She will become a spy.
So far the Mop has climbed and conquered every terrain they have encountered, scaffolding the sides of hills, braiding the heights above rivers, pillaring broad plains. She has peered through the green murk and trod across root-heaved earth for so long that sometimes she forgets the arid smell of open places, the flash of sunlight, and the kiss of unobstructed wind. All is humid and enclosed. She feels like a mole, forever racing beneath the thatch, always wary of flying shadows. When she thinks of the Stone Hags who have fallen in exhaustion, they are already buried in her soul’s eye.
Finally they come to a stone formation jutting like a great fractured bone from the earth. Scrub clings to its scarped shelves, but nothing else, and peering up they actually catch ragged glimpses of sky where its bulk breaches the canopy. Standing aloof from their curious peering, the Captain bids them to find a way to the summit. Though hours of daylight remain, they will camp.
The sun glares. The air chills. The Mop tosses on and on, an endless ocean of swaying crowns. Whatever relief they hope to find in wind and sunlight is snuffed when they look to one another. Squinting. Eyes glittering from blackened faces. Ragged like beggars. In the gloom below, they seemed as true to their surroundings as the moss or the humus. Here on the heights, there is no overlooking either their straits or their desperation.
They look like the damned. Achamian, in particular, given the Mark.
They make camp on the formation’s rump, where enough soil has accumulated to sustain a thin wig of foliage. They sit in scattered clots, watching the setting sun fall crimson into distant canopies. The Mop seems to mock and to beckon in turn, a susurrus unlike any she has heard, a horde of a million million leaves rattling in the dying breeze.
Opposite their camp, the formation rears into a promontory, stone horned like a bent-back thumb. The Captain stands in the dying light, beckons Cleric to follow him. Mimara pretends not to watch them vanish about the treacherous ledges. She counts fifty heartbeats, then strikes out along the opposite face, where they have designated their latrine. She continues past the putrid smell, literally risks life and limb scaling a serrated pitch. Then she creeps forward in a crouch, moving toward the sound of muttered voices.
The breeze or the play of echoes across chaotic stone fools her, for she almost blunders upon them. Only some instinct to freeze saves her from discovery. She breathlessly shrinks behind the cover of a tortoise-humped outcropping.
“They remind you …”
The Captain’s voice. It shocks her as surely as a knife point pressed against the back of her neck.
She creeps along the outer circuit of the tortoise stone, nearer, nearer … As shallow as it is, her breath burns against the tightness of her high chest. Her heart thumps.
“What’s happening?” the Nonman says. “I don’t … I don’t understand …”
“You are truly a blasted idiot.”
She steps from behind the rising shell of rock, finds herself standing almost entirely exposed. Only the direction of their gazes prevents them from seeing her. Cleric sits in a pose of dejected glory, at once beautiful and grotesque for the blasted depths of his Mark. The Captain stands over him, a vision of archaic savagery, his Chorae so close to the Nonman that she can see a faint husk of salt rising across his scalp.
“Tell me!” Incariol cries in hushed tones. “Tell me why I am here!”
A moment of glaring impatience. “Because they remind you.”
“But who? They remind me of who?” Even as Cleric says this his glittering black eyes wander toward her.
“Someone you once knew,” the Captain grates. “They remind you of someone you once—”
He whirls toward her. His hair swings in broken sheets of black and grey.
“What are you doing?” he barks.
“I-I …” she stammers. “I think I need more … more Qirri.”
A moment of murderous deliberation, then something like a grin hooks his eyes. He turns wordlessly to the Nonman, who remains seated as before.
“No,” Cleric says with a strange solemnity. “Not yet. I apologize … Mimara.”
This is the first time he has spoken her name. She retreats, flinching from the Captain’s manic glare, her skin buzzing with the shame of her exposure. Afterward she remembers the Nonman’s lips more than his voice, their fulsome curves, white tinged with too-long-in-the-water blue. She sees them moving to the rhythm of consonant and vowel.
