The white-luck warrior

Early Summer, 20 New Imperial Year (4132 Year-of-the-Tusk), The High Istyuli

"I am the smoke that hangs from your cities!" the Nonman screams. "I am the horror that captivates! The beauty that chases and compels!"

And they gather before him, some kneeling, others hanging back with reluctance and terror. One by one they open their mouths to his outstretched finger.

"I am the plummet!"

Twelve walkers, little more than grey shadows in the veils of dust, lean to the rhythm of their exertions. The forests, vast and haunted, are behind them. The Sea, trackless and heaving, is behind them. The dead who mark their path are long rotted.

The plains pass like a dream.

Food becomes scarce. Xonghis continually scans the ground for sign of voles and other rodents, leads them on a winding course, toward this or that high-circling bird of prey. Whenever he finds a warren, he directs the Wizard to tear up the ground while the others stand ready with their weapons. Arcane lights prise the earth in broad sheets. When the Imperial Tracker guesses true, most are killed outright, while the others are stunned or lamed enough to easily skewer. Fat-limbed rats, Mimara can not help but think as she devours them, her face and fingers greased in the evening gloom. Because finding the warrens is uncertain, they heap uneaten carcasses on their backs.

This is what kills Hilikas: sickness from spoiled meat.

The twelve become eleven.

Starlight provides their sole illumination at night. The Captain speaks only to Cleric, long murmuring exhortations that no one can quite hear. The others gather like shipwreck survivors, small clots separated by gulfs of exhaustion. Galian holds court with Pokwas and Xonghis. The three gripe and joke in low, suspicious tones and sometimes watch the others, only to look away when the subject of their scrutiny turns to question them. Conger and Wonard rarely speak but remain shoulder to shoulder whether walking, eating, or sleeping. Sarl sits alone, skinnier, and far less inclined to ape his former role as Sergeant. Mimara catches him glaring at the Captain from time to time, but she can never decide whether she glimpses love or murder in his eyes.

Of the Stone Hags, only Koll remains. Never has Mimara witnessed a man so gouged. But he awakens, wordlessly, joins their long striding march, wordlessly. It seems he has forsworn all speech and thought as luxuries belonging to the fat. He has abandoned his armour and his girdle. He has tied a string from the pommel of his broadsword, which he slings about his forehead so he can carry the blade naked across his back.

Once she catches him spitting blood. His gums have begun bleeding.

She avoids all thought of her belly.

Sometimes, while walking in the dusty cool of the morning, or the drought-sun glare of the afternoon, she catches herself squeezing her eyes shut and opening them, like someone warding much needed sleep. The others are always there, trudging through their own dust in a scattered file.

As are the plains, stretching dun and white to the limit of the bleached sky…

Passing like a dream.

"How I loved you!" the Nonman weeps. "So much I would have pulled down mountains!"

Stars cloud the sky in sheets, vaulting the night with innumerable points of light. In the shadow of the False Man, the scalpers bend back their heads, open their mouths in infant need, infant wonder.

"Enough to forswear my brothers!"

They wave their arms in exultation, cry out in laughing celebration.

"Enough to embrace damnation!"

Koll watches them from the dark.

– | The Wizard recites long-dead poets, his voice curiously warm and resonant. He argues metaphysics, history, even astrology.

He is a wild old man, clad in rancid hides. He is a Gnostic Mage from days of old.

But he is a teacher most of all.

"The Qirri," he says to her one evening. "It sharpens the memory, makes it seem as if… you know everything you know."

"It makes me happy," she replies, resting her cheek on her raised knees.

A beaming smile splits his beard. "Yes… sometimes."

A momentary frown clenches his brow.

He shakes it into another smile.

The plains pass like a dream.

She sits with herself in the high grasses, thinking, Could I be this beautiful?

She finds herself fascinated by the line of her jaw, the way it curves like a chalice to the soft hook of her earlobe. She understands the pleasure that mirrors hold for the beautiful. She knows vanity. In the brothel, they endlessly primped and preened, traded fatuous compliments and envious gazes. Beauty may have been the coin of their subjugation, but it was the only coin they possessed, so they prized it the way drunks prize wine and liquor. Take away enough and people will treasure their afflictions… If only to better accuse the world.

"I know what you're doing," she whispers to the thing called Soma.

"And what am I doing?"

There are differences to be sure. It wears the rags that were once Soma's gowns, for one. And the thing is filthier than she-something she would have not thought possible before encountering it here, away from the others. Especially about the face and neck, where the remains of multiple raw feedings have sheathed and stained its skin…

Her skin.

"Surrogation," she says. "Consult skin-spies typically begin with a servant or a slave-someone who allows them to study their real target, learn their mannerisms, voice, and character. Once they've learned enough, they begin transforming themselves, sculpting their flesh, moulding their cartilage bones, in preparation for the subsequent assassination and replacement of the target."

It has even replicated the lean, starved look that has begun to afflict them all.

"Your father has told you this?"

"Yes."

And the growing curve of her lower belly…

"You think this is what I'm doing?"

"What else could you be doing?" A sudden sharpness pokes through her manner. She will show this thing… this beautiful thing.

"Declaring your beauty," it replies.

"No, Soma. Do not play games with me. Nothing human passes through your soul because you have no soul. You're not real."

"But I speak. How could I speak if I had no soul?"

"Parrots speak. You are simply a cunning parrot."

"I fear I am far more."

"I can even prove it to you."

"Can you now?"

Now she's playing games, she realizes, games when she has so many burning questions-ones crucial to their survival. Every night she rehearses them, but for some reason they no longer seem… pertinent. If anything, they suddenly feel absurd, bloated with unreality, the kinds of questions fat priests might ask starving children. Even the central question, when she thinks of it, leaves her leaden with reluctance…

And yet she needs to ask it, to lean heedless into the thing's menace and demand an answer, to blurt, "What do you mean, the Nonman is trying to kill us?"

But she cannot.

And it has become as proper as proper can be, avoiding things troubling and obvious. To play games with inhuman assassins.

"A man comes to you saying," she begins with a sly smile, "'Do not believe anything I say, for I am liar…'" She pauses to allow the words to resonate. "Tell me, thing, why is this a paradox?"

"Because it's strange for a liar to say such things."

The response occasions a small flare of triumph. It's remarkable, really, witnessing things learned in the abstract happen in actuality-and yet further proof of her stepfather's divinity. She can even see the Aspect-Emperor's luminous face, smiling and gentle, saying, "Remember, Mimara… If you fear, simply ask this question…"

The thing before her truly possesses no soul. But as dread as the fact is, it seems… a farce.

"There. That is my proof."

"Proof? How?"

She feels as if she pretends the water has boiled even though the fire has long since guttered, as if everyone raises stone-cold bowls, smacks their lips, and spouts some homily about the way tea warms the soul even as they shudder at the chill lining their collective gut.

"Only a soul can hold a paradox," she explains. "Since the true meaning of paradox escapes you, you can only grasp non-paradoxical approximations. In this case, 'strange.' Only a soul can comprehend contradictory truths."

"If I'm not a soul, then what am I?"

How? How has everything become such a farce?

"An abacus crafted of skin, flesh, and bone. A monstrous, miraculous tool. A product of the Tekne."

"That too is something special, is it not?"

Something is wrong, she realizes. Their voices have waxed too loud. And the Wizard, she knows, will be peering into the darkness after her, wondering. Worrying.

"I must go… I've tarried too long."

Cleric saw it first, scooped along distant tentacles of wind. A scarf of white and gold-the colours of the Thousand Temples-floating, coiling and uncoiling. The first sign of humanity they had encountered since passing the last of the Meori ruins weeks previous.

Of course Achamian was among the last to pick it out against the dun monotony of the distance. "There," Mimara repeated time and again, pointing. "There…" At last he glimpsed it, twisting like a worm in water. He clenched his teeth following its meandering course, balled his fists.

The Great Ordeal, he realized. Somewhere on this very plain, the host of Kellhus and his Believer-Kings marched the long road to Golgotterath. How close would they pass?

But this worry, like so many other things, seemed uprooted, yet another scarf floating across parched ground. Everything seemed to float lately, as if yanked from its native soil and carried on a slow flood of invisibility.

Few men returned the same after months or years of travel-Achamian knew this as well as anyone. Sheer exposure to different sights, different customs, different peoples, was enough to alter a man, sometimes radically. But in Achamian's estimation, the real impetus, what really changed men, was the simple act of walking and thinking, day after day, week after week, month after month. Innumerable thoughts flitted through the soul of the long traveller. Kith and kin were condemned and pardoned. Hopes and beliefs were considered and reconsidered. Worries were picked to the point of festering-or healing. For those who could affirm the same thoughts endlessly, men like the Captain, the trail typically led to fanaticism. For those with no stomach for continuous repetition, men like Galian, the trail led to suspicion and cynicism, the conviction that thought was never to be trusted. For those who found their thoughts never quite repeating, who found themselves continually surprised by novel angles and new questions, the trail led to philosophy-to a wisdom that only hermits and prisoners could know.

Achamian had always considered himself one of the latter: a long-walking philosopher. In his younger days, he would even take inventory of his beliefs and scruples to better judge the difference between the man who had departed and the man who had arrived. He was what the ancient Ceneian satirists called an aculmirsi, literally, a "milestone man," one who would spend his time on the road forever peering at the next milestone-a traveller who could not stop thinking about travelling.

