“No love is simple, Mimara.” Something hooked his voice while saying this, something like weak eyes and a burning throat. “At least no love worth the name.”
“But …”
“But nothing,” he said. “Far too many of us confuse complexity for impurity—or even pollution. Far too many of us mourn what we should celebrate as a result. Life is unruly, Mimara. Only tyrants and fools think otherwise.”
She frowned in a mock here-we-go-again manner. “Ajencis?” she asked, her eyes bright and teasing.
“No … Just wisdom. Not everything I say is borrowed, you know!”
She walked in silence for a time, her smile fading into a look of puzzled concentration. Achamian paced her in silence.
She resumed her account, describing the Imperial twins, Kelmomas and Samarmas. The latter was indeed an idiot, as Achamian had heard. But according to Mimara, the Imperial Physicians had feared both children were idiots in the beginning. Apparently the two infants would simply stare into each other’s eyes, day after day, month after month, then year after year. If separated, they ceased to eat, as if they shared but one appetite between the two of them. It was only after Esmenet contracted a celebrated physician from Conriya that their two souls were finally pried apart and the idiocy of Samarmas was revealed.
“It was a wonder,” Mimara exclaimed, as if reliving the memories of their cure in a rush. “To be so … so strange, and then to waken as, well, beautiful little boys, normal in all respects.”
“You were fond of them.”
“How could I not be? They were innocents born into a labyrinth—a place devious beyond compare. The others could never see it, no matter how much they complained and clucked, they could never see the Andiamine Heights for what it was.”
“And what was that?”
“A prison. A carnival. And a temple, a temple most of all. One where sins were counted according to harms endured rather than inflicted. It was no place for children! I told Mother as much, told her to take the twins to one of the Refuge Estates, some place where they could grow in the light of the sun, where things were … were …”
They had stooped to make their way beneath the fallen tree he’d seen earlier, so he supposed she had trailed to better concentrate. The limbs of the giant had folded and snapped, either bending back or prying deep into the earth. Dead leaves hung in rasping sheets. Finding passage was no easy task.
“Where things were what?” he asked when it became apparent she did not care to continue.
“Simple,” she said dully.
Achamian smiled in his wise old teacher way. The thought occurred to him that she had sought to protect the memory of her own childhood as much as the innocence of her two little brothers. But he said nothing. People rarely appreciate alternative, self-serving interpretations of their conduct—especially when suffering ruled the balance of their lives.
“Let me guess,” he ventured. “Your mother refused, said that they would need to learn the perils and complexities of statecraft to survive as Princes-Imperial.”
“Something like that,” she replied.
“So you trusted him. Kelmomas, I mean.”
“Trusted?” she cried with open incredulity. “He was a child! He adored me—to the point of annoyance!” She fixed him with a vexed look, as if to say, Enough, old man … “He was the reason I ran away to find you, in fact.”
Something troubled the old Wizard about this, but as so often happens in the course of heated conversations, his worries yielded to the point he hoped to press home. “Yes … But he was a child of Kellhus, an Anasûrimbor by blood.”
“So?”
“So, that means he possesses Dûnyain blood. Like Inrilatas.”
They had sloshed across the stream and were now climbing the far side of the gully. They could see the rest of the company above them, a string of frail forms labouring beneath the monumental trunks.
“Ah, I keep forgetting,” she said, huffing. “I suppose he simply must be manipulative and amoral …” She regarded him the way he imagined she had regarded countless others on the Andiamine Heights: as something ridiculous. “You’ve been cooped in the wilds too long, Wizard. Sometimes a child is just a child.”
“That’s all they know, Mimara. The Dûnyain. They’re bred for it.”
She dismissed him with a flutter of eyelids. She had no inkling, he realized—like everyone else in the Three Seas. For her, Kellhus was simply what he appeared to be.
In the first years of his exile, the hardest years, Achamian had spent endless hours revisiting the events of the First Holy War—his memories of Kellhus and Esmenet most of all. The more he pondered the man, the more obvious the Scylvendi’s revelatory words came to seem, until it became difficult to remember what it was like living within the circuit of his glamour. To think he had still loved the man after he had lured Esmenet to his bed! That he had spent sleepless hours wrestling with excuses—excuses!—for him.
But even still, after so many years, the appearances continued to argue for the man. Everything Mimara had described regarding the preparations for the Great Ordeal—even the scalpers accompanying him!—attested to what Kellhus had claimed so many years previous: that he had been sent to prevent the Second Apocalypse. Achamian had suffered that old sense several times now while feuding with Mimara, the one that had plagued him as a Mandate Schoolman travelling the courts of the Three Seas arguing the very things Kellhus had made religion (and there was an irony that plucked, if there ever was one). The anxious urge to throw words atop words, as if speaking could plaster over the cracked expressions that greeted his claims. The plaintive, wheedling sense of being disbelieved.
Maybe you need it, old man … Need to be disbelieved.
He had seen it before: men who had borne perceived injustices so long they could never relinquish them and so continually revisited them in various guises. The world was filled with self-made martyrs. Fear goads fear, the old Nansur proverb went, and sorrow, sorrow.
