He had inked these questions across parchment many times.
'I have no idea. Perhaps it's the Whore-fucking Fate. Perhaps it's a happy consequence of my madness-for one cannot endure what I've endured day and night without going a little mad, I assure you.' He made her laugh by blinking his eyes and jerking his head in caricature. 'Perhaps, by ceasing to live my own life, I'd began living his. Perhaps some dim memory, some spark of Seswatha's soul, is reaching out to me… Perhaps…'
Achamian blinked at the crack in his voice, cleared his throat. Words could soar, dip, and dazzle, and sometimes even cross paths with the sun. Blind and illuminate. But the voice was different. It remained bound to the earth of expression. Not matter how it danced, the graves always lay beneath its feet.
On the back of a heavy breath, he said, 'But there is a far greater question.'
She hugged her knees before the pop and swirl of the fire, blinking slowly, her expression more careful than impassive. He knew how he must look, the challenge in his glare, the defensiveness, the threat of punishing surrogates. He looked like a venomous old man, balling up his reasons in uncertain fists-he knew as much.
But if there were judgment in her eyes, he could detect nothing of it.
'My stepfather,' she said. 'Kellhus is the question.'
He imagined he must be gaping at her, gawking like a stump-headed fool.
He had spoken to her as if she were a stranger, an innocent, when in point of fact she was joined to him at the very root. Esmenet was her mother, which meant that Kellhus was her stepfather. Even though he had known this, the significance of that knowing had completely escaped him. Of course she knew of his hatred. Of course she knew the particulars of his shame!
How could he be so oblivious? The Dыnyain was her father! The Dыnyain.
Did this not instantly make her an instrument of some kind? A witting or unwitting spy? Achamian had watched an entire army-a holy war-succumb to his dread influence. Slaves, princes, sorcerers, fanatics-it did not matter. Achamian himself had surrendered his love-his wife! What chance could this mere girl have?
How much of her soul was hers, and how much had been replaced?
He gazed at her, tried to scowl away the slack from his expression.
'He sent you, didn't he?'
She looked genuinely confused, dismayed even. 'What? Kellhus?' She stared at him, her mouth open and wordless. 'If his people find me, they would drag me home in chains! Throw me at the feet of my fucking mother- you have to believe that!'
'He sent you.'
Something, some mad note in his voice perhaps, rocked her backward. 'I'm not ly-lying…' Tears clotted her eyes. A strange half-crook bent her face to the side, as though angling it away from unseen blows. 'I'm not lying,' she repeated with a snarling intensity. A twitch marred her features. 'No. Look. Everything was going so well… Everything was going so well!'
'This is the way it works,' Achamian heard himself rasp in an utterly ruthless voice. 'This is the way he sends you. This is the way he rules-from the darkness in our own souls! If you were to feel it, know it, that would simply mean there was some deeper deception.'
'I don't know what you're talking about! He-he's always been kind-'
'Did he ever tell you to forgive your mother?'
'What? What do you mean?'
'Did he ever tell you the shape of your own heart? Did he ever speak salving words, healing words, words that helped you see yourself more clearly than you had ever seen yourself before?'
'Yes-I mean, no! And yes… Please… Things were going so-!'
There was a grinding to his aspect, an anger that had become reptilian with age. 'Did you ever find yourself in awe of him? Did something whisper to you, This man is more than a man? And did you feel gratified, gratified beyond measure, at his merest tenderness, at the bare fact of his attention?'
He was shaking as he spoke now, shaking at the memories, shaking at the nakedness of twenty years stripped away. It seemed to hang about the edges of his vision, the lies and the hopes and the betrayals, the succession of glaring suns and uproarious battles.
'Akka…' she was saying. So like her whore-mother. 'What are you talki-?'
'When you stood before him!' he roared. 'When you knelt in his presence, did you feel it? Hollow and immovable, as if you were at once smoke and yet possessed the bones of the world? Truth? Did you feel Truth?'
'Yes!' she cried. 'Everyone does! Everyone! He's the Aspect-Emperor! He's the Saviour. He's come to save us! Come to save the Sons of Men!'
Achamian stared at her aghast, his own vehemence ringing in his ears. Of course she was a believer.
'He sent you.'
It was too late, he realized, staring at the image of Mimara across the fire. It had already happened. Despite all the intervening years, despite the waning violence of the Dreams, she had returned him to the teeth of yesterday. To simply gaze upon her was to taste the dust and blood and smoke of the First Holy War.
He understood her look-how could he not when he so readily recognized it as his own? Too many losses. Too many small hopes denied. Too many betrayals of sell. The look of someone who understands that the World is a peevish judge, forgiving only to render its punishments all the more severe. She had suffered a moment of weakness when she had seen him clambering down the slopes with food; he could see that now. She had let herself hope. Her soul had taken her body's gratitude and made it its own.
He believed her. She was not a willing slave. If anything she reminded him of the Scylvendi, of a soul at once strong and yet battered beyond recognition. And she looked so much like her mother…
She was precisely the kind of slave Kellhus would send to him. Part cipher. Part opiate.
Someone Drusas Achamian could come to love.
'Did you know I was there when he first arrived in the Three Seas,' he said, broaching the silence of dark forests and rustling flames. 'He was no more than a beggar claiming princely blood-and with a Scylvendi as his companion no less! I was there from the very first. It was my back he broke climbing to absolute power.'
He rubbed his nose, breathed deep as though preparing for the plunge. It never ceased to strike him as strange, the fits and starts of the body and its anxieties.
'Kellhus,' he said, speaking the name in the old way, with the intonations of familiarity and wry trust. 'My student… My friend… My prophet… It was my wife he stole…
'My morning.'
He glared, challenging her to speak again. She simply blinked, wriggled as though to adjust her position. He could see her swallow behind the line of her lips.
'The only thing,' he continued, his voice wrung ragged with conflicting passions. 'The only thing I took with me from my previous life was a simple question: Who is Anasыrimbor Kellhus? Who?'
Achamian stared at the bed of coals pulsing beneath the blackened wood, paused to allow Mimara fair opportunity to respond, or so he told himself. The truth was that the thought of her voice made him wince. The truth was that his story had turned into a confession.
'Everyone knows the answer to that question,' she ventured, speaking with a delicacy that confirmed his fears. 'He's the Aspect-Emperor.'
Of course she would say this. Even if she hadn't been Kellhus's adoptive daughter, she would have said precisely the same thing. They so wanted it to be simple, believers. 'It is what is!' they cried, sneering at the possibility of other eyes, other truths, overlooking their own outrageous presumption. 'It says what it says,' spoken with a conviction that was itself insincerity. They ridiculed questions, for fear it would make their ignorance plain. Then they dared call themselves 'open.'
This was the iron habit of Men. This was what shackled them to the Aspect-Emperor.
He shook his head in slow deliberation. 'The most important question you can ask any man, child, is the question of his origin. Only by knowing what a man has been can you hope to say what he will be.' He paused, brought up short by an old habit of hesitation. How easy it was to hide in his old pedantic ruts, to recite rather than