But this journey, arguably the most significant of his long life… was different somehow. Something was happening.

Something inexplicable. Or something that wanted to be…

His Dreams had changed as well.

The night they had camped atop the Heilor, he once again found himself one of many captives chained in an ever-diminishing line, still toothless for scarce-remembered beatings, still nameless for the profundity of what he suffered-and yet everything was different. He glimpsed the flash of memories when he blinked, for one, images of ghastly torment, obscenities too extreme to be countenanced. The glimpse of Sranc hunched in frenzied rutting. The taste of their slaver as they arched and drooled across him. The stench of their black seed…

Degradations so profound that his soul had kicked free his body, his past, his sanity.

So he pinned his eyes wide in false wakefulness, stared over the wretches before him with a kind of mad glaring, toward the opening that marked his destination. Where scrub and brush had enclosed the file before, he now saw gleaming bulkheads and curved planes of gold: a corridor of metal, canted as though part of an almost toppled structure or some great boat dragged ashore. Where the tunnel had ended in a clearing of some kind, he now saw a chamber, vast in implication, though he could see naught but the merest fraction, and illuminated with a kind of otherworldly light, one that rinsed the walls in watery arrhythmia, and sickened for staring.

The Golden Room, he called it. And it was the sum of all horrors.

The unseen horn would blare, scraping across intonations no human ear was meant to suffer. Shadows would rise from the threshold, and the procession would be heaved staggering forward-two steps, never more. He would listen to the shrieks, infant in their intensity, as the Golden Room devoured yet another damaged soul.

Thinking, Please… Let it end here.

The trees, he had realized upon awakening. The Dream had been refracted through their lethargic wrath, distorted. A forest tunnel. A forest clearing. Now the barked skin of the Mop had fallen away, revealing the true locus of his dream captivity, one that he recognized instantly, yet was long in admitting…

The Dread Ark. Min-Uroikas. He now dreamed the experiences of some other soul, a captive of the Consult, shuffling to his doom in the belly of wicked Golgotterath.

And yet, despite the mad significance of this latest transformation, despite all the care and scrutiny he had heaped upon his Dreams over the years, he found himself dismissing these ethereal missives with an inexplicable negligence. Even though their horror actually eclipsed his old dreams of the Apocalypse, they simply did not seem to matter… for some reason… for some reason…

The old Wizard laughed sometimes, so little did he care.

– | Seventeen days into the Istyuli Plains, the day following the scarf, Mimara suddenly asked him why he had fallen in love with her mother.

Mimara was forever talking about the "Empress," as she called her, always describing her in ways that lampooned and criticized. Often she would adopt her mother's tone and voice-lips pulled into a line, eyelids wary and low, an expression that strove to look impervious yet seemed brittle instead. It was a habit that amused and alarmed the old Wizard in equal measure.

Although Achamian was forever defending Esmenet, as well as chiding Mimara for her lack of charity, he had always managed to avoid revealing his true feelings. His instinct was to keep his counsel when talking mothers to their children-even when adult. Motherhood, it seemed, meant too much to be trusted to something as sordid as truth.

So he would tell her pleasant lies, the kind of polite observations designed to discourage further discussion. If she insisted or, worse yet, pestered him with direct questions, he would bark and bristle until she relented. Too much pain, he would tell himself. And besides, he had become quite fond of acting the crabby old Wizard.

But this time he did neither.

"Why?" she asked. "Out of all the women you had lain with, why love her?"

"Because she possessed a sharp wit," he heard himself reply. "That was why I… why I returned, I think. That and her beauty. But your mother… She was always asking me questions about things, about the world, the past-even my Dreams fascinated her. We would lie in her bed sweating, and I would talk and talk, and she would never lose interest. One night she interrogated me until dawn gilded the cracks of her shutters. She would listen and…"

He trailed into the marching silence, not so much stymied by the difficulty of what he wanted to say as astonished by the fact he spoke at all. When had confession become so easy?

"And what?"

"And she… she believed me…"

"Your stories, you mean. About the First Apocalypse and the No-God."

He glanced about, as though wary about being overheard, when in truth he really did not care.

"That… But it was more, I think. She believed in me."

Could it be so simple?

And so he continued. He heard himself explaining things he never knew he understood, how doubt and indecision had so ruled his soul and intellect that he could scarce act without lapsing into endless recriminations. Why? Why? Always why? He heard himself explaining the horrors of his Dreams, and how they had frayed his nerves to the quick. He heard himself telling her how he had come to her mother weak, a man who would sooner hatch plots in his soul than take any real action…

How Drusas Achamian, the only Wizard in the Three Seas, had been a cringer and a coward.

The strange thing is that he found himself actually yearning for those days-missing not so much the fear, perhaps, as the simple anguish of needing another. Living with her in Sumna while she continued taking custom, sitting and waiting in the bustling agora, watching the to and fro of innumerable Sumnites while images of her coupling with strangers plagued him gut and soul. Perhaps this explained what happened later, when she had climbed into Kellhus's bed, believing that Achamian had perished in the Sareotic Library. If there was any fact from his past that caused Achamian to both flinch and marvel, it was the way he had continued to love both of them after their joint betrayal. Despite the years, he never ceased balling his fists at the pageant of memories, his awe of Kellhus and the godlike ease with which he mastered the Gnosis, and his impotent fury when the man retired… to lie with his wife-his wife!

Esmenet. Such a strange name for a whore.

"Fear…" the old Wizard said in resignation. "I was always afraid with your mother."

"Because she was a whore," Mimara said with more eagerness than compassion.

She was right. He had loved a whore and had reaped the wages accordingly. Perhaps the final days of the First Holy War simply had been a continuation of those early days in Sumna. The same hurt, the same rage, only yoked to the otherworldly glamour that was Anasurimbor Kellhus.

"No…" he said. "Because she was so beautiful."

It seemed a proper lie.

"What I don't understand," Mimara exclaimed with the air verbalizing something she had long debated in silence, "is why you refuse to hold her accountable. She was a caste-menial, not sold into slavery like me. She chose to be a whore… just as she chose to betray you."

"Did she?" It seemed that he listened to his voice more than he spoke with it.

"Did she what? Choose? Of course she did."

"Few things are so capricious as choice, girl."

"Seems simple to me. Either she chooses to be faithful or she chooses to betray."

He glared at her. "And what about you? Were you chained to your pillow in Carythusal? No? Does that mean you chose to be there? That you deserved everything you suffered? Could you not have jumped off the ship when the slavers she sold you to put out to sea? Why blame your mother for your wilful refusal to run away?"

Her look was hateful but marred by the same hesitation that seemed to dog all of their heated conversations of late, that moment of searching for the proper passion, as if willing away some reptilian fragment of self that simply did not care. Mimara, part of him realized, was injured because he had said something injurious, not because she felt any real pain. That capacity, it seemed, had been lost in the dark bowels of Cil-Aujas.

"There are chains," she said dully, "and then there are chains."

"Exactly."

A kind of humility haunted her manner after that, but one that seemed more motivated by weariness than any real insight. Even so, he welcomed it. Arrogance is ever the patron of condemnation. Though most all men lived in total ignorance of the ironies and contradictions that mortared their lives, they instinctively understood the power of hypocrisy. So they pretended, laid claim to an implausible innocence. To better sleep. To better condemn. The fact that everyone thought themselves more blameless than blameworthy, Ajencis once wrote, was at once the most ridiculous and the most tragic of human infirmities. Ridiculous because it was so obvious and yet utterly invisible. Tragic because it doomed them to unending war and strife.

There is more than strength in accusation, there is the presumption of innocence, which is what makes it the first resort of the brokenhearted.

During the first years of his exile, Achamian had punished Esmenet in effigy innumerable times in the silent watches before sleep-too many times. He had accused and he had accused. But he had lived with his grievances too long, it seemed, to perpetually condemn her for anything she might have done. No one makes the wrong decisions for reasons they think are wrong. The more clever the man, as the Nroni were fond of saying, the more apt he was to make a fool of himself. We all argue ourselves into our mistakes.

And Esmenet was nothing if not clever.

So he forgave her. He could even remember the precise moment. He had spent the bulk of the day searching his notes for the specifics of a certain dream, one involving a variant of Seswatha's captivity in Dagliash-he could no longer remember why it was important. Furious with himself, he had decided to climb down from his room to assist Geraus with his wood chopping. The odd blister, it seemed, helped focus his thoughts as well as steady his quill. The slave was doggedly hacking away at one of the several shorn trunks he had drawn to the crude hutch where they stored their wood. Grabbing what turned out to be the dull axe, Achamian began chopping as well, but for some bizarre reason he could not strike the wood without sending chips spinning up into Geraus's face. The first one went unmentioned. The second occasioned a frowning smile. The third incited outright laughter and a subsequent apology. The fifth chip caught the man in the eye, sent him to the water-bucket blinking and grimacing.

