face, always so remote, always so terrifying, slowly scan the slovenly gloom. What would a god think, she wonders, looking upon the low belongings of his old teacher, the obsessive issue of his wife's first abiding love?
Nothing human, she is certain.
She laughs in the course of these ruminations, loud and hard enough to draw more than one questioning look from the others. Part of her blames the Qirri, which she adores even as she hates. It continues to leach her soul, to draw water from her previous concerns. Now and again she even catches herself thinking her captivity an honest and advantageous trade… so long as Cleric continues to plumb her mouth with his cool and bitter finger.
But the humour is real. From the very beginning she had dismissed the old Wizard's fears regarding her stepfather. 'This is the way he sends you,' Achamian said. '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…'
She had discounted him with a smirk, with the grimace she reserved for fools. She, an Anasurimbor by marriage, who had lived in his divine presence, who had sat riven, skinned in goose-pimples, as her stepfather merely crossed the room. Like so many she confused absence with impotence. The Andiamine Heights seemed so distant. Now she knows: the Aspect-Emperor transcends distance. Anasurimbor Kellhus is everywhere.
Exactly as the old Wizard feared.
With this realization comes a new understanding of her power. She finds herself scrutinizing the Captain, guessing at the warring scales within him, the precarious balance of piety and bloodlust. She represents an infuriating complication, Mimara decides, the wrinkle marring the long silk of his ambition. He feels no worldly terror, she decides, because his fear of damnation eclipses all. Too warlike to find redemption in the Gods of Compassion. Too miserly and too cruel to secure the favour of War or the Hunter…
Only the Aspect-Emperor. Only he can make a virtue out of his bloodlust. Only he can deliver him to Paradise.
She is the variable, she thinks, remembering the algebra she learned at the knee of Yerajaman, her Nilnameshi tutor. She is the value he cannot calculate.
What Lord Kosoter does, she finally decides, depends on what he thinks his lord and master, his god, desires.
'I am with child,' she tells him.
A flinch passes across the implacable face.
'Are you not curious?' she asks.
His glare does not waver. Never has a man so terrified her.
'You know…' she presses. 'Don't you?'
She has spent her life, it seems, staring into the faces of bearded men, guessing at the line of their jaw, feeling their hair chafe the bare skin of her neck. She has childhood memories of bare-faced priests and caste- nobles in Sumna. Some of the older Nansur who populated the Imperial Court still clung to their womanish cheeks. But it seems that for as long as she can remember, men meant beards. And the more they adorned them, the higher their station.
Lord Kosoter looks like little more than a cutthroat to her-a beggar, even. Think of him as that! she cries wordlessly. He is less than you! Less!
'Know what?' he grates.
'Who the father is…'
He says nothing.
'Tell me, Captain,' she says, her voice pinched shrill. 'Why do you think I fled the Andiamine Heights?'
Even his blink seems a thing graven, as if mere flesh were too soft to contain such a gaze.
'Why does any girl flee her stepfather's home?' she asks.
The lie is a foolish one: he need only guess at the length of her term to realize there is no way she could have been impregnated in Momemn. But then, what would a man such as him know of pregnancy, let alone one borne of a divine violation? Her mother had carried all her brothers and sisters far beyond the usual term.
'You understand, don't you? You realize what I bear…'
A god… I carry a god in my belly. It seems she need only tell herself this for it to be true…
Another gift of the Qirri.
And she sees it sparking in his eyes. Wonder and horror both. She almost cries out in jubilation. She has cracked his face. At last she has cracked his face!
His lunge is so sudden, so swift, she scarcely knows what has happened until she slams across the turf. He pins her. His right hand clamps her mouth, so large it all but engulfs the lower half of her face. A kind of wild monkey rage shines from his glare. He leans close enough for her to smell rotting teeth.
'Never!' he says in a roaring whisper. 'Never speak of this again!'
Then she is free, her head spinning, her lips and cheeks numb.
He turns away from her, back toward the watching Nonman. There is nothing to do, it seems, but to sit and weep.
Despair fills her after this last foolish gambit. These were scalpers. Implacable. These were the kind of men who never paused to reflect, who asked questions of women only so they might show them the proper answer. Even without the Qirri, they were forever trapped at the rushing edge of passion and thought, believing utterly what they needed to see their hungers appeased. Where some were set aflutter by the mere suspicion of slight, nothing but outright calamity could throw these men back into themselves. Only blood- their blood-could incite them to question.
What was, for these men, was. Lord Kosoter was a fanatical agent of the Aspect-Emperor. Drusas Achamian was his prisoner. They marched to plunder the Coffers.
If they were caught in the wheels of some greater machination, then so be it.
It is night and the scalpers argue. The voices of the others climb about the Captain's rare growl. They sit in a clutch several paces away, ragged shadows chalked in starlight. Sarl's laughter scratches the night. For some reason the substance of their feud does not concern her, even though she periodically hears the word peach carried on the wind. She has her razor to consider.
Achamian lies trussed beside her, his face pressed into the turf. He either sleeps or listens.
Cleric sits cross-legged nearby, his knees obscured by weedy shags. He stares at her without embarrassment. She can still feel the chill of his finger across her tongue.
She raises her waterskin high, slowly pours it over her head. She can feel the water warm as it snakes along her scalp. Her hair wet, her gaze fixed on the watching Nonman, she lifts the razor to her scalp.
She works quickly, even thoughtlessly. She has done this innumerable times: the custom of whores in Carythusal was to wear wigs. She had owned eleven by the time her mother's men had come with their swords and torches.
Galian's voice rises in disbelief. 'Slog?' he cries. 'This is mor-'
Her hair drops in a tangle of ribbons across her lap. Rare dry strands ride the wind, float out behind her, where they snag grasses, hang quivering.
Cleric watches, twin points of white wetting his black gaze.
She pours more water across her shorn head, works her scalp until the filth becomes a kind of lather. Raising the razor once again, she takes the remaining hair down to nothing. Then she scrapes away her eyebrows.
When she finishes, she sits blinking at the imperturbable Nonman, savours the tingle of air over unearthed skin. Several heartbeats pass-more. His mere presence seems to crackle, he remains so motionless.
She crawls into the pool of his immediate gaze. Her skin pimples, as if she has been stripped of her clothing as well.
'Do you remember me?' she finally whispers.
'Yes.'
She raises her hand to his face, draws the pad of her finger across the soft length of his lips. She presses between, touches hot spit. She gently thrusts her finger between his fused teeth, wonders at the dullness of the opposing edges. She probes deep, forces a channel down the centre of his tongue.
How many thousands of years? she wonders. How many sermons across the ages?
She withdraws her finger, wonders at the gleam of inhuman saliva.
'Do you remember your wife?'
