites her lip, hard, as proof against getting sick.

Achamian could scarce believe his fortune.

Until sighting Kelmeol, he had not realized just how little he had believed in his own mission. Ever since Marrow, some seditious faction within his soul had doubted he would survive even this far. And it seemed a kind of miracle that Men could suffer such trials in the absence of belief, that deeds worthy of wonder and song could be accomplished on the strength of a doubting will.

Unable to find the causeway, the company waded through the mire, beset by clouds of mosquitoes and biting flies. Several actually cried out in relief when they finally clambered onto hard ground and into the wind. After a mere watch Sarl looked poxed, he was covered with so many welts.

Kelmeol lay before them, the terrain humped with tells, the grasses so high it seemed a field in Massentia save for the grand remains of towers and temples breaching the near distance. Achamian had wandered the ruins of antique cities before, but never one so vast or so old. Seswatha had come to Kelmeol in 2150, one more refugee of the fall of the High Norsirai nations. And though those dreamed glimpses were two thousand years old, Achamian could not shake the sense that Kelmeol had fallen in his lifetime, that he was witness to a miraculous obliteration. With every glance a part of him wanted to cry out in disbelief.

There, where the mighty twin statues of Aulyanau had looked down the processional and out across the harbour and over the turquoise sea. Later he would find one of the great heads staring out of the high grasses, more than half-buried and yet still taller than a man. The harbour itself had been swallowed by waving miles of reeds, its very shape lost to the creep of earth and ages.

There, where the Hull, the white-washed curtain walls, had traced the circuit of the city. In some places nothing more than a berm remained of the once-celebrated fortifications, whereas in others sections remained remarkably intact, missing only the polished bronze spikes that had once adorned the crenulations.

There, where the ponderous lines of the Nausk Mausoleum had loomed over the lesser structures of the Pow, the low harbour district-a place of drawn blades and bared breasts. He could still see the rear walls of the Nausk rising like a husk from the ruins of the facade, the stone black save where matted with white and green lichens. The Pow, however, had utterly vanished beneath the waving sheets of green.

And there, the Heilor, the sacred acropolis where the Three Auguries once read the future in the blood of stags, rising like a low-hewn tree stump against the blue band of the Cerish Sea. The citadel had been razed to its foundations. The palace, where Seswatha had taken refuge from the Whirlwind, was little more than a mouth of ruined teeth behind the marble-pillared porticoes.

The decision was made to camp on the ruined acropolis, where they could defend against whatever Sranc clans ranged the marshes. In the Mop, they had slogged in a loose file. Now they spread out across the fields, walked in a ragged rank. They opened and closed about fragments of structure and ornamentation, heaps of spilled masonry, and square columns fallen for so long that the ground had climbed to encompass all but their leaning crowns. In some places, the ruins crowded thick enough to break their formation altogether.

A sadness welled through the old Wizard as he walked and peered, a mourning that possessed the airy clutch of premonition. There was poetry in loss and ruin, a wisdom that even children and idiots understood. For a time he suffered the eerie sense that he walked one of the great capitals of the Three Seas, that these were the ruins of Momemn, Carythusal, or Invishi, and they were the Last Men, thirteen instead of the one hundred and forty-four thousand of legend, and that no matter how far they travelled, how many horizons they outran, all they would find was soot and broken stone.

The world became strange with loneliness. And quiet, very quiet.

Insects whirred to and fro. Fluff scribbled across the back of warring gusts.

Without thinking he reached out for Mimara's hand. He did not answer her wondering gaze.

By happenstance, he found himself abreast Galian and one of the remaining Stone Hags, the dispossessed Tydonni thane, Tuborsa Hurm.

Hurm was perhaps the strangest of Stone Hags, both in appearance and behaviour. He continued to shave, for one, long after even Galian had abandoned his bare chin. At the close of the day's march, when his brothers could scarce speak for exhaustion, he would set to sharpening his dagger, which he had worn as narrow as a fish knife, for use on his cheeks at first light. Apparently this was a kind of ritual protest among the ordinarily long-bearded Tydonni, a way to proclaim the theft of one's honour.

