The white-luck warrior

Summer, 20 New Imperial Year (4132 Year-of-the-Tusk), the Istyuli Plains

She made love to him, draping her famed hair, which was so blonde as to be white.

They despised each other, but their passion was oblivious and so did not suffer. Her final cries brought the servants scurrying in alarm, even as her thrashing cracked his loins asunder. Afterward they even laughed at the commotion. And as the drowsiness overcame him, he thought it was not such a bad thing for a man to sound a woman without heart or scruple, so long as she was his wife.

He did not pause to ask why she had seduced him. Perhaps there will be peace between us, he thought, slipping into sleep…

Except that he remained awake-somehow, impossibly.

Through closed eyes he watched her, Ieva, his wife of seven years, scurry naked to the cabinet across their spare room and produce a philtre, which she considered with an expression hung between terror and gloating. She turned to him, her face thin and cruel.

"How she will weep," she growled, "the filthy whore… And I will see it, and savour it, the breaking of her heart when she learns her beloved Prince has died in his wife's arms!"

He tried to call out as she leaned above him, holding the black tube with medicinal care. But he was sleeping and could not move.

"But you will not die, my heroic husband. Oh no! For I will fall upon your corpse, and I will wail-wail-wail, claiming to the Bull Heavens that you demanded to be buried rather than burned-like a Nonman!"

He tried to spit the foul liquid she poured between his teeth. He tried to reach up and out, seize her pale neck…

"Oh my husband!" she cried in a whisper. "My dear-dear husband! How could you not see the grudge I hold against thee? But you will know it, soon enough. When you are delivered, when you are beaten and broken-then you will know the compass of my spite!"

Cold trickled into the back of his throat-and burned.

And at last his slumbering form answered the alarums screeching through his soul. Drusas Achamian shot upright, gasping and sputtering… swatting at the afterimage of another man's treacherous wife.

Gone was the ancient bedroom. Gone was the drowsy light of afternoon…

But he could taste the poison all the same.

He spat across the dead grasses, sat clutching his temples, incredulous and reeling.

Nau-Cayuti. He had dreamed he was Anasurimbor Nau-Cayuti… and more.

He had dreamed not the experience, but the fact of his ancient assassination.

What was happening?

He turned to Mimara, who lay motionless beside him, beautiful despite the squalor of her skin and clothing. He recalled her fateful declaration the first and only night they had lain together.

"You have become a prophet… A prophet of the past."

Never had he seen the like, not even in the darkest of Seswatha's Dreams.

They had crossed paths worn by herds of elk, vast swathes of grassland veined by innumerable trails, diverging, crossing, forking out to the limits of their vision. As gouged as they were, the scalpers could not but whistle, their souls' eyes straining to conjure a herd whose mere passing could so mark the earth. "The ground moans at their approach," Xonghis told them that evening. Apparently he had seen the elk herds during his days as an Imperial Tracker. "Even the skinnies flee."

But this…

They had spent the morning climbing long lobes of land piled one atop the other-a range of flattened hills. They paused to recover their wind when they finally crested the summit, only to find it stolen by the vista before them.

The Wizard's first thoughts were of the Great Carathay, that the drought had transformed the Istyuli into a northern desert. But as his aging eyes sorted through the distances he realized that he was gazing across another trail, one far greater than the braided immensities left by the elk…

"The Great Ordeal," he called out to the others. Something clutched his throat, thinned his voice, a horror or wonder he could not feel.

That was when his eyes began picking out the points of black scattered all across the landscape that bowled out before them in swirls of dun and ochre. The dead.

A battleground, Achamian realized. They had happened upon a battleground, one so vast it would take more than a day to cross, even with their quickened limbs.

"A battle of some kind?" Galian called as if reading his thoughts.

"Not a pitched one," Xonghis said, his almond eyes little more than slits as he peered northward. "A running battle, I think… There're dead skinnies along the entire length of the trail."

"The true contest was to the north," Cleric said, peering.

Images from his dreams assailed the old Wizard. In the early days of the First Apocalypse, before the coming of Mog-Pharau, the ancient hosts of Kuniuri and Aorsi had left trails such as this whenever they marched through Sranc lands. "A Hording," he heard himself say. He turned to address the small crowd of curious looks. "A mobbing like no other. This is what happens when you fight your way through an endless accumulation of Sranc."

"Now we know where all the skinnies went," Pokwas said, a great hand raised to the back of his neck.

"Aye," Galian said nodding. "Why chase scraps when a feast marches across your land."

The company passed the first clutch of Sranc within a watch of its downward trek, at least a hundred of them, their skin withered to hide, their limbs jutting like sticks. Xonghis had difficulty estimating when they had been killed because of the drought. "Dried to jerky," he said, gazing across the blackened remains with a practised eye.

Soon they were in the midst of the battlefield, a thin file wandering across trammelled dust that was barely whiskered with grass-a barren as vast as the horizon. They saw vultures feuding, crows probing eye sockets, wolves and jackals loping in wary circles. They saw figures burned to charcoal, little more than stumps jutting from sand blasted to glass. They saw bodies hacked to the ground, tangled lines and arcs of them, and in his soul's eye the old Wizard saw the battle formations that had shaped them, the hard-armoured men fighting beneath banners drawn from across the Three Seas. They saw what looked like the remains of pyres, broad circles of gutted black. Mimara crouched to the dust, fetched a wire Circumfix from the sand. The old Wizard watched her tie the leather string, then loop the thing over her neck. By some perverse coincidence, the symbol fell directly across the Chorae that lay hidden against her breast.

Everywhere the old Wizard looked, he glimpsed the stain of sorceries, Gnostic rather than Anagogic. To the practised eye, the difference was plain, as if the world had been gored with razors instead of bludgeoned with hammers. Mimara once told him that Kellhus had largely honoured the ancient Mandate monopoly on the Gnosis, granting the secret knowledge only to the witches, the Swayali, as both a promise and a goad for other Schools. So wherever he glimpsed some Gnostic residue, he could not help but think of his erstwhile brothers and wonder why he no longer seemed to care.

"Skinnies!" Sarl cackled from somewhere behind him. "A mobbing like no other! Think of the bales!"

The Captain said nothing. Cleric said nothing. Both walked as if the scene about them were interchangeable with any other landscape, as if mounds of dead surrounded them no matter where they walked. But the others craned their looks this way and that, pointing to various sights of grisly interest.

"He marches against Golgotterath," Mimara murmured from the old Wizard's side. "He slaughters Sranc…"

"What do you mean?"

"Kellhus… You still think him a fraud?"

He swept his gaze across the strewn carnage.

"That's for Ishual to answer."

Ghosts moved in him, ghosts of who he had been. Once, before his exile, he would have celebrated fields such as this with hoots of exultation, tears of joy. An Aspect-Emperor marching against the Consult, bent on preventing the Second Apocalypse: the old him would have laughed in derision had anyone suggested he would live to see such a sight, laughed at the desperation of his longing.

But there was another ghost in him, a memory of who he had been mere months ago, the man who would have been aghast at the sight, not because he did not pray for Golgotterath's fall-he did with a fervour only a Mandate Schoolman could know-but because he had wagered the lives of innocents in a mad quest to prove the faith of millions wrong, and a lunatic barbarian-a Scylvendi, no less-right…

What had happened? Where had this man gone?

And if he was gone, what did that make of his quest?

He turned to scrutinize Mimara, gazed long enough to spark a curious frown.

She was right… He realized this as if for the first time.

The Qirri.

Flies had inherited the earth.

They crossed fields of detritus, threading the hillocks of dead, stepping over dried-out puddles skinned in cracked blood. Lines and blots of interlocking corpses reached out to knot the distances. Skin tight about grinning skulls. Innumerable hands with sunken palms, fingers drawn into claws. A thousand poses corresponding to a thousand deaths: thrown, struck spinning, flailing in fire. All of them lying inert and breathless in pools of inky shadow.

The reek was overpowering, a melange of rot and feces. The wind raised it, powdered them in it, yet they did not care.

The Captain called a halt. They prepared camp.

The sun scorched the western horizon. Nearby, hundreds of Sranc had been piled for some unknown reason, forming a heap that had dried into a kind of grisly deadfall. Stripped to his loincloth, Cleric climbed to the summit, his bare feet cracking ribcages like crusts of snow. The sight of him, a Nonman burnished in the bronze and copper of sunset standing upon the compressed remains of Sranc, struck the old Wizard with peculiar force. He sat gawking at Mimara's side, fumbling with things half-remembered.

