No. She was nothing like Esmenet. Even the vicious dismissiveness of her snorts-all her own.
"Is that what you've told these scalpers?"
"What do you mean, 'told'?"
"That this journey will see them all killed."
"No."
"What did you tell them?"
"That I can show them the Coffers."
"The Coffers?"
"The legendary treasury of the School of Sohonc, lost when the Library of Sauglish was destroyed in the First Apocalypse."
"So they know nothing of Ishuдl? They have no idea that you hunt the origins of their Holy Aspect-Emperor? The man who pays the bounty on their scalps!"
"No."
"Murderer. That makes you a murderer."
"Yes."
"Teach me, then… Teach me, or I'll tell them everything!"
"Extortion, is it?"
"Murder is more wicked by far."
"What makes you certain I wouldn't kill you, if I'm a murderer as you say?"
"Because I look too much like my mother."
"There's a thought. Maybe I should just tell the Captain who you are. A Princess-Imperial. Think of the ransom you would fetch!"
"Yes… But then why bleed all the way to Sauglish looking for the Coffers?"
Impudent. An almost lunatic selfishness! Was she born this way? No. She wore her scars the way hermits wore their stench: as a mark of all the innumerable sins she had overcome.
"This is not a contest you can win, Wizard."
"How so?"
"I'm no fool. I know you've sworn by whatever it is you hold sacred to never teach anoth-"
"I am cursed! Disaster follows my teaching. Death and betra-"
"But you're mistaken to think that you can use threats or pleas or even reason with me. This Gift I have, this ability to see the world the way you see it, it's the only Gift I have ever received, the only hope I have ever known. I will be a witch, or I will be dead."
"Didn't you hear me? My teaching is cursed!"
"We're a fine match then."
Impudent! Impudent! Was there ever such a despicable slit?
That night they cast their camp a short distance from the cluster of others. Neither of them spoke a word. In fact, a quiet had fallen across all the Skin Eaters, enough to make the crackle of their fires the dominant discourse. Only Sarl's hashed voice continued to saw on as before.
"Kiampas! Kiampas! That was no pretty night, I tell you!"
Achamian need only look up to see several orange faces lifted in their direction-even among the Bitten. Never in his life, it seemed, had he felt so absurdly conspicuous. He heard nothing, but he listened to them mutter about her all the same: assessing her breasts and thighs, spinning expressions of longing into violent boasts, catalogues of what they would do, the vigour of their penetrations, and how she would scream and whimper; speculating on the whys and wherefores of her presence, how she had to be a whore to dare the likes of them, or how she soon would be…
He need only glance at Mimara to know that she listened too. Another woman, a free-wife, or a Princess-Imperial raised in cozened isolation, might be oblivious, simply assume that the white-water souls of men sluiced through the same innocent tributaries as their own, that they shared a common turbulence. But not Mimara. Her ears were pricked-Achamian could tell. But where he felt apprehension, the shrill possessiveness of an overmatched father, she seemed entirely at her ease.
She had been raised in the covetous gaze of men, and though she had suffered beneath brutal hands, she had grown strong. She carried herself, Achamian realized, with a kind of coy arrogance, as though she were the sole human in the presence of resentful apes. Let them grunt. Let them abuse themselves. She cared nothing for all the versions of her that danced or moaned or choked behind their primitive eyes-save that they made her, and all the possibilities that her breath and body offered, invaluable.
She was the thing wanted. So be it. She would find ways to make them pay.
But for Achamian it was too much. Her resemblance to Esmenet was simply too uncanny. And though he had little or no affection for the daughter-the girl was too damaged-he felt himself falling in love with the mother all over again. Esmenet. Esmenet. Sometimes, when his flame-gazing reveries dipped too deep, he found himself startled by the image of her in his periphery, and the very world would reel as he struggled to sort memories of the First Holy War from the chill dark of the now. To go back, he found himself thinking. I would do anything to go back…
So, with the hollow chest of speaking for the sake of forgetting, Achamian began explaining the metaphysics of sorcery to her-if only to kill the prurient silence with the sound of his own voice. She watched him, wide-eyed, the perfect oval of her face perched on her knees-illuminated and beautiful.