Mim … araa …
Like a kiss, she thinks, her arms bundled against a curious sense of chill.
Like a kiss.
She keeps to herself the following day. The Wizard seems only too happy to oblige her. The trail has its rhythms, its own ebb and flow. Sometimes everyone seems to be engaged in low conversation, while other times everyone appears sullen and wary or simply lost in their own labouring breaths, and naught can be heard above the whistling chorus of birdsong. Their descent back into the Mop has replaced their anxiousness with melancholy.
She is quite lost in thought when Cleric comes alongside her, senseless ruminations, more a collage of recriminations and pained memories than anything meaningful.
She smiles at her shock. The unearthly beauty of his face and form unsettles her, almost as much as the horrid depth of his Mark. Something wrenches at the inner corners of her eyes whenever she allows her gaze to linger. He is contradiction incarnate.
“Is it true,” he inexplicably asks, “that being touched by another and touching oneself are quite distinct sensations for Men?”
The question bewilders and embarrasses her, to the point of drawing even more heat to her flushed face. “Yes … I suppose …”
He walks in silence for a time, eyes tracking the ground before his booted feet. There is something … overwhelming about his stature. The other men, with the possible exception of Sarl, exude the same aura of physical strength and martial brutality as had so many warlike men on the Andiamine Heights. But Cleric possesses a density beyond intimations of force and threat, one that reminds her of her stepfather and the way the world always seemed to bow about his passage.
She thinks of all the skinnies he has killed, the legions incinerated in the existential thunder of his voice. And he seems hardened for the multitudes that flicker shrieking before her soul’s eye—in Cil-Aujas, on Maimor, across the Mop—as if murder draws flesh to stone. She wonders what it would be like, dying beneath his black-glittering eyes.
Beautiful, she decides.
“I think I once knew this,” he finally says. At first she cannot identify the passion twining through his voice. Achamian has told her much about the Nonmen, how their souls often move in ways counter to the tracks of human passion. She wants to say sorrow, but it seems more somehow …
She wonders if tragedy could be a passion.
“Now you know it again,” she says, smiling at the frigid gaze.
“No,” he replies. “Never again.”
“Then why ask?”
“There is … comfort … in rehearsing the dead motions of the past.”
She finds herself nodding—as if they were peers discussing common knowledge. “We are alike in this way.”
“Mimara,” he says, his tone so simple with astonishment that for an instant he seems a mortal man. “Your name is … Mimara …” He turns to her, his eyes brimming with human joy. She shudders at the glimpse of his fused teeth—there is something too dark about his smile. “Ages have passed,” he says wondering, “since I have remembered a human name …”
Mimara.
Afterward, her thoughts racing, she ponders the absurdity of memory, the fact that so simple a faculty can make a being so powerful so pathetic in its faltering. But the Wizard has been watching, of course. He’s always watching, it seems. Always worried. Always … trying.
Like Mother.
“What did he want?” he rasps in heated Ainoni.
“Why do you fear him?” she snaps in return. She is never sure where thi
s instinct comes from, knowing how to throw men on their heels.
The old Wizard walks and scowls, frail against a murky background of colossal trunks and mossed deadfalls. Trees growing in a graveyard of trees.
“Because I’m not sure that I could kill him when the time comes,” he finally says. He speaks as much to the matted ground as to her, his beard crowded against his breastbone, his eyes unfocused in the manner of men making too-honest admissions.
“When the time comes …” she says in mocking repetition.
He turns to her profile, studies her.
“He’s an Erratic, Mimara. When he decides he loves us, he will try to kill us.”
The words she overheard the previous night seem to clutch with their own fingers, to scratch with nails like quills …
“But who? They remind me of who?”
“Someone,” the Captain replies in his grinding voice, “you once knew …”
She composes her face into the semblance of boredom. “How can you be so sure?” she asks the Wizard.
“Because that is what Erratics do. Kill those they love.”