Cleric stood with regal inhumanity, his skin gleaming as if greased. "This war," he began. "This war is older than your tongues and nations…"

The old Wizard found himself wondering where the gruel of rotted memory would lead the Nonman this time. Would he speak of Far Antiquity? The First Apocalypse? Or would he speak of times when the Five Tribes of Men still wandered the wastes of Eanna?

Would he reveal his true identity?

Achamian lowered his gaze, stared blinking at his hands, at his scabbed knuckles, at the grime darkening the whorls of his skin. How long had it been since he last asked this question?

When had he forgotten to wonder?

"Men bled here," Cleric said from his macabre summit. "Men leaned shouting into their shields."

How long had it been since he had last cared? Even now he could feel it welling within him, defeat and dissolution, a knee-cracking resignation. And a voice whispered within him, his voice, asking, What is there to care about?

"So frail, so mortal," the ancient Ishroi continued, "yet they cast themselves before the scythes of happenstance, yielded their souls to the perversities of Fate."

All the world seemed a burned-out pyre. All the glory gone, roaring into the hiss of failing coals. All the hope twisting into smoky oblivion.

"Dogs scavenge," the Nonman called. "Wolves chase the foaling mother, the aged, and the weak. Even the lion shies from clawed prey. Only you and I know the madness that is war. Man and Nonman. Only we pursue what lions flee."

And who was he, Drusas Achamian, to think he could grapple Fate, pin Her to the floor of his hateful aspiration?

"We die for what we know," the Nonman boomed, "and we know nothing! Generations heaped upon generations, tossing lives after self-serving guesses, murdering nations in the name of ignorance and delusion."

Seswatha? Was that who he thought he was? The incarnation of an ancient hero?

"We call our greed justice! We call our soiled hands divine! We strike in the name of avarice and vanity, and the-!"

"Enough!" the Captain shouted at the high-shining figure. Aside from Cleric, he alone stood, wind whipped and insane. "Some wars are holy," he grated in blood-raw tones. "Some wars… are holy."

The Nonman regarded him from his summit, blinked once before turning from his furious aspect. He climbed from the heaped Sranc, making a stair of heads and torsos, then leapt to the dust with leonine grace. The shadows of the dead crowded his naked legs.

"Yes," he said, drawing his shoulders back to stand tall. "Enough."

The sky darkened. The reek of dust and death tumbled through the air. The Nonman reached for the leather pouch where it lay against his bare hip.

Yes! something cried within the old Wizard, something that leaned forward with his own shoulders, flooded his mouth with his own spit. An affirming urgency.

Yes! This is all that matters. The worries will go away. They. Will. Go. Away. And if not, clarity will come-yes! Clarity. Clarity will come, the clarity needed to honestly consider these questions. Come. Come, old man! Out of the muck!

Animal spirits inhabit every soul, which is why a man could attend to one thing while remaining vigilant for another, why he could converse with his neighbour while lusting after his wife. In that moment, Cleric was all that existed. Incariol, wild and dark and, yes, even holy. The word upon which creation's own prayer seemed to turn. The Nail of Heaven gleamed across his scalp, a crown that only the Hundred could bestow. And it was as proper as it was inevitable, for he ruled the way the moon ruled the tides, the way the sun ruled the fields…

Absolute. As a father among his children.

One by one he ministered to the sitting scalpers, and Achamian watched, leaning in envy and anticipation. There is closeness in ritual. There is touch. There is an intimacy that approached coupling, an iron faith that the nearing hands would not strike or throttle. Achamian watched the near-naked form loom above Mimara beside him, watched her raise her lips in eager acquiescence. The blackened finger slipped along the chute of her tongue, pressed deep into her mouth. She went rigid, pulled her shoulders back in bliss. For the first time he noticed the bow of her belly…

Pregnant? Was she pregnant? But…

Yes! his soul's voice cried. Simplicity! You need simplicity to honestly ponder complications!

Cleric loomed over him, his shoulders brushing the violet clouds, his face blank with inhuman serenity. Achamian watched his finger, still glistening with Mimara's saliva, dip into the fox-mouth opening of his pouch. A delicious moment, magical in the way of small miracles, the little pins from which all life hangs. He watched the finger reappear, tip blackened as with soot… ashes…

Cu'jara Cinmoi.

Mimara… pregnant?

Who? Who are you?

Yes! Honesty. Simplicity! Raise your lips-yes!

The finger rose before him, its tip a tingling black. The old Wizard bent back his face, opened his mouth…

"The next time you come before me," the hated voice called out over fawning masses, "you will kneel, Drusas Achamian…"

Kellhus.

A coldness smoked through Achamian. The finger hesitated. He raised his eyes to the Nonman's black-glittering gaze.

Kellhus. The Aspect-Emperor.

"No," the old Wizard said. "No more."

She falls asleep troubled by the wordless uproar of the evening. Her own half-hearted attempt to refuse the Qirri the previous week had occasioned little more than curiosity, it seemed to her. Who knew a women's fickle ways? But when the Wizard had refused, a strange species of alarm had gripped the company. Dread prickled the silence. She could sense the scalpers watching at angles to their eyes. Wariness quickened their movements as they went about otherwise thoughtless tasks. The Captain, especially, possessed the air of waiting.

"Akka…" she whispered in the dark. "Something is wrong."

"Many things are wrong," he replied, his voice clipped, his eyes fogged with turmoil.

He was at war, she realized.

"I've been a drunkard before," he muttered-but not to her, it seemed. "I've even hung from the hooks of the poppy…" Momentary clarity sparked in his eyes. "The burden that Mandate Schoolmen bear… Many of us are compelled to seek low pleasures."

At war with the earthly residue of Cu'jara Cinmoi.

Her fear is a novelty to her, so long have her passions slipped into oblivion at the merest distraction. She struggles to keep hold of it, but she is too weary. She drifts into unsettled sleep.

She dreams of Cil-Aujas, of white throngs scratching through the black. She dreams that she runs with them, the Sranc, chasing her own waifish figure ever deeper into the earth.

A cry awakens her, grunts and earth-scuffing struggle.

She blinks, sucks waking air. The sounds are near-very near.

Dawn rims a blackened world. Two figures crouch over the Wizard… The Captain and Cleric.

What?

The Wizard kicks and pedals.

"What are you doing?" she asks with bleary curiosity. No one acknowledges her. The Wizard gags, jerks, and struggles like a landed fish.

"What are you doing!" she cries.

Heedless, she scrambles to her feet, throws herself across the Nonman's hunched back. He shrugs her away. "Hold her!" the Captain barks at shadows standing in the dark. Calloused hands clamp about her wrists: Galian, restraining her from behind. "There, pretty!" he grunts, dragging her back. He twists her arms against the small of her back, thrusts her to her knees. She hears herself howling in fury. "No! Nooooo!" All she can see of the Wizard is his legs kicking. Crude laughter slouches from the dark-Sarl. A hand closes about the back of her neck. Her face is slammed into the dust, the wiry remains of weeds. Other hands seize the waist of her breeches. She knows what comes next.

But the Captain has turned from the struggling Wizard, sees what has happened to her. He flies to his feet, savagely kicks one of her unseen assailants. Stabs another-she sees Wonard stumble kicking to the dust. The hands vanish and she finds herself on all fours.

"Touch her," Lord Kosoter grates to the unseen shadows behind her, "and your soul is forfeit!"

She glimpses Wonard convulsing, puking blood into his beard. She scrambles forward with an instinct borne of desperation. She seizes Squirrel from her meagre belongings, draws it retreating, trips over the beehive carcass of a Sranc.

Dawn is but a corona of slate and blue across the horizon. The night sky rises black and infinite, oblivion littered with countless stars. The scalpers are naught but hunched shadows, their heads and their shoulders stuck in pale starlight. They approach her, wary and weaponless.

Achamian screams.

"Nooo!" she shrieks. "Stop this! Stop!"

The Captain draws his blade. The rasp draws chills across her skin. He strides toward her as if she were nothing more than wood to kindle. Light soaks the horizon behind him, renders him black. She can see the murderous glint of his eyes beneath his hood of wild hair. They seem to glow for the black lines tattooed about them.

"What are you doing?" she cries. "What madness is this?" Her voice cuts the back of her throat, such is her terror. This is how it happens, she realizes. The brothel taught her as much, but she has forgotten in all the intervening years. Your doom always outruns you. You grow complacent, fat in the company of peace, then awaken to find all safety, all hope, overthrown.

The air is windless, chill. Lord Kosoter lunges at her. He hacks with a violence that notches her blade, wrenches her wrists. She retreats. She is quick enough, skilled enough to parry his strikes. She is trained. He sweeps and swings his broadsword, brings it clanking down. His caste-noble braid swings like sodden rope.