Perhaps he was mad. Perhaps everything—the suffering, the miles, the lives lost and taken—was naught but a fool’s errand. As wrenching as this possibility was, and as powerful as the Scylvendi’s words had been, Achamian would have been entirely prepared to accept his folly. He was a true student of Ajencis in this respect …
Were it not for his Dreams. And the coincidence of the Coffers.
The old Wizard continued on in silence, mulling the details of Mimara’s tale. The picture she had drawn was as fascinating as it was troubling. Kellhus perpetually distracted, perpetually absent. His children possessing a jumble of human and Dûnyain attributes—and half-mad for it, apparently. Games heaped upon games, and sorrow and resentment most of all. Esmenet had fetched her broken daughter from the brothel only to deliver her to the arena that was the Andiamine Heights—a place where no soul could mend.
Not hers, and certainly not her daughter’s.
Was this not a kind of proof of Kellhus? Pain followed him, as did tumult and war. Every life that fell into his cycle suffered some kind of loss or deformation. Was this not an outward sign of his … his evil?
Perhaps. Perhaps not. Suffering had ever been the wages of revelation. The greater the truth, the greater the pain. No one understood this quite so profoundly as he.
Either way, it was proof of Mimara. Our words always paint two portraits when we describe our families to others. Outsiders cannot but see the small peeves and follies that wrinkle our relationships with our loved ones. The claims we make in defensive certainty—that we were the one wronged, that we were the one who wanted the best—cannot but fall on skeptical ears since everyone but everyone makes the same claims of virtue and innocence. We are always more than we want to be in the eyes of others simply because we are blind to the bulk of what we are.
Kellhus had taught him that.
Mimara had wanted him to see her as a victim, as a long-suffering penitent, more captive than daughter, and not as someone embittered and petulant, someone
who often held others accountable for her inability to feel safe, to feel anything unpolluted by the perpetual pang of shame …
And he loved her the more for it.
Later, as the murk of evening steeped through the forest galleries, she slowed so that he could draw abreast, but she did not return his questioning gaze.
“What I told you,” she eventually said, “that was foolish of me.”
“What was foolish?”
“What I said.”
This final exchange left him sorting through melancholy thoughts of his own family and the wretched Nroni fishing village where he had been born. They seemed strangers, now, not simply the people who inhabited his childhood memories, but the passions as well. The doting love of his sisters … Even the tyranny of his father—the maniacal shouts, the wordless beatings—seemed to belong to some soul other than his own.
This, he realized … This was his true family: the mad children of the man who had robbed him of his wife. The New Anasûrimbor Dynasty. These were his brothers and sisters, sons and daughters. And this simply meant that he had no family … that he was alone.
Save for the mad woman trekking beside him.
His little girl …
Back when he had been a tutor in Aöknyssus, he took up the antique Ceneian practice of considering problems while walking—peripatetics, the ancients had called it. He would trudge down from his apartment by the Premparian Barracks, through the wooded pathways of the Ke, and down to the port, where the masts made a winter forest of the piers. There was this defunct temple where he would always glimpse the same beggar through a breach in the walls. He was one of those unravelled men, unkempt and withered, slow-moving and speechless, as if dumbfounded at where the years had delivered him. And for some reason it always knocked Achamian from his stride seeing him. He would pass gazing, his walk slowing to a numb saunter, and the beggar would simple stare off, beyond caring who did or did not watch. Achamian would forget whatever problem he had set off to ponder and brood instead about the cruel alchemy of age and love and time. A fear would clutch him, knowing that this, this, was true solitude, to find yourself the feeble survivor, stranded at the end of your life, your loves and hopes reduced to remembered smoke, hungering, suffering …
And waiting. Waiting most of all.
His mother was dead, the old Wizard supposed.
Making water or mud has always been an irritating challenge for her. She cannot simply retreat behind a tree as the others might, not for the sake of modesty—a sentiment that had been pummelled from her in childhood—but out of a keen awareness of men and their lustful infirmities. She has to plunge deeper, beyond the possibility of craning looks. “A glimpse is a promise,” the brothel masters used to say. “Show them what they would steal, and they will spend—spend!”
She squats, her breeches crowded about her knees, stares up into the veined complexities of the canopy as she relieves herself. She follows the dark lines of silhouetted limbs scrawling across foliated stages, ragged screen set across ragged screen, each brighter than the next. She doesn’t see the figure … not at first.
But then its shape is unmistakable: human limbs clutched and hanging about arboreal. Unlike other forests, where trees branch and thicken according to their exposure to the sun, the trees of the Mop fork into the low nethers, as though begrudging all open space. The creature hangs from the lowermost skein, unnaturally still, intent with scrutiny and malice.
The thing called Soma.
Her fear falls short of reason. If it had wanted to kill her, she would already be dead. If it had wanted to steal her, she would already be missing.
No. It wants something.
She should cry out, she knows, send it fleeing into the sepulchral depths, chased by the crack and thunder of sorcerous lights. But she does not. It wants something, and she needs to know what. Slowly, deliberately, she stands and draws up her leggings, winces at her own humid reek.