Once again Achamian apologized, but only so far as was seemly between master and slave. Strangely enough, he had come to prize the jnanic etiquette he so despised when travelling the fleshpots of the Three Seas. Afterward he stood there, watching the man he owned rinse his left eye time and again, feeling somehow guilty and wronged at the same time. After all, he had meant to assist the man…

Geraus turned toward him, ruefully shook his head, and commended him for his supernatural aim. Achamian's vague ire evaporated, as it always did in the face of the man's relentless good nature. And then, impossibly, he caught the scent of the desert, as if somewhere just beyond the arboreal screens that fenced his tower, he would find the dunes of the mighty Carathay.

And just like that, she was forgiven… Esmenet, the whore become Empress.

Numb to his fingertips, Achamian returned the axe to its nook. "Better to heed the Gods," Geraus had said in approval.

Of course habits, like fleas, are not so easy to kill, especially habits of thought and passion. But she was forgiven, nonetheless. Even if he wasn't finished accusing her, she was forgiven.

And somehow, while walking with a band of killers through the empty heart of a dead civilization, he managed to explain this to Mimara.

He told her about their very first meeting, about the bawdy way her mother had accosted him from her window.

"Hey, Ainoni," she had shouted down. It was the custom in Sumna to call all bearded foreigners Ainoni. "A man so swollen needs to take his ease, lest he bursts…"

"I was quite fat in those days," he said, answering Mimara's dubious look.

And he told her about herself-or at least the memory of her that continued to haunt her mother.

"This was the summer after the famine. Sumna, the whole Nansur Empire had suffered grievously. In fact, the poor had sold so many of their children into slavery that the Emperor issued an edict voiding all such sales between Nansur citizens the previous summer. Like most caste-menials, your mother was too poor to afford citizenship, but Exceptions were being issued by various tax farmers throughout the city. Your mother would have never told me about you, I think, were it not for the law… the Sixteenth Edict of Manumission, it was called, I think. She needed the gold, you see. She was mad for gold-for anything she might use as a bribe."

"You gave it to her."

"Your mother never dreamed she could get you back. In fact, she never thought she would survive the famine. She literally believed she was sparing you her doom. You simply cannot imagine the straits she was in, the chains that shackled her. She sold you to Ainoni slavers, I think, because she thought the farther she could deliver you from the Nansurium the better."

"So the Emperor's edict was useless."

"I tried to tell her, but she refused to listen… Really refused," he added with a chuckle, drawing a finger to the small scar he still sported on his left temple. "Even still, she managed to secure the Exception… from a man, a monster, named Polpi Tharias-someone I still dream of killing. The first day the law went into effect she went down to the harbour. I don't know about now, but back then the Ershi district-you know? the north part of the harbour, in the shadow of the Hagerna-was where the slavers held their markets. She refused to let me accompany her… It was something… something she needed to do on her own, I think."

It was a strange thing for a man to enter the world of a damaged woman. The apparent disproportion between event and evaluation. The endless sinkholes that punished verbal wandering. The crazed alchemy of compassion and condemnation. It was a place where none of the scales seemed balanced, where the compass bowl never settled and the needle never showed true north.

"You know, girl, I think that was when I truly fell in love with her… that day, so very hot, as humid as any day in the Sayut Delta. I sat on the very sill she used to accost men on the street below, watched her slender form swallowed by the mobs…"

For some reason, he could not conjure the image in his soul's eye. Instead he glimpsed the eunuch-fat man she had vanished behind in the press: his smile hooking his jowls, empires of dark soaking his armpits.

Such is the perversity of memory. Small wonder the Nonmen lapsed into madness.

"She wasn't the only one," he continued. "Apparently thousands of Exceptions had been sold, almost all of them counterfeit. Not that it would have mattered, given that you were in Carythusal, far beyond the sway of the Emperor and his ill-considered law. The slavers had hired mercenaries in anticipation. There were riots. Hundreds were killed. One of the slaver's ships was set alight. When I saw the smoke I went out into the city to try to find her."

He idly wondered whether anyone had seen as many smoking cities as he. Many, he decided, if the rumours he had heard regarding the Wars of Unification were true.

Sarl and the Captain among them.

"Men are fools at the best of times," he continued, "but when they gather in mobs they lose whatever little reason they can claim when alone. Someone cries out, they all cry out. Someone bludgeons or burns, and they all bludgeon and burn. It's remarkable really, and terrifying enough to send kings and emperors into hiding.

"I was forced to resort to the Gnosis twice just to reach the harbour, and this in a city where Chorae were rife and sorcerers had their tongues scraped out with oyster shells. I actually remember little, just smoke, shadows running, bodies in the dust, and this… this cold that seemed to burn in the bottom of my gut."

Even after so many years, the phantasmagoric feel of that afternoon still tickled. It had been one of the first times his waking life had approximated the shrieking madness of his Dreams.

"Did you find her?" Mimara asked. She had been walking with her head slouched, almost slung, from her shoulders. It was a unlikely posture, a peculiar combination of reflection and defeat.

"No."

"No? What do you mean, no?"

"I mean no. I remember thinking I found her. Along one of the Hagerna's walls, lying face first in her own blood…" The moment came back to him unbidden. He had been nauseated for smoke and worry, leaning his then fat body against what seemed a laborious incline. The sight of her struck all thought and breath and motion from him. He just stood there, teetering, while the screams and shouts continued to pipe in the near distance behind him. At first, he had simply known it was her. The same girlish form and piling black hair. Even more, the same mauve cloak-though it struck him now that it might have only seemed the same cut and colour. Fear has a way of rewriting things to suit its purposes. She had fallen facing up-hill, pigeon-toed, one arm slack along her side, the other bent beneath her torso. The blood had streamed along her edges, outlining her in black and crimson. He remembered horns sounding across the harbour-the Shrial Knights signalling-and how in their blaring wake a hush had fallen, allowing him to hear the tap-tap of her blood directly into the heart of the earth: she had fallen across one of Sumna's famed gutters.

"But it wasn't her?" Mimara was asking.

Several young men had raced past without so much as seeing them. With nerveless fingers he had reached down, certain she would be as light as bundled rags. She was not, and it reminded him of pulling stones out of wet beach sand as a child. He heaved the woman onto her back, revealed her sodden face, and stumbled back against the wall, falling to his rump.

Joy and relief… unlike anything he would experience until the First Holy War.

"No," he replied. "Just some other unfortunate. Your mother had found her way back with nary a scrape." She had been sitting on her sill when he returned, staring down the slots between the opposing tenements, toward the harbour. The room was dark, so that she seemed to glow from where he stood in the doorway.

"She never spoke of you again… Not to me or anyone."

Not until she succumbed to Kellhus.

They both fell silent for a trudging time, as though struggling to absorb the sideways significance of his tale. They stared at the sparse crowd of scalpers before them: Pokwas with a vole carcass slung across his great tulwar, which he wore holstered diagonally across his back. Galian bobbing at his side, his stride as quick and nimble as his tongue. Conger and Wonard shuffling like hurried ghosts, their Galeoth war-knots so haphazard that their hair fell in filthy rags to their shoulders. Koll lurching and limping, his shoulders as sharp as sticks.

"Your mother is a survivor, girl," Achamian finally hazarded. "Same as you."

He found himself thinking that perhaps she had died that day in the harbour-or a part of her. The Esmenet he had found was not the Esmenet who had left him, that much was certain. Her melancholy had lifted, if anything. He remembered thinking that she had actually healed in some way. Before that day, a kind of inward lethargy had always blunted the appetite of her curiosities, the wicked edge of her witticisms. Or so it seemed at the time.

"Let the Outside sort her sins," he added.

He typically shied from this kind of talk. The World seemed too much a rind pulled across something horrific, and death loomed as the only terror. Someday his sins would be sorted as well, and he did not need Mimara and her Eye to know his ultimate fate.

He walked, waiting for Mimara to pinch him with more questions and unflattering observations. But she kept her face turned to the distances before them, the wind-whisking openness, the endless lines. You would not know the world was crooked, he thought, living on the plains.

Perhaps because they had been speaking Ainoni, he found himself recalling the time he had spent in Carythusal spying on the Scarlet Spires, and of this old drunk-Posodemas, he called himself-who would ply him with stories at a tavern called the Holy Leper. The man, who claimed to have survived seven naval battles and no less than five years as a captive of the Shirise pirates, would speak of nothing but his wives and mistresses. He would describe, in excruciating detail, how each had betrayed him in this or that humiliating respect. Achamian would sit listening to the cow-eyed wretch, alternately scanning the crowd and nodding in false encouragement, telling himself that few things were more precious to a man than his shame — the very sense endless drink stripped from him.

And that, he realized with no small amount of dismay, was what seemed to be happening here, on the long road to Ishual.

Endless intoxication. And with it, the slow strangulation of shame. What good was honesty when it carried no pain?

Dust on the horizon. Human smells on the hot wind.

Fleet, they sprinted across the grasses, running low so that the weeds clawed their shoulders, their numbers scattered wide so that the dust of their approach would not alert their prey. They howled insults at the hated sun. They were sleek creatures, tireless and unrelenting in the prosecution of their dread appetites. They took dirt for sustenance, violence for bliss. They wore the faces of their enemy, inhumanly beautiful when calm, twisted grotesqueries when aroused.

Sranc… Weapons of an ancient war, ranging a dead world.

