He rubbed his nose, breathed deep as though preparing for the plunge. It never ceased to strike him as strange, the fits and starts of the body and its anxieties.
“Kellhus,” he said, speaking the name in the old way, with the intonations of familiarity and wry trust. “My student … My friend … My prophet … It was my wife he stole …
“My morning.”
He glared, challenging her to speak again. She simply blinked, wriggled as though to adjust her position. He could see her swallow behind the line of her lips.
“The only thing,” he continued, his voice wrung ragged with conflicting passions. “The only thing I took with me from my previous life was a simple question: Who is Anasûrimbor Kellhus? Who?”
Achamian stared at the bed of coals pulsing beneath the blackened wood, paused to allow Mimara fair opportunity to respond, or so he told himself. The truth was that the thought of her voice made him wince. The truth was that his story had turned into a confession.
“Everyone knows the answer to that question,” she ventured, speaking with a delicacy that confirmed his fears. “He’s the Aspect-Emperor.”
Of course she would say this. Even if she hadn’t been Kellhus’s adoptive daughter, she would have said precisely the same thing. They so wanted it to be simple, believers. “It is what is!” they cried, sneering at the possibility of other eyes, other truths, overlooking their own outrageous presumption. “It says what it says,” spoken with a conviction that was itself insincerity. They ridiculed questions, for fear it would make their ignorance plain. Then they dared call themselves “open.”
This was the iron habit of Men. This was what shackled them to the Aspect-Emperor.
He shook his head in slow deliberation. “The most important question you can ask any man, child, is the question of his origin. Only by knowing what a man has been can you hope to say what he will be.” He paused, brought up short by an old habit of hesitation. How easy it was to hide in his old pedantic ruts, to recite rather than talk. But no matter how woolly, his abstractions always became snarled in the very needling particularities he so unwittingly tried to avoid. He had always been a man who wanted to digress, only to find himself bleeding on the nub.
“But everyone knows the answer to that question,” she said with same care as before, “Kellhus is the Son of Heaven.” What else could he be? her over-bright eyes asked.
“Yet he is flesh and blood, born of a father’s seed and a mother’s womb. He was reared. He was taught. He was sent out into the world …” He raised his eyebrows as though speaking something crucial but universally overlooked. “So tell me, where did all this happen? Where?”
For the first time, it seemed, he glimpsed real doubt gnawing her gaze. “They say he was a prince,” she began, “that he comes from Atrith—”
“He does not come from Atrithau,” Achamian snapped. “I know this on a dead man’s authority.”
The Scylvendi. Cnaiür urs Skiötha. As always, the man’s words came back to him: “With every heartbeat they war against circumstance, with every breath they conquer! They walk among us as we walk among dogs, and we yowl when they throw out scraps, we whine and whimper when they raise their hand … They make us love!”
They. The Dûnyain. The Tribe of the Aspect-Emperor.
“But what about his bloodline?” Mimara asked. “Are you saying his name is false as well?”
“No … He is an Anasûrimbor, I grant you that—the coincidences would be stacked too high were it otherwise. That is our only clue.”
“How so?”
“Because it means the question of his birthplace is the question of where the Line of Anasûrimbor could have survived.”
She seemed to consider this. “But if not Atrithau, then where? The North is more than ruined, more than wilderness—or so my tutors always say. How could anyone survive with … them?”
Them. The Sranc. Achamian thought of the multitudes, clawing the earth in frustration, throwing up gouts of dirt in the absence of warding limbs, stamping and howling, stamping and howling across the endless tracts.
“Exactly,” he said. “If the Line were to survive, it had to be within a refuge of some kind. Something secret, hidden. Something raised by the Kûniüric High Kings, ere the First Apocalypse …”
“Then listen!” the Scylvendi cried. “For thousands of years they have hidden in the mountains, isolated from the world. For thousands of years they have bred, allowing only the quickest of their children to live. They say you know the passing of ages better than any, sorcerer, so think on it! Thousands of years … Until we, the natural sons of true fathers, have become little more than children to them.”
“A sanctuary.”
Achamian knew he was speaking too desperately now, even though he measured his words the way hungry mothers dolloped out butter. Such words could not come slow enough. The Aspect-Emperor a liar? Her face was blank in the way of those grievously offended, whose retort remained bottled by the fear of unstopping too many passions. His soul’s eye and ear cried out for her: Jealous old fool! He stole her, Esmenet! That is the sum of your pathetic case against him. He stole the only woman you’ve loved! And now you lust only for his destruction, to see him burn, though all the world is tinder …
He breathed deeply, leaned back from the fire, which suddenly seemed to nip him with its heat. He resolved to refill his pipe, but could only clench his fists against the tremors.
My hands shake.
His voice grows more shrill. His gesticulations become wilder. His discourse develops a pinned-in-place savagery that makes him difficult to watch and impossible to contradict.
Her heart rejoices at first, certain that he has relented. But the tone of his voice quickly tells her otherwise. The excitement. The wry delivery of his observations, as though to say, How many times? The way people speak is a bound thing, as far from free as a slave or a horse. Place binds it. Occasion binds it. But other people rule it most of all; the shadow of names lies hidden in every word spoken. And the longer he talks, the more Mimara realizes that he is speaking to someone other than her …
To Esmenet.