With a kind of wonder she realizes that he isn't trying to kill her. The future towers dark and shrieking in her soul's eye. Images of torment and violation, of brutalities only scalpers could commit.

Her cries become a wail. She throws herself at him, fighting the way her brothers have taught her, nimble and light, pitting craft against strength. He grunts in surprise, swatting at Squirrel. He relinquishes a single step, a hoary shadow thrown onto its heels.

Gold bursts across the horizon. He sidesteps, leans, angles his shadow to her side. Sunlight crashes into her squint. She blinks, hesitates. Her sword spins from fingertips she cannot feel. A fist of stone strikes her to the ground. It's happening, she thinks. After enduring so much, surviving so much, her death is happening.

"Akka…" she gasps, scrambling back. Sunlight splices her tears. Blood runs hot across her lips.

And nothing happens. No hand clamps about her throat. No knife pares away her rags.

Out of instinct she falls motionless, breathless.

The Judging Eye, which had remained sealed for so long, opens.

And she sees them standing in a ragged arc, demons on the plain. Their hides charred, the hair of their few redeeming deeds the only light threading them. And the darkest, the most fearsome by far, lies directly before her… kneeling. The Captain.

"Princess-Imperial," it croaks, glaring from eyes of fiery tar. "Save us from damnation."

"I am Anasurimbor Mimara," she cries. "Princess-Imperial, daughter of the Holy-Empress, wife-daughter of the Aspect-Emperor himself! On pain of death and damnation I command you to release the Wizard!"

They have Achamian bound and gagged, trussed like a corpse about to be raised to the pyre.

"You are apostate," the Captain says. "A runaway."

They have her sword, poor Squirrel.

"No! No! I am on a… a…"

They have her Chorae… her Tear of God.

"Foolish girl. Did you think your disappearance went unnoticed?"

They have her.

"You presume? You presume to command me?"

"You are a captive. Thank your gods you are not more."

And she recalls as much as realizes that he is completely unlike her-that in soul and sentiment he is as alien as the Nonman, if not more. There is a wholeness to him, a singularity of act, aspect, and intention. She can see it in his look, in his face: the utter absence of warring pieces.

For some reason this calms her. There is relief to be found in futility. She knew this once.

"So what? You're going to bring me back to Mother then?"

His gaze has strayed from her to the dawn. Crimson light illuminates his face, paints the wilder strands of his beard in tones of blood.

"We march to the Coffers… Same as before."

"Why? What has my father commanded?"

He draws his knife, begins shaving the calluses about his fingernails.

"Why?" she cries. "I demand you tell me why."

He looks up from his trivial labour, gazes with a flat intensity that sets her thoughts quailing. He has always frightened her, Lord Kosoter. The threat of violence has always kindled his manner. For him, atrocity was simply one more thoughtless faculty-one more base instinct. Kindness, she knows, is mist to him, something not entirely real. The honed edge is one of only two boundaries he respects.

The other is faith… Faith in her mother's husband. Even after running so far, deep into the savagery beyond the New Empire's rim, she remains caught in the Aspect-Emperor's nets. And knowing this has made the Captain even more fearsome. The thought that he is Zaudunyani …

She does not ask again.

She rifles through the Wizard's satchel, finds only five sheaves of parchment, the writing across them illegible for some river soaking-evidence of the Qirri in that, she supposes. And a small razor, scabbed with rust, which she conceals beneath her belt.

She wants to weep as they resume their course. She wants to scream, to run, to scratch out the Captain's eyes. She slouches instead, stares at her feet for as long as boredom allows. She avoids looking at the scalpers, consigns them to her periphery, where they seem apiece with the desolate plains, little more than leering shadows.

She feels naked now that she is known.

They keep the old Wizard bound and gagged at all times. When they break for meals, either Galian or Pokwas remove the gag while the Captain dandles a Chorae-whether his own or the one he stole from her, she does not know-before the old Wizard's face. Achamian avoids any glimpse of the Trinket, invariably looks down to his right instead. He says absolutely nothing, even with his gag removed, presumably because Lord Kosoter has told him that any sound, arcane or mundane, would mean his instant death. Periodically, the thick fingers holding the Chorae stray too close, and the Wizard grimaces at the salting of his skin. After several days, a patchwork of scabs and pink skin web his face above his beard.

He reminds her of an ascetic she once saw burned alive in Carythusal when she was still young enough to feel terror for others. The Shrial Priests had marched the old man through the streets, decrying his heretical claims, and bidding onlookers to come witness his fiery cleansing. Where Achamian wears rancid furs, he wore putrid rags. But otherwise, they seem so alike that her gut flutters at the recollection. Knob-knuckled hands bound before them. Gags to stop the danger of their voice. Wild hair and beard, wiry and grey. And the distant look of men condemned long before the thugs had seized them.

The old Wizard stares at her, from time to time. A strange look, ragged, at once hopeless and reassuring. They have always shared an understanding, it seems, one as deep and cold as clay in earth. They have both been broken over the knee of Fate, and as different as their lives and catastrophes have been, their hearts have sheared along similar lines.

Be calm, girl, his eyes seem to say. No matter what happens to me, survive…

Without fail, his looks make her think of the razor hidden beneath her belts.

She only hears Achamian when he's gagged. On the afternoon of the first day, he begins roaring at the Captain through the spit-soaked cloth, shrieking with such guttural fury that the man pauses in his approach. Nostrils flaring. Eyes glaring with lunatic intensity. He screams about his own retching.

The Captain remains as imperturbable as always, simply gazes and waits until the Wizard's maniacal ire subsides. Then he cups his palm and cuffs the old man to the ground.

Mimara glimpses the smiling look exchanged between Galian and Pokwas.

Each night they force Qirri upon him.

She receives her measure willingly.

Koll hunches alone in the dusty grass, watches them with dead eyes. She cannot remember when she last heard his voice. Did he even speak Sheyic?

The Stone Hags no longer seem real.

She prays that Soma still follows them-that a skin-spy might save her! — but she has no way of knowing: the Captain now forces her to practise her daily indignities in plain view.

The other scalpers-Galian and Pokwas especially-regard her with forced indifference. They gambled on their lust, thinking the Wizard her only protection. Now, their intentions revealed, they behave like pious thieves, like men wronged for wronging others. They sit and eat without speaking. Aside from the rare hooded glance in her direction, it seems they look only to their hands or the horizon. The mutinous air that had festered ever since Cil-Aujas has become gangrenous. The expedition now seems more a collection of warring tribes than men bound to a singular purpose.

She finds herself stranded with the Captain and Cleric.

The first few nights she lies awake, plotting possibilities more than actions. Her body aches with sensation: the bruising ground, the prick of grasses, the tickle of fleas climbing her scalp. She can see Squirrel jutting from the beggar's bundle that is his pack. She can sense both her Chorae and the Captain's beneath his tunic, dark little twins suckling oblivion. She guesses at his slumber, only to be disabused time and again. He invariably lies on his side, his head cradled on a raised arm. But just when she thinks he has fallen into the arms of Orosis, he raises his head and lies rigid, as if probing the surrounding black with his ears. Once she even begins crawling toward him, her thoughts a mad tumble of terror and mayhem. Grab your sword! her thoughts cry through the tumult. Grab your sword! Cut his throat! But she glimpses his hand slide to his waist as she continues her feline creep, sees his fingers settle upon the grime-blackened pommel of his broadsword.

After that she decides he never sleeps. At least not the way humans sleep.

They rarely speak to each other, Cleric and the Captain. They almost never address her. For the entirety of their journey, a part of her has wondered at their relationship. The Captain's advantage seems plain enough: a scalper's kill is a scalper's profit, and she can scarce imagine a killer more formidable than Cleric. But what could induce a Nonman, an Ishroi no less, to submit to a mortal's will-even a will so preternatural as Lord Kosoter's? She fixates on this mystery, even becomes jealous of it, thinking that at the very least this one question will be answered. But as the days pass, as she watches them from their very midst, the relationship becomes more enigmatic if anything.

A week into the Wizard's captivity she is awakened by the sound she finds inexplicable at first until, blinking, she spies Cleric sitting cross-legged on the far side of the Captain's slumbering form. He weeps. She lies motionless across the hard ground, feeling the stamp of flattened weeds through her blanket. She battles a sudden terror of breathing. Cleric sits with his arms stretched across his knees, his head hanging so low that she can see the sinews roping the back of his neck, the humps of his spine. His breath is dog rapid, horse deep. He moans-a sound as bottomless as Cil-Aujas. He mumbles or murmurs-words she cannot decipher. Random tremors seem to fly through him, afflicting first this hand, then that shoulder, as if the ghost of some bird battles to escape him. A sense of heroic melancholy seems to emanate from him, as onerous and grand as the ages that have birthed it…

A sorrow that would crack a human soul.

