'I remember all that I have lost.'
She is beautiful. She knows she is beautiful because she so resembles her mother, Esmenet, who was the most celebrated beauty in the Three Seas. And mortal beauty, she knows, finds its measure in the immortal…
'How did she die?'
A single tear falls from his right eye, hangs like a bead of glass from his jaw. 'With the others… Cir'kumir teles pim'larata… '
'Do I resemble her?'
'Perhaps…' he says, lowering his gaze. 'If you wept or screamed… If there was blood.'
She moves closer, into the smell of him, sits so that her knees brush his shins. His pouch hangs from his waist, partially hooked in a miniature thicket of stems. Vertigo billows through her, a sudden horror of tipping, as if the pouch were a babe set too close to a table's edge. She clutches his forearms.
'You tremble,' she whispers, resisting the urge to glance at the pouch. 'Do you want me? Do you want to…' She swallows. 'To take me?'
He draws away his arms, stares down into his palms. Beyond him, clouds pile like inky flotsam beneath the stars. Dry lightning scorches the plains a barren white. She glimpses land piling atop land, scabbed edges, woollen reaches.
'I want to…' he says.
'Yes?'
He lifts his eyes as if drawing them against weighted threads. 'I… I want to… to strangle you… to split you with my-'
His breath catches. Murder floats in the sorrow of his gaze. He speaks like someone marooned in a stranger's soul. 'I want to hear you shriek.'
And she can feel the musky strength of him, the impotence of her flailing arms, clawing fingers, should he simply choose…
What? a stranded fragment of her asks. What are you doing? She's not quite certain what she intends to do, let alone what she hopes to accomplish. Is she seducing him? For Achamian? For the Qirri?
Or has she finally broken under the weight of her suffering? Is that what it is? After all this time, is she still the child traded between sailors, weeping to the moan of timbers and men?
She glimpses herself climbing into the circuit of Cleric's arms, taking his waist into the circuit of her legs. Her breath catches at the thought of his antique virility, the union of her flower and his stone. Her stomach quails at the thought of his arcane disfigurement, the ugliness heaving against her, into her.
'Because you love me?'
'I…'
He grimaces, and she glimpses Sranc howling by the light of sorcerous fire. He raises his face to the vault of the night, and she sees a world before human nations, a nocturnal age, when Nonmen marched in hosts from their great underworld mansions, driving the Sons of Men before them.
'No!' Cleric cries. 'No! Because I… I need to remember! I must remember!'
And miraculously, she sees it. Her purpose and her intent.
'And so you must betray…'
His passion blows from him, and he falls still-very still. Clarity peers out from his eyes, a millennial assurance. Gone is the bewildered stoop, the listless air of indecision. He pulls his shoulders and arms into an antique pose of nobility. He draws his hands behind him, seems to clasp them in the small of his back. It is a posture she recognizes from Cil-Aujas and its innumerable engravings.
The voices of the scalpers continue to feud and bicker. The clouds continue to climb, a shroud drawing across the gaping bowl of Heaven. The Captain is speaking, but low rolling thunder obscures his voice.
The first darts of rain tap across the dust and grasses.
'Who?' Mimara presses. 'Who are you, truly?'
The immortal Ishroi watches her, his smile wry, his eyes luminous with something too profound to be mere regret.
'Nil'giccas…' he murmurs. 'I am Nil'giccas. The Last Nonman King.'
To be silent, the old Wizard discovered, is to watch.
You see more when you speak less. First your eyes turn outward, the thoughtless way they always turn outward when you have spoken your say: to await a response, to gauge the effectiveness of your lies. But when your voice is bricked over, when you are robbed of the very possibility of speaking, your eyes are left hanging. And like bored children they begin inventing things to do.
Like observing things otherwise unseen.
He noticed the way Galian would sleep apart from the others, and how he would make inexplicable little cuts on his arms when he thought no one could see him. He noticed how Pokwas would glance at the small wounds when Galian seemed distracted. He noticed how Xonghis whispered what were either prayers or folk-charms over his arrows. He noticed Koll convulsing when no one else seemed to notice him at all.
He noticed how barren life became when camp after camp was struck without making a fire. When Men sat in darkness.
To see what was unseen was to understand that blindness was always a matter of degree. To say that all men were blind in some respect-to the machinations of others, to themselves-was a truism scarcely worth noting. What was astounding was the way this truism perpetually escaped Men, the way they confused seeing mere slivers with seeing everything they needed to see.
He pondered this for days: the invisibility of the unknown.
The hook from which all deception hung.
He struggled to remember the posture of his soul before Cleric and the Captain had fallen upon him. He had been so preoccupied with his inner demons, he had utterly forgotten the outer. It had never occurred to him that Lord Kosoter, whose cruelty had become such an unwelcome ally, could be an agent of the Aspect-Emperor. He had been too confused to fear for himself when they fell upon him, but his horror for Mimara, for what might happen to her absent his power, had been immediate. Time and again he had cried out, against the gag choking him, against the leather straps binding him, but against the colossal perversity of Fate most of all. He could scarce see her in the subsequent scuffle of shadows, but he saw enough to know the others had seized her, that their intent was both violent and carnal. He was not heartened in the least when Lord Kosoter intervened. He remembered the early days of the expedition, how the Captain had executed Moraubon for attempting to rape Mimara. The Captain, as Sarl had said, always gets the first bite. So Achamian assumed that he simply saved her for himself. He wasn't at all surprised when the Captain fought to disarm rather than to kill her. What had stunned him, seized him with both horror and relief, was watching the Captain kneel before her.
He had been deceived. He had never trusted these men, these scalpers, but he had trusted their nature-or what he had assumed to be their nature. So long as they thought they marched for riches, for the Coffers, so long as they thought he was their key, he believed he could… manage them. Knowing. This was the great irony. Knowing was the foundation of ignorance. To think that one knew was to become utterly blind to the unknown.
He had been a fool. What scalper company would assent to an expedition such as this? Who would be so desperate as to wager their lives in pursuit of ancient rumour? Only fanatics and madmen would undertake such a quest. Only men like the Captain…
Or himself.
Thinking he knew, Achamian had blinded himself to the unknown. He had ceased asking questions. He had plucked his own eyes, and unless he could find some way to overcome this reversal, the daughter of the only woman he had ever loved was almost certainly doomed.
Ignorance was trust. Knowing was deception. Questions! Questions were the only truth.
This was the resolution that arose out of his first days of captivity. To notice everything. To question everything. To take no knowledge for granted.
This was why his aggression wilted so quickly, why a kind of fatalistic calm claimed his soul.
Why he began waiting.
I live because Kosoter needs me, he would remind himself. I live because of things I cannot see…
Of course the absurdity of all this pondering was not lost on him. A captive of men without scruple or pity,