She holds his gaze for an instant, then looks down to her trudging feet. She glimpses the skull of some animal—a fox, perhaps—jutting from the humus.
“To remember.”
She doesn’t mean this as a question, and apparently understanding, the old Wizard says nothing in reply. He always seems preternaturally wise when he does this.
“But his memory …” she says. “How could he be more powerful than you when he can barely follow the passage of days?”
Achamian scratches his chin through the wiry mat of his beard. “There’s more than one kind of memory … It’s events and individuals he forgets, mostly. Skills are different. They don’t pile on the same way across the ages. But like I told you, sorcery depends on the purity of the meanings. What makes magic so difficult for you to learn turns on the same principle that makes him so powerful—even if he has forgotten the bulk of what he once knew. Ten thousand years, Mimara! The purity that escapes you, the purity that I find such toil, is simply a reflex for the likes of him.”
He stares at her the way he always does when trying to press home some crucial point: his lips slightly parted, his eyes beseeching beneath a furrowed brow.
“A Quya Mage,” she says.
“A Quya Mage,” he repeats, nodding in relief. “Few things in this world are more formidable.”
She tries to smile at him but looks away because of the sudden threat of tears. Worry and fear assail her. Over Cleric and the Captain, over the skin-spy and what it has insinuated. She draws a deep breath, risks looking at the old man. He grins in melancholy reassurance, and suddenly it all seems manageable, standing here at his gruff and tender side.
Akka. The world’s only sorcerer without a School. The only Wizard.
“Akka …” she murmurs. A kind of gentle beseeching.
She understands now why her mother still loves him—even after so many years, even after sharing her bed with a living God. The uniform teeth behind his smile. The sheen of compassion that softens even his most hostile glare. The heart and simple passion of a man who, despite all his failings, is capable of risking everything—life and world—in the name of love.
“What?” he asks, his voice querulous, his eyes twinkling.
An unaccountable shyness climbs into her face. He is, she realizes, the first man to have ever made her feel safe.
“May our dooms be one,” she says with curt nod.
The old Wizard smiles. “May our dooms be one, Mimara.”
The pebble it throws is round and chipped, drawn down from the high mountains, its surface cracked and polished by ages of blasting water and migrating gravel. It threads the sieve of dead branches, climbing its low-thrown arc, before sailing into the midst of supine company, over the slumbering form of Pokwas, into the tangle of hair about her head.
She awakens instantly, knows instantly.
Soma.
She recoils from the thought, knowing that Soma, the real Soma, lies dead somewhere near Marrow—that what awaits her in the black has no name because it has no soul.
She wanders from the camp, following a rare lane of low light, beyond the first ring of towering sentinels, beyond the reach of any incipient Wards. She feels more than sees the shadow atop the blunt limb above her. Breathless, she looks up …
The shadow leans down and forward, and she sees it, staring at her with wide, expectant eyes …
Her own face.
“I can smell the fetus within you …” she hears her voice say.
“Kill the Captain, and it will be saved.”
No. No. No.
Deceit! Devilry and deceit!
All her life she has thought in whispers. A habit of slaves, who must practise within what will save them without.
But her heart shouts as she tries to find her way back to sleep.
Lie. This is what they do, skin-spies. Uncertainty is their contagion; fear and confusion are their disease. “They seduce,” her mother once told her. “They play on your fears, your vulnerabilities, use them to craft you into their tool.”
But what if …
Coupling. It was something she did … A kind of blankness rose within her, an absence where human feeling should have been. Men always wanted her, and she almost always despised them for it. Almost always. Sometimes, when she needed things or when she simply wanted to feel dead, her body answered their want, and she took them into her. She held them while they laboured and trembled, she bore them as a burden upon her back. And she almost never thought about it afterward, simply continued running through her running life.
She had endured innumerable suitors while on the Andiamine Heights, an insufferable parade of dandies and widowers, some cruel, others despondent, all of them hungry for the peach of Imperial power. To a man she had spurned them, had even managed to provoke a handful of formal protestations. One, the Patridomos of House Israti, even brought a suit before the Judges, claiming that she should be forced to marry him as punishment for her slander. Mother had seen to that fool.