They could smell them, the trespassers. They could see the lobes of flesh, the bloody pockets they would cut for their coupling, the eyes wide with unspeakable horror. Though generations had passed since their ancestors had last encountered Men, the fact of them had been stamped into their flesh. The aching splendour of their screams. The heat of their bleeding. The twitching glory of their struggles.

They loped like wolves, scuttled like spiders. They ran for truths they did not know, for verities written in their blood. They ran for the promise of violation…

Only to be astonished by a human figure rising from wicks of scrub and grass.

A woman.

Baffled, they tripped to a walk, closed about her in a broad arc. The wind flowed over her limbs, rifled through her hair, her rags, drawing with it the sediment that was her scent.

Man, rot, feces, and… and something else…

Something at once alarming and alluring.

They formed fences about her, swaying and screeching, brandishing crude weapons, or mewling in confused apprehension. Their Chieftain approached, his arms thrown down and back to drag knives through the powdery turf. He stood before her, nearly as tall, flies buzzing about the rotted leathers that clothed him.

"What are you?" he barked.

"A child of the same father," she said.

The Chieftain began stomping. He bared his teeth, gnashed them for the woman to see. "Father… father! We have no fathers save the earth!"

She smiled a mother's smile. "But you do. And they deny you this path."

"Kill! Kill you! Kill-murder-fuck the others!"

"Yet you have no hunger for me…"

"No hunger…"

"Because we are children of the same fathers."

"Kill!" the Chieftain shrieked. "Kill-murder-fuck!" He shook his jaws like a wolf disputing a bone, raised his pitted knives to the featureless sky.

The thing called Mimara leapt high over the Chieftain's wagging head. Sunlight sparked from bared steel. It somersaulted with preternatural languor, landed in a warrior stance. Behind its back the Chieftain jerked, shrieked, clawed the air, as if trying to snatch at the violet blood spouting from his neck. The beast spun into the dust, little more than a twitching shadow behind screens of chalk.

"We are children of the same fathers," the woman said to the others. "Do you smell the truth-power of this?"

A raucous swell of howls…

"The Black Heaven will call you very soon."

She smiled at the grovelling obscenities.

"He will call you very soon."

"What was it like?" she asks. "Meeting Kellhus for the first time, I mean."

The old Wizard's reply is typically long-winded.

Ajencis, he tells her, was fond of chiding his students for confusing assent with intellect. Apparently this confusion was what made obviously profound souls so troubling-and so rare. "You, my girl, are the ground of your assumptions. No matter how bent your cubit may be, it is the very definition of straight for you. So when another comes to you with their carpenter's string… Well, let's just say they will necessarily come up short the degree to which their assumptions deviate from yours-and it will strike you as obviously so. No matter how wrong, how foolish you are, you will think you know it 'in your stomach,' as the Galeoth say."

"So true wisdom is invisible? You're saying we can't see it when we encounter it."

"No. Only that we have great difficulty recognizing it."

"Then what made my stepfather different?"

The old Wizard walked in silence for what seemed a long while, pondering the kick of his boots through the leathery grasses. "I've spent many hours mulling this. Now, you see, he possesses the authority… He is the mighty, all-knowing Aspect-Emperor. His listeners come to him with their yardsticks in hand, actually seeking his correction. But back then… Well, he was little more than a beggar and a fugitive."

His tone is halting, pensive. He has the manner of a man surprised by things so familiar they have become thoughtless.

"He had a gift for showing you the implications of things…" he says, then trails into the silence of second thoughts. His brow furrows. His lips purse within the shaggy profile of his beard. "Ajencis was forever saying that ignorance is invisible," he begins again, "and that this is what fools us into thinking we know the truth of anything, let alone complicated matters. He thought certainty was a symptom of stupidity-the most destructive one. But at the risk of offending the Great Teacher-or his ancient shade, anyway-I would say that not all ignorances are… are equal. I think there are truths, profound truths, that we somehow know without knowing…"

Mimara glances around the way she often does when they have conversations like this. Pokwas is the nearest, his harness sagging, his black skin chalked by dust. Galian trudges nearby-the two have become inseparable. Cleric strides more than walks several paces ahead, his scalp gleaming white in the wide-sky sun. Sarl lags with Koll, his face pulled into a perpetual grimace. The Skin Eaters. They look more like a scattered mob of refugees than a warlike company on a quest.

"This…" Achamian says, still gazing into his reminiscences, "this was Kellhus's noschi, his genius. He could look into your eyes and pluck these… half-known truths from you… and so, within heartbeats of speaking with him, you would begin doubting your own cubit, and begin looking more and more toward his measure…"

She feels her eyes arch wide in comprehension. "A deceiver could ask for no greater gift."

The Wizard's look is so sharp that at first she fears she has offended him. But he has that appreciative gleam in his eyes, the one she has come to prize.

"In all my years," he continues, "I have never quite understood worship, what happens to souls when they prostrate themselves before another-I've been a sorcerer for too long. And yet I did worship him… for a time. So much so I even forgave him the theft of your mother…"

He shakes his head as if trying to ward away bees, looks away to the stationary line of the horizon. A cough kicks through him.

"Whatever worship is," he says, "I think it involves surrendering your cubit… opening yourself to the perpetual correction of another…"

"Having faith in ignorance," she adds with a wry grin.

His laughter is so sudden, so mad with hilarity, that fairly all the scalpers turn toward them.

"The grief you must have caused your mother!" he cries.

Even though she smiles at the joke, a part of her stumbles in errant worry. When has she become so clever?

The Qirri, she realizes. It quickens more than the step.

Wary of the sudden attention, they stay their tongues. The silence of endless exertion climbs over them once again. She stares out toward the northern horizon, at the long divide between sky and earth. She thinks of Kellhus and her mother making love in a distant desert. Her hand drifts to her belly, but her thoughts dare not follow… Not yet.

She has the sense of things bending.

The World is old and miraculous and is filled with a deep despair that none truly know. The Nonman, Mimara has come to understand, is proof of this.

"There was a time," he says, "when the world shook to the stamping chorus of our march…"

Dusk rolls the plain's farther reaches into darkness and gloom. The wind buffets, hard enough to prickle with grit. Thunderheads scrawl across the sky, dark and glowing with internal discharges, but rainless save for the odd warm spit.

The Nonman stands before them, naked to the waist, one held in the eyes of ten. His hairless form is perfect in cast and proportion, the very image of manly grace and strength, a statue in a land without sculptors.

"There was such a time…"

Thunder rolls across the mocking skies, and the scalpers crane their gazes this way and that. It alarms the soul, thunder on the plain. The eyes turn to shelter when the heavens crack, and plains are naught but the absence of shelter, exposure drawn on and on across the edge of the horizon. The plains offer no place to hide-only directions to run.

"A time when we," Cleric says, "when we! — were many, and when these depravities-these skinnies — were few. There was a time when your forefathers wept at the merest rumour of our displeasure, when you offered up your sons and daughters to turn aside our capricious fury!"

She cannot yank her gaze from him-Incariol. He is a mystery, a secret that she must know, if she and Achamian were to be saved. His aspect has become a compulsion for her, like a totem or even an idol: something that rewards the ardour of its observation.

"The most foolish among us," Cleric continues, "has forgotten more than your wisest will ever know. Even your Wizard is but a child stumbling in his father's boots. You are but twig-thin candles, burning fast and bright, revealing far more than your span allows you to fathom."

He bends back his head until the line of his jaw forms a triangle above the banded muscle of his neck. He shouts heavenward, mouthing words that pool blue and brilliant white… Then, miraculously, he steps into the sky, arms out, rising until the clouds become a kind of mantle about his shoulders, a windblown cloak of smoke and warring, interior lights.

"But now look at us," he booms down to their astonished shadows. "Diminished. Perpetually foundering. Lost without memories. Persecuted as false. Hunted by the very depths we warred to uncover, the very darkness we sought to illuminate."

He hangs above them. He lowers his radiant gaze. His tears burn silver with refracted light. Thunder crashes, a thousand hammers against a thousand shields.

"This is the paradox-is it not? The longer you live, the smaller you become. The past always dwarfs the present, even for races as fleeting as yours. One morning you awaken to find now… this very moment… little more than a spark in a cavern. One morning you awaken to find yourself so much… less…"

Incariol, she thinks. Ishroi…

"Less than what you wanted. Less than what you once were."

She is in love, she realizes. Not with him, but with the power and wonder of what he was.

"One day you, who have never been mighty or great, will ask where the glory has gone. Failing strength. Failing nerve. You will find yourself faltering at every turn, and your arrogance will grow brittle, defensive. Perhaps you will turn to your sons and their overshadowed ardour. Perhaps you will seal yourself in your mansion, as we did, proclaiming contempt for the world rather than face its cruel measure…"

She is more in his presence, she decides. She will always be more, whether he flees or dies or utterly loses himself in the disorder that is his soul. For knowing him… Cleric.

"One day you, who have never been mighty or great, will peer through the maze of your depleted life, and see that you are lost…"

He abandons his mantle of clouds, sinking as though on a wire. He sets foot upon powder-dry earth.

Mimara leans forward with the Wizard and the other scalpers. Their mouths hang slack with drool.

"Lost like us," he murmurs, reaching for the wonder that hides in his pouch.

The thunderheads continue their march into the obscurity of night.

