scalpers. A captive of his foe of foes, Kellhus… Far more than his life, he knew, would be decided by this forced march across the dregs of the Istyuli. And yet here he was, whiling away the watches pondering philosophical inanities.
His lips cracked to bleeding. His throat and palette scored with ulcers. His fingers numbed to paralysis, his wrists festering. And yet here he was, smiling at the play of insight, at the assemblage of categorical obscurities in his prying soul.
Only a drug could so overturn the heart's natural order. Only the ashes of a legendary king.
Qirri. The poison that made strong.
They need only bend back their faces to drink.
The rain drums down across their heads, rolls across the distances in misty sweeps. The puddled earth sizzles, sucks at the rotting seams of their boots. Clothing sags and pinches, rubbing skin raw. Straps long rotted by sweat give way altogether. Pokwas is forced to bind his shoulder harness about his waist, so that the scythed tip of his tulwar sketches an arthritic line through the muck. Sarl even tosses away his hauberk in a bizarre tirade where he alternately argues, rages, and laughs. 'On the ready!' he cries time and again. 'This is skinny country, boys!'
On and on it falls. In the evenings they cluster together for their meagre repast, glaring into nowhere with a kind of beaten-down fury.
Only the Wizard, looking strangely young with his hair and beard flattened into sheets, seems unaffected. He watches with a canniness that Mimara finds both encouraging and alarming. It would be better, she thinks, if he were to look more defeated… Less dangerous.
Only Koll shivers.
On the third night, Cleric strips naked and climbs a clutch of thumb-shaped boulders. He is little more than a grey shadow in the near distance, yet all of them with the exception of Koll gaze in wonder. He does this sometimes, Mimara has learned, shouts his crazed sermons to the greater world.
They listen to him rant about curses, about ages of loss and futility, about the degradation of life's end. 'I have judged nations!' he bellows into the curtained gloom. 'Who are you to condemn me? Who are you to deliver?'
They watch him trade lightning with the clouds. Even sodden, the earth shivers with competing thunders.
When Mimara looks away, she finds the old Wizard staring at her.
The ground is more broken, the undergrowth more toilsome: grasses like flayed hide, shrubs still sharp from the drought. Even still, the forests seem to arrive without warning. The land pitches upward, and kinked hill country climbs out of the grey haze, guttered with gorges booming with brown waters, sloped with stands of slender poplar and crooked fir.
Kuniuri, she realizes. At long last they have arrived.
It is the weariness of this realization, if anything, that astonishes her. Were she the same woman who had fled the Andiamine Heights, this moment would be profound with disbelief. Kuniuri, the ancient homeland of the High Norsirai ere their destruction, the place so deeply revered by the nameless authors of The Sagas. How many expositions had she read, descriptions of its works, chronicles of its kings? How many scrolls authored by its enlightened sons? How many psalms to its lost glory?
It all seems little more than dross in the face of her trudging misery. The world seems too grey, too cold and sodden for glory.
But the rain stops not long after, and the uniform grey resolves into clouds balled into fists of darkness. Soon the sun presses through, and the clouds are drawn into pageants of purple and gold. The land is revealed, and she gawks across previously unseen miles, rugged hills marching to the horizon, stumps of limestone rising from gowns of gravel and earth. For the first time in days her face is warmed for looking.
And again she thinks, Kuniuri.
During her years as a brothel-slave the name meant little to her. It seemed simply another dead thing known by everyone older and wiser, like a grandfather who had died before she was born. That had changed when her Empress mother had burned Carythusal. For all the symbolic tempest of her revolt, she fell upon the gifts her mother lavished upon her, the clothes, the cosmetics, and the tutors — the tutors most of all. Who she had been, the brothel-slave, dwindled to an ignorant kernel, albeit one that refused to relinquish the heights of her soul. The world became a kind of drug. And Kuniuri became an emblem of sorts, as much a marker of her ingrown emancipation as the dead and sacred land of The Sagas.
And now she is here, on the frontier of her own becoming.
That night they camp in the ruins of an ancient fort: battered foundations glimpsed between trees, the remains of a single bastion, massive blocks arrested in their downward tumble. After their passage across the Istyuli and the endless miles of human absence, the ruins almost seemed a landmark promising home.
Game is plentiful, and thanks to Xonghis and his unerring aim they feast on a thrush and a doe. The Imperial Tracker skins and butchers the doe, which Cleric then cooks using a small and incomprehensible Cant. As his eyes dim to a dark glitter, the tip of his finger shines as bright as a candle flame, and Mimara cannot but think of the glorious soot, the Qirri, that will blacken it later in the evening. Cleric slowly draws the pad of his finger along the haunches, then the ribs, transforming crimson lobes into sizzling, smoking meat.
The thrush they boil.
Afterward, Mimara saunters along the edges of the Captain's distraction, then creeps back in a broad circle, ducking behind palms of leaning stone, slipping between throngs of undergrowth. A wall of sorts borders the inner courtyard where they have gathered, an arc of unmortared stone broken into toothlike sections. The Captain has deposited the Wizard at the far end, careful as always to keep him segregated from the others. She hurries even though she knows she risks Cleric's preternatural hearing. For a man who betrays almost no anxiety, Lord Kosoter is nothing if not a fastidious shepherd, always counting and remorselessly quick to catch strays with his crook.
She slows as she nears the wall behind the old Wizard, following the tingle of his Mark more than any visual cue. She slinks between sumac, presses against the cold stone. She stretches out onto her belly, creeps with serpent patience until she can see the Wizard's maul of hair rising before her.
'Akka…' she whispers.
A warmth climbs through her as she speaks, an unaccountable assurance, as if out of all her crazed burdens, confession is the only real encumbrance. Secrecy mars the nature of every former slave, and she is no different. They hoard knowledge, not for the actual power it affords, but for the taste of that power. All this time, even before Achamian's captivity, she has been accumulating facts and suspicions. All this time she has fooled herself the way all men fool themselves, thinking that she alone possessed the highest vantage and that she alone commanded the field.
All this time she has been a fool.
She tells him what she has learned about the Captain and his mission. 'He knows he's damned. We are his only hope of salvation-or so he believes. Kellhus has promised him paradise. So long as he needs us, we're secure… As soon as I discover just why he needs us, I promise I'll find some way to tell you!'
She tells him how Cleric is more than Ishroi-so much more. 'Nil'giccas!' she cries under her breath. 'The last Nonman King! What could that mean?'
She speaks of the terror she did not know she had. And there is something in her murmur, a despair perhaps, that bumps her from the ruts, carries her away from the tracks the previous weeks and months have worn into her thoughts. She recalls who she was.
She tells him of the incense mornings on the Andiamine Heights, when she would laze in bed watching the sheers across her balcony rise and fall with twining grace, her breath deep and even, her eyes fluttering to protest the sun.
'I dreamed of you… you, Akka.'
Because he wasn't real. Because a fictitious love was the only love she could bear.
She always knew he would rebuff her, that he would deny his paternity, deny her the knowledge she so desperately sought. She always knew, in the queer way of damaged souls, that she loved him because he knew nothing about her, and so had no grounds for casual judgment-or even worse, the watchful pity she so despised in her mother's eyes.
