At last the latch is thrown and she flees sobbing, clutching her belly as she runs.
She waddles and scrambles through the slum alleys, between camps that were little more than strewn belongings, beggars’ nests. She keeps her face down so none might see her resemblance to her mother, her pelts thrust forward to conceal her bulbous abdomen, but word of her presence has spread, and no matter what precinct she flees to, she is recognized; the infernal masses fall to their knees and cry out in wonder, utterly insensitive to the crushing yoke of Eternity.
She walks among them, the damned Men of the Ordeal, turning the Eye away as best as she can manage. And impossibly, she grows accustomed to the company of demons, the servile fawning of burning souls. For this, she realizes, is what it means to possess the Judging Eye, to walk among, and not flee, the damned, and to find some way to help them see. Why should she flee? And it astounds her, the disproportion of her return, how someone who was little more than a spark kicked from a worldly flame, could return as the very sun. It flabbergasts, even terrifies her, knowing that soon—so very soon!—she will stand before the Holy Aspect-Emperor, and that she will be the immovable one, the one most holy, the one to pass sentence …
Give voice to the Judging Eye. The Judgment of God.
And she stumbles for the realization … even though it seems to her that she has always known. All this … all the damned kings and warriors and sorcerers … the Great Ordeal … and its dread task …
All of it belongs to her.
No matter what she sees when the Eye falls upon Anasûrimbor Kellhus, upon the Dûnyain who has usurped the whole of the Three Seas …
She, the child-whore, the waif, the mad, melancholy runaway—Mimara …
She is the only true Prophet here.
Achamian would never know what had compelled him, only that he had been a fool.
They had picked their way down the Occlusion then set out across the chill reaches of the Furnace Plain. He recalled feeling years accumulate with each and every footfall, and how announcing as much led to an inevitable feud over the Qirri. They paused, isolate in the vast expanse. Apertures opened in the woolen skies above, allowing shafts of lucid sunlight to trawl the distances. Silent pockets of summer, the kind that spark yearning, skimming into oblivion. The Horns of Golgotterath glowered more than gleamed … as they had in horror of his dreams.
Titanic gold.
The two of them partook of the Last Nonman King in the old way, with their mouths. The ash was sweet. Then they resumed their trek, skirting the wastes where they had watched the Great Ordeal roil and howl watches previous. Step after step they laboured, Golgotterath a nauseous looming to their left, the encampment a midden heap kicked and raked across the landscape before them, the Occlusion fencing all visible creation.
They walked.
The Qirri had restored their wind, but left their confusion intact. Perhaps it was the obscurity, the uncertainty of what was about to happen. Perhaps it was the finality. Perhaps their transit had damaged them too profoundly to countenance any destination, let alone the one pinioned between Golgotterath and the Aspect-Emperor.
His thoughts were too watery to congeal into memory, let alone anything resembling reason. Anxieties and images sluiced through senseless channels. Walking had become the one abiding thing, the myriad of aches and stings and discomforts. As was so often the case on the long trail, the toll of incessant movement became the one truly motionless thing, the blind anchor of blind being.
As they crossed the scuffed tracts he turned to peer at the thumb of stone where Kellhus had harangued the Great Ordeal. The Accusatory, he had realized on a dull flare of wonder, suddenly seeing the shadow of the Arobindant in the black whorls and encrustations across the surrounding slopes. Peering, he glimpsed the two figures hanging from its blunt terminus, as well as the loose collection of souls keeping vigil below. For some reason, he could not look away from the image, and as so often happens when vision strays, his path strayed as well. Something about the sight itched, for some reason. The great, chapped finger pointed not so much at him as over, toward Golgotterath beyond, two nameless victims strung from the point of its cryptic accusation. It was only as he neared that he had realized it was the figure trussed and hanging to the left, the paler one, that he sought …
He fairly panicked when he realized that Mimara had not followed his straying.
She had the Qirri.