The irony stings for some reason. She had taken him to be her father, and now he takes her to be her mother. He’s mad … Mad the same as me.
The Wizard is not so much her father, she realizes, as her brother. Another child of Esmenet, almost as broken, and every bit as betrayed.
She has been wrong about him in every way, not simply with regard to demeanour and appearance. Her mother styled him a scholar and a mystic, someone who spent his exile lost in arcane researches. Mimara has read enough about sorcery to know the importance of meanings, that semantic purity is a Schoolman’s perennial obsession. And yet nothing could be further from the case. As he explains to her, he cares nothing for the Gnosis, not even as a tool. He has retired from the Three Seas for heartbreak—this much is true. But the reason, the rule that makes his life rational in his own eyes, is simple vengeance.
The truth of Anasûrimbor Kellhus, he insists, was to be found in the secret of his origins—in the secret of something called the Dûnyain. “The Scylvendi was his mistake!” Achamian cries, his eyes wild with unkempt passions. “The Scylvendi knew what he was. Dûnyain!” And the secret of the Dûnyain, he claims, though Mimara understands instantly that this is little more than a hope, was to be found in the detail of Seswatha’s life.
His Dreams. His Dreams had become the vehicle for his vengeance. Here, on the very edge of the wilderness, he has bent all his efforts to decoding their smoky afterimages. Twenty years he has laboured, mapping, drawing up meticulous inventories, sifting through the debris, the detritus of a dead sorcerer’s ancient life, searching for the silver needle that would see his wrongs avenged.
It’s more than a fool’s errand; it is a madman’s obsession, on a par with those ascetics who beat themselves with strings and flint, or who eat nothing but ox-hides covered in religious writings. Twenty years! Anything that could consu
me so much life simply has to be deranged. The hubris alone …
His hatred of Kellhus she finds understandable, though she herself bears no grudge against her stepfather. She barely knows the Aspect-Emperor, and those rare times she found herself alone with him on the Andiamine Heights—twice—he seemed at once radiant and tragic, perhaps the most immediate and obvious soul she had ever encountered.
“You think you hate her,” he once said—referring to her mother, of course.
“I know I do.”
“There’s no knowledge,” he had replied, “in the shadow of hate.”
Now, watching and listening to this old man, she thinks she understands those words. Cooped in his desolate tower, trapped between the banks of his soul, how could Achamian not bring the two great currents of his life together? His Dreams and his Hatred. Contained too long in too little space, how could they not become entangled in a single turbulent stream? To resent is to brood in inaction, to pass through life acting in a manner indistinguishable from those who bear no grudges. But hatred hails from a wilder, far more violent tribe. Even when you cannot strike out, you strike nonetheless. Inward, if not outward, as if such things have direction. To hate, especially without recourse to vengeance, is to besiege yourself, to starve yourself to the point of eating your own, then to lay wreaths of blame at the feet of the accused.
Yes, she decides. Drusas Achamian is her brother.
“So all this time,” she says, daring to speak into one of the few silences he affords her, “you’ve been dreaming his life, cataloguing it, searching for clues as to my stepfather’s origin …
“Yes.”
“What have you found?”
The question shocks him; that much is plain. He draws clawed fingers through his great and grizzled beard. “A name,” he finally says with the sullen resentment of those forced to admit the disproportion between their boasts and their purse.
“A name?” She nearly laughs.
A long sour glare.
She reminds herself to take care. Her instinct, given all that she has endured, is to be impatient with the conceits of others. But she needs this man.
An inward look of concentration, then he says, “Ishuäl.”
He almost whispers it, as though it were a jar containing furies, something that could be cracked open by a careless tongue.
“Ishuäl,” she repeats, simply because his tone seems to demand it.
“It’s derived from a Nonman dialect,” he continues. “It means ‘Exalted Grotto,’ or ‘High Hidden Place,’ depending on how literal the translation.”
“Ishuäl? Kellhus is from Ishuäl?”
It troubles him, she can tell, to hear her refer to her stepfather as such—as someone familiar.
“I’m certain of it.”
“But if it’s a hidden place …”
Another sour glare. “It won’t be long,” he mutters with old man dismissiveness. “Not now. Not any more. Seswatha … His life is opening … Not just the small things, but the secrets as well.”
A life spent mining the life of another, pondering glimpses of tedium through the lense of holy and apocalyptic portent. Twenty years! How can he hope to balance the proportions? Grub through dirt long enough and you will prize stones.
“Like he’s yielding,” she forces herself to say.
“Exactly! I know I sound mad for saying it, but it’s almost as if he knows.” She finds nodding difficult, as though pity has seized the hinge of her neck and skull. What reservoirs of determination would it take? To spend so long immersed in a task not only bereft of any tangible profit, but without any appreciable measure of progress—how much would it require? Year after year, wrestling with the imperceptible, wringing hope out of smoke and halfmemory. What depths of conviction? What kind of perseverance?
Certainly not any the sane possess.
