foliage. They sit in scattered clots, watching the setting sun fall crimson into distant canopies. The Mop seems to mock and to beckon in turn, a susurrus unlike any she has heard, a horde of a million million leaves rattling in the dying breeze.
Opposite their camp, the formation rears into a promontory, stone horned like a bent-back thumb. The Captain stands in the dying light, beckons Cleric to follow him. Mimara pretends not to watch them vanish about the treacherous ledges. She counts fifty heartbeats, then strikes out along the opposite face, where they have designated their latrine. She continues past the putrid smell, literally risks life and limb scaling a serrated pitch. Then she creeps forward in a crouch, moving toward the sound of muttered voices.
The breeze or the play of echoes across chaotic stone fools her, for she almost blunders upon them. Only some instinct to freeze saves her from discovery. She breathlessly shrinks behind the cover of a tortoise-humped outcropping.
' They remind you…'
The Captain's voice. It shocks her as surely as a knife point pressed against the back of her neck.
She creeps along the outer circuit of the tortoise stone, nearer, nearer… As shallow as it is, her breath burns against the tightness of her high chest. Her heart thumps.
'What's happening?' the Nonman says. 'I don't… I don't understand…'
'You are truly a blasted idiot.'
She steps from behind the rising shell of rock, finds herself standing almost entirely exposed. Only the direction of their gazes prevents them from seeing her. Cleric sits in a pose of dejected glory, at once beautiful and grotesque for the blasted depths of his Mark. The Captain stands over him, a vision of archaic savagery, his Chorae so close to the Nonman that she can see a faint husk of salt rising across his scalp.
'Tell me!' Incariol cries in hushed tones. 'Tell me why I am here!'
A moment of glaring impatience. 'Because they remind you.'
'But who? They remind me of who?' Even as Cleric says this his glittering black eyes wander toward her.
'Someone you once knew,' the Captain grates. 'They remind you of someone you once-'
He whirls toward her. His hair swings in broken sheets of black and grey.
'What are you doing?' he barks.
'I–I…' she stammers. 'I think I need more… more Qirri.'
A moment of murderous deliberation, then something like a grin hooks his eyes. He turns wordlessly to the Nonman, who remains seated as before.
'No,' Cleric says with a strange solemnity. 'Not yet. I apologize… Mimara.'
This is the first time he has spoken her name. She retreats, flinching from the Captain's manic glare, her skin buzzing with the shame of her exposure. Afterward she remembers the Nonman's lips more than his voice, their fulsome curves, white tinged with too-long-in-the-water blue. She sees them moving to the rhythm of consonant and vowel.
Mim… araa…
Like a kiss, she thinks, her arms bundled against a curious sense of chill.
Like a kiss.
She keeps to herself the following day. The Wizard seems only too happy to oblige her. The trail has its rhythms, its own ebb and flow. Sometimes everyone seems to be engaged in low conversation, while other times everyone appears sullen and wary or simply lost in their own labouring breaths, and naught can be heard above the whistling chorus of birdsong. Their descent back into the Mop has replaced their anxiousness with melancholy.
She is quite lost in thought when Cleric comes alongside her, senseless ruminations, more a collage of recriminations and pained memories than anything meaningful.
She smiles at her shock. The unearthly beauty of his face and form unsettles her, almost as much as the horrid depth of his Mark. Something wrenches at the inner corners of her eyes whenever she allows her gaze to linger. He is contradiction incarnate.
'Is it true,' he inexplicably asks, 'that being touched by another and touching oneself are quite distinct sensations for Men?'
The question bewilders and embarrasses her, to the point of drawing even more heat to her flushed face. 'Yes… I suppose…'
He walks in silence for a time, eyes tracking the ground before his booted feet. There is something… overwhelming about his stature. The other men, with the possible exception of Sarl, exude the same aura of physical strength and martial brutality as had so many warlike men on the Andiamine Heights. But Cleric possesses a density beyond intimations of force and threat, one that reminds her of her stepfather and the way the world always seemed to bow about his passage.
She thinks of all the skinnies he has killed, the legions incinerated in the existential thunder of his voice. And he seems hardened for the multitudes that flicker shrieking before her soul's eye-in Cil-Aujas, on Maimor, across the Mop-as if murder draws flesh to stone