The rain, as always, refuses to fall.

– | Cil-Aujas, she decides. Something broke in Cil-Aujas. Something between them, something within. And now sanity is abandoning them, drip by lucid drip.

There's a new Rule of the Slog, and even though it has never been spoken, Mimara knows with utter certainty that violators will be punished as lethally as all the others. A rule that ensures no mention shall be made of the madness slowly possessing them.

No questions. No doubters on the slog.

The extraordinary thing about insanity, she has come to realize, is the way it seems so normal. When she thinks of the way the droning days simply drop into their crazed, evening bacchanals, nothing strikes her as strange-nothing visceral, anyway. Things that should make her shudder, like the nip of Cleric's nail as his finger roams the inside of her cheek, are naught but part of a greater elation, as unremarkable as any other foundation stone.

It is only when she steps back and reflects that the madness stares her plain in the eye.

"He's killing you…" the thing called Soma had said. "The Nonman."

She finds herself drifting to the rear of their scattered mob and approaching Sarl, thinking that someone wholly broken might know something about the cracks now riddling their souls. According to the old Wizard, the Sergeant has known Lord Kosoter since the Unification Wars-a long time, as far as life is measured by scalpers. Perhaps he can decipher the skin-spy's riddle.

"The Slog of Slogs," she says lamely, not knowing where to begin with a madman. "Eh, Sarl?"

The others have long since abandoned him to his crazed musings. No one dares glance at him, for fear of sparking some kind of rambling tirade. For weeks she has expected, and a couple of times even hoped, that the Captain would silence him. But no matter how long his harsh voice rattles on into the night, nothing is done, nothing is said.

Sarl, it seems, is the lone exception to the Rules.

"She talks to me," he says, staring off to her right as if she were a phantasm that had plagued his ruminations too long to be directly addressed. "The second most beautiful thing…"

He was easily one of the most wrinkled men she had ever seen when she first saw him. Now his skin is as creased as knotted linen. His tunic has rotted to rags, his hauberk swings unfastened from his knobbed shoulders, and his kilt has somehow lost its backside, baring withered buttocks to open daylight.

"Tell me, Sergeant. How long have you known the Captain?"

"The Captain?" The hoary old man wags a finger, shaking his head in cackling reproach. "The Captain, is it? He-heeee! There's no explanation for the likes of him. He's not of this world!"

She flinches at the volume of his voice, reflexively lowers her own tone to compensate.

"How so?"

He shudders with silent laughter. "Sometimes souls get mixed up. Sometimes the dead bounce! Sometimes old men awaken behind the eyes of babes! Sometimes wolves…"

"What are you saying?"

"Don't cross him," he rasps with something like conspiratorial glee. "He-he! Oh, no, girl. Never cross him!"

"But he's such a friendly fellow!" Mimara cries.

He catches her joke but seems to entirely miss the humour. So much of his laughter possesses the dull hollow of reflex. More and more he seems to make the sound of laughter without laughing at all…

And suddenly she can feel it, the lie that has been burrowing through all of them, like a grub that devours meaning and leaves only motions. Laughter without humour. Breath without taste. Words said in certain sequences to silence words unsaid-words that must never be said.

Her whole life she has lived some kind of lie. Her whole life she has charted her course about some contradiction, knowing yet not knowing, and erring time and again.

But this lie is different. This lie somehow eludes the pain of those other lies. This lie carves the world along more beautiful joints.

This lie is bliss.

She needs only look to the others to see they know this with the same deathless certainty. Even Sarl, who had long since fled the world's teeth, content to trade fancy for mad fancy, seems to understand that something… false… is happening.

"And Cleric… How did you fall in with him?"

There's something about the Sergeant's presence that winds her. His gait is at once vigorous and wide, his arms swinging out like a skinny man pretending to be fat.

"Found him," he says.

"Found him? How? Where?"

Mischief twinkles in his gaze.

"Found him like a coin in the dirt!"

"But where? How?"

"After we took Carythusal, when they disbanded the Eastern Zaudunyani… they sent us north to Hunoreal, he-he!"

"Sent you? Who sent you?"

"The Ministrate. The Holies. Stack skinnies, they said. Haul the bales and keep the gold-they don't care about gold, the Holies. Just stay on the southeastern marches of Galeoth, they said. Nowhere else? No. No. Just there…"

This confuses her. She has always thought that scalpers were volunteers.

"But what about Cleric?" she presses. "Incariol…"

"Found him!" he explodes with a phlegmatic roar. "Like a coin in the dirt!"

More eyes have turned to them, and she suddenly feels conspicuous-even guilty in a strange way. Aside from other madmen, only thieves trade jokes with madmen-as a way of playing them. Even the old Wizard watches her with a quizzical squint.

Simply talking to the man has compromised her, she realizes. The others now know that she's seeking something… The Captain knows.

"The Slog of Slogs," she says lamely. "They'll sing songs across the Three Seas, Sergeant-think on it! The Psalm of the Skin Eaters."

The old man begins weeping, as though overwhelmed by the charity of her self-serving words.

"Seju bless you, girl," he coughs, staring at her with bleary, blinking eyes. For some reason he has started limping, as if his body has broken with his heart.

Suddenly he smiles in his furrow-faced way, his eyes becoming little more than deeper perforations in his red-creased face. "It's been lonely," he croaks through rotted teeth.

They see the plume of dust shortly after breaking camp. It rises chalk-white and vertical before being drawn into a mountainous, spectral wing by the wind. The plains pile to the north in desiccated sheets, some crumpled, others bent into stumps and low horns. The plumb line of the horizon has been raised and buckled, meaning some time will pass before the authors of the plume become visible. So they continue travelling with a wary eye to the north. Mimara hears Galian and Pokwas muttering about Sranc. The company has yet to encounter any since crossing into the Istyuli, so it stands to reason.

The plume waxes and wanes according to unseen terrain but grows ever nearer. The Captain barks no instructions, even when the first of the specks appear crawling across the back of a distant knoll.

Hands held against the spiking sun, they peer into the distance.

Riders. Some forty or fifty of them-just enough to defend themselves against a single clan of skinnies. A motley assemblage of caste-menials, wearing crude hauberks of splint over stained tunics of blue and gold. Their beards hang to their waists, sway to the canter of their ponies. They ride beneath a standard she has never seen before, though she recognizes the checkered black shields of Nangaelsa.

"Nangaels," she says aloud. "They're Tydonni."

The Wizard hushes her with an angry glance.

The Great Ordeal, she realizes. At long last they have crawled into its mighty shadow…

A kind of trembling anticipation suffuses her, as if she has stumbled into the gaze of something monstrous with power. And she wonders when she became terrified of her stepfather, when for so long he seemed the only sane voice, the only understanding soul.

"A lost patrol?" Galian asks.

"Supply cohort," Xonghis says with authority. "They must have abandoned their wains."

Even though they can see the approaching riders discussing and debating them, the Skin Eaters remain silent. They have outrun civilization, these men, so far and for so long they no longer need fatuous words to bind them.

The Nangael commander is a greybeard with a long, craggy face and a low, prominent brow. His left arm hangs in a sling. The Captain gestures for Galian to accompany him. The two men walk out several paces to greet the nearing man.

The aging officer does them the courtesy of dismounting, as do the two riders nearest him. But his eyes linger on Cleric for several heartbeats. He does not like the looks of him.

"Tur'il halsa brininausch virfel?" the officer calls.

"Tell him we don't speak gibberish," the Captain instructs the former Columnary.

Mimara looks to the old Wizard, suddenly afraid. He wags his head almost imperceptibly, as if warning her against anything rash.

"Manua'tir Sheyarni?" Galian calls back.

The Nangaels are sunburned and travel-worn, their kilts frayed, the lines of their faces inked in sweat-blackened dust. But the contrast between them and her companions horrifies Mimara. The scalpers' clothing has been reduced to black rags, waxy with filth. Conger's tunic has all but disintegrated into shags of foul string. They look like things that should shamble… like things dead.

The officer comes to a halt before the two men. He is Tydonni tall, but stooped with years, so that he seems of a height with Lord Kosoter. The Captain seems more shade than man in his presence. "Who are you?" he asks in passable Sheyic.

"Skin Eaters," Galian says simply.

" Scalpers? This far? How is that possible?"

"The skinnies were mobbing. We had no choice but to flee northwest."

A moment of canny blankness dulls the officer's eyes.

"Unlikely."

"Yes," the Captain says.

He pulls his knife, thrusts it into the man's eye socket. "Unlikely."

The body slumps forward. Cries rifle the arid sky, and somehow Mimara knows the commander was beloved. The men to either side of the officer stumble back in horror. Lord Kosoter glares and grins, his knife braced against his right thigh. His eyes shine above the tangled fury of his teeth and beard. Weapons are drawn in the clamour. Beneath shouts of alarm and outrage, a different voice strums the strings of a different world…

Cleric is singing.

He stands pale and bare-chested. Brilliance glares through the apertures of his face. He reaches out, his hands crooked into empty claws. Lariats of white light scribble across the rear of the ragtag column…

The Seventh Quyan Theorem-or something resembling it.

