greed…
'Can you teach me that!' she cried under her breath.
He knew her well enough to see she was bursting with questions, that she would likely plague him for hours if she could. And to his surprise, he found himself disarmed by her interest, which for the first time seemed honest instead of fraught with anger and calculation as before. To be a student required a peculiar kind of capitulation, a willingness not simply to do as one was told, but to surrender the movements of one's soul to the unknown complexities of another's. A willingness, not simply to be moved, but to be remade.
How could he not respond? Despite all his violent resolutions to the contrary, his was a teacher's soul.
But the time wasn't right. 'Yes-yes,' he said, speaking with gentle impatience. He grasped her shoulder to forestall her protest, sought Cleric through the commotion. He needed to know just how much the Nonman remembered. Their passage through the Repositorium was blocked, thanks to the ancient calamity heaped before them. If Cleric knew of no other way through the peril that was Cil-Aujas, they would be forced to backtrack, to begin the long trek back to the Obsidian Gate. If he pretended or remembered falsely, they could very well be dead.
He was about to explain as much to Mimara when Lord Kosoter suddenly appeared next to them, reeking in his hoary old Ainoni armour and dress. Steel grey hairs manged his plaited beard. Beneath his mailed breast, his Chorae hummed with unseen menace.
'No more,' he said, his voice as flat as frozen water. 'No more'-his tongue tested the edge of his teeth-'antics.'
It was impossible not to be affected by the man's dead gaze, but Achamian found himself returning his stare with enough self-possession to wonder at the man's anger. Was it simple jealously? Or did the famed Captain fear that awe of another might undermine his authority?
'What?' Mimara said angrily. 'We should have stumbled on through the dark?'
Achamian watched the eyes slouch toward her, glimpsed the mayhem behind their frigid calm. For all her ferocious pride, his gaze bled her white.
'As you wish,' Achamian said quickly, like a man trying to call the attention of wolves. 'Captain. As you wish.'
Lord Kosoter continued staring at Mimara for several heartbeats. When he looked back at Achamian, his eyes seemed to carry some mortal piece of her. He nodded, not so much at Achamian's concession, it seemed, as at the fear that stuttered through the Wizard's heart.
Your sins, the dead eyes whispered. Her damnation.
They sat about a fire of bones. Without the merest wind, the smoke spewed directly upward, a column of black floating into black. The reek of it was strange, like something sodden and already burned.
The Skin Eaters had congregated at the edges of the rubble, where streams of ruin had created a bowl with boulders large enough for men to sit and lean forward. Lord Kosoter sat between his two sergeants, Sarl and Kiampas, absorbed in the shining length of his Ainoni sword. Again and again, he drew his whetstone along its length, then raised it, as if to study the way the edge cut the play of reflected flames. Everything about his manner spoke of indifference, utter and absolute, as though he sat with a relative's hated children. Achamian had taken a seat nearly opposite him, with Mimara at his side. Galian, Oxwora, and the other Bitten formed the first tier, those close enough to actually feel the fire's acrid heat. The others sat scattered through the shadows. Cleric squatted apart from them all, high on the back of a monolithic stone. The shadow of his perch rode high on his chest, so that only his right arm and head fell in the firelight. Whenever Achamian looked away from him, he seemed to lose substance, to become a kind of dismembered reality… A headless face and a palmless hand, come to speak and to seize.
For the longest time the chatter was small, with words traded only between those seated side by side, or nearly such. Many simply gnawed on their salted rations, staring into the firelight. When men laughed they did so quietly, with the between-you-and-I circumspection of temple services and funeral pyres. No one dared mention the precariousness of their situation, at least no one that Achamian heard. Fear of fear was ever the greatest censor.
Eventually the talk petered out, and a gazing silence fell over the company. Ash glowed ruby and orange through blackened eye sockets. Fused Nonmen teeth gleamed like wet jewels.
Then without warning, Cleric addressed them from on high.
'I remember,' he began. 'Yes…'
Achamian looked up in exasperated relief, thinking the Nonman meant he remembered another way through Cil-Aujas. But something in the regard of the others told the Wizard otherwise. He glanced around at those nearest the fire, noticed Sarl staring at him, not the Nonman, with manic intensity. See! his expression seemed to shout. Now you shall understand us!
'You ask yourselves,' Cleric continued, his shoulders slumped, his great pupils boring into the flames. 'You ask, 'What is this that I do? Why have I followed unknown men, merciless men, into the deeps?' You do not ask yourself what it means. But you feel the question-ah, yes! Your breath grows short, your skin clammy. Your eyes burn for peering into the black, for looking to the very limit of your feeble vision…'
His voice was cavernous, greased with inhuman resonances. He spoke like one grown weary of his own wisdom.
'Fear. This is how you ask the question. For you are Men, and fear is ever the way your race questions great things.'
He lowered his face to the shadows, continued speaking to his palms and their millennial calluses.
'I remember… I remember asking a wise man, once… though whether it was last year or a thousand years ago I cannot tell. I asked him, 'Why do Men fear the dark?' I could tell he thought the question wise, though I felt no wisdom in asking it. 'Because darkness,' he told me, 'is ignorance made visible.' 'And do Men despise ignorance?' I asked. 'No,' he said, 'they prize it above all things-all things! — but only so long as it remains invisible.''
The words implied accusation, but the Nonman's tone was reassuring, as though he ministered to the wretched and the lost. He spoke true to his slog-name, Achamian realized, as the inhuman priest of scar-hearted men.
Cleric.
'We Nonmen…' he continued telling his hands, 'we think the dark holy, or at least we did before time and treachery leached all the ancient concerns from our souls…'
'The dark?' Galian said, and his voice warm and human-and as such, so very frail. 'Holy?'
The Nonman lifted his flawless white face to the light, smiled at the Nansur scalper's questioning gaze.
'Of course… Think on it, my mortal friend. The dark is oblivion made manifest. And oblivion encircles us always. It is the ocean, and we are naught but silvery bubbles. It leans all about us. You see it every time you glimpse the horizon-though you know it not. In the light, our eyes are what blinds us. But in the dark-in the dark! — the line of the horizon opens… opens like a mouth… and oblivion gapes.'
Though the Nonman's expression seemed bemused and ironic, Achamian, with his second, more ancient soul, recognized it as distinctively Cыnuroi-what they called noi'ra, bliss in pain.
'You must understand,' Cleric said. 'For my kind, holiness begins where comprehension ends. Ignorance stakes us out, marks our limits, draws the line between us and what transcends. For us, the true God is the unknown God, the God that outruns our febrile words, our flattering thoughts…'
These words trailed into the wheezing murmur of their fire. Few of the scalpers, Achamian noted, dared look the Nonman in the eye as he spoke, but rather watched the flames boil into noxious smoke.
'Do you see now why this trek is holy?' the deep voice resumed. 'Do you see the prayer in our descent?'
No one dared breath, let alone reply. The hanging face turned to survey each of them.
'Have any of you ever knelt so deep?'
Five heartbeats passed.
'This God of yours…' Pokwas said unexpectedly. 'How can you pray to something you cannot comprehend? How can you worship?'
'Pray?' A snort of breath that might have indicated amusement in a man. 'There is no prayer, Sword-Dancer. But there is worship. We worship that which transcends us by making idols of our finitude, our frailty…' He rolled his face as if working an ancient kink, then repeated, 'We… we…'
