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 Anasыrimbor Kellhus, he insists, was to be found in the secret of his origins-in the secret of something called the Dыnyain. "The Scylvendi was his mistake!" Achamian cries, his eyes wild with unkempt passions. "The Scylvendi knew what he was. Dыnyain!" And the secret of the Dыnyain, 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 consume 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, "Ishuдl."
He almost whispers it, as though it were a jar containing furies, something that could be cracked open by a careless tongue.
"Ishuдl," 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."
"Ishuдl? Kellhus is from Ishuдl?"
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 half-memory. 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 besi
de 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 away.
"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 before 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.
Which was why Nannaferi realized she had to move. More and more the copper talents came to her palm, rather than to those other beggars raised beside her. More and more they landed with a knowing clink, a momentary hesitation. One young girl, a Galeoth slave, even gave her an onion, whispering, "Priestess-Mother."
It always happened this way, even in cities as great as Iothiah. The human heart was ever bent on exchange. Even though people knew the purpose of the Beggar's Sermon, they were still drawn to her once the rumours of her presence spread. They felt the pinch of their offering, and assumed that this made it Gift enough. If you asked them whether they were trying to purchase the Goddess's favour, they would insist they only wanted to give. But their eyes and expressions always shouted otherwise.
Such a strange thing, giving, as if the arms of beggars could be the balance of the world.
So Nannaferi would be forced to move, to find someplace where anonymity could assure the purity of the offerings she received. To take from those angling for dispensations was a kind of pollution. And more importantly, it saved no souls. For adherents to the Cult of Yatwer, ignorance was the royal road to redemption.
She undid the veil from her old and cratered face, pocketed the coins in her sack-cloth robe. As though to verify her conclusion, three more coins plopped into the dust before her, one of them silver. Excess generosity was ever the sign of greed. She left them in their small oblong craters. Other Yatwerian priestesses, she knew, would have taken them, saying waste not want not or some other trite blasphemy. But she was not one of the others-she was Psatma Nannaferi.
She grabbed her cane and with shaking elbows out began to hoist herself to her feet…
Only to be struck to her knees.
It began as it always did, with a curious buzzing in the ears, as though dragonflies swarmed about her head. Then the ground bucked and flopped like cloth thrown over fish, and watercolour haloes swung about every living form. And she saw her, though she could not turn to look, a shadow woman, spoked in sun-silver, walking where everything and everyone exploded like clay urns, a silhouette so sharp it cut eyes sideways. A hand reached out and pressed the side of her hooded head, irresistibly gentle, forcing her cheek down to the pungent earth.
"Mother," she gasped.
The shadow held her, as though pinning her below unseen waters. "Be still, child," it said in a voice that crawled like beetles up out of the heart of things. It seemed that she would crack open, that her marrow would climb out and wrap her in a newer skin.
"Your brother has finally arrived. The White-Luck Warrior has come."
The hand leaned down upon her, a sun-swallowing mountain.
"So soon?"
"No, my love. On the anointed day."
Her body was but a string tied about an infinite iron nail, woollen tailings that trembled in an otherworldly wind.
"And the D-D-Demon?"
"Will be driven to his doom."
Then the roar vanished, sucked up like smoke from the opium bowl. The blasted streets became a wall of onlookers, peopled by vendors, teamsters, harlots, and soldiers. And the shadow became a man, a Nansur caste-noble by the look of him, with concerned yet gentle eyes. And the hand was his hand, rubbing her poxed cheek the way you might massage a sleeping limb.
He does not fear to touch-
"It's okay," he was saying. "You were seized, but it's passing. How long have you suffered the Falling Disease?"
But she ignored him-and all the others. She clawed aside his hovering hands. She fairly beat herself a path with her cane when she clambered to her feet.
What did they know of giving?
The city of Iothiah was ancient. Not so old as Sumna perhaps, but certainly older than the Thousand Temples-far older. As was the Cult of Yatwer.
The recently built Chatafet Temple in the northeast of the city was where most of Iothiah's faithful congregated to worship, mourn, and celebrate. By all accounts, it was one of the most successful Yatwerian temples in the Three Seas, bolstered by the ever-growing number of converts among what had been, until the First Holy War, a largely heathen population. But for those initiated in the greater mysteries of the Cult, it was little more than a point of administrative pride. The true importance of Iothiah lay in the funerary maze of the Ilchara Catacombs, the great Womb-of-the-Dead.
The once famed Temple of Ilchara
had been destroyed by the heathen Fanim, its marble and sandstone looted over the centuries of their tenure. Now it was little more than a gap in the rambling network of tenements surrounding it. All that remained were gravel heaps hazed by desert scree. Here and there ragged blocks rose pale as ice from the shag of grasses. Sandy tracks marked the paths taken by generations of playing children. Were it not for the black banners stitched with Yatwer's sacred sign-a harvest sickle that was at once a pregnant belly-nothing immediate would have identified it as hallowed ground.
Psatma Nannaferi led her sisters across a flower-covered mound toward the Catacomb entrance. Their sandalled feet swished through the grasses, adding a strange melancholy to their sporadic conversation. Nannaferi said nothing, concentrated on holding her head high despite her bent back. It seemed she wore her revelation rather than the black-silk gowns of her holy station, so palpable it had become. She could feel it billow about her in winds that only souls could sail. Immortal attire. She was certain the others glimpsed it, even if their eyes remained ignorant. They glanced more than they should, more quickly than they should, the sidelong appraisals of the envious and overawed.
Even scarred and diminutive, Nannaferi was and always had been imposing, a will of oak among hearts of balsa. In her youth, the senior priestesses never failed to overlook her when doling out the reprimands they used to confirm their superior station. Others they scolded and whipped, but they always passed by the "Shigeki pox-girl," as they called her, in silence. Small as she was, she seemed a weight too great for their flimsy nets. Something about her eyes, perhaps, which always seemed fixed on their tipping point. Or her voice, whose flawless edge called attention to the cracks and twists in their own.
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