Even still, his eye was drawn back to the wretch strung to the left—to the direction his strides already took him. The kernel of all madness resides in the clarity of its unreason. Doubt is ever the ballast of sanity, what opens the course of Men to the correction of other Men. This was why Achamian now feared more for his intellect than his sanity, because it seemed he had stepped out of void, that his origins had been stripped from him. Why? Why had he come here?
He walked, gums tingling, clamouring for more cannibal ash.
To find Ishuäl? To discover the truth of Anasûrimbor Kellhus?
He knew he was sane because confusion had always ruled him—he chased hazy inklings, not divine edicts.
He drifted to a stop below the promontory, peered up without blinking.
He knew he was sane.
No matter how disjoint it felt now, he had not stumbled across Eärwa in a stupor … but then neither had he sought out the origins of Anasûrimbor Kellhus.
He had come to recover what was stolen. A cherished wife.
A beloved student.
Head hanging down from shoulders wrenched back, elbows bound into the apex of an agonizing triangle. Creaking to and fro. Dripping blood.
Prosha …
He stood staring at the strangeness and the familiarity. Locks of black hair hanging, satin with filth. Eyes sealed in rheum and misery. The old Wizard was not alone. In his periphery, he sensed the gaze of the blond youth who knelt nearby, beneath the Zeumi wretch who hung opposite his once-beloved pupil. Achamian did not so much ignore as forget the youth, such was his grief.
There was shouting.
He could not look away. His neck clamoured. He wanted to weep, and somehow, the fact that he could not seemed the worst misery of all. He wanted to scream. He even wanted—for a heartbeat at least—to put out his own eyes …
Madness had its consolations.
But he was a Wizard far more than he was a Man, a soul bent to unceasing, unnatural toil. He understood that there was meaning here, meaning bound upon the tickle of the Incû-Holoinas in the small of his back. The tutor and the student of days bygone were anything but alone on this accursed plain. Other reasons dwelt here, some written into the very ink of what happened.
He had come to deliver Mimara, the Judging Eye.
Drusas Achamian suffered a second certainty then, one unlike any he had ever known. And somehow it made his remorse holy. He squinted at the one child he had loved most aside from Inrau. The second son he had taught and failed to keep alive.
“My boy …” was the most he managed to croak.
Not so high above, the bound form of Proyas, blessed son of Queen Thaila and King Onoyas, swayed on slow revolutions …
Dying in the shadow of Golgotterath.
It wasn’t a dream, the little Prince-Imperial realized upon awakening.
What he remembered … It had happened!
The light become nausea and ground. The vast slum of shelters, the encamped Ordeal knitted like mould along the inner arc of a low range of mountains. The Horns rearing beyond—the Horns of Golgotterath soaring vast and unbelievable from the blasted lands. The Ordealmen streaming from all quarters, ghastly mockeries of the Men they had been. How they had blubbered and whooped upon their arrival. Sobbed and grovelled! Like foul beggars tugging at Father’s robe. Some had even torn their beards for joy and grief!
Father abandoned him and Mother to them almost immediately, stepping back into the selfsame light they had just stumbled from. A company of crazed and filthy Pillarians took them in hand. Mother had t
o be carried, so violent was her illness—even Kelmomas had reeled and vomited. Father had pressed them hard across the final horizons. The Men bore them to a massive black pavilion with a kind of deranged reverence. Some had openly wept! Mother had been too sick to protest when they had installed him with her in a gloomy chamber—the Umbilicus, they had called it. And so he had lain exhausted and joyous—joyous!—his soul and stomach spinning, pondering the fact that after everything, he had somehow found himself here …
Mother’s chamber. Bellied black canvas walls, barricading the gloom. A single lantern light, plucking the geometry of empty and eclectic spaces from the black, illuminating palms of painted and brocaded pattern.
A lion. A heron. Seven horses.
A straw mattress laid out like corpses across the ground. Silk sheets, dull for the soil of unwashed bodies, but still gleaming, lines of white hooked across the restless tangle, sharp against the bruise of rose.
And Mother, the beloved one, sleeping.