Shrieks, both equine and human. The glimpse of shadows in high sunlight. Men are thrown. Horses roll and thrash, kicking up clouds of dust. Mimara sees a man on his knees screaming. At first he's little more than a shadow in the dust, but by some miracle a tunnel of clarity opens through the sheets. He howls, his beard aflame beneath scalded cheeks.

Then the battle crashes over her.

Nangael war-cries wrack the air. The nearest Tydonni kick their ponies forward, shields braced, broadswords swinging high. The scalpers meet their charge with eerie calm. They step around the hurtling forms, hacking riders, stringing horses. Pokwas leaps, pivoting to the weight of his great tulwar. A pony blunders into exploding dust. A rider's head spins high, then falls, trailing its beard like a comet. Xonghis ducks between charging Tydonni, gores a thigh. The Captain draws another in an elusive half-circle before lunging high to pierce the man's throat. The wretch falls backward, is dragged choking from his right stirrup.

Chaos and obscurity. Figures emerge then vanish into the tan fog. Sorcerous light flickers and glows, like lightning in clouds. An injured Nangael lurches out of the curtained madness, a cudgel raised in a bloody fist. Mimara is astonished to find Squirrel in her hand, bright and sharp. His face is blank with mortal determination. He swings at her, but she easily ducks to one side, scores the inside of his forearm to the bone. He roars and wheels, his beard pendulous for blood. But the cudgel slips from his hand-she has cut him to the tendon. He leaps to tackle, but again she is too nimble. She steps aside, brings Squirrel flashing down, chops the back of his neck. He drops like a nerveless sack.

The clamour fades. The dust is drawn up and out like milk spilled into a stream. The scalpers stand in what should have been gasping disbelief but more resembles blinking curiosity. The fog clears, revealing chalked figures crawling or writhing across the parched grasses. They have tar for blood.

Mimara gazes at the man she has killed. He lies motionless on his stomach, blinking as he suffocates. The tattoo of a small Circumfix graces his left temple. She cannot bring herself to end his suffering the way the others do. She turns away, blinking at the dust, looking for Achamian…

She finds him several paces from Koll, who stands exactly as he had before the battle began, his sword still hanging from the string that creases his forehead. She tries to secure the Wizard's gaze, but he's peering somewhere beyond her, squinting into the distance.

"No," Achamian croaks, as though jarred from a profound stupor. "No!"

At first Mimara thinks he refers to the murder of innocents before them, but then she realizes that his gaze follows the escaping riders. She can scarce see them for the dust-some eight or nine men, riding hard for the north.

"Noooooo!"

Gnostic words rumble out from all directions, as if spoken with the sky's own lungs. Bluish light flares from the Wizard's eyes and mouth… Meaning-unholy meaning. He steps out into the open sky, climbing across spectral ground. Wild, hoary, old-he seems a doll of rags flung high against the distance.

She stands dumbstruck, watches as he gains on the fleeing horsemen, then rains brilliant destruction down upon them. Dust steams and plumes, the mark of tumult on the horizon.

The others scarce seem interested. A quick glance reveals that almost all of them are intact, save for Conger, who sits in the dust grimacing, his hands clutched about a crimson welling knee. He watches his Captain's approach with dull horror. The shadow of Lord Kosoter's sword hangs across his face for a breathless heartbeat, then Conger is no more.

"No limpers!" the Captain grates, his eyes at once starved and bright.

And that is the sum of their plunder. It seems sacrilege, for some reason, to don the possessions of others-things so clean they can only be filthy. The old Wizard returns on weary foot, framed by seething curtains of smoke. He has set the plains afire.

"I'm damned already," is all he says in reply to Mimara's look.

He stares at the ground and says nothing for the next three days.

His continuing silence does not trouble her so much as her own indifference to it. She understands well enough: in running down the Tydonni, the old Wizard has murdered in the name of rank speculation. But she knows his guilt and turmoil are as much a matter of going through the motions as is her compassion. His silence is the silence of falsehood, and as such, she sees no reason why she should care.

She has the weight of her own murder to bear.

The morning of the third day passes like any other, save that the tributaries they cross have all dried to dust and their skins have grown flabby enough for the Captain to institute rationing. When the old Wizard finally chooses to speak, he does so without spit.

"Have you ever seen Kellhus with it?"

Kellhus. Hearing the name pricks her for some reason, so much so she resists the urge to make one of the signs of warding she learned in the brothel. Before Achamian, she had never heard anyone refer to her stepfather in the familiar before, not even her mother, who always referred to him as "your father." Not once.

"Seen my stepfather?" she asked. "You mean with my… other eyes?"

She can tell by his hesitation that this is a question he had feared to ask for a long time.

"Yes."

Absolution, she realizes. He killed the Tydonni to prevent any word of their expedition from reaching the Great Ordeal. Now he seeks to absolve himself of their deaths through the righteousness of his cause. Men murder, and men excuse. For most the connection is utterly seamless: those killed simply have to be guilty, otherwise why would they be dead? But Achamian, she knows, is one of those rare men who continually stumble over the seams in their thought. Men for whom nothing is simple.

"No," she replies. "You must believe me when I tell you I've only seen him a handful of occasions. Prophets have scarce the time for real daughters, let alone the likes of me."

This is true. For most of her years on the Andiamine Heights, the Aspect-Emperor was scarce more than a dread rumour, an unseen presence that sent hoards of perfumed functionaries scurrying this way and that through the galleries. And in a manner, she realizes with a peculiar numbness, very little has changed. Was he not the hidden tyrant of this very expedition?

For the first time, it seems, she sees things through Drusas Achamian's eyes: a world bound to the machinations of Anasurimbor Kellhus. Looking out, she has a sudden sense of loads borne and stresses diffused, as if the world were a wheel spoked with mountains, rimmed with seas, one so vast that the axle lay perpetually over the horizon-perpetually unseen. Armies march. Priests tally contributions. Ships leave and ships arrive. Emissaries howl in protest and wriggle on their bellies…

All at the pleasure of the Holy Aspect-Emperor.

This is the world the old Wizard sees, the world that frames his every decision: a singular thing, a living thing, nourished by the arteries of trade, bound by the sinew of fear and faith…

A leviathan with a black cancer for a heart.

"I believe you," he says after a time. "I was just… just wondering."

She ponders this image of the Aspect-Emperor and his power, this hellish seal. It reminds her of the great Nilnameshi mandala that hangs in the Allosium Forum below the Andiamine Heights. For more than a thousand years, the artisan-sages of Invishi sought to capture creation in various symbolic schemes, resulting in tapestries of unparalleled beauty and manufacture. The Allosium Mandala, her mother had told her once, was famed for being the first to use concentric circles instead of nested squares to represent the hierarchies of existence. It was also notorious for containing no image whatsoever in its centre, the place typically reserved for the God of Gods…

Innovations that, her mother explained, saw the artisan stoned to death.

Now Mimara sees a mandala of her own manufacture in her soul's eye, one more temporal than cosmological but every bit as subversive in its implications. She sees the million-panelled extremities, the tiny lives of the mob, each enclosed in ignorance and distraction. And she sees the larger chambers of the Great Factions, far more powerful but just as oblivious given their perpetual scramble for prestige and dominance. With terrifying clarity she sees it, apprehends it, a symbolic world thronging with life yet devoid of nerves, utterly senseless to the malignancy crouched in their absent heart…

A dark world, one battling a war long lost.

As thin as her passions have become, it seems she can feel it: the impotence, the desolation, the gaping sense of hopelessness. She walks for a time, tasting, even savouring, the possibility, as if doom were a kind of honey-cake. A world where the Aspect-Emperor is evil…

And then she realizes that the opposite could just as easily be true.

"What would you have thought," she asks the old Wizard, "if I had told you he was wreathed in glory when I saw him, that he was, without any doubt, the Son of Heaven?"

This is it, she realizes. The rat that hides in his gut, gnawing and gnawing…

"Hard questions, girl. You have a talent for them."

The overthrowing fear.

"Yes. But the dilemmas remain yours, don't they?"

He glares at her, and for the merest heartbeat, she glimpses hatred. But like so much else, it drops away without residue. Simply another passion too greased with irrelevance to be clutched in the hands of the present.

"Strange…" he replies distantly. "I see two sets of footprints behind me."

There is this sense of unravelling.

A sense of threads worn and abraded, until snipped by their own tension. A sense of things hanging, as if they were nothing more than fluff skipping across the wind. A sense of things tying, of newborn anchors, novel tautnesses yanked across old seams, old straps, as if they were spiderwebs become kites, soaring high and free, batted by falcon winds, pinned to the earth by a singular string…

Qirri.

Qirri the holy. Qirri the pure.

Each night they queue before the Nonman, suck from the teat that is his finger. Sometimes he clasps their cheek with his free hand, gazes long and melancholy into their eyes, while his finger probes their tongue, their gums and teeth.

And it is right and proper to taste the spittle of another.

They have found a new Tusk to guide them, a new God to compel their hearts and to bend their knees. Qirri, as rationed and apportioned by its prophet, Incariol.

During the day they walk, utterly absorbed in the blessed monotony. Like beetles, they walk with their faces to the earth, step after step, watching their boots hooking through haloes of dust.

During the night they listen to Cleric and his incoherent declarations. And it seems they grasp a logic that binds disjointed absurdities into profound wholes. They revel in a clarity indistinguishable from confusion, an enlightenment devoid of claim or truth or hope…

And the plains pass like a dream.

