"Why did she leave you?" she asks the old Wizard the following afternoon on the trail. "Mother, I mean."
"Because I died," the old Wizard says, his brown eyes lost in the fog of distant seeing. He refuses to say anything more specific. "The world is too cruel to wait for the dead."
"And the living?"
He stops and fixes her with that curious stare of his, the one that makes her think of artisans reviewing the work of more gifted rivals.
"You already know the answer to that one," he says.
"I do?"
He seems to catch his smile, condense it into pursed lips. Galian and Sutadra file between them, the former frowning, the latter intent and oblivious. There are times when they all become strangers to one another, and now is one of them-though it seems that Sutadra has been a stranger all along. Bald stone ridges flange the distances beyond the Wizard, promising toil and arms bundled against high wind.
"Why…" the Wizard begins, then trails. "Why didn't you leave me back in the pit?"
Because I lov "Because I need you," she says without breath. "I need your knowledge."
He stares at her, his beard and hair trembling in the breeze. "So the old wineskin has a few swallows left," he says inexplicably.
He ignores her glare, turns to follow the others. More riddles! She fumes in silence for the remainder of the afternoon, refuses to even look at the old fool. He laughs at her, she decides-and after acknowledging that she had saved him! Bent-back ingrate.
Some starve. Some eat. Disparity is simply the order of things. It's only when fat men make sauce out of other's starvation that it becomes a sin.
– | She belongs.
The others have shown this to her in ways numerous and infinitesimal. The pitch of their talk does not change when she enters their midst. They tease her with brotherly skepticism instead of masculine daring. Their eyes are less inclined to linger on her limbs and more inclined to remain fixed on her gaze.
The Skin Eaters are less and they are more. Less because of what Cil-Aujas has taken, more because she has become one of them. Even the Captain seems to have accepted her. He now looks through her the way he looks through all his men.
They make camp on a ridge that falls in a series of gravel sheaves into the Mop. She stares at the forests for a time, at the play of sunlight across the humped canopy. Birds like floating dots. She thinks of how the expedition will crawl across the landscape, like lice picking their way through the World's own pelt. She has heard the others mutter about the Mop, about the dangers, but after Cil-Aujas, nothing seems particularly dangerous, nothing that touches sky.
They dine on what remains of Xonghis's previous kill, but she finds herself more eager for the smudge of Qirri that Cleric dispenses. Afterward, she keeps to herself, makes a point of avoiding Achamian's many looks, some questioning, others… searching. He does not understand the nature of his crime-like all men.
Somandutta once again tries to engage her, but she simply glares at the young caste-noble until he slouches away. He had saved her in Cil-Aujas, actually carried her for a mad term, only to abandon her when her need was greatest-and this she cannot forgive.
To think she had thought the fool charming.
She watches Sarl instead: he alone has not bathed since climbing out of the Ziggurat's bowel, so he sometimes seems more shade than man. Sranc blood has soaked into the very texture of his skin. His hauberk is intact, but his tunic is as foul as rags worn by a latrine beggar. He huddles against a rust-stained boulder the size of a cart, huddles in a way that suggests hiding one moment, conspiring the next. The boulder is his friend, she realizes. Sarl now sits with everything as if it were his closest friend.
"Ah, yes…" he murmurs in the gurgle that is his voice. His small black eyes glitter. "Ah… yesss…" The dusk carves his wrinkles so deep that his face looks woven of bundled string.
"The fucking Mop… The Mop. Eh, lads? Eh? "
Viscous laughter, followed by a snapping cough. The back of his thought is broken, she realizes. He can only kick and claw where he has fallen.
"More darkness, yes. Tree darkness…"
She does not remember what happened at the bottom of the Great Medial Screw, and yet she knows nonetheless, knows with the knowledge that moves limbs and drums hearts.
Something was open that should not have been open. She closed it…
Somehow.
Achamian, during one of his many attempts to sound her out on the matter, mentions the line between the World and the Outside, of souls returning as demons. "How, Mimara?" he asks with no small wonder. "What you accomplished… It should not have been possible. Was it the Chorae?"
No, she wants to say, it was the Tear of God… But she nods and shrugs instead, in the bored manner of those who pretend to have moved on to more decisive things.
She has been given something. What she has always considered a blight, a deformity of the soul, has become fraught with enigma and power. The Judging Eye opened. At the moment of absolute crisis, it opened and saw what needed to be seen…
A tear of the God, blazing in her palm. The God of Gods!
She has been a victim her whole life. So her instinct is the immediate one, to raise a concealing hand, to turn a shoulder in warding. Only a fool fails to hide what is precious.
Precious-and of course utterly incompatible with the one thing she desperately wants. Chorae and witches, as the Ainoni would say, rarely prosper beneath the same roof.
She finds a sour comfort in this-even a kind of warrant. Had it been pure and simple she would have shunned it out of jaded, melancholy reflex. But now it is something that demands to be understood-on her terms…
So of course the old Wizard refuses to tell her anything.
More comfort. Frustration and torment is the very shape of her life. The one thing she trusts.
That night she awakens to the sound of Sarl crooning in a low, lilting voice. A song like smoke, quickly drawn into soundlessness by the ridge's height. She listens, watching the Nail of Heaven as it peeks through the tattered garments of a cloud. The words to the song, if there are any, are incomprehensible.
After a time, the song trails into rasping murmur, then a moan.
Sarl is old, she realizes. He left more than his wits in the bowel of the mountain.
Sarl is dying.
A pang of terror bolts through her. She turns to look for the Wizard among the rocks, only to find him immediately behind her, bestial with hair. He had crept to her side after she had fallen asleep, she realizes.
She stares into the shadow of his rutted face and smiles, thinking, At least he does not sing. She crinkles her nose at his smell. She drifts back asleep to the fluttering image of him.
I understand, Mother… I finally see… I really do.
She dreams of her stepfather, wakes with the frowning confusion that always accompanies dreams too sticky with significance. With every blink she sees him: the Aspect-Emperor, not as he is but as he would be were he the shade that haunted the accursed deeps of Cil-Aujas…
Not a man but an emblem. A living Seal, rising on tides of hellish unreality.
"You are the eye that offends, Mimara…"
She wants to ask Achamian about the dream but finds the memory of their feud too sharp to speak around. She knows what everybody knows about dreams, that they are as likely to deceive as to illuminate. On the Andiamine Heights, the caste-noble wives would consult augurs, pay outrageous sums. The caste-menials and the slaves would pray, usually to Yatwer. The girls in the brothel used to drip wax on pillow-beetles to determine the truth of their dreams. If the wax trapped the insect, the dream was true. She has heard of dozens of other folk divinations besides. But she no longer knows what to believe…