Gold bursts across the horizon. He sidesteps, leans, angles his shadow to her side. Sunlight crashes into her squint. She blinks, hesitates. Her sword spins from fingertips she cannot feel. A fist of stone strikes her to the ground. It's happening, she thinks. After enduring so much, surviving so much, her death is happening.
'Akka…' she gasps, scrambling back. Sunlight splices her tears. Blood runs hot across her lips.
And nothing happens. No hand clamps about her throat. No knife pares away her rags.
Out of instinct she falls motionless, breathless.
The Judging Eye, which had remained sealed for so long, opens.
And she sees them standing in a ragged arc, demons on the plain. Their hides charred, the hair of their few redeeming deeds the only light threading them. And the darkest, the most fearsome by far, lies directly before her… kneeling. The Captain.
'Princess-Imperial,' it croaks, glaring from eyes of fiery tar. 'Save us from damnation.'
'I am Anasurimbor Mimara,' she cries. 'Princess-Imperial, daughter of the Holy-Empress, wife-daughter of the Aspect-Emperor himself! On pain of death and damnation I command you to release the Wizard!'
They have Achamian bound and gagged, trussed like a corpse about to be raised to the pyre.
'You are apostate,' the Captain says. 'A runaway.'
They have her sword, poor Squirrel.
'No! No! I am on a… a…'
They have her Chorae… her Tear of God.
'Foolish girl. Did you think your disappearance went unnoticed?'
They have her.
'You presume? You presume to command me?'
'You are a captive. Thank your gods you are not more.'
And she recalls as much as realizes that he is completely unlike her-that in soul and sentiment he is as alien as the Nonman, if not more. There is a wholeness to him, a singularity of act, aspect, and intention. She can see it in his look, in his face: the utter absence of warring pieces.
For some reason this calms her. There is relief to be found in futility. She knew this once.
'So what? You're going to bring me back to Mother then?'
His gaze has strayed from her to the dawn. Crimson light illuminates his face, paints the wilder strands of his beard in tones of blood.
'We march to the Coffers… Same as before.'
'Why? What has my father commanded?'
He draws his knife, begins shaving the calluses about his fingernails.
'Why?' she cries. 'I demand you tell me why.'
He looks up from his trivial labour, gazes with a flat intensity that sets her thoughts quailing. He has always frightened her, Lord Kosoter. The threat of violence has always kindled his manner. For him, atrocity was simply one more thoughtless faculty-one more base instinct. Kindness, she knows, is mist to him, something not entirely real. The honed edge is one of only two boundaries he respects.
The other is faith… Faith in her mother's husband. Even after running so far, deep into the savagery beyond the New Empire's rim, she remains caught in the Aspect-Emperor's nets. And knowing this has made the Captain even more fearsome. The thought that he is Zaudunyani …
She does not ask again.
She rifles through the Wizard's satchel, finds only five sheaves of parchment, the writing across them illegible for some river soaking-evidence of the Qirri in that, she supposes. And a small razor, scabbed with rust, which she conceals beneath her belt.
She wants to weep as they resume their course. She wants to scream, to run, to scratch out the Captain's eyes. She slouches instead, stares at her feet for as long as boredom allows. She avoids looking at the scalpers, consigns them to her periphery, where they seem apiece with the desolate plains, little more than leering shadows.
She feels naked now that she is known.
They keep the old Wizard bound and gagged at all times. When they break for meals, either Galian or Pokwas remove the gag while the Captain dandles a Chorae-whether his own or the one he stole from her, she does not know-before the old Wizard's face. Achamian avoids any glimpse of the Trinket, invariably looks down to his right instead. He says absolutely nothing, even with his gag removed, presumably because Lord Kosoter has told him that any sound, arcane or mundane, would mean his instant death. Periodically, the thick fingers holding the Chorae stray too close, and the Wizard grimaces at the salting of his skin. After several days, a patchwork of scabs and pink skin web his face above his beard.
He reminds her of an ascetic she once saw burned alive in Carythusal when she was still young enough to feel terror for others. The Shrial Priests had marched the old man through the streets, decrying his heretical claims, and bidding onlookers to come witness his fiery cleansing. Where Achamian wears rancid furs, he wore putrid rags. But otherwise, they seem so alike that her gut flutters at the recollection. Knob-knuckled hands bound before them. Gags to stop the danger of their voice. Wild hair and beard, wiry and grey. And the distant look of men condemned long before the thugs had seized them.
The old Wizard stares at her, from time to time. A strange look, ragged, at once hopeless and reassuring. They have always shared an understanding, it seems, one as deep and cold as clay in earth. They have both been broken over the knee of Fate, and as different as their lives and catastrophes have been, their hearts have sheared along similar lines.
Be calm, girl, his eyes seem to say. No matter what happens to me, survive…
Without fail, his looks make her think of the razor hidden beneath her belts.
She only hears Achamian when he's gagged. On the afternoon of the first day, he begins roaring at the Captain through the spit-soaked cloth, shrieking with such guttural fury that the man pauses in his approach. Nostrils flaring. Eyes glaring with lunatic intensity. He screams about his own retching.
The Captain remains as imperturbable as always, simply gazes and waits until the Wizard's maniacal ire subsides. Then he cups his palm and cuffs the old man to the ground.
Mimara glimpses the smiling look exchanged between Galian and Pokwas.
Each night they force Qirri upon him.
She receives her measure willingly.
Koll hunches alone in the dusty grass, watches them with dead eyes. She cannot remember when she last heard his voice. Did he even speak Sheyic?
The Stone Hags no longer seem real.
She prays that Soma still follows them-that a skin-spy might save her! — but she has no way of knowing: the Captain now forces her to practise her daily indignities in plain view.
The other scalpers-Galian and Pokwas especially-regard her with forced indifference. They gambled on their lust, thinking the Wizard her only protection. Now, their intentions revealed, they behave like pious thieves, like men wronged for wronging others. They sit and eat without speaking. Aside from the rare hooded glance in her direction, it seems they look only to their hands or the horizon. The mutinous air that had festered ever since Cil-Aujas has become gangrenous. The expedition now seems more a collection of warring tribes than men bound to a singular purpose.
She finds herself stranded with the Captain and Cleric.
The first few nights she lies awake, plotting possibilities more than actions. Her body aches with sensation: the bruising ground, the prick of grasses, the tickle of fleas climbing her scalp. She can see Squirrel jutting from the beggar's bundle that is his pack. She can sense both her Chorae and the Captain's beneath his tunic, dark little twins suckling oblivion. She guesses at his slumber, only to be disabused time and again. He invariably lies on his side, his head cradled on a raised arm. But just when she thinks he has fallen into the arms of Orosis, he raises his head and lies rigid, as if probing the surrounding black with his ears. Once she even begins crawling toward him, her thoughts a mad tumble of terror and mayhem. Grab your sword! her thoughts cry through the tumult. Grab your sword! Cut his throat! But she glimpses his hand slide to his waist as she continues her feline creep, sees his fingers settle upon the grime-blackened pommel of his broadsword.
After that she decides he never sleeps. At least not the way humans sleep.