"Kosoter…" he rasps.

This is the first time she has heard Cleric refer to the Captain by name. It prickles her skin for some reason. The Captain draws himself to a seated position opposite the Nonman. She can only see the man's back, the play of starlight across the battered lines of his splint hauberk. Funnelled down the centre of his back, his hair hangs in a tangle about the rope of his caste-noble braid.

She already knows that Cleric's sanity is not a constant thing, that it ebbs and flows according to its own disordered rhythm. But she has only guessed at the role played by the Captain.

A shudder passes through the Nonman's frame. "I… I struggle."

"Good." There is an uncharacteristic softness to the Captain's voice, one borne more out of a greed for secrecy than any tenderness.

"Who… Who are these people?"

"Your children."

"What? What is this?"

"You are preparing."

The Nonman lowers his bald head back into shadow.

"Preparing? What is this tongue I speak? Where did I learn this tongue?"

"You are preparing."

"Preparing?"

"Yes. To remember."

Cleric raises his face to the grim figure sitting before him. Then without warning, his black gaze clicks over the Captain's shoulder, finds Mimara where she pretends to sleep.

"Yes…" the white lips say, full in the play of blackness and starlight. "They remind me…"

The Captain turns to follow his gaze, reveals his savage profile for no more than an instant before turning away. "Yes… They remind you of someone you once loved."

Lord Kosoter stands, shouldering the light of the stars, then draws Cleric into the windy dark.

This exchange alarms her, but more like news of growing famine overseas than any immediate threat. She recalls Achamian's description of Nonmen Erratics, how their memories of mundane life fade first, leaving only archipelagos of spectacle and intensity, the confusion of a soul hanging without foundation. And how their redemptive memories gradually follow, stranding them more and more with disconnected episodes of torment and pain, until their life becomes a nightmare lived through mist, until all love and joy sink into oblivion, become things guessed at through the shadows cast by their destruction.

This, she realizes. This is the prize the Captain has cast upon the balance of their transaction. Cleric yields up his power, and Lord Kosoter offers him memory. Men to love. Men to destroy…

Men to remember.

And yet Lord Kosoter is Zaudunyani — one of her stepfather's fanatics. Why else would he protect her from the bent lusts of the others? And if he is Zaudunyani, then he would never deliver his expedition into destruction unless… Unless his Aspect-Emperor has commanded it.

The deal he has struck with Incariol, she realizes, could be a false one. If so, the Captain plays a most deadly game.

Like all of the Few, she is accustomed to ignoring her arcane sight. But Cleric bears his mark so deeply, the residue of ages of sorcerous practice. Occult ugliness blasts him, the scars of his innumerable crimes against creation. Add to this the sheer beauty of his mundane form-the contradiction-and it sometimes seems as if the merest glance will pry her eyes from their sockets. Even if she had not seen him warring through the sewered depths of Cil-Aujas or beneath the clawed bowers of the Meorn Wilderness, she would have known he was a power-a great power.

If he were to choose to annihilate the Skin Eaters…

Only Achamian could possibly hope to stand against him-were he free to speak.

The company continues its lonely walk, dwarfed by the confluence of never-ending land and sky. What features the landscape possesses are slavish and melancholy, as if they were mountains beaten into ruddy heaps and long-wandering flanges. Wild clouds feather the sky, slow-sailing immensities that promise rain that is never delivered. She often gazes into them while she walks, probing the precipices and the plummets, wondering at the way they form floating plates that seem to wheel in competing directions, pinching deep glimpses of blue into white oblivion.

The Wizard stumbles along, bound and gagged, glaring hate at everyone save her.

Survive, Mimara! Forget me!

More days pass before she is able to piece things together. Sarl, especially, provides her with pivotal insights. He tells her how Lord Kosoter, famed for his cruelty and marshal zeal, had come to the Aspect-Emperor's attention during the Unification Wars. How he had been promised a special Shrial Remission by none other than her uncle, Maithanet, for founding a scalper company and remaining in the vicinity of Hunoreal-where he could regularly check on the Wizard.

"He is born of Hell," the madmen tells her, his face squished into I-knew-all-along glee. "He is born of Hell, the Captain. And he knows it-oh ho! He knows it. He thinks your gurwikka, there, will pay his toll…" His squint pops open in mock alarm. "Deliver him to paradise!"

"But how?" she protests.

"Because of him!" the madman cackles. " Him! The Aspect-Emperor knows all…"

She herself had seen the yield of the Wizard's twenty years alone in the wilderness. After Achamian absconded for Marrow, she fought her way past his slaves and broke into his tower room. Part of her had expected to be blasted, to die screaming in sorcerous fire. She could sense the residue of something arcane. But there had been no incipient Wards protecting the room, nothing… Because of his slaves' children, she knew.

At first she could see little save the sunlight outlining the shuttered window where she had first seen him. The smell was rancid but curiously dry and inviting. Finally she saw the wolf-pelts warming the walls and ceiling. The crude-hewn bed. And then the issue of his decades-long labour.

Pages. Scattered. Stacked into teetering piles. Scrolls piled like bones, tumbling into shadow. Dream after dream, scratched in ink and numbered-everything numbered. Pattern after pattern. Theory after theory. Seswatha this. Seswatha that. A horde of details she could never hope to decode, let alone remember.

Out of all the scribbles she peered at, only one would live on in her memory, what seemed the old Wizard's final entry, the one that would spur her to pursue him. She has returned. Of all people!

I am awake at last.

She, he had written. She… Esmenet.

Mother.

If she could simply walk into the old Wizard's room, Mimara reasons, then so too could her stepfather. She can even see him in her soul's eye, the Aspect-Emperor stepping from a point of blue-white light. She can see his face, always so remote, always so terrifying, slowly scan the slovenly gloom. What would a god think, she wonders, looking upon the low belongings of his old teacher, the obsessive issue of his wife's first abiding love?

Nothing human, she is certain.

She laughs in the course of these ruminations, loud and hard enough to draw more than one questioning look from the others. Part of her blames the Qirri, which she adores even as she hates. It continues to leach her soul, to draw water from her previous concerns. Now and again she even catches herself thinking her captivity an honest and advantageous trade… so long as Cleric continues to plumb her mouth with his cool and bitter finger.

But the humour is real. From the very beginning she had dismissed the old Wizard's fears regarding her stepfather. "This is the way he sends you," Achamian said. "This is the way he rules-from the darkness in our own souls! If you were to feel it, know it, that would simply mean there was some deeper deception…"

She had discounted him with a smirk, with the grimace she reserved for fools. She, an Anasurimbor by marriage, who had lived in his divine presence, who had sat riven, skinned in goose-pimples, as her stepfather merely crossed the room. Like so many she confused absence with impotence. The Andiamine Heights seemed so distant. Now she knows: the Aspect-Emperor transcends distance. Anasurimbor Kellhus is everywhere.

Exactly as the old Wizard feared.

With this realization comes a new understanding of her power. She finds herself scrutinizing the Captain, guessing at the warring scales within him, the precarious balance of piety and bloodlust. She represents an infuriating complication, Mimara decides, the wrinkle marring the long silk of his ambition. He feels no worldly terror, she decides, because his fear of damnation eclipses all. Too warlike to find redemption in the Gods of Compassion. Too miserly and too cruel to secure the favour of War or the Hunter…

Only the Aspect-Emperor. Only he can make a virtue out of his bloodlust. Only he can deliver him to Paradise.

She is the variable, she thinks, remembering the algebra she learned at the knee of Yerajaman, her Nilnameshi tutor. She is the value he cannot calculate.

What Lord Kosoter does, she finally decides, depends on what he thinks his lord and master, his god, desires.

"I am with child," she tells him.

A flinch passes across the implacable face.

"Are you not curious?" she asks.

His glare does not waver. Never has a man so terrified her.

"You know…" she presses. "Don't you?"

She has spent her life, it seems, staring into the faces of bearded men, guessing at the line of their jaw, feeling their hair chafe the bare skin of her neck. She has childhood memories of bare-faced priests and caste-nobles in Sumna. Some of the older Nansur who populated the Imperial Court still clung to their womanish cheeks. But it seems that for as long as she can remember, men meant beards. And the more they adorned them, the higher their station.