Eyes closed in the grey ghost of lampblack. Lips sealed about an open jaw, slumped chin. Oblivious.
The little one watching. The fallen one.
The beauty of her was carved into his very bones. He had been drawn from her womb—hewn from her hips!—but he nevertheless remained of her in every way. The girlish tangle of her hair knotted him. The bare length of her left arm made tack and gum of his breath. The slow cycle of her breathing was a pang rising and falling within his own breast.
To gaze upon her was as near a soul such as his could ever come to worship. The Blessed Empress.
Mommy.
There was much he had refused to know—as of yet. The entire World now twisted from a solitary hair. And for all his Dûnyain guile, he possessed a child’s feral understanding of powerlessness, the concessions that helplessness exacted from those, such as him, who were condemned to love. To be Kelmomas the Feared, the Hated was at once to be Kelmomas the Alone, the Unwanted … the Doomed.
For what was love, if not weakness become blessing?
She. She was the one thing that mattered. The only mystery to be solved. All the rest, Father’s return, the Narindar, the Earthquake—even Father’s interrogation—mattered not at all. Not even the mad fact that he was about to witness the Great Ordeal assail Golgotterath! Only she …
Only Mommy.
Slumbering as he had never seen her slumber before, her heart thrumming fleet, then ponderous, following deep and inexplicable patterns. Their miraculous journey across Eärwa had almost proven beyond her endurance. Father had carried her convulsing, retching spittle for a greater part of their mad and magnificent passage. She was weak …
Worldborn.
She needs us …
To protect her, yes.
The Prince-Imperial made no effort to feign sleep or otherwise conceal his scrutiny. He had always resided here, invulnerable and unknown, in the very bosom of her slumber. This was his place. And it always had been. The difference was that he had never before feared she might stir from her slumber. She would awaken, yet slumber still.
She hates us!
Hates you. She always loved me better.
The anguish was quite unlike anything he had known. There was the pain he had suffered following Uncle’s palace coup, but there had been exhilaration and play as well. As desperate, as forlorn as he had been, he had had such fun-fun! There was the pain of being abandoned, he supposed, and then there was the pain of being found, and the latter was so much worse-worse—horrible! A loss without the hope of recovery.
No! Noooo!
Yes. She could always smell Him on you!
Him. Father. They had hidden from him so long Kelmomas had thought himself invisible. But Father had simply cast his eye across the curve of the World. He need only look, the way Inrilatas had looked, to see all of it …
You mean the Strength. She could always sense the Strength in me.
Yes. The Strength.
Sharacinth. Inrilatas. Uncle. The hunting and the feasting …
All the fun.
Father knows all—Everything!
Yes. He is the strongest.
And he had told Mommy. They had seen it in her eyes, the way it died, the one part he had sought to raise above all others …
A mother’s love for her poor little son.
What are we going to do, Sammi?
That isn’t the question—you know this.
Yes-yes.
He knelt upon the corner of the mattress watching her, and he fairly swooned, so intense was the desire, so cosmic the need, to simply lay a cheek upon the maternal hill that was her hip, to hold tight what he had been, cling to the one soul that could save him.
What? What was Father going to do with his wayward sons?
Maybe the Consult will kill him.
To see is to follow. Mimara understands that now, understands why the blind are so prone to linger, to roam apart from the mob. She sees the tented slums of the encampment, follows impromptu ways that fork like old veins. The recognition belonging to that first soul on the encampment’s perimeter pursues her like a famished dog, so that Men drop all about her wherever she wanders, some grovelling, croaking and moaning like demented beggars, others beseeching, importuning, crying across outstretched fingers. She goes so far as to cast arms against the leering visages.
To see is to follow. She speaks to no one, makes no queries, and yet finds herself standing before the Umbilicus all the same. It rears as a many-poled mountain range before her, the mottled grey of things once-black, more bruised than adorned with circumfixes, so mudded and tattered was the embroidery. It seems to flap and billow, though the air is absolutely still.
She comes upon it from the east, such is the Whore’s perversity. Golgotterath rises beyond, monstrous and implacable.