Faces. All conduct is a matter of wearing the appropriate faces. The brothel taught her that, and the Andiamine Heights simply confirmed the lesson. It’s as though expressions occupy various positions, a warning here, a greeting there, with the distance between measured by the difficulty of forcing one face from the other. At this moment nothing seems so difficult as squeezing pity into the semblance of avid interest.
“No other Mandate Schoolman has ever experienced anything like this?” She has asked this already, but it bears repeating.
“Nothing,” he replies, his face and posture true to his frailty. He has shrunk into the husk of hides that clothe him. He seems as lonely as he is, and even more isolate. “What can it mean?”
She blinks, strangely offended by this open display of weakness. Then it happens.
The Mark already blasts him, renders him ugly in the manner of things rent and abraded, as though his inner edges have been pinched and twisted, pinched and twisted, his very substance worried from the fabric of mundane things. But suddenly she sees more, the hue of judgment, as though blessing and condemnation have become a wash visible only in certain kinds of light. It hangs about him, bleeds from him, something palpable … evil.
No. Not evil. Damnation.
He is damned. Somehow she knows this with the certainty with which children know their hands. Thoughtless. Complete.
He is damned.
Another blink, the different eye closes, and he is an old Wizard once again. The illuminated surfaces are as impervious as before.
Sorrow wells through her, at once abstract and tidal, the resignation one feels when losses outrun numbers. Clutching her blanket, she presses herself to her feet, scuttles to sit on the cold ground beside him. She looks at him with the eyes she knows so well, the gaze that promises to roam wherever. She knows that he is hopeless, the wreck of what was once a mighty man.
But she also knows what she needs to do—to give. Another lesson from the brothel. It’s so simple, for it’s what all madmen yearn for, what they crave above all things …
To be believed.
“You have become a prophet,” she says, leaning in for the kiss. Her whole life she has punished herself with men. “A prophet of the past.”
The memory of his power is like perfume.
The recriminations come later, in the darkness. Why is there no place so lonely as the sweaty slot beside a sleeping man?
And at the same time, no place so safe?
Bundling a blanket about her nakedness, she crawls to the dim bed of coals, where she sits, rocking herself between clutched arms and rough folds, trying to squeeze away the memory of skidding skin, the wheezing of old man exertions. The dark is complete, so much so the forest and the stoved-in tower seem painted in pitch. The warmth of the gutted fire only sharpens the chill.
The tears do not come until he touches her—a gentle hand across her back, falling like a leaf. Kindness. This is the one thing she cannot bear. Kindness.
“We have made our first mistake together,” he says, as though it were something significant. “We will not make it again.”
No forest slumbers in silence, even in the dead of a windless night. The touch of twigs and leaves, the press of forking branches, the sweep of limbs endlessly interlocking, incorporating more and more skirted trunks, creating a labyrinth of hollows, with only sudden scarps to interrupt them. Somehow it all conspired to create a whispering dark.
The coals tinkle like faraway glass.
“Am I broken?” she sobs. “Is that why I run?”
“We all bear unseen burdens,” he replies, sitting more behind her than beside. “We are all bent somehow.”
“You mean you,” she says, hating herself for the accusation. “The way you are bent!”
But the hand does not retreat from her back.
“The way I must be … I must discover the truth, Mimara. More than my spite turns upon what I do.”
Her snort is convulsive, phlegmatic. “What difference will it make? Golgotterath will be destroyed within the year. Your Second Apocalypse will be over before it even begins!”
His fingertips draw a
way.
“What do you mean?” he says, his tone both light and brittle.
“I mean that Sakarpus will have already fallen.” Why does she suddenly hate him? Was it because she seduced him, or because he failed to resist? Or was it because laying with him made no difference? She gazes at him, unable or unwilling to hide the triumph her eyes. “The plans were afoot ere I fled the cursed Heights. The Great Ordeal marches, old man.”
Silence. Remorse comes crashing in.
Can’t you see? something shrieks within her. Can’t you see the poison I bring? Strike me! Strangle me! Pare me to the core with your questions!
But she laughs instead. “You have shut yourself away for too long. You have found your revelation too late.”
CHAPTER FIVE
Momemn
Where luck is the twist of events relative to mortal hope, White- Luck is the twist of events relative to divine desire. To worship it is to simply will what happens as it happens
—ARS SIBBUL, SIX ONTONOMIES
Early Spring, 19 New Imperial Year (4132 Year-of-the-Tusk), Iothiah
Psatma Nannaferi sat in the dust, rocking to whispered prayers, her crooked hand held out to the train of passers-by. Though she counted their shadows, she took care not to probe their eyes, knowing that whatever moved them to give, be it pity, the bite of guilt, or simply the fear of an unlucky coin, it must be their own. The blessed words of the Sinyatwa were clear on that account: “From seed to womb, from seed to furrow. The right hand cannot give to the left …”
To give was to lose. It was an arithmetic with only one direction.
This was the miracle of the Ur-Mother, Yatwer, the Goddess of Fertility and Servitude, who moved through the world in the form of more and more and more. Unasked for bounty. Undeserved plenitude. She was the pure Gift, the breaking of tit for tat, the very principle of the birthing world. It was She who made time flesh.
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