Lord Kosoter looks like little more than a cutthroat to her-a beggar, even. Think of him as that! she cries wordlessly. He is less than you! Less!

"Know what?" he grates.

"Who the father is…"

He says nothing.

"Tell me, Captain," she says, her voice pinched shrill. "Why do you think I fled the Andiamine Heights?"

Even his blink seems a thing graven, as if mere flesh were too soft to contain such a gaze.

"Why does any girl flee her stepfather's home?" she asks.

The lie is a foolish one: he need only guess at the length of her term to realize there is no way she could have been impregnated in Momemn. But then, what would a man such as him know of pregnancy, let alone one borne of a divine violation? Her mother had carried all her brothers and sisters far beyond the usual term.

"You understand, don't you? You realize what I bear…"

A god… I carry a god in my belly. It seems she need only tell herself this for it to be true…

Another gift of the Qirri.

And she sees it sparking in his eyes. Wonder and horror both. She almost cries out in jubilation. She has cracked his face. At last she has cracked his face!

His lunge is so sudden, so swift, she scarcely knows what has happened until she slams across the turf. He pins her. His right hand clamps her mouth, so large it all but engulfs the lower half of her face. A kind of wild monkey rage shines from his glare. He leans close enough for her to smell rotting teeth.

"Never!" he says in a roaring whisper. "Never speak of this again!"

Then she is free, her head spinning, her lips and cheeks numb.

He turns away from her, back toward the watching Nonman. There is nothing to do, it seems, but to sit and weep.

Despair fills her after this last foolish gambit. These were scalpers. Implacable. These were the kind of men who never paused to reflect, who asked questions of women only so they might show them the proper answer. Even without the Qirri, they were forever trapped at the rushing edge of passion and thought, believing utterly what they needed to see their hungers appeased. Where some were set aflutter by the mere suspicion of slight, nothing but outright calamity could throw these men back into themselves. Only blood- their blood-could incite them to question.

What was, for these men, was. Lord Kosoter was a fanatical agent of the Aspect-Emperor. Drusas Achamian was his prisoner. They marched to plunder the Coffers.

If they were caught in the wheels of some greater machination, then so be it.

It is night and the scalpers argue. The voices of the others climb about the Captain's rare growl. They sit in a clutch several paces away, ragged shadows chalked in starlight. Sarl's laughter scratches the night. For some reason the substance of their feud does not concern her, even though she periodically hears the word peach carried on the wind. She has her razor to consider.

Achamian lies trussed beside her, his face pressed into the turf. He either sleeps or listens.

Cleric sits cross-legged nearby, his knees obscured by weedy shags. He stares at her without embarrassment. She can still feel the chill of his finger across her tongue.

She raises her waterskin high, slowly pours it over her head. She can feel the water warm as it snakes along her scalp. Her hair wet, her gaze fixed on the watching Nonman, she lifts the razor to her scalp.

She works quickly, even thoughtlessly. She has done this innumerable times: the custom of whores in Carythusal was to wear wigs. She had owned eleven by the time her mother's men had come with their swords and torches.

Galian's voice rises in disbelief. "Slog?" he cries. "This is mor-"

Her hair drops in a tangle of ribbons across her lap. Rare dry strands ride the wind, float out behind her, where they snag grasses, hang quivering.

Cleric watches, twin points of white wetting his black gaze.

She pours more water across her shorn head, works her scalp until the filth becomes a kind of lather. Raising the razor once again, she takes the remaining hair down to nothing. Then she scrapes away her eyebrows.

When she finishes, she sits blinking at the imperturbable Nonman, savours the tingle of air over unearthed skin. Several heartbeats pass-more. His mere presence seems to crackle, he remains so motionless.

She crawls into the pool of his immediate gaze. Her skin pimples, as if she has been stripped of her clothing as well.

"Do you remember me?" she finally whispers.

"Yes."

She raises her hand to his face, draws the pad of her finger across the soft length of his lips. She presses between, touches hot spit. She gently thrusts her finger between his fused teeth, wonders at the dullness of the opposing edges. She probes deep, forces a channel down the centre of his tongue.

How many thousands of years? she wonders. How many sermons across the ages?

She withdraws her finger, wonders at the gleam of inhuman saliva.

"Do you remember your wife?"

"I remember all that I have lost."

She is beautiful. She knows she is beautiful because she so resembles her mother, Esmenet, who was the most celebrated beauty in the Three Seas. And mortal beauty, she knows, finds its measure in the immortal…

"How did she die?"

A single tear falls from his right eye, hangs like a bead of glass from his jaw. "With the others… Cir'kumir teles pim'larata… "

"Do I resemble her?"

"Perhaps…" he says, lowering his gaze. "If you wept or screamed… If there was blood."

She moves closer, into the smell of him, sits so that her knees brush his shins. His pouch hangs from his waist, partially hooked in a miniature thicket of stems. Vertigo billows through her, a sudden horror of tipping, as if the pouch were a babe set too close to a table's edge. She clutches his forearms.

"You tremble," she whispers, resisting the urge to glance at the pouch. "Do you want me? Do you want to…" She swallows. "To take me?"

He draws away his arms, stares down into his palms. Beyond him, clouds pile like inky flotsam beneath the stars. Dry lightning scorches the plains a barren white. She glimpses land piling atop land, scabbed edges, woollen reaches.

"I want to…" he says.

"Yes?"

He lifts his eyes as if drawing them against weighted threads. "I… I want to… to strangle you… to split you with my-"

His breath catches. Murder floats in the sorrow of his gaze. He speaks like someone marooned in a stranger's soul. "I want to hear you shriek."

And she can feel the musky strength of him, the impotence of her flailing arms, clawing fingers, should he simply choose…

What? a stranded fragment of her asks. What are you doing? She's not quite certain what she intends to do, let alone what she hopes to accomplish. Is she seducing him? For Achamian? For the Qirri?

Or has she finally broken under the weight of her suffering? Is that what it is? After all this time, is she still the child traded between sailors, weeping to the moan of timbers and men?

She glimpses herself climbing into the circuit of Cleric's arms, taking his waist into the circuit of her legs. Her breath catches at the thought of his antique virility, the union of her flower and his stone. Her stomach quails at the thought of his arcane disfigurement, the ugliness heaving against her, into her.

"Because you love me?"

"I…"

He grimaces, and she glimpses Sranc howling by the light of sorcerous fire. He raises his face to the vault of the night, and she sees a world before human nations, a nocturnal age, when Nonmen marched in hosts from their great underworld mansions, driving the Sons of Men before them.

"No!" Cleric cries. "No! Because I… I need to remember! I must remember!"

And miraculously, she sees it. Her purpose and her intent.

"And so you must betray…"

His passion blows from him, and he falls still-very still. Clarity peers out from his eyes, a millennial assurance. Gone is the bewildered stoop, the listless air of indecision. He pulls his shoulders and arms into an antique pose of nobility. He draws his hands behind him, seems to clasp them in the small of his back. It is a posture she recognizes from Cil-Aujas and its innumerable engravings.

The voices of the scalpers continue to feud and bicker. The clouds continue to climb, a shroud drawing across the gaping bowl of Heaven. The Captain is speaking, but low rolling thunder obscures his voice.

The first darts of rain tap across the dust and grasses.

"Who?" Mimara presses. "Who are you, truly?"

The immortal Ishroi watches her, his smile wry, his eyes luminous with something too profound to be mere regret.

"Nil'giccas…" he murmurs. "I am Nil'giccas. The Last Nonman King."

To be silent, the old Wizard discovered, is to watch.

You see more when you speak less. First your eyes turn outward, the thoughtless way they always turn outward when you have spoken your say: to await a response, to gauge the effectiveness of your lies. But when your voice is bricked over, when you are robbed of the very possibility of speaking, your eyes are left hanging. And like bored children they begin inventing things to do.

Like observing things otherwise unseen.

He noticed the way Galian would sleep apart from the others, and how he would make inexplicable little cuts on his arms when he thought no one could see him. He noticed how Pokwas would glance at the small wounds when Galian seemed distracted. He noticed how Xonghis whispered what were either prayers or folk-charms over his arrows. He noticed Koll convulsing when no one else seemed to notice him at all.

He noticed how barren life became when camp after camp was struck without making a fire. When Men sat in darkness.

To see what was unseen was to understand that blindness was always a matter of degree. To say that all men were blind in some respect-to the machinations of others, to themselves-was a truism scarcely worth noting. What was astounding was the way this truism perpetually escaped Men, the way they confused seeing mere slivers with seeing everything they needed to see.

He pondered this for days: the invisibility of the unknown.

The hook from which all deception hung.

