humour he mustered, he could usually coax a degree of openness from her.
'It was complicated,' she began pensively.
'Well then, start at the beginning.'
'You mean when they came for me in Carythusal?'
The old Wizard shrugged and nodded.
They had slackened their pace enough to fall behind the others, even the dour file of Stone Hags, who stole longing glances as Mimara drifted past. Despite the chorus of birdsong, a kind of silence reared about them, the hush of slow growth and decay. It felt like shelter.
'You have to understand,' she said hesitantly. 'I didn't know that I had been wronged. The brutalities I endured… But I was a child… and then I was a brothel-slave-that's what I was… Something made to be violated, abused, over and over, until I grew too old or too ugly, and they sold me to the fullery. That was just the… the way… So when the Eothic Guardsmen came and began beating Yappi… Yapotis… the brothel master, I didn't understand. I couldn't understand…'
Achamian watched her carefully, saw a rare strand of sunlight flash across her face. 'You thought you were being attacked instead of saved.'
A numb nod. 'They took me away before the killing began, but I knew… I could tell from the soldiers' manner, cold, as merciless as any of these scalpers. I knew they would kill anyone who had a hand in my… my fouling…'
She had the habit of slipping into Tutseme when she became upset, the rough dialect peculiar to menials and slaves from Carythusal. The clipped vowels. The singsong intonations. Achamian would have teased her for sounding like an Ainoni harlot, had the subject matter been less serious.
'They brought me to a ship-you should have seen them! Stammering, bowing and kneeling, not the soldiers, but the Imperial Apparati who commanded them. They asked me- begged me! — for some kind of request, for something they could do, for my health and my ease, they said. For my glory. I'll never forget that! My whole life my only prize had been the lust my form incited in men-the face of an Empress, the hips and slit of a young girl-and there I stood, the proud possessor of what? Glory? So I said, 'Stop. Stop the killing!' And they looked at me with long faces and said, 'Alas, Princess, that is the one thing we cannot do.' 'Why?' I asked them…
''Because the Blessed Empress has commanded it,' they said…
'So I stood on the prow and watched… They had moored on the high river, on the quays typically reserved for the Scarlet Spires-you know those? — so I could see the slums rise to the north, all the Worm laid out for inspection. I could see it burn… I could even see souls trapped on their roofs… Men, women, children… jumping…'
The old Wizard watched her, careful to purge any hint of pity from his frown. To be a child-whore one moment and a Princess-Imperial the next. To be plucked from abject slavery and hurtled to the heights of the greatest empire since Cenei. And then to have your old world burned down around you.
Esmenet, he understood, had tried to undo her crime with the commission of another. She had mistook vengeance for reparation.
'So you understand,' Mimara continued, swallowing. 'My first years on the Andiamine Heights were hateful… shameful, even. You understand why I did everything I could to punish Mother.'
Achamian studied her for a moment before nodding. The company had crested a gradual slope and now descended, using webs of bared roots as steps. A rare glimpse of the sun flashed above, making silhouettes of shagged leaves.
'I understand,' he said as they picked their way down, feeling the raw weight of his own story, his own grievances, press through the tone of his reply. They were both victims of Esmenet.
They walked in silence, their strides as thoughtless as they were quick.
'Thank you,' Mimara said after a time, fixing him with a curious gaze.
'For what?'
'For not asking what all the others ask.'
'Which is?'
'How I could have stayed all those years. How I could have allowed myself to be used as I was used. Apparently everyone would have run away, slit their master's throat, committed suicide…'
'Nothing makes fools of people quite like a luxurious life,' Achamian said, shaking his head and nodding. 'Ajencis says they confuse decisions made atop pillows for those compelled by stones. When they hear of other people being deceived, they're certain they would know better. When they hear of other people being oppressed, they're certain they would do anything but beg and cringe when the club is raised…'
'And so they judge,' Mimara said sourly.
'They certainly picked the wrong woman in your case!'
This coaxed another smile-another small triumph.
She began talking about her younger siblings, haltingly at first, then with more confidence and detail. She seemed surprised by her own reminiscences, and troubled. She had foresworn her family-he knew that much. But watching and listening to her describe the embittered object of her anger, he came to suspect she had gone so far as to deny her family, to tell herself that she was in fact alone, without the guy ropes of kith and kin to prop her.
Small wonder she had been so reluctant to tell him anything. People are generally loathe to describe what they need to forget, especially the small things, the loving things that contradict their precious sense of injustice.
She started with Kayutas, the child Esmenet had carried in her womb the day Achamian had repudiated her before the assembled Lords of the Holy War. He would have seemed a kind of god to her, she said, had her stepfather not been Kellhus-a real God. 'He is the very image of his father,' she said, nodding as if agreeing with her own description. 'Not so remote, certainly… More…'
'Human,' the old Wizard said, scowling.
She then turned to Moenghus, whom she described as the most normal and difficult of her younger siblings. Apparently he was quite the terror as a youth, given to episodes of inconsolable anger and continually brooding, if not sulking. Esmenet regularly left the boys in her care-with the hope of fostering some tenderness for her younger siblings, Mimara presumed. She despised the swimming expeditions most of all.
Apparently Moenghus enjoyed diving under the water and not reappearing for the longest time. The first incident was the worst-she even called on their bodyguards to help her, only to watch Moenghus's head break the flashing water several spans away. He ignored her commands and curses, and repeated the stunt again and again. Each time she would tell herself he was simply playing, but her heart would continue counting beats, and the panic would well higher and higher-until she was fairly beside herself with fear and fury. Then his head would magically pop into sight, his black hair glazed in white sunlight, and he would glare at her shouting antics before descending again. Finally she turned on his brother, demanding an explanation.
'Because,' Kayutas said with a detachment that clammed her skin, 'he wants people to think him dead.'
The old Wizard responded with a nodding snort. When he asked her whether anyone knew about his true parentage, she merely frowned and said, 'Questioning our holy parentage is sacrilege.'
Lies, Achamian mused. Deceit heaped atop deceit. In the early days of his exile, he would sometimes lie awake at night, convinced that sooner or later someone would see through Kellhus and his glamour, that the truth would win out, and all the madness would come crashing down…
That he could come home and reclaim his wife.
But as the years passed he came to see this for the rank foolishness that it was. He-a student of Ajencis, no less! Truths were carved from the identical wood as were lies-words-and so sank or floated with equal ease. But since truths were carved by the World, they rarely appeased Men and their innumerable vanities. Men had no taste for facts that did not ornament or enrich, and so they wilfully-if not knowingly-panelled their lives with shining and intricate falsehoods.
Mimara's eldest sister, Theliopa, would be the only one of her siblings to occasion a true smile. According to Mimara, the girl was almost incapable of expressing passion of any sort and was oblivious-sometimes comically so- to all but the most obvious social graces. She was also dreadfully thin, famine thin, and had to be continually cajoled and bullied to eat. But her intellect was nothing short of a miracle. Everything she read, she remembered,