Quite against his intentions, he began teaching her the Gnosis.
The hike into the mountains proved arduous. The trail heaved and plummeted as it strayed farther and farther from the river gorges. The mules clicked across tracts of sheeted gravel and bare stone. The mighty broadleaves of the plateau became ever more spindly. "It's like we're climbing back into winter," Mimara breathlessly noted after picking a purple bud from the twigs hanging above her head.
Perhaps because of the accusatorial aura hanging between them, or perhaps just to steer his thoughts away from the burning in his thighs or the stitches in his flank, Achamian began teaching her Gilcыnya, the ancient tongue of all Gnostic Magi. As a student at Atyersus, he had been dismayed to discover that he would have to learn an entire language-not to mention one whose grammar and intonation were scarcely human-before he would be able to sing his first primitive Cant. Mimara, however, took to the task with out-and-out zealotry.
He hadn't the heart to tell her the truth: that the reason the sorcerous Schools were loath to take adults as students had to do with the way age seemed to diminish the ability to learn languages. What had taken him a single year as a child could very well take her several. It could be the case that she would never learn to manipulate the meanings with the precision and purity required…
Why this should seem a crime was beyond him.
The Skin Eaters watched them whenever opportunity afforded, some more boldly than others. Where the width of the trail allowed, a dozen or so always seemed to gather in loose and fortuitous packs about them. Achamian found himself bristling each time, and not simply because of the endless succession of gazes sliding across her form. They were friendly, courteous to a fault, but there was no mistaking their bullying nearness, or the predatory lag whenever their look crossed his own, that moment too long, pregnant with threat and prowess. He understood the game well enough, the false gallantry of helping her across the more treacherous twists in the trail, the implicit significance of offering him the exact same assistance. Leave her to us, old man…
Mimara, of course, affected not to notice.
That afternoon a stop was called at the base of an incline. No one at their end of the line knew the cause of the delay, and everyone was worn out enough to remain incurious. Achamian was doing vocabulary drills with Mimara when Sarl surprised them. "The Captain wants you," the man said, smiling as usual, though more than a little chagrin seemed written into the wrinkles netting his eyes. He grimaced at Mimara as he paused to catch his breath, then looked to the other Skin Eaters milling in the gloom. He lowered his voice to a mutter. "Troubling news."
Achamian did his best to pace the old cutthroat up the incline. By the time he gained the crest of the ridge line, he was breathing hard, pressing his knees with his hands at every step. A cold breeze greeted him, soaking through his beard and clothing. The Osthwai Mountains piled across the horizon in all their glory, titanic flanges of earth and stone rearing into cloud-smothered peaks. The woollen ceiling seemed close enough to touch, and so black that his hackles raised in the expectation of thunder. But the distances remained crisp with silence.
He saw Lord Kosoter standing with Cleric looming at his side
. Both were watching Kiampas haggle with a Thunyeri almost as tall as Oxwora, though far older and nowhere as thick-limbed. The two seemed to be speaking some mongrel tongue that combined elements of Sheyic and Thunyeri. At least several dozen of the man's wild countrymen stood watching in the near distance.
The tall one, Sarl explained in a low murmur, was called Feather, though Achamian could see nothing avian about his ornament. Several shrunken Sranc heads adorned his crazed red-and-grey hair. His war girdle used knuckle-bones in the place of beads. Aside from his hauberk, the gold-wire Circumfix hanging about his neck seemed his only concession to civilization. Even paces back, Achamian could smell his furs, the carnivore reek of blood and piss. He was, Sarl continued in a low mutter, the chieftain of one of the so-called tribal companies, most of which were made up of Thunyeri, a people who had warred so long and so hard against the Sranc it had become a missionary calling.