He struggled to remember the posture of his soul before Cleric and the Captain had fallen upon him. He had been so preoccupied with his inner demons, he had utterly forgotten the outer. It had never occurred to him that Lord Kosoter, whose cruelty had become such an unwelcome ally, could be an agent of the Aspect-Emperor. He had been too confused to fear for himself when they fell upon him, but his horror for Mimara, for what might happen to her absent his power, had been immediate. Time and again he had cried out, against the gag choking him, against the leather straps binding him, but against the colossal perversity of Fate most of all. He could scarce see her in the subsequent scuffle of shadows, but he saw enough to know the others had seized her, that their intent was both violent and carnal. He was not heartened in the least when Lord Kosoter intervened. He remembered the early days of the expedition, how the Captain had executed Moraubon for attempting to rape Mimara. The Captain, as Sarl had said, always gets the first bite. So Achamian assumed that he simply saved her for himself. He wasn't at all surprised when the Captain fought to disarm rather than to kill her. What had stunned him, seized him with both horror and relief, was watching the Captain kneel before her.

He had been deceived. He had never trusted these men, these scalpers, but he had trusted their nature-or what he had assumed to be their nature. So long as they thought they marched for riches, for the Coffers, so long as they thought he was their key, he believed he could… manage them. Knowing. This was the great irony. Knowing was the foundation of ignorance. To think that one knew was to become utterly blind to the unknown.

He had been a fool. What scalper company would assent to an expedition such as this? Who would be so desperate as to wager their lives in pursuit of ancient rumour? Only fanatics and madmen would undertake such a quest. Only men like the Captain…

Or himself.

Thinking he knew, Achamian had blinded himself to the unknown. He had ceased asking questions. He had plucked his own eyes, and unless he could find some way to overcome this reversal, the daughter of the only woman he had ever loved was almost certainly doomed.

Ignorance was trust. Knowing was deception. Questions! Questions were the only truth.

This was the resolution that arose out of his first days of captivity. To notice everything. To question everything. To take no knowledge for granted.

This was why his aggression wilted so quickly, why a kind of fatalistic calm claimed his soul.

Why he began waiting.

I live because Kosoter needs me, he would remind himself. I live because of things I cannot see…

Of course the absurdity of all this pondering was not lost on him. A captive of men without scruple or pity, scalpers. A captive of his foe of foes, Kellhus… Far more than his life, he knew, would be decided by this forced march across the dregs of the Istyuli. And yet here he was, whiling away the watches pondering philosophical inanities.

His lips cracked to bleeding. His throat and palette scored with ulcers. His fingers numbed to paralysis, his wrists festering. And yet here he was, smiling at the play of insight, at the assemblage of categorical obscurities in his prying soul.

Only a drug could so overturn the heart's natural order. Only the ashes of a legendary king.

Qirri. The poison that made strong.

They need only bend back their faces to drink.

The rain drums down across their heads, rolls across the distances in misty sweeps. The puddled earth sizzles, sucks at the rotting seams of their boots. Clothing sags and pinches, rubbing skin raw. Straps long rotted by sweat give way altogether. Pokwas is forced to bind his shoulder harness about his waist, so that the scythed tip of his tulwar sketches an arthritic line through the muck. Sarl even tosses away his hauberk in a bizarre tirade where he alternately argues, rages, and laughs. "On the ready!" he cries time and again. "This is skinny country, boys!"

On and on it falls. In the evenings they cluster together for their meagre repast, glaring into nowhere with a kind of beaten-down fury.

Only the Wizard, looking strangely young with his hair and beard flattened into sheets, seems unaffected. He watches with a canniness that Mimara finds both encouraging and alarming. It would be better, she thinks, if he were to look more defeated… Less dangerous.

Only Koll shivers.

On the third night, Cleric strips naked and climbs a clutch of thumb-shaped boulders. He is little more than a grey shadow in the near distance, yet all of them with the exception of Koll gaze in wonder. He does this sometimes, Mimara has learned, shouts his crazed sermons to the greater world.

They listen to him rant about curses, about ages of loss and futility, about the degradation of life's end. "I have judged nations!" he bellows into the curtained gloom. "Who are you to condemn me? Who are you to deliver?"

They watch him trade lightning with the clouds. Even sodden, the earth shivers with competing thunders.

When Mimara looks away, she finds the old Wizard staring at her.

The ground is more broken, the undergrowth more toilsome: grasses like flayed hide, shrubs still sharp from the drought. Even still, the forests seem to arrive without warning. The land pitches upward, and kinked hill country climbs out of the grey haze, guttered with gorges booming with brown waters, sloped with stands of slender poplar and crooked fir.

Kuniuri, she realizes. At long last they have arrived.

It is the weariness of this realization, if anything, that astonishes her. Were she the same woman who had fled the Andiamine Heights, this moment would be profound with disbelief. Kuniuri, the ancient homeland of the High Norsirai ere their destruction, the place so deeply revered by the nameless authors of The Sagas. How many expositions had she read, descriptions of its works, chronicles of its kings? How many scrolls authored by its enlightened sons? How many psalms to its lost glory?

It all seems little more than dross in the face of her trudging misery. The world seems too grey, too cold and sodden for glory.

But the rain stops not long after, and the uniform grey resolves into clouds balled into fists of darkness. Soon the sun presses through, and the clouds are drawn into pageants of purple and gold. The land is revealed, and she gawks across previously unseen miles, rugged hills marching to the horizon, stumps of limestone rising from gowns of gravel and earth. For the first time in days her face is warmed for looking.

And again she thinks, Kuniuri.

During her years as a brothel-slave the name meant little to her. It seemed simply another dead thing known by everyone older and wiser, like a grandfather who had died before she was born. That had changed when her Empress mother had burned Carythusal. For all the symbolic tempest of her revolt, she fell upon the gifts her mother lavished upon her, the clothes, the cosmetics, and the tutors — the tutors most of all. Who she had been, the brothel-slave, dwindled to an ignorant kernel, albeit one that refused to relinquish the heights of her soul. The world became a kind of drug. And Kuniuri became an emblem of sorts, as much a marker of her ingrown emancipation as the dead and sacred land of The Sagas.

And now she is here, on the frontier of her own becoming.

That night they camp in the ruins of an ancient fort: battered foundations glimpsed between trees, the remains of a single bastion, massive blocks arrested in their downward tumble. After their passage across the Istyuli and the endless miles of human absence, the ruins almost seemed a landmark promising home.

Game is plentiful, and thanks to Xonghis and his unerring aim they feast on a thrush and a doe. The Imperial Tracker skins and butchers the doe, which Cleric then cooks using a small and incomprehensible Cant. As his eyes dim to a dark glitter, the tip of his finger shines as bright as a candle flame, and Mimara cannot but think of the glorious soot, the Qirri, that will blacken it later in the evening. Cleric slowly draws the pad of his finger along the haunches, then the ribs, transforming crimson lobes into sizzling, smoking meat.

The thrush they boil.

Afterward, Mimara saunters along the edges of the Captain's distraction, then creeps back in a broad circle, ducking behind palms of leaning stone, slipping between throngs of undergrowth. A wall of sorts borders the inner courtyard where they have gathered, an arc of unmortared stone broken into toothlike sections. The Captain has deposited the Wizard at the far end, careful as always to keep him segregated from the others. She hurries even though she knows she risks Cleric's preternatural hearing. For a man who betrays almost no anxiety, Lord Kosoter is nothing if not a fastidious shepherd, always counting and remorselessly quick to catch strays with his crook.

She slows as she nears the wall behind the old Wizard, following the tingle of his Mark more than any visual cue. She slinks between sumac, presses against the cold stone. She stretches out onto her belly, creeps with serpent patience until she can see the Wizard's maul of hair rising before her.

"Akka…" she whispers.

A warmth climbs through her as she speaks, an unaccountable assurance, as if out of all her crazed burdens, confession is the only real encumbrance. Secrecy mars the nature of every former slave, and she is no different. They hoard knowledge, not for the actual power it affords, but for the taste of that power. All this time, even before Achamian's captivity, she has been accumulating facts and suspicions. All this time she has fooled herself the way all men fool themselves, thinking that she alone possessed the highest vantage and that she alone commanded the field.

All this time she has been a fool.

She tells him what she has learned about the Captain and his mission. "He knows he's damned. We are his only hope of salvation-or so he believes. Kellhus has promised him paradise. So long as he needs us, we're secure… As soon as I discover just why he needs us, I promise I'll find some way to tell you!"

She tells him how Cleric is more than Ishroi-so much more. "Nil'giccas!" she cries under her breath. "The last Nonman King! What could that mean?"

