They rarely speak to each other, Cleric and the Captain. They almost never address her. For the entirety of their journey, a part of her has wondered at their relationship. The Captain's advantage seems plain enough: a scalper's kill is a scalper's profit, and she can scarce imagine a killer more formidable than Cleric. But what could induce a Nonman, an Ishroi no less, to submit to a mortal's will-even a will so preternatural as Lord Kosoter's? She fixates on this mystery, even becomes jealous of it, thinking that at the very least this one question will be answered. But as the days pass, as she watches them from their very midst, the relationship becomes more enigmatic if anything.
A week into the Wizard's captivity she is awakened by the sound she finds inexplicable at first until, blinking, she spies Cleric sitting cross-legged on the far side of the Captain's slumbering form. He weeps. She lies motionless across the hard ground, feeling the stamp of flattened weeds through her blanket. She battles a sudden terror of breathing. Cleric sits with his arms stretched across his knees, his head hanging so low that she can see the sinews roping the back of his neck, the humps of his spine. His breath is dog rapid, horse deep. He moans-a sound as bottomless as Cil-Aujas. He mumbles or murmurs-words she cannot decipher. Random tremors seem to fly through him, afflicting first this hand, then that shoulder, as if the ghost of some bird battles to escape him. A sense of heroic melancholy seems to emanate from him, as onerous and grand as the ages that have birthed it…
A sorrow that would crack a human soul.
'Kosoter…' he rasps.
This is the first time she has heard Cleric refer to the Captain by name. It prickles her skin for some reason. The Captain draws himself to a seated position opposite the Nonman. She can only see the man's back, the play of starlight across the battered lines of his splint hauberk. Funnelled down the centre of his back, his hair hangs in a tangle about the rope of his caste-noble braid.
She already knows that Cleric's sanity is not a constant thing, that it ebbs and flows according to its own disordered rhythm. But she has only guessed at the role played by the Captain.
A shudder passes through the Nonman's frame. 'I… I struggle.'
'Good.' There is an uncharacteristic softness to the Captain's voice, one borne more out of a greed for secrecy than any tenderness.
'Who… Who are these people?'
'Your children.'
'What? What is this?'
'You are preparing.'
The Nonman lowers his bald head back into shadow.
'Preparing? What is this tongue I speak? Where did I learn this tongue?'
'You are preparing.'
'Preparing?'
'Yes. To remember.'
Cleric raises his face to the grim figure sitting before him. Then without warning, his black gaze clicks over the Captain's shoulder, finds Mimara where she pretends to sleep.
'Yes…' the white lips say, full in the play of blackness and starlight. 'They remind me…'
The Captain turns to follow his gaze, reveals his savage profile for no more than an instant before turning away. 'Yes… They remind you of someone you once loved.'
Lord Kosoter stands, shouldering the light of the stars, then draws Cleric into the windy dark.
This exchange alarms her, but more like news of growing famine overseas than any immediate threat. She recalls Achamian's description of Nonmen Erratics, how their memories of mundane life fade first, leaving only archipelagos of spectacle and intensity, the confusion of a soul hanging without foundation. And how their redemptive memories gradually follow, stranding them more and more with disconnected episodes of torment and pain, until their life becomes a nightmare lived through mist, until all love and joy sink into oblivion, become things guessed at through the shadows cast by their destruction.
This, she realizes. This is the prize the Captain has cast upon the balance of their transaction. Cleric yields up his power, and Lord Kosoter offers him memory. Men to love. Men to destroy…
Men to remember.
And yet Lord Kosoter is Zaudunyani — one of her stepfather's fanatics. Why else would he protect her from the bent lusts of the others? And if he is Zaudunyani, then he would never deliver his expedition into destruction unless… Unless his Aspect-Emperor has commanded it.
The deal he has struck with Incariol, she realizes, could be a false one. If so, the Captain plays a most deadly game.
Like all of the Few, she is accustomed to ignoring her arcane sight. But Cleric bears his mark so deeply, the residue of ages of sorcerous practice. Occult ugliness blasts him, the scars of his innumerable crimes against creation. Add to this the sheer beauty of his mundane form-the contradiction-and it sometimes seems as if the merest glance will pry her eyes from their sockets. Even if she had not seen him warring through the sewered depths of Cil-Aujas or beneath the clawed bowers of the Meorn Wilderness, she would have known he was a power-a great power.
If he were to choose to annihilate the Skin Eaters…
Only Achamian could possibly hope to stand against him-were he free to speak.
The company continues its lonely walk, dwarfed by the confluence of never-ending land and sky. What features the landscape possesses are slavish and melancholy, as if they were mountains beaten into ruddy heaps and long-wandering flanges. Wild clouds feather the sky, slow-sailing immensities that promise rain that is never delivered. She often gazes into them while she walks, probing the precipices and the plummets, wondering at the way they form floating plates that seem to wheel in competing directions, pinching deep glimpses of blue into white oblivion.
The Wizard stumbles along, bound and gagged, glaring hate at everyone save her.
Survive, Mimara! Forget me!
More days pass before she is able to piece things together. Sarl, especially, provides her with pivotal insights. He tells her how Lord Kosoter, famed for his cruelty and marshal zeal, had come to the Aspect-Emperor's attention during the Unification Wars. How he had been promised a special Shrial Remission by none other than her uncle, Maithanet, for founding a scalper company and remaining in the vicinity of Hunoreal-where he could regularly check on the Wizard.
'He is born of Hell,' the madmen tells her, his face squished into I-knew-all-along glee. 'He is born of Hell, the Captain. And he knows it-oh ho! He knows it. He thinks your gurwikka, there, will pay his toll…' His squint pops open in mock alarm. 'Deliver him to paradise!'
'But how?' she protests.
'Because of him!' the madman cackles. ' Him! The Aspect-Emperor knows all…'
She herself had seen the yield of the Wizard's twenty years alone in the wilderness. After Achamian absconded for Marrow, she fought her way past his slaves and broke into his tower room. Part of her had expected to be blasted, to die screaming in sorcerous fire. She could sense the residue of something arcane. But there had been no incipient Wards protecting the room, nothing… Because of his slaves' children, she knew.
At first she could see little save the sunlight outlining the shuttered window where she had first seen him. The smell was rancid but curiously dry and inviting. Finally she saw the wolf-pelts warming the walls and ceiling. The crude-hewn bed. And then the issue of his decades-long labour.
Pages. Scattered. Stacked into teetering piles. Scrolls piled like bones, tumbling into shadow. Dream after dream, scratched in ink and numbered-everything numbered. Pattern after pattern. Theory after theory. Seswatha this. Seswatha that. A horde of details she could never hope to decode, let alone remember.
Out of all the scribbles she peered at, only one would live on in her memory, what seemed the old Wizard's final entry, the one that would spur her to pursue him. She has returned. Of all people!
I am awake at last.
She, he had written. She… Esmenet.
Mother.
If she could simply walk into the old Wizard's room, Mimara reasons, then so too could her stepfather. She can even see him in her soul's eye, the Aspect-Emperor stepping from a point of blue-white light. She can see his