When Kiampas and Feather concluded their business, the tall chieftain reached out to clasp forearms with Lord Kosoter. It struck Achamian as a formidable moment, two storied Scalpoi, each with their own aura of assassination, each garbed in tattered parodies of their nation's battledress. It was the first time he had witnessed the Captain extend anything so precious as respect. With an enigmatic gesture, the chieftain returned to the trail, followed by the long line of his men. His manic blue eyes scraped across Achamian as he passed.
"They plan on camping on the low slopes," Kiampas was saying to Lord Kosoter, "hunting, foraging…"
"What's the problem?" Achamian asked.
Kiampas turned to him, his eyes smiling in an otherwise guarded expression, the triumphant look of a man who kept fastidious count of wins and losses. "A spring blizzard in the mountains," he said. "We're stuck here for at least two weeks, probably more."
"What are you saying?" Achamian looked to the glaring Captain.
Kiampas was only too happy to respond. "That your glorious expedition has come to an end, Wizard. We can wait or we can hump round the Osthwai's southern spur. Either way we've no hope of reaching Sauglish by summer's end." There was no mistaking the relief in his eyes.
"The Black Halls," someone said in the tone of contradiction.
It was the Nonman, Cleric. He had his broad back turned to them, his cowl facing east, toward the nearest of the mountains to their right. His voice pimpled the skin, as much for its import as for its inhuman resonances. "There is another way through the mountains," he continued, twisting his unseen face toward them. "A way that I remember."
Achamian held his breath, understanding instantly what the Nonman was suggesting but too dismayed to truly consider the implications. Sarl snorted, as if hearing a joke beneath even his vulgar contempt.
Lord Kosoter studied his Nonman lieutenant, stared into the black oval with cryptic intensity.
"Are you sure?"
A drawn silence, filled by the guttural banter of the Thunyeri trudging behind them.
"I lived there," Cleric said, "on the sufferance of my cousins, long ago… Before the Age of Men."
"Are you sure you remember?"
The cowl bent earthward.
"They were… difficult days."
The Ainoni nodded in grim deliberation.
"Captain?" Kiampas exclaimed. "You know the stories… Every year some fool leads his compa-"
Lord Kosoter had not looked at the sergeant until he mentioned the word fool. His eyes were interruption enough.
"The Black Halls it is, then!" Sarl exclaimed in a smoky cackle, the one he always used to blunt his Captain's more murderous inclinations. He seemed to wheeze and laugh at each man in turn. "Kiampas! Can't you see, Kiampas? We're Skin Eaters, man-Skin Eaters! How many times have we talked about the Black Halls?"
"And what about the rumours?" the Nansur officer snapped, though with the wariness of a struck dog.
"Rumours?" Achamian asked.
"Bah!" Sarl cackled. "Men just can't countenance mystery. If companies get eaten, they have to invent a Great Eater, no matter what." He turned to Achamian, his face wrinkling in incredulity. "He thinks a dragon hides in the Black Halls. A Dragon!" He jerked his gaze back to Kiampas, red face thrust forward, knobby fists balled at his side. "Dragon, my eye! It's the skinnies that get them. It's the skinnies that get us all in the end."
"Sranc?" Achamian asked, even though fire-spitting monstrosities heaved in his soul's eye. How many Wracu had roared through his ancient dreams? "How can you be sure?"
"Because their clans make it through the mountains somehow," Sarl replied, "especially in the winter. Why do you think so many scalpers risk the Black Halls in the first place?"
"I told you," Kiampas persisted. "I met those two from Attrempus, survivors of the High Shields. I'm no fool when it comes-"
"Poofs!" Sarl spat. "Moppers! Trying to soak you for a drink! The High Shields were massacred on the long side of the mountains. Kiampas. Kiampas! Everyone knows that! The Long Side!"
The two sergeants glared at each other, Sarl in entreaty, like the son who always placates his father for his brother's sake, and Kiampas in incredulous resentment, like the sole sane officer in a host of madmen-which was, Achamian reflected, not all that far from the case.
"We take the Low Road," Lord Kosoter grated. "We enter the Black Halls."
His tone seemed to condemn all humanity, let alone the petty dispute before him. The Nonman continued to stare off into the east, tall and broad beneath his mottled cowl. The mountain climbed the climbing ground beyond him, a white sentinel whispering with altitude and distance.