As damned as the Ordealmen are, the Ark leans across the Eye in a manner almost too violent to comprehend, a vision that strums the scale of the spirit too profoundly to hear. All this time, she has thrown aside her face, shielded her gaze, lest she vomit, void her bowel.
But there is no avoiding it now, short of groping her way forward.
Evil. An alien malice as cold as the Void.
Mutilated babes. Cities heaped like so many beehives upon a bonfire. The Horns gleam static through imagistic clamour, rise against clouds of tangled violet, crisp and gleaming, massive and inanimate, scarcely reflecting the eruption of demonic atrocities below, the thousandfold glimpses of dying peoples, races, civilizations—crimes that break the back of imagination, multiplied unto lunacy across the span of lands and ages, so heinous as to draw Hell, like fat in famine, up through the pores of the World.
She stands shaking, a child drawn from the tub in winter. Urine sops her inner thighs. She smells burnt belongings, roasting horseflesh.
Please!
“Princess-Imperial?” a masculine voice exclaims. “Sweet Sejenus!”
And she sees it, blackness bound in whirling dust, towering across the Heavens …
“Is it truly you?”
“Our Holy Aspect-Emperor,” Apperens Saccarees said, affecting a brittle distraction. “Does he know you are here?”
The old Wizard shrugged. “Who can say what he does and does not fathom?”
That earned him a sharp look.
“Aye,” the Mandate Grandmaster replied. The man set aside the tome he had been perusing, scrutinized the greatest traitor his School had ever known.
The Men of the Ordeal had been roasting horses when Achamian finally hobbled into the encampment, great shanks of meat slicked over fires fuelled by what belongings they had managed to salvage thus far. Few paid him any attention. They were grim, exhausted. Many were blackened for unwashed skin. Mangy black and brown stained every tunic. A kind of expectancy animated them, but tempered by the air of survival, of too many cuts endured, the fever, perhaps, of a lingering sepsis. Achamian recognized the look, or the nub of it anyway, from the siege of Caraskand. These Men of the Ordeal had suffered grievo
usly getting here. They had burned and hacked the breadth of Eärwa, crossed an ocean of Sranc, and now they had reached the point of greatest dread for any host campaigning in hostile lands, the turn where they must begin consuming the very things that sheltered and conveyed them.
The old Wizard was neither troubled nor surprised.
Night had gathered almost all ere he had found the Mandate encampment. He had not known what to expect of his former brothers. Both more and less, he supposed, than the ring of ramshackle pavilions he found. The skies had cleared, baring all to the Nail of Heaven and the pallor of the infinite Void. He found breathing difficult, so convincing was the illusion of airlessness. Thanks to some perversity of his vantage, the Ark appeared to loom inscrutable over the encampment’s immediate perimeter, its monstrous contours gilded by hooks of silver sterility. Resolve as he might, Achamian could not stop casting glances over his shoulder. You’re here! a breath would cry within him. Here! And alarums would skitter across his skin, terrors would burr his thoughts, and yes, even glee would evanesce through his soul.
It was happening. The horror and anguish that he and every Mandate Schoolman alive or dead had dreamed night after miserable night—all of if could be redeemed! Vengeance—vengeance!—was finally at hand!
And yet the aura in the compound had been one of doddering … numbness.
“However …” the Grandmaster continued, “you are the legendary Drusas Achamian …” He smiled. “The Wizard.”
He had never known Saccarees personally, but he had heard of him. As irritating as teachers find prodigies in the room, they crow in their absence, quick to find evidence of their efficacy. Saccarees fairly had his masters falling over themselves in self-congratulation. Whatever the man’s gifts, Kellhus had certainly recognized them quickly. Achamian idly wondered whether the Mandate had ever possessed a Grandmaster so young. The only thing more outrageous than his hairline was the fact his hair possessed so little grey.
Achamian smiled in turn. “And you are?”
Twenty years in self-imposed exile, months warring across the wastes, and there it was, as oiled and effortless and accursed as it had ever been: jnan.