Either way, it spoke to the man's stamina: even without Qirri he seemed to have little difficulty matching the company's pace. He had one of those lean physiques, with powerful shoulders perpetually angled forward as if in anticipation of a sprint. His face, which remained ruddy even in the perpetual gloom of the Mop, was shaped like the outward curve of a bow, with close-set eyes and a tiny, even womanish mouth beneath a shark-fin nose.

Galian was pressing the man with questions about the Stone Hags and the scalpers they robbed and murdered-an indelicate topic even given the crude standards of the slog.

"Gali…" Achamian heard Pokwas murmur in warning.

The former Columnary scowled up at the towering Zeumi. "I want to know what moves a man to kill his own kind when skinnies are stacked to the horizon."

"Scalps," Hurm said, grinning. "The Custom House counts. It makes no distinction between the likes of you and the likes of me."

"I don't understand," Galian said, his voice lowered in mock caution. Somewhere, somehow, Achamian realized with more than a little dismay, the man had lost his fear of their Captain. "The Bounty is the Holy Bounty, is it not?"

"Holy, is it?"

"What else would it be?"

A phlegmatic snort. "Gold," Hurm said after spitting a string of phlegm. "Gold for mead. Gold for pork-and-onion stew…" His porcine gaze clicked from place to place, then settled on Mimara, appraised her with a kind of milky viciousness. His lips parsed about rotted teeth. "Gold for pretty, pretty peaches."

Perhaps this was when Achamian first sensed the madness about to happen.

"You would wager damnation for these things?" Galian asked.

"Damnation?"

A sly grin. "The Holy Bounty is Holy because it has been decreed by the Aspect-Emperor."

"The Aspect-Emperor, is it? Would you like to know what I think of our glorious tyrant?"

Achamian recognized the triumph in the Columnary's look. Galian used the same baiting manner with Soma, only with more mischief than malice in his eyes.

"Very much."

What was happening here?

The Tydonni thane grinned with alehouse cruelty. "I think his gold was born to burden my purse. I think he overlooks the likes of me… and of you! I think all those prayers, all those little wire circumfixes, are naught but wasted effort! Because in the end," he continued with a conspiratorial lean, "I think he's no different than you or me. A sinner. A dog. A demon when too deep in his cups! A fool. A fraud. A scalper of sou-!"

Lord Kosoter materialized at the man's side, his knife out… Achamian blinked in confusion. A stabbing motion. Hurm crushed his cheek against his shoulder, as if plagued by a mosquito in his ear.

Mimara cried out for shock. Achamian stood dumbfounded.

Gripping a nest of black hair, the Captain-impossibly- held the man upright while he hacked at the man's neck with his free hand. For an instant there was no blood. Then it seemed to gush from the jerking form.

"Blasphemer!" Sarl chortled, his teeth and gums shining, his eyes squeezed into creases. "No blasphemers on the slog!"

Galian had known this would happen, the old Wizard realized.

The Captain continued his savage work, grimacing in yellow-toothed disgust. He did not so much cut the head from the body as hack the body from under the head. The Hag's black-stained limbs flumped senseless between the grasses. His head yanked high like a freed kite.

"Anasurimbor Kellhus!" the Captain raved at the survivors. " He is the God! And this "-he swung Hurm's head so that blood flew from the crimson lobes of its mouth-"is His work!"

Achamian could only watch with detached wonder, the kind that afflicts the survivors of sudden catastrophes. He saw well enough. He knew well enough. And yet none of it made the slightest sense.

He found himself wondering how long before Cleric called on them to dispense the Qirri. He needed it. To the point of wringing hands and clenched teeth, he needed it.

The Captain, it seemed, was a Believer.

Zaudunyani.

The pretense of thought twined through the fraud that was its soul…

It ran like a dog, bent, so that the grasses whipped in wet shags about its face and shoulders. The morning sun hung low, a pale orb in the mists that always greeted the dawn on the shore of a great sea. Gold limned any stonework bared to the sky. The acropolis rose from the ink of its own shadow, a silhouette without depth in the haze. There was beauty in the destruction, as well as thunderous proof of the Old Fathers and their power. Here, the will and might of Men had perished before the rapacious hunger of the Derived. Here, the glorious multitudes had coupled with the screaming, the broken and the dead.