"Cleric says he remembers."
Achamian returned to find Mimara fairly surrounded by Skin Eaters, most of them Bitten. She stood childlike in the looming presence of Oxwora and Pokwas, her look one of guarded good humour. She was careful to keep her face and posture directed toward the trail, as though she expected to leave their company at any moment, as well as to not look at any one of them for more than a heartbeat. He could tell she was frightened, but not in any debilitating way.
"So you're Ainoni, then?"
"Small wonder the Captain's smitten…"
"Maybe he'll stop undressing us with his cursed eyes!"
The laughter was genuine enough to make Mimara smile, but utterly unlike the raucous mirth that was their norm. Soldiers, Achamian had observed, often wore thin skins in the presence of women they could neither buy nor brutalize. A light and careless manner, a gentle concern for the small things, stretched across a sorrow and an anger that no woman could fathom. And these men were more than soldiers, more than scalpers, even. They were Skin Eaters. They were men who led lives of uncompromising viciousness and savagery. Men who could effortlessly forget the dead rapist that had been their bosom friend.
And they would try to woo what they could not take.
"It's as I thought," Soma said as Achamian joined them. His look was amiable enough but with an edge that advised no contradictions. "She's one of the Bitten as well!"
The smell of contrivance hung about all their looks. They had planned this, Achamian realized, as a way of luring the prize to their fire. The question was one of how far the covenant went.
"The Ochain Passes are closed," he said. "Blizzard."
He watched their faces struggle to find the appropriate expressions.
There was comedy in all sudden reversals, a kind of immaterial nudity, to find your designs hanging, stripped of the logic that had been their fundament. Their carnal plots depended on the expedition, and the expedition depended on the Passes.
"The decision has been made," he said, trying hard not to sound satisfied.
"We brave the Black Halls of Cil-Aujas."
CHAPTER NINE
Momemn
A beggar's mistake harms no one but the beggar.
A king's mistake, however, harms everyone but the king.
Too often, the measure of power lies not in the number who obey your will, but in the number who suffer your stupidity.
— Triami
s I, Journals and Dialogues
Early Spring, 19 New Imperial Year (4132 Year-of-the-Tusk), Momemn
Her face seemed numb for tingling.
"Does he hear us, Mommy? Does he know?"
Esmenet clutched Kelmomas's little hand so tight she feared she might hurt him. "Yes," she heard herself say. The stone of the Ashery snared her words, held them close and warm, as though she spoke into a lover's neck. "Yes. He's the son of an earthly god."
According to Nansur custom, the mother of a dead male child had to mark her face with her son's ashes each full moon after the cremation: two lines, one down each cheek. Thraxami, they were called, tears-of-the-pyre. Only when her tears no longer darkened them could the rite cease. Only when the weeping ended.
Even now, she could feel his residue across her cheeks, burning, accusing, as though transmuted, Samarmas had become antithetical to his mother, a kind of poison that her skin could not abide.
As though he had become wholly his father's.
The tradition was too old, too venerated, to be contradicted. Esmenet had seen engravings of women marked with thraxami dating back to the early days of ancient Cenei, trains of them marching like captives. And in the ritual dramas the temples put on during Cultic festivals, mummers used black lines down a white-painted face to represent desolate women the way they used red horizontal lines, wurrami, to depict rage-maddened men. For the Nansur, thraxami were synonymous with mourning.
But where others kept their child's remains in their household shrine, little Samarmas, as a Prince-Imperial, had been interred in the High Royal Ashery of the Temple Xothei. So once again, what was tender and private for others became rank spectacle for her. Thousands had mobbed the gates of the Imperial Precincts, and thousands more the foundations of mighty Xothei, a seething carnival of mourning and anticipation, mothers casting dust skyward and rending their hair, slaves loafing and gawking, boys jumping to snatch glimpses over grown shoulders, and many more. Even here, deep in the temple's mazed bowel, she thought she could hear their anxious hum.
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