"The Qirri…" she finally manages to blurt. "It's beginning to frighten me."

The Wizard's silence has the character of a breach. She senses his alarm, the effort of will it takes for him to stifle his rebuke. She knows the words warring for control of his voice because they are the same words that continue to nag and accuse the corners of her thought. Fool. Why throw stones at wolves? Everything is as it must be. Everything will turn out fine…

"How so?" he says coldly.

"In the brothel…" she hears herself reply and is amazed because she is usually so loathe to speak of the place. "Some of the girls, the ones who broke, mostly… They would feed them opium-force them. Within weeks they would… would…"

"Do whatever they needed to get more," the Wizard says dully.

Trudging silence. Coughing from somewhere ahead of them.

"Could that be what the Nonman is doing to us?"

Speaking this question is like rolling a great stone from her chest. How could it be so difficult to stand square in the light of what was happening?

"Why?" the Wizard asks. "Has he been making… making demands?"

"No," she answers. Not yet.

He ponders the ground, his stride, and the resulting exhalations of dust.

"We have nothing to fear, Mimara," he finally says, but there is something false in his manner, as if he were a frightened boy borrowing the assured tone and posture of a priest. "We're not the same as the others. We understand the dangers."

She does not know how to reply, so she simply continues pacing the Wizard in silent turmoil. Yes! something cries within her. Yes! We know the danger. We can take precautions, refuse the Qirri anytime we wish! Anytime!

Just not now.

"Besides…" he eventually continues, "we need it."

She has anticipated this objection. "But we've travelled so far so fast already!"

Why so harsh? a voice-her voice-chides her. Let the man speak at the very least.

"Look at the Stone Hags," he replies. "Men bred for the slog, eaten up in the matter of weeks. How well do you think an old man and a woman would fare?"

"Let the others go ahead then. Or even better, we could steal away in the heart of night!"

Or best of all, it occurs to her, just take the Nonman's pouch… Yes! Steal it! This makes so much sparkling sense to her that she almost laughs out loud-even as a more sober part of her realizes that one does not take anything from a Quya Mage-ever. As quick as her smile leaps to her lips, her eyes tear in frustration.

"No," the old Wizard is saying. "There's no breaking the covenant we've struck with these men. They would hunt us down, and well they should, given what they've sacrificed."

He is warming to the ingenuity of his rationalizations-as is she.

"Maybe we should confront Cleric," she offers. "Drag the issue before the whole company." Even as she utters this, she can feel her resolution leach away. See? Why bother?

You never had the heart for this…

Achamian shakes his head as if at a truth so old and fat it cannot but be weary. "I don't trust Galian. I fear the Qirri is the only thing keeping him here…"

"Let him leave then." Her shrug is directed more at her words than at the man, it seems.

"If Galian leaves," Achamian replies, his self-assurance relentless now, "he will take Pokwas and Xonghis with him. We need Xonghis. To eat as much to find our way."

Though they smile at each other, their gazes are too slicked with apprehension to truly lock. And so it ends, a conversation that began so real it sent burning coals skidding through her gut, become a pantomime, a shadow-play of numbing words and self-serving reasons.

As she had hoped all along.

They walk, the nine, their backs bent to an exhaustion only the remaining Stone Hag can feel. Mimara actually cries, softly, so that the others cannot hear above the wind batting their ears. She sobs, once, twice, so profound is her relief. Her thighs blush and her mouth waters at the thought of the coming darkness…

And of the soot smudged across the tip of Cleric's white finger.

There is a vastness to the wind on the nocturnal plain, a sense of heaven-spanning enormities, one drawn roughly across the other. All things are seized. All things are lifted and bent. And when the gusts are violent enough, all things kneel-or are broken.

She has crept from the others into the night. Gusts scour the ground, galloping like the outriders of an infinite horde. She turns her face away from the prick of flying sand, gazes without surprise at herself wearing the tattered rags that had once belonged to Soma.

It seems she had known she would find it here waiting-the Consult skin-spy. The company had continued marching past dusk, stopping only when they found the protection of a meagre depression. She set out the way she always set out, instinctively choosing the line of sight and wind most favourable to a stalking predator…

And found one.

"How?" she hisses. There is something frantic within her, something that would fly into pieces were it not for her skin. "How is the Nonman killing us?"

The thing mimics her crouching posture. It seems at once harmless, nothing more than an image without depth, a mere reflection, and as deadly as a bolt cocked in a ballistae. Fear tickles her, but she feels it with a stranger's skin.

"Tell me!"

It smiles with the same condescension she has felt across her face innumerable times. One both beautiful and infuriating.

"Your Chorae," it says with her voice. "Give it to me and I can save you."

What? She clasps the pouch where it hangs between her breasts.

"No! No more games! Tell me how!"

Her vehemence surprises both of them. She watches her eyes click to the darkness of the camp behind her, her face imperceptibly bent to the needs of a sharper ear.

Then she hears it herself. The mutter of sorcery, effortlessly stepping around the buffeting wind, climbing up out of the substance of dust and earth.

"The Qirri…" the other her says. The other spy. "Ask him what it is!"

Then the thing is gone, leaping high and deep into the darkness and running like no human can run. Yanking her head about, Mimara sees the old Wizard scaling the gusting heights, his eyes and mouth alight with brilliant meaning. His voice echoes deep across the angles and surfaces of a different plane. Lines of blinding light needle the dark, carving trails of white across plain. She glimpses fire and exploding earth, swathes of ground clawed into black by the shadow of grasses.

She glimpses herself running with gazelle beauty, leaping with serpentine grace. Then the spewing dust sweeps up to obscure him and so secure his escape.

Koll. The last of the Stone Hags.

She stares at him while the Wizard rails at her.

"What? What were you doing so far away?"

The man sits hunched, the only one not watching her and her father. He was a large man, a powerful man, when they had rescued the surviving Stone Hags in the Mop. Now he is scarce more than a knob-jointed rack. He has long ceased caring about his war-knot, so his hair falls in mats about his face and shoulders. Whatever armour he possessed, he has lost to the trail-and were it not for the Captain, he would have cast away his broadsword as well, she imagines. His beard is matted with grime, making a sphincter of his mouth, which hangs perpetually open. His eyes stare down, always down, but even still they possess the glint of desperation.

"It just came to me," she lies, for in truth, she came to it. "It had my face…"

"You could have been killed! Why? Why would you wander so far?"

Koll. Only Koll. Of all his brother Hags, only he has yet to succumb to the rigours of the trail. He is, she realizes, the last pure thing in their mad company.

The measure, the cubit of their depravity. The only one who has not tasted Qirri.

"It meant to replace you!"

As she watches, the man's shaggy head jerks as if to a gnat's sting. The bleary eyes squint and struggle, as if trying to sort shadows from the darkness…

He can't see, she realizes. Not because his eyes fail him, but because it is a moonless night and clouds obscure the Nail of Heaven. He can't see because his eyes remain human…

Unlike theirs.

"Fool! Fool of a girl! It would have strangled you. Stripped and replaced you!"

At last she turns to look up at the Wizard. He stands with his back to the wind so the edges of him-rotted hide and tangled hair-seem to fly toward her.

"What is it?" she asks in Ainoni.

He blinks, and even though his fury continues to animate him, she somehow knows that a kernel of him simply does not care, that a hunger lies balled like a greased marble in his soul, waiting for the watches to pass and for the pouch to be drawn again.

"What is what?" he cries. He is troubled, she knows, because she has spoken in Ainoni, the tongue of their conspiracy. "I'm talking to you, girl!"

In her periphery she can see the hoary aspect of the Captain, his hair and caste-noble braid lashing the air above his right shoulder, his eyes as bright as Seleukaran steel. His knife slumbers in its scabbard, hanging high on his girdle, but she sees its curve glint above his bloodstained knuckles nonetheless.

"Nothing," she says to the Wizard, knowing that he does not know.

Qirri is Qirri…

The desire that forever slips the leash of your knowing. The hunger that leaves no trace in your trammelled soul.

"Water before food," Xonghis says to them.

They walk an undeviating line now that their water-skins are empty. Nothing can be more simple, it seems, than walking straight across never-ending flatness. And yet all is turmoil and confusion, not the kind that quickens hearts or wrings hands, but the kind that simply hangs like a chrysalis in her soul, suspended, motionless. Everything, it seems-her voice, her scissoring step, her expression-is as assured as it has ever been, save that the world they confront has become a dream.

Everything possesses a nagging lightness. The colours, the maroon swirls of different weeds drying and dying, the patches of sienna dust, the black of some recent grass fire. The swagger of the land piling without height, as if some god had poured mud atop mud just to watch the edges spread over the horizon. The drama of the sky, the clouds climbing in ranges, here tangled into luxuriant locks, there swept up and around in a snowy melange of wings. A kind of disbelief plagues everything she sees, as if existence were foam, and the world nothing more than a titanic bubble…

What was happening?

"You have the look," a voice gurgles from behind.

She turns and sees teeth and gums, eyes pinched into besotted creases. Sarl, somehow shadowy though all the world is bright, looking like a filthy gnome.

"You have the look… Aye!"

She can hear phlegm snap in his cackle. The peril of speaking to madmen, she realizes, is that it permits them to speak to you.

"Don't dispute me, girl, it's true. You have the look of a path long mudded. Am I wrong? Am I? Tell me, girl. How many men have marched 'cross your thighs?"

She should hate him for saying this, but she lacks the inner wind. When has feeling become an effort?

"Many fools. But men… Very few."

"So you admit it!"

She smiles out of some coquettish reflex, thinking she might use his carnal interest to learn more about Lord Kosoter.

"What am I admitting?"

The grin drops from his face, enough for her to glimpse a sliver of his bloodshot eyes. He leans close with a kind of wonder-too close. She fairly gags at his buzzing reek.

"She burned a city for you-didn't she?"

"Who?" she replies numbly.

"Your mother. The Holy Empress."

"No," she laughs in faux astonishment. "But I appreciate the compliment!"

Sarl laughs and nods in turn, his eyes once again squeezed into invisibility. Laughs and nods, trailing ever farther behind her…

What was happening?

She is not who she is…

She is already two women, each estranged from the other. There is the Mimara who knows, who watches the old motives, the old bonds, gradually disintegrate. And there is the Mimara who has gathered all of the old concerns and set them in a circle about an unspeakable pit.

She is already two women, but she needs only touch her bowing abdomen to become three.

They laugh at her for all the food she eats. More and more, she is ravenous come evening. She chides the Wizard for loitering when he should be preparing the humble field Cants he uses to cook their spoiling game. She scolds Xonghis when he fails to secure them enough game.

Whatever speech they possess leaks away as the sun draws down the horizon. They sit in the dust, their beards lacquered with grease, the entrails of their victims humming with flies. Vultures circle them. They sit and they wait for rising darkness… for the melodious toll of Cleric's first words.

"I remember…"

They gather before him. Some come crawling, while others shuffle, kicking up ghostly trails of dust that the wind whips into quick oblivion.

"I remember coming down from high mountains, and treating with Mannish Kings…"

He sits cross-legged, his forearms extended across his knees, his head hanging from his shoulders.

"I remember seducing wives… healing infant princes…"

Stars smoke the arch of Heaven paint the Nonman's slouching form in strokes of silver and white.

"I remember laughing at the superstitions of your priests."

He rolls his head from side to side, as if the shadow he cradles possesses hands that caress his cheeks.

"I remember frightening the fools among you with my questions and astounding the wise with my answers. I remember cracking the shields of your warriors, shattering arms of bronze…"

And it seems they hear distant horns, the thunder of hosts charging, clashing.

"I remember the tribute you gave to me… The gold… the jewels… the babes that you laid at my sandalled feet."

A hush.

"I remember the love you bore me… The hatred and the envy."

He raises his head, blinking as if yanked from a dream inhumanly cruel for its bliss. Veins of silver fork across his cheeks… Tears.

"You die so easily!" he cries, howls, as if human frailty were the one true outrage.

He sobs, bows his head once more. His voice rises as if from a pit.

"And I never forget…"

One of the scalpers moans in carnal frustration… Galian.

"I never forget the dead."

Then he is standing, drawn like a puppet by invisible strings. The Holy Dispensation is about to begin. Strange shouts crease and crumple the windy silence, like the yelping of leashed dogs. She can see hunger leaning in their avid eyes. She can see manly restraint give way to clutched arms and rocking gesticulations. And she does not know when this happened, how awaiting the pouch had become a carnival of fanatic declarations, or how licking a smudged fingertip had become carnal penetration.

She sits rigid and estranged, watching Cleric, yes, but watching his pouch even more. As meagre as their rations are-scarce enough to blacken the crescent of a pared fingernail-she wonders how long they have before the purse fails them altogether. Finally he towers before her, his bare chest shining with hooks of light and shadow, his outstretched finger glistening about the nub of precious black.

She cannot move.

"Mimara?" the Ishroi asks, remembering her name.

He calls to both of her selves, to the one who knows but does not care and to the one who cares but does not know.

But for once it is the third incarnation that answers…

"No," it says. "Get that poison away from me."

Cleric gazes at her for a solemn moment, long enough for the others to set aside their singular hunger.

There is horror in the Wizard's look.

Lord Incariol gazes at her, his eyes watery white about coin-sized pupils. "Mimara…"

She repeats herself, finding new wind in her unaccountable resolution. "No."

Desire, she has come to understand, is not the only bottomless thing…

There is motherhood.

She dreams that an absence binds her, a hole that claws at her very substance. Something is missing, something more precious than jewels or celebrated works, more sustaining than drink or love or even breath. Something wonderful that she has betrayed…

Then she is gasping, swallowing at sour consciousness, and blinking at the visage of Incariol leaning over her.

She does not panic, for everything seems reasonable.

"What are you doing?" she coughs.

"Watching you."

"Yes. But why?"

Even as she asks this, she realizes that only sorcery, subtle sorcery, could have made this visitation possible. She thinks she can even sense it, or at the very least guess at its outlines, the warping of the Wizard's incipient Wards. It was as if he had simply bent the circumference of Achamian's conjuring, pressed into his arcane defences as if they were no more than a half-filled bladder.

"You…" the flawless face said. "You remind me… of someone… I think…"

There is something old about this reply. Not dead nation old, but doddering old… frail.

"What is it?" she asks. She does not know where this question comes from, nor which traitor gives voice to it.

"I no longer remember," he replies with a grave whisper.

"No… The Qirri… Tell me what it is!"

The Wizard murmurs and stirs beside her.

Cleric stares at her with ancient, ancient eyes. The Nail of Heaven traces a perfect white sickle along the outer rim of his brow and skull. He has a smell she cannot identify, a deep smell, utterly unlike the human reek of the Wizard or the scalpers. The rot that softens stone.

"Not all of my kind are buried… Some, the greatest, we burn like you."

And she understands that she has been asking the wrong question-the wrong question all along. Not what, but who?

"Who?" she gasps. Suddenly his hand is all that exists. Heavy with power, gentle with love. Her eyes track its flying path to his hip, to the rune-stitched pouch…

"Taste…" he murmurs in tones of distant thunder. "Taste and see."

She can feel the weight of him, the corded strength, hanging above her, and a part of her dreams she is naked and shivering.

His finger lowers toward her, pointing to something that cannot be seen…

She leans back her head, parts her lips. She closes her eyes. She can taste her breath, moist and hot, passing from her. The finger is hard and cold. She closes the pliant lobes of her mouth about it, warming and wetting its stubborn white skin. It comes alive, pressing down the centre of her tongue, tracing the line of her gums. It tastes of strength and dead fire.

In the corner of her eye she glimpses the Captain through overlapping lattices of dead grass-a wraith watching.

Above her, Cleric's face dissolves into a porcelain blur. Relief tunnels like lightning through her, swelling the slack hollows about her heart, flushing her extremities. Thin clouds race overhead, black trimmed in starlight, swept into the shapes of wings and scythes. They lend the illusion of surface across the infinite plummet of Heaven like froth drawn along a stream.

He draws his finger back, and a reflex rises within her. She clamps her lips about his knuckle, takes the tip between her teeth, pad and nail. Her tongue soaks whatever residue remains.

He places his hand across her face, thumb against her chin, fingers along her jaw and cheek. He withdraws the penetrating finger slowly, rolling down her lower lip. The Nail of Heaven gleams along its glazed edges. He stands in a single motion, at once swift and utterly soundless. She cannot tear her eyes from him, nor can she smother the longing that wells through her-so profound the ground itself seems to move.

Her mouth tastes of ash and soot and glory…

Glory everlasting.

The old Wizard walked.

Once, while travelling between Attrempus and Aoknyssus, he saw a child of no more than ten summers fall from the willow he had climbed in the hope of stealing honey from a great hive. The child broke his neck, died in his father's arms, mouthing inaudible words. Another time, while walking the endless paddies of the Secharib, he saw a woman accused of witchcraft stoned to death. They had bound her with rose wicks so that her struggles scored her skin. Then they cast stone after laughing stone, until she was little more than a crimson worm writhing through the mud her bleeding had conjured from the dust. And once on the road between Sumna and Momemn, he camped at the ruins of Batathent, and in the cool of morning, glimpsed the shadow of Fate cast across the First Holy War.

Adversity lay in all directions, the Nilnameshi were fond of saying. A man need only walk.

"I know what it is," Mimara said from his side. The sun spiked his eyes when he turned to her. Even when he squinted and raised his hand, it framed her with fiery white, blackened her with encircling brilliance. She is a shadow. A judging shadow.

"The Qirri…" her silhouette continued. "I know what it is…"

An angel-of-the-sun delivering tidings of woe.

"What is it?" he asked. But not because he cared. He had outrun all caring.

"Ashes…" she almost whispered. "Ashes from the pyre."

Something in this stirred him, as if she had kicked a long-gutted fire and discovered coals-deep burning coals.

"Ashes? Who?"

He slowed, allowing her to outrun the sun's glare. He blinked at the immobility of her expression.

"Cu'jara Cinmoi… I think…"

A name drawn from the root of history.

There was nothing to say, so he turned to the trackless world before them. Great flocks of tern rose like steam from the far-ranging folds of dust and grasses.

The plains…

They passed like a dream.