She speaks of the terror she did not know she had. And there is something in her murmur, a despair perhaps, that bumps her from the ruts, carries her away from the tracks the previous weeks and months have worn into her thoughts. She recalls who she was.

She tells him of the incense mornings on the Andiamine Heights, when she would laze in bed watching the sheers across her balcony rise and fall with twining grace, her breath deep and even, her eyes fluttering to protest the sun.

"I dreamed of you… you, Akka."

Because he wasn't real. Because a fictitious love was the only love she could bear.

She always knew he would rebuff her, that he would deny his paternity, deny her the knowledge she so desperately sought. She always knew, in the queer way of damaged souls, that she loved him because he knew nothing about her, and so had no grounds for casual judgment-or even worse, the watchful pity she so despised in her mother's eyes.

And it seems, somehow, impossibly, that she knew it would come to this, rooting across sodden earth, cringing against crumbling stone, whispering desperations…

Clutching her belly and declaring love.

Grace is more than immortal. The more the world besieges it, the greater its significance burns. And she can feel it, this very instant, a spark shining in the God's infinite palm.

"The child is yours," she whispers sobbing. "Can't you see?

"I bear my mother's child…"

She reaches out with fingers that are steady even as shudders wrack her. She presses them through the matted nest of his hair, sobs aloud when she touches the hot skin of his scalp. For the first time she feels movement in her womb-an infant heel…

"We're here, Akka… Kuniuri. At last we're here!"

The Captain's voice, when it comes, seems to crack all hope asunder.

"Lot of bones in this ground," he says from the far side of the stone. "I can feel it."

Lord Kosoter stands from an unseen crouch, looms over her and the Wizard, testing his aging knees. Her intake of breath is so sharp it sounds like an inverted shriek. An unkind coincidence of angles places the Nail of Heaven just beyond his brow, illumines the rim of his hair, so that he seems more an unholy wraith than a man, a dark god come to punish for mere perversity's sake. He holds a rib in his hands, strips the last remaining rind with his teeth. Grease slicks his beard below his mouth.

"Keep throwing the sticks like this, girl, and you will join them."

He bends toward her with the leisurely cruelty of a butcher picking his slaughter. He grips the back of her neck, hauls her kicking to her feet. He throws her to the ground in the direction of the others. As she scrambles to find her footing, he kicks her to the ground once again. Weeds claw her cheeks.

"This is my slog!" the Captain growls, unfastening one of his belts.

Suddenly she is a little girl, one sold to foreign slavers by a starving mother. Suddenly she is flinching beneath violent shadows, cringing and cringing until she is scarce a human child at all, but a thing small, blind, and mewling, a thing to be cracked in mercantile jaws, a thing to be tasted…

"Sarl!" the merciless voice bellows. "What's the Rule?"

"Pleaaase!" she weeps, scuffing backward. "I'm-I'm sor-!"

"No conniving!" the madman chortles. "No whispering on the slog!"

She raises a frantic palm in warding. The belt makes small cooing sounds as it whips through the air. It reminds her of the lariats that musicians use performing in the alleyways of Carythusal's slums. And the breathless songs they composed, haunting, as if their instruments were children crying out from sleep.

She looks past the shadows of those who laugh and catcall. She looks to him, the Nonman King. She calls out to the horror she sees in his great eyes. She spits blood and sobs his name, his real name.

But he merely watches…

She knows he will remember.

That night he comes to the little girl. He kneels beside her, offers his blackened fingertip.

"Take him," he says. "Cherish him. He will make you strong."

The little girl clutches his hand, halts its descent. She clasps his finger, then presses the stained tip across his own lips. She rises into his embrace, sucks the magic from his mouth. The strength of it races across her skin, then soaks through her, rinsing away a constellation of pains.

"You could have stopped him…" the little girl wheezes between her sobs.

"I could have stopped him," he says, dropping his solemn gaze.

He withdraws into the dark.

– | The following morning it is her Judging Eye that opens.

Lashed and bone-sore, she breakfasts with charcoal-scabbed demons. Even the old Wizard sits with his skin blistered, his edges haunted by the shadow of his soul's future thrashing. Galian glances at her and mutters to the others, and laughter jumps through them in small, peevish squalls. And it seems she can see it, the piling on of sin-wickedness in all its bestial diversity. Thievery and betrayal, deceit and gluttony, vanity and cruelty, and murder — murder most of all.

"About your screams…" Galian says to her, his face grave with mockery. "You really should cross the Captain more often. The boys and I were quite taken."

Pokwas laughs outright. Xonghis grins while working his bow.

She has wondered at Galian's transformation. He seemed a friend in the beginning, someone who could be trusted, if only because he was wry and sane. But as his beard grew and his clothing and accoutrements rotted, he became ever more remote, ever more difficult to trust. The burdens of the trail, she thought, recalling the way the brothel had embittered so many sweet souls.

But now, seeing him revealed in the light of God, she realizes the months of hardship-or even the Qirri-have changed him very little. He is one of those men who is lovable or despicable depending on the peevish lines of camaraderie. Gracious and generous with those he deems his friends and caring not at all about others.

"A crimson butterfly…" she murmurs, blinking at memories not her own.

The man's grin falters. "A what?"

"You raped a child," she tells the former Columnary. "You killed her trying to stifle her screams… You still dream of the crimson butterfly your bloody palm left on her face…"

All three men go rigid. Pokwas looks to Galian for a laughing dismissal that does not come. A kind of pity wells through her, watching horror and arrogance dual in Galian's eyes.

Henceforth, she knows, his jokes will be furtive and hidden. Fearful.

Of all the Skin Eaters, none are more blasted than Cleric, whose sins run so deep she can scarce glance at him without her eyes rebelling. He is an impossible figure, a heaving motley of monstrosities, angelic beauty marred by sorcerous ugliness, blotted by ages of moral obscenity.

But the Captain is perhaps the most horrifying. She can see the hallow brilliance of the two Chorae burning white through his rag tunic and between the splints of his hauberk-a contradiction that intensifies the hoary imprint of his transgressions. Murder barks his skin, victim chapped across victim. Cruelty smokes from his eyes.

He gives the call to march, and then, inexplicably, the Eye closes. The sins vanish in a kind of inward folding, like wood unburning. The right and wrong of the world is hidden once again.

She has been beaten many times. Beatings were simply the penultimate rite in the flurry of mean and petty ceremonies that composed life in the brothel. As a child she learned that some men could find bliss only in fury, climax in degradation. And as a child she learned to flee her body, to take refuge behind wide-open eyes. A final sip. Her body would weep, moan, even shriek, and yet she would always be there, hidden in plain sight, calmly waiting for the tempest to pass. One sip remaining.

The outrage would come afterward, when she returned to find her body curled and sobbing.

"You are a cunning little slit," Abbarsallas, her first owner, once told her. "The others fear the likes of you. They fear you because you are so difficult to see… Your kind lurks and lurks, waiting for opportunities… opportunities you do not even know! A knife forgotten. A shard of glass. A throat bared in a thoughtless moment. I've seen it with my own eyes-oh yes! You don't even know it's happening. You just strike, spit all your poison, and a freeman dies." He laughed as if at the particulars of some crazed memory. "That's why the others would keep you shackled, or drown you in the courtyard as a moral for the others. Spare themselves the worry. But me, oh, I see gold in you, my little darling. Hard men take no pleasure in breaking what is already broken. And your kind can be broken a thousand times-a thousand more!"

Five years later they would find him dead, his body jammed into the sewer chute behind the scullery. Apparently Abbarsallas could only be broken once.

Anasurimbor Mimara has been beaten many times, so the coldness she feels as she walks, the numbness of a soul flinching from its own sharp edges, is a familiar one. As is the impulse that draws her to the fore of the slack-eyed company, into the glowering presence of the Captain.

"I will tell him. He will damn you."

A part of her even laughs, saying such to someone already damned-irrevocably.

She has wondered what he was like in his youth. It seems absurd that he once reclined at heteshiras, the night-long bacchanals of eating and vomiting so popular among the Ainoni nobility, that he plotted with men too fat to walk, that he concealed his expressions with porcelain masks during negotiations, or painted his face white before riding out to war. High Ainon was a land of ringlets and perfume, where men ranked one another according to eloquence and jnanic wit. Where disputes over buttons could provoke duals to the death.

And here stands Lord Kosoter, as savage as any Kutnarmi tribesman, as hard-bitten as mountain flint. More so than any of the other Skin Eaters, he seems bred to the cycle of deprivation and tribulation that rules a scalper's life. She can scarce imagine a man more at odds with the consumptive pantomime that was Carythusal. Silk, it seems, would tear for simply touching his skin.

