"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.
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