Its face hangs down just far enough to be discernable in the murk. Soma, as if glimpsed through a veil of black gauze. The canopy’s high-hanging glow paints his edges with traceries of green.
“He’s killing you,” it coos. “The Nonman.”
She stares up, breathless, immobile. She knows this thing, she reminds herself, knows it as surely as scalpers know Sranc. Assassins. Deceivers. Sowers of resentment and mistrust. Discord arouses them. Violence spills their cup. They are, as her mother once told her, the consummate union of viciousness and grace.
“Then I shall kill him first,” she says, shocked by the resolute tenor of her voice. Her whole life she has been surprised by her ability to appear strong.
This is not the reply it was expecting. She’s not sure how she knows this: its hesitation, perhaps, or the click of indecision that passes like smoke across its false expression. Regardless, she knows that it does not want the Nonman dead … at least not yet.
“No …” it whispers. “Such a thing is beyond your power.”
“My fath—”
“He too would certainly perish.”
She glares upward, peering, trying to discern the folding digits that compose its face. She cannot.
“There is only one way to save yourself,” it rasps.
“And how is that?”
“Kill the Captain.”
She rejoins the company as if nothing has happened. She should tell Achamian. She knows this without wanting to know. Her reflex is to hide and to hoard—a product of the brothel, no doubt. Too much had been stolen.
Soma came to me …
She circles this thought, stalks it, returns to it the way she continually reaches for her Chorae where it hangs about her neck. As troubled as she is, as frightened as she is, a part of her soul exults—in the mystery of it, certainly, but also because it had chosen her before any of the others.
Why had it saved her during the Stone Hag attack? At the cost of revealing itself, no less!
Why was it following them in the first place?
And why was it reaching out to her?
After the nightmare of Maimor, Achamian spent long miles verbally pondering the skin-spy and its presence among the Skin Eaters. From the outset he made assumptions, forgivable assumptions: that the skin-spy had infiltrated the Skin Eaters immediately after he had contracted them. That he, the outcast inheritor of their ancient and implacable enemy, Seswatha, was the motive for the infiltration. That it was charged with killing him, lest he discover something too decisive … And so on.
More than anything else, what prevents her from telling the old Wizard is the fear that he is wrong—utterly and catastrophically. The suspicion that the Consult has sent the skin-spy, not to assassinate Achamian or to sabotage the expedition, no. Her fear is that the Consult has sent it to assist them … to ensure they reach Sauglish and the Coffers.
And why not, when Drusas Achamian is the enemy of their enemy? According to her mother, the Consult waited months before finally attacking Kellhus during the First Holy War. “The only thing they found more terrifying than your stepfather,” she said, “was the possibility there could be more like him.”
The possibility of Ishuäl.
The origin of the Aspect-Emperor. As much as Achamian desires this knowledge to judge Anasûrimbor Kellhus, would not the Unholy Consult covet it even more?
She has seen the Wizard with the Judging Eye—seen his damnation. At the time she simply assumed that sorcery was the cause, that contrary to her stepfather’s claims, sorcery remained the unpardonable sin. And this seemed to lend credence to Achamian and his desperate case against the man who had stolen his wife. But what if this wasn’t the case? What if this very quest was the ground of his damnation? There is poetry in the notion, as perverse as it is, and this more than anything else is what hones her fear to a cutting edge. To strike out in the name of love, only to inadvertently unleash the greatest terror the world has ever seen. When she mulls the possibility, it seems to smell of the Whore through and through … at least from
what she has seen of Her.
This is what makes telling the Wizard all but impossible. What was she supposed to say? That his life and the lives of all those his deceptions have killed have been in vain? That he is a tool of the very apocalypse he hopes to prevent?
No. She will not speak what cannot be heard. Soma would have to remain her secret, at least for the immediate future. She needs to discover more before going to the Wizard …
Kill the Captain …
She knows this creature. She can number the bones in its false face. She even knows the questions that will confuse it, hint at the absence that is its soul. It stands upon a different field of battle, vast and spectral and devious with a thousand years of patient calculation. And for some reason, it needs Lord Kosoter to be a casualty of that cryptic battle.
Kill the Captain. Understand this command, she realizes, and she will understand Soma’s design.
She has watched the slow transformation of loyalties and rivalries within the company. She has seen the glint of sedition in Galian’s eyes. She has noticed the way Achamian has come to accept, even prize, the Captain and his ruthless methods. Lord Kosoter will deliver them to the Library of Sauglish—despite all the perils and uncertainties. He is simply one of those men, possessed of a will so cruel, so domineering, that the world could not but yield.
He was the Captain. The harsh shadow, bloodthirsty and pitiless, forever standing in her periphery.
She has always watched, and her eyes are nothing if not critical, but she has never probed, never tested. According to Soma something was happening, something that would eventually imperil their lives. According to Soma things transpired that neither she nor the old Wizard could see.
So she will squint against the glare of the obvious, peer into the gloom of implication. She will pretend to sleep while pondering possibilities and assembling questions. She will solve this one mystery …