But she had been bedded nonetheless. And despite years of carrying a whore-shell, despite the chaos of her menstrual cycle, pregnancy was not impossible. The strong seed forces the womb …
Her mother was proof of that.
Three, she tells herself. There are only three occasions she can think of that would make the accursed creature true. There was the darling body-slave—little more than a boy—who attended to her ledgers before her flight. As absurd as it is, she owns estates across the Three Seas—as does everyone in the Imperial Family. There was Imhailas, the vain Captain of the Eothic guard, who helped her escape in exchange for a taste of her peach.
Then there was Achamian, who yearned so for the mother she so resembled. She had yielded and he had taken—their “first mistake together,” he had called it—in exchange for a sorcery she no longer desired.
Three, she tells herself, when in fact there is only one.
She dwells on the skin-spy and its revelation, makes adversaries of its words and an arena of her soul.
“I can smell the fetus within you …”
She battles it with unvoiced denunciations. Liar! she rails within. Obscene deceiver! But hers is a treacherous heart, forever miring what should be simple with unwanted implications. So she hears the Wizard speaking in rejoinder …
“The Judging Eye is the eye of the Unborn …”
Trying to explain away the horror of her accursed sight.
“The eye that watches from the vantage of the God.”
On and on the voices tangle, until it seems they are one and the same, the sorcerer and the spy.
“Kill the Captain, and it will be saved.”
No, she tells herself. No. No. No. The brothel has taught her the power of pretense, the way facts will sometimes fade into oblivion, if you deny them with enough ferocity.
This is what she will do.
&n
bsp; Yes. Yes. Yes.
Several days pass without sign of the thing called Soma. She tells herself she is relieved, yet she lingers in the lonely dark nonetheless, gazing up through the dead branches, listening to the blackness croak and creak.
One night she finds a small pool bathed in a miraculous shaft of moonlight. She crouches beside it, stares up through the hanging tunnel to consider the moon. She gazes at her image poised between floating leaves and finds herself troubled. The skin-spy, she realizes, was the last time she saw her own face. She wants to fret over her appearance in the old way, to primp and preen, but it all seems so foolish, life before this, the Slog of Slogs.
Then, in the empty interval between breaths, the Judging Eye opens.
For a time she gazes in stupefaction, then she weeps at the transformation.
Her hair cropped penitent short. Her clothing fine, but with the smell of borrowed things. Her belly low and heavy with child …
And a halo about her head, bright and silver and so very holy. The encircling waters darken for its glow.
She convulses about breathless sobs, falls clutching her knees for anguish …
For she sees that she is good—and this she cannot bear.
The old Wizard pesters her with questions when she returns. He wonders at her swollen eyes—worries. She withdraws the way she always withdraws when dismay overwhelms her ability to think clearly. She can see the hurt and the confusion in the Wizard’s eyes, knows that he has treasured the gradual intimacy that has grown between them—that he truly has come to think of her as his daughter …
But this can never be, for fathers do not lie with their daughters.
So she spurns him, even as she allows him to curl about her.
To shelter.
Weeks pass. Weeks of marching gloom and touches of Qirri. Weeks of battling clans of Sranc.
Weeks of tracing the line of her stomach in the murk.
At last they walk clear of the Mop, and it seems like climbing, setting foot on land open to the sun. They gather in a line across a low ridge, thirteen of them including the Hags, their skin and clothes black from sleeping across mossy earth, the splint and chainlinks of their armour rusted for rain and torn for battling Sranc. The Skin Eaters remain intact, but the Hags have dwindled to three: the Tydonni thane, Hurm, who remains as hale as any; the Galeoth freeman, Koll, whose body seems to be wasting about his will; and the deranged Conriyan, Hilikas—or Grinner, as Galian calls him—who seems to draw sustenance from madness.
The White Luck Warrior Page 21