What began as a remedy in the Cil-Aujan deeps had somehow transcended habit and become sacred ritual. 'The Holy Dispensation,' Mimara once called it in a pique of impatience.
Each night they queued before the Nonman, awaiting their pinch of Qirri. Usually Cleric would sit cross-legged and wordlessly dip his index finger into his pouch, darkening the pad with the merest smear. One by one the Skin Eaters would kneel before him and take the tip of his outstretched finger into their mouths-to better avoid any waste. Achamian would take his place among the others, kneel as they did when his time came. The Qirri would be bitter, the finger cold for the spit of others, sweet for the soil of daily use. A kind of euphoria would flutter through him, one that stirred troubling memories of kneeling before Kellhus during the First Holy War. There would be a moment, a mere heartbeat, where he would buckle beneath the dark gaze of the Nonman. But he would walk away content, like a starving child who had tasted honey.
Thoughtless, he would sit and savour the slow crawl of vitality through his veins.
The first and only Stone Hag to dare ridicule the act was found dead the following morning. Afterward, the renegade scalpers restricted their opinions to sullen looks and expressions-fear and disgust, mostly.
Sometimes the Nonman would climb upon some wild pulpit, the mossed remains of a fallen tree, the humped back of a boulder, and paint wonders with his dark voice. Wonders and horrors both.
Often he spoke of war and tribulation, of loves unravelled and victories undone. But no matter how the scalpers pressed him with questions, he could never recall the frame of his reminiscences. He spoke in episodes and events, never ages or times. The result was a kind of inadvertent verse, moments too packed with enigma and ambiguity to form narrative wholes-at least none they could comprehend. Fragments that never failed to leave his human listeners unsettled and amazed.
Mimara continually pestered the old Wizard with questions afterward. 'Who is he?' she would hiss. 'His stories must tell you something!'
Time and again Achamian could only profess ignorance. 'He remembers the breaking of things, nothing more. The rest of the puzzle is always missing-for him as much as for us! I know only that he's old… exceedingly old…'
'How old?'
'Older than iron. Older even than human writing…'
'You mean older than the Tusk.'
All Nonmen living were impossibly ancient. Even the youngest of their number were contemporaries of the Old Prophets. But if his sermons could be believed, Cleric-or Incariol, Lord Wanderer-was far older still, in his prime before the Ark and the coming of the Inchoroi.
An actual contemporary Nin'janjin and Cu'jara Cinmoi…
'Go to sleep,' the Wizard grumbled.
What did it matter who Cleric had been, he told himself, when the ages had battered him into something entirely different?
'You look upon me and see something whole… singular…' the Nonman said one night, his head hanging from his shoulders, his face utterly lost to shadow. When he looked up tears had silvered his cheeks. 'You are mistaken.'
'What did he mean?' Mimara asked after she and the Wizard had curled onto their mats. They always slept side by side now. Achamian had even become accustomed to the point of absence that was her Chorae. Ever since that first Sranc attack, when she had been stranded with Soma beyond the protective circuit of his incipient Wards, he had been loathe to let her stray from his side.
'He means that he's not a… a self… in the way you and I are selves. Now go to sleep.'
'But how is that possible?'
'Because of memory. Memory is what binds us to what we are. Go to sleep.'
'What do you mean? How can somebody not be what they are? That makes no sense.'
'Go to sleep.'
He would lay there, his eyes closed to the world, while the image of the Nonman-mundane beauty perpetually at war with his arcane disfiguration-plagued his soul. The old Wizard would curse himself for a fool, ask himself how many watches he had wasted worrying about the Erratic. Cleric was one of the Pharroika, the Wayward. Whatever the Nonman once was, he was no longer-and that should be enough.
If he had ceased pondering Incariol altogether in the days following the battle in the ruins of Maimor, it was because of the skin-spy and what its presence implied. But time's passage has a way of blunting our sharper questions, of making things difficult to confront soft with malleable familiarity. Of course, the Consult had been watching him, the man who had taught the Gnosis to the Aspect-Emperor, and so delivered the Three Seas. Of course, they had infiltrated the Skin Eaters.
He was Drusas Achamian.
But the further Soma fell into the past, the more Cleric's presence irked his curiosity, the more the old questions began prickling back to life.
Even his Dreams had been affected.
He had lost his inkhorn and papyrus in the mad depths of Cil-Aujas, so he could no longer chronicle the particulars of his slumbering experience. Nor did he need to.
It almost seemed as if he had become unmoored when he pondered the transformations. First he had drifted from the central current of Seswatha's life, away from the tragic enormities and into the mundane details, where he had been delivered to knowledge of Ishual, the secret fastness of the Dunyain. Then, as if these things were too small to catch the fabric of his soul, he slipped from Seswatha altogether, seeing things his ancient forebear had never seen, standing where he never stood, as when he saw the Library of Sauglish burn.
And now?
He continued to dream that he and nameless others stood shackled in a shadowy line. Broken men. Brutalized. They filed through a tube of thatched undergrowth, bushes that had grown out and around their passage, forming vaults of a thousand interlocking branches. Over the stooped shoulders of those before him, he could see the tunnel's terminus, the threshold of some sunlit clearing, it seemed-the spaces beyond were so open and bright as to defeat his gloom-pinched eyes. He felt a dread that seemed curiously disconnected from his surroundings, as if his fear had come to him from a far different time and place.
And he did not know who he was.
A titanic horn would blare, and the line would be pulled stumbling forward, and peering, he would see a starved wretch at the fore, at least a hundred souls distant, stepping into the golden light… vanishing.
And the screaming would begin, only to be yanked short.
Again and again, he dreamed this senseless dream. Sometimes it was identical. Sometimes he seemed one soul closer to the procession's end. He could never be sure.
Was it the Qirri? Was it the deathless rancour of the Mop, or a cruel whim of Fate?
Or had the trauma of his life at last unhinged him and cast his slumber to the wolves of grim fancy?
For his whole life, ever since grasping the withered pouch of Seswatha's heart deep in the bowel of Atyersus, his dreams had possessed meaning… logic, horrifying to be sure, but comprehensible all the same. For his whole life he had awakened with purpose.
And now?
'So what was it like?' Achamian asked her as the company filed through the arboreal maze.
'What was what like?'
They always addressed each other in Ainoni now. The fact that only the Captain could comprehend them made it seem daring somehow-and curiously proper, as if madmen should oversee the exchange of secrets. Even still, they took care that he did not overhear.
'Life on the Andiamine Heights,' he said, 'as an Anasurimbor.'
'You mean the family you're trying to destroy.'
The old Wizard snorted. 'Just think, no more running.'
At last she smiled. Anger and sarcasm, Achamian had learned, were a kind of reflex for Mimara-as well as a fortress and a refuge. If he could outlast her initial hostility, which proved difficult no matter how much good