These were holy facts-sacred. But the thing called Soma did not raise its head to contemplate or to consider. It did not dare. There was the tracker, Xonghis, whose almond eyes missed little. And there was the Nonman, whose senses almost rivalled its own in some respects.

There was the mission.

It paused over the headless corpse of the Stone Hag, listened to the music of carrion flies. It lingered for a moment, long enough to savour the thickness between its thighs, the arching bloat. Then it continued racing along the company's blundering trail.

On the heights of what had once been called the Heilor, it dashed through concentric shells of ruin, crept along debris-choked foundations. It ignored the vista: the city scattered like bones, the steaming marshes, the plate of the Cerish Sea. Instead it rooted through the remains of the scalper camp, sniffing the sweet where their anuses had pressed against the grasses. It found the spot where the female had made water, only to flee from the reek of her fetus.

It paused over the sour musk of the Nonman.

Something was happening… Something unanticipated by the Old Fathers.

It cringed, swatted its face in slouching fear. Had anyone happened upon it at that moment, they would have seen a crazed creature, limbed like a man but possessing a woman's beautiful face, greased with blood and filth, rocking from foot to foot like a bereaved ape.

It bent back its head until the base of its skull pressed against the crown of its spine, unsheathed its second voice…

And screamed.

"There's no need…" a small voice piped from above. "I have followed you since sunrise."

It whirled in feral alarm.

A series of ruined walls fenced the ground behind, each rising and falling like miniature mountain ranges. A bird perched on the summit of the nearest, its body glossy black, shot with strains of violet, its head white with marmoreal translucence-and human.

A Synthese… vessel of the Old Fathers. Flowering weeds trembled in the wind beside its clicking feet. A daylight moon, pale as a blind cat's eye, rose above its obsidian back.

The thing called Soma fell to its false face.

"You were to watch him," the bird said, a miniature scowl creasing its expression.

"Things have changed."

Eyes like blue beads closed then opened. "How so?"

The thing called Soma dared raise Mimara's face. "A sorcerer, a Gnostic sorcerer, hired the company several weeks ago… He hopes to find the Coffers."

A moment of palm-sized confusion.

"The Mandate? The Mandate has hired the Skin Eaters?"

"No… I'm not sure… He claims to be a Wizard, a sorcerer without a School. Even still, Chigra burns strong in him. Very strong."

The Synthese bent its tiny head down in momentary meditation. "So the old fool has found his way back to the benjuka plate… And he discovered you? Drusas Achamian? "

"No… There is a woman with him-one who has been taught how to recognize us. A pregnant woman…"

A sharp puppet nod. "The face you wear… I see." Shadows fluttered around the bird form, as if some greater eye blinked about the world. An intimation of rage and power. "Mimara."

The thing called Soma cringed and retreated. "Yes."

"She's pregnant. You are certain of this?"

"The stench is unmistakable."

Another moment of bird-hesitation, as if each thought had to be untangled… It was no small matter planting a soul so mighty into a skull the size of an eggshell.

"Then she cannot be harmed. All the prophecies must be respected, the false as much as the true."

"Yes, Old Father. I anticipated this, which is why I… refrained."

A sideways twitch of the head. "She leaves the safety of the others?"

"To piss and shit. I have spoken with her twice now. She will yield their secret in time."

"And the Schoolman has not intervened?"

"He does not know."

The small head flicked back. Laughter tinkled like glass. The Consult Synthese looked from the Heilor, its gaze ticking between points across the fields of papyrus out to the featureless reaches of the Cerish Sea. The wind combed its feathered tailings, blowing wide with the inaudible roar of absence and ruin.

The thing called Soma breathed deep the scent of ash become earth.

" Brave girl…" the Old Father cooed, still considering the crumbs of the age-long feast that was the Meorn Empire. "Continue tracking them, Tsuor. At the very least, they will take you home."