"You argue your own doom," he says without so much as glancing at her.

"How is that?"

He turns, seizes her with his gaze. "Killing you would be my only recourse, if what you say is true."

Perhaps she is too exhausted to be frightened-or too disgusted. If her smile surprises him, he shows no sign of it. "You think he would not see such treachery within you?" she asks, using the tone her mother and the Wizard know so well. "You think he will not see these very words when you kneel before him?"

"He'll see it. But you don't know him as I know him."

"You know him better?"

"There is a chasm, girl, an abyss between the hearth and the battlefield. Your stepfather and my prophet are two very different men, I assure you."

"You sound certain of yourself, my Lord."

There is a flatness to him, an aura of immovability. When she speaks to him like this, in low tones, walking side by side, she has this nagging sense of amputation, of a soul that either has legs for hatred and fury or has no legs at all.

"We were seven days out from Attrempus," he says, sparing her his scrutiny, "marching on the Numaineiri Orthodox. We were naught but the jugglers-the greater parade lay with my kinsmen to the south. But still, he found time to inspect our bloody handiwork. The long-bearded fools only thought they believed. We showed them convictionZaudunyani conviction. But your stepfather, he decided we needed to show more, something all the blondies in Ce Tydonn could mull in their racks. So we herd up the converts, all those who had found salvation in the execution line, and we put out their eyes. Gropers, we called them-what they call them still."

He does not turn to look at her, as she would expect from anyone who cared whether his words had effect. So much of what makes him unsettling, she realizes, are these violations of the innumerable small ways people anticipate one another. He is the most ruthlessly direct man she has ever known, and still he continually surprises her.

"So you think my stepfather's cruelty is something that I should fear?"

She even manages to laugh.

He sweeps his gaze about and down, swallows her with a kind of compressed regard-a look that seems to throw her whole existence on the balance, as if weighing her life against half-hearted promises.

"Besides," she says, pressing the remnants of her anger into her glare. "It's my mother you really need to consider." She looks away in feigned disinterest.

"If she would burn down half a city to avenge me, what do you think she will do to you?"

Day after day, they walk through a dead land, a land where sons were slaughtered before they could father, where daughters were exterminated before their wombs could quicken. A land where birth itself had been murdered. And she mourns.

She mourns her lost naivete, the girl who would be a witch, not for knowledge's sake, but to better batter an offending world. To better injure a mother she cannot forgive.

She mourns all those they have lost. Skin Eaters. Stone Hags. She whispers prayers to Yatwer, though she knows the Goddess despises warlike men as takers. She prays for Kiampas, for giant Oxwora. She even laments Soma, the unknown youth who was murdered not for gold or hate but for his face.

She mourns her captivity and the suffering of the Wizard.

She mourns her boots, which will very soon fail her feet.

She mourns the tiny black sliver that is her ration of Qirri.

She did not know what to expect coming to Kuniuri. Great journeys are often such, a matter of placing one foot before the other, again and again, for what seems a trudging eternity. Sometimes dusk and sleep are your only destination, and the trek's overarching end comes about as a kind of surprise.

She wasn't journeying to places glimpsed in ancient dreams. She wasn't drawn the way the Wizard was drawn.

She had been chased.

She thinks of the Andiamine Heights, of her Empress mother. She thinks of her little brother, Kelmomas, and she worries-as far as the Qirri will allow her.

At last they come to a river, every bit as great as the Sayut or the Sempis, broad-backed and slow moving, deep green with life and sediment, gleaming like a plate of silver where it catches the sun.

The Captain turns to his captive. "Is this it?"

Gagged, the old Wizard simply gazes at him in incredulity and disgust.

The Captain yanks the gag from his mouth. "Is this it?"

Achamian spits, works his lips and jaw for a moment. For the first time Mimara notices the sores caking the creases of his lips. After glaring at the Captain, the old Wizard turns to the others with mock grandiloquence. "Behold!" he cries through the sludge of a long-stopped voice. "Behold the Mighty Aumris! The nursery of Mannish civilization! The cradle of all!"

The Captain slaps him to the ground for his insolence.

She mourns the fact that cringing has become so easy.

The old Wizard was the first to realize how near they had come. He lay bound on his side as he had fairly every night of his captivity. But this time the Captain had thrust him across an incline, so that he could see the night sky through a broad gap in the canopy. A black plate of stars. At first, he gazed with a kind of senseless yearning, the attitude belonging to the defeated, one numbed to things beyond the immediate circuit of his fears. But then he glimpsed patterns… ancient constellations.

The Round of Horns, he realized. The Round of Horns as it appeared during the height of summer…

From Sauglish.

After that he bore the Captain's indignities with renewed resolution.

Stone heaved with greater regularity from the earth, until dirt became something found only in scallops of rock. Soon the Aumris became a booming white cataract, rushing through giant scarp-shelved canyons that were sometimes miles wide. They followed high lips of stone, laboriously descending and scaling the hanging gorges that fed the river. The Mirawsul, the Kuniuri had called these highlands-a name that meant "Cracked Shield" in ancient Umeri.

They found and followed what remained of the Hiril, the road that traversed the Mirawsul and where Seswatha had once shown a band of highwaymen the error of their ways. Three consecutive nights the Skin Eaters camped in the shells of ruined watchtowers-the famed Nulrainwi, the "Sprinting-fires," beacons of war and peace that had linked the cities of Aumris since the days of Cunwerishau.

At last they came to the Shield's end, and from high cliffs they gazed across forested alluvial plains that reached to the hazed horizon. For Achamian, the vista was like seeing a work of intricate art defaced with a child's crude strokes. Gone was the Kairil, the monumental stone road that tracked Aumris's winding course with ruler straight lines. Gone were the villages and the fields arrayed in great radial quilts. Gone were the innumerable plumes of smoke and the hearths and families that had kindled them.

The Wizard had expected a land like this, a wilderness overgrown with thronging life. But he had assumed that the Sranc would assail them time and again, an endless string of clans, and that he and Cleric would spend their nights crying out destruction. Knowing there could only be one explanation, Achamian found himself gazing into the east, wondering how many days their bent company would have to march to overtake them…

Kellhus and the onerous lodestone that was his Great Ordeal.

The old Wizard reflected on his days in arid Gedea, on the humble campfire he had shared with Esmenet and Kellhus more than twenty years ago. He could only marvel that Fate had brought them so far.

The company descended the cliffs using what remained of a great switchback stair. Soon they found themselves on the loamy banks of an Aumris that once again flowed wide and ponderous and brown. Great willows, some even rivalling the mighty elms and oaks of the Mop, stepped and knotted the ground they trod, trailing sheaves of yellow and green across the waters. There was a strange peace in their passage, even a sense that the land was at last awakening, having slumbered ages waiting for their return.

Flies plagued them.

That night, as always, the old Wizard dreamed of the horror that was the Golden Room. The moaning procession. The eviscerating horn. The chain heaving him and the other wretches forward.

Closer. He was coming closer.

They reached the ruined gates of Sauglish two nights following. The towers had become knolls and the walls had crumbled into low, earthen ridges, like the wandering dikes so common to Shigek and Ainon.

But no one needed to be told. The very air, it seemed, smelled of conclusion.

Climbing the ridge, they could even see sun-bright trees waving across the westward slopes of the Troinim in the near distance: three low hills made one by the ruins strewn across their backs. Mottled walls, here hewn to their foundations, there rising blunted. Cratered brick faces. Witch-fingers of stone rising from the clamour of growth and tumble. The silence of things distant and dead.

The Holy Library.

It did not seem possible.

We all imagine what it will be like when we finally reach long-sought places. We all anticipate the wages of our toil and suffering-the momentary sum. Achamian had assumed he would feel either heartbreak or outrage, setting eyes upon the legendary Sohonc stronghold. Tears and inner turmoil.

But for some reason it seemed just another derelict place.

Give him Qirri. Give him sleep.

The dead could keep until morning.

They made camp at the mouth of the gate. There was no sermon that night, only the rush of wind through the treetops and the sound of Sarl's cackle, gurgling through the mucus that perpetually weighted his lungs, rising and falling in the manner of drunks given to reciting grievances at the edge of unconsciousness.

"The Cofferrrssss! Ha! Yes! Think on it, boys! Such a slog as there never was!"

"Kiampas! Kiampas! He-hee! What did I tell you…"

On and on, until it seemed an animal crouched in their shadowy midst, growling with low and bestial lust.

"The Cofferrrssss…"