her like an unwanted yen for perversion. Its lid is drowsy, and indeed it slumbers so deep she often forgets its presence. But when it stirs, the very world is transformed.
For moments at a time, she can see them… Good and evil.
Not buried, not hidden, but writ like another colour or texture across the hide of everything. The way good men shine brighter than good women. Or how serpents glow holy, while pigs seem to wallow in polluting shadow. The world is unequal in the eyes of the God-she understands this with intimate profundity. Masters over slaves, men over women, lions over crows: At every turn, the scriptures enumerate the rank of things. But for terrifying moments, the merest of heartbeats, it is unequal in her eyes as well.
It's a kind of madness, she knows. She has seen too many succumb in the brothels to think she is immune. Their handlers were loath to mark the skin, so they punished the soul. She was no exception.
It has to be madness. Even still, she cannot but wonder how Achamian will appear in the light of this more discerning eye.
The morning sun rears from the bulk of the hill and lances across the trees with their limbs like frozen ropes, spilling pools of bright through the thatched gloom. And she watches and watches, until the colours pale into coral evening.
And she thinks the tower was not so tall. It only seems such because it occupies higher ground.
The world hates you…
The thought comes upon her, not with stealth or clamour, but with the presumption of a slave owner, of one who sees no boundaries save their own.
The suffering follows quick upon the heels of her vigil-she had exhausted the last of her provisions before reaching the tower-and something within her rejoices. The world does hate her-she does not need a small brother's tearful confession to know that. 'It hurts Momma to even look at you! She wishes she would have drowned you instead of sold you…' Here she sits, starving and shivering, staring and croaking at the inscrutable window beneath the tower's demolished crown. This one thing she wants-to become a witch, to exact what she has paid…
So of course she must be denied.
There is no other place. So why not cast her life across the Whore's table? Why not press Fate to the very brink? At least she will die knowing.
She weeps twice, though she feels nothing of the sorrow that moves her: once glimpsing one of the little girls crouched peeing beneath sun-shot bowers, and again seeing the Wizard's silhouette pacing back and forth across his open window-back and forth. She literally cannot remember the last time she has been at one with her weeping. In her childhood, she supposes. Before the slavers.
At the very end of the heart's exhaustion lies a kind of resignation, a point where resolve and surrender become indistinguishable. Wavering requires alternatives, and she has none. The world is in rout. To leave would be to embark on a flight without refuge, to lead an itinerant existence, aimless, with nothing to credit one far-flung road over another, since despair has become all directions. She has no choice because all her choices have become the same.
A broken tree, as her brothel-master once told her, can never yield.
Two days become three. Three become four. Hunger makes her dizzy, while the rain makes her clay-cold. The world hates you, she thinks, staring at the broken tower. Even here.
The last place.
And then one night he simply comes out. He looks haggard, not just like an old man who never sleeps, but one who never forgives-himself or others, it does not matter. He bears rank wine and steaming food, which she falls upon like a thankless animal. Then he sits opposite her fire and begins talking. 'The Dreams,' he says with the intensity of someone who has waged long war against certain words.
She stares at him, unable to stop fingering food into her mouth, which she swallows against the sob in the back of her throat. The firelight seems to have grown shining porcupine quills. For a moment, she fears she might swoon for relief.
He speaks of the Dreams of the First Apocalypse, the nightmares that all Mandate Schoolmen share thanks to the derelict memories of their ancient founder, Seswatha, and the long dark horror of his war against the Consult. 'Over and over,' he mutters, 'as if a life can be writ like a poem, torments fashioned into verses…'
'Are they that bad?' she asks in the lame silence. She can scarce see him past the combination of her tears and the fire's glare: an old and rutted face, one that has seen much-too much-and yet has not forgotten how to be tender or honest.
He winks at her before gazing down to fiddle with his pouch and pipe. He stuffs the bowl, his look both pensive and sealed. He picks up a twig from the fire's edge; a small flame twirls from the end of it.
'They used to be,' he says, lighting the pipe. He goes cross-eyed, staring at the touch of fire and bowl.
'I don't understand.'
He draws deeply on the stem; the bowl glows like a molten coin.
'Do you know,' he asks, exhaling a cloud of sweet-smelling smoke, 'why Seswatha left us his dreams?'
She knows the answer. Her mother always resorted to talk of Achamian to salve the abrasions between her and her embittered daughter. Because he was her real father, Mimara had always thought. 'To assure the School of Mandate never forgets, never loses sight of its mission.'
'That's what they say,' Achamian replies, savouring his smoke. 'That the Dreams are a goad to action, a call to arms. That by suffering the First Apocalypse over and over, we had no choice but to war against the possibility of the Second.'
'You think otherwise?'
A shadow falls across his face. 'I think that your adoptive father, our glorious, all-conquering Aspect-Emperor, is right.' The hatred is plain in his voice.
'Kellhus?' she asks.
An old man shrug-an ancient gesture hung on failing bones. 'He says it himself, Every life is a cipher…' Another deep inhalation. 'A riddle.'
'And you think Seswatha's life is such.'
'I know it is.'
And then the Wizard tells her. About the First Holy War. About his forbidden love for her mother. About how he was prepared to gamble the very World for the sanctuary of her arms. There is a candour to his telling, a vulnerability that makes it all the more compelling. He speaks plaintively, lapsing time and again into the injured tone of someone convinced others do not believe them wronged. And he speaks slyly, like a drunk who thinks he confides terrible secrets…
Even though Mimara has heard this story many times, she finds herself listening with an almost childish attentiveness, a willingness to be moved, even hurt, by the words of another. He has no idea, she realizes, that this story has become song and scripture in the world beyond his lonely tower. Everyone knows he loved her mother. Everyone knows that she chose the Aspect-Emperor and that Achamian subsequently fled into the wilderness…
The only secret is that he still lives.
With these thoughts her wonder quickly evaporates into embarrassment. He seems overmatched, tragically so, wrestling with words so much larger than himself. It becomes cruel to listen as she does, pretending not to know what she knows so well.
'She was your morning,' she ventures.
He stops. For a heartbeat his eyes seem to lose something of their focus, then he glares at her with a kind of compressed fury. He turns to tap his pipe against a stone jutting from the matted leaves.
'My what?'
'Your morning,' Mimara repeats hesitantly. 'My mother. She used to tell me that… that she was your morning.'
He holds the bowl to the firelight for inspection. 'I no longer fear the night,' he says with an absent intensity. 'I no longer dream as Mandate Schoolmen dream.' When he looks up, there is something at once flat and decisive in his eyes. The memory of an old and assured resolution.
'I no longer pray for the morning.'
