horror that flexed through him.
'And that's funny?' she asked, her voice warbling with indignation.
'No, girl… It's just that…'
'That what?'
'Your stepfather… Kellhus.'
He had improvised this, not willing to stray too far into the truth. But once spoken it seemed every bit as true and far more terrible with significance. Such was the perversity of things that Men often recognized their own arguments only after they had spoken them. 'Kellhus…' he repeated numbly.
'What about him?'
'He says the Old Law has been revoked, that Men are at long last ready for the New…' The words of the Mandate Catechism came back to him unbidden, and with the heat of truths drawn intact from the crucible of deception. Though you lose your soul, you shall gain the world…
'Think,' he continued. 'If sorcery is no longer abomination, then…' Let her think it was this, he told himself. Perhaps it would even serve to discourage her. 'Then why would you see it as such?'
He was surprised to discover he had stopped walking, that he stood riven, staring at the woman whose parentage had stirred so many echoes of heartbreak and whose unscrupulous obstinacy threatened everything. The last of the Skin Eaters had passed them, casting dubious backward glances as they marched with the mule-train beyond the limits of his light. Within heartbeats it was just the two of them, flanked by knolls of heaped basalt, plains of dust, and bones bleached as light as charcoal by the ages. Cleric's light had tapered to a point, and the company had dwindled to a floating procession of shining helms and trudging shadows.
Silence sealed them as utterly as the blackness.
'I always knew something was… wrong,' she said softly. 'I mean, I read and I read, everything I could find about sorcery and the Mark. And nowhere, not once, was there any mention of what I see. I thought it was because it was so… unpredictable, you know, just when I would see the… the good of the evil. But when I see it, it burns so… so… I mean, it strikes me so much deeper than at any other time. It was too profound to go without saying, to be left out of the records… I just knew that something had to be different. That something had to be wrong!'
First her arrival, and now this. She had the Judging Eye-she could see not just sorcery, but the damnation it betokened… To think he had convinced himself the Whore of Fate would leave him be!
'And now you're saying,' she began hesitantly, 'that I'm a kind of… proof?' She blinked in the stammering manner of people finding their way through unsought revelations. 'Proof of my stepfather's… falsity?'
She was right… and yet what more proof did he, Drusas Achamian, need? That night twenty years ago, on the eve of the First Holy War's final triumph, the Scylvendi Chieftain had told him everything, given him all the proof he would ever need, enough to fuel decades of bitter hate-enough to deliver these scalpers to their doom. Anasыrimbor Kellhus was Dыnyain, and the Dыnyain cared for naught but domination. Of course he was false.
It was for her sake that the Wizard trembled. She possessed the Judging Eye!
He thought of their coupling, and the sordid passions that had driven it. A cold sweat compressed the skin and wool beneath his pack. He could feel the pity hanging like wet string in his expression, the way his look saw past what she was now-the pale image of her mother standing small in white light-into the torment that awaited her.
'We have more immediate concerns at the moment,' he said in a rallying voice.
'You mean Cleric,' she replied, her little hands balled into slack fists. She was looking at him with the kind of wilful focus that spoke of contravening interests. Soon, he knew, she would come at him with questions, relentless questions, and he needed to consider carefully the kinds of answers he could and could not give.
'Yes,' he said, drawing her by the elbow after the others. 'Incariol.' He thought of how men always did this, managed the thoughts of others, and wondered why it should exact such a toll from him. 'His Mark means he's old… older than you could imagine. And that means he's not only a Quya Mage, but Ishroi, a Nonman noble…'
He could feel the note of falsity, like a cold coin in the slick palm of his voice. He cursed himself for a fool, even as he sought her gaze, hoping that a sincere look might carry what his words could not. The Erratic and his ability to lead them through this deserted warren was their immediate concern. The fact that Achamian used them to another purpose… Weren't all words simply tools in the end?
'So he's Ishroi, then…' Mimara said. The lilt in her tone told him that she knew something was amiss. When had he ever urged her into the murk of his ruminations?
'Such figures don't easily slip through the cracks of history, Mimara. And what history I haven't lived through Seswatha, I've read many times. Moithural, Hosыtil, Shimbor-all the mannish translators and chroniclers of the Nonmen. I assure you, there's no mention of any Incariol, nowhere, not even in their own Pit of Years…' Despite himself, his voice was striking more, not fewer, tin notes of insincerity.
Her gaze was bolt-forward now, apparently following Cleric's light and the small mob of men and pack animals labouring beneath it. From their vantage, the Skin Eaters seemed to pick their way across the vast back of nothingness. Here and there small clearings of floor opened between them, bloomed colourless and flat in the illumination, only to be obscured by kicked dust and the drift of shadowy legs.
They had travelled past the point of sturdy grounds.
'This Judging Eye,' she said with cool resignation. 'It's a curse, isn't it? An affliction…'
Many years had passed since last he had suffered this feeling, not simply of too much happening too quickly, but of some dread intent in motion, as though all these things, the Nonman, the Captain, the dead scalper out there, and now Mimara, were like the suckered arms of the octopuses he and his father had sometimes pulled from the Meneanor Sea-limbs webbed in the sinew of a singular Fate.
Circumstances always encompassed, but sometimes they encircled as well, as many-chambered as this mountain and every bit as dark. His heart seemed to beat against sagging bandages.
'Just legends,' he said. 'Nothing more.'
'But you've read them all,' she said in a high, scathing voice.
He raised a knobbed hand to silence her, nodded to the interval of darkness separating them from the company. A figure had surfaced from the advancing perimeter of their light, became what looked like, for a mad moment, a wizened ape armoured in human rags…
It was Sarl. He waited for them, alone in the darkness, smiling, his lips stretched longer than the arc of his gums and teeth. 'Well-well-well,' he called in the tones of a cracked flute. Even in the dark the man squinted.
'We'll speak of this later,' Achamian said to Mimara, halting her with a gentle hand on her elbow. She frowned and in a careless moment looked to the sergeant with naked fury. Though the man remained some several paces distant, there was no way he could have failed to see her anger.
'You take the light,' Achamian said quickly.
'Me?'
'You have the Gift of the Few. You can grasp it with your soul, even without any real sorcerous training… If you think on it, you should actually be able to feel the possibility.'
For the bulk of his life, Achamian had shared his calling's contempt of witches. There was no reason for this hatred, he knew, outside the capricious customs of the Three Seas. Kellhus had taught him as much, one of many truths he had used to better deceive. Men condemned others to better celebrate themselves. And what could be easier to condemn than women?
But as he watched her eyes probe inward, he was struck by the practicality of her wonder, the way her expression made this novelty look more like a recollection. It was almost as if women possessed a kind of sanity that men could only find on the far side of tribulation. Witches, he found himself thinking, were not only a good thing, they could very well be a necessity. Especially the witch-to-be before him.
'Yes,' she said. 'I can feel it. It's like… It's…' She trailed in smiling indecision.
'It's a small Cant,' he said, grateful that Sarl, for whatever reason, had granted them this moment together. With a finger, he redirected the light so that it rested several feet above her head. 'Something called the Surillic Point…'
'Surillic Point,' she repeated, her voice hot with breath.
'So,' he continued, 'picture yourself in your soul's eye.' He paused a heartbeat. 'Now picture the light, not as you see it, but as you see its Mark.'
She nodded, staring at him with forked concentration. The light stretched the outline of her face across her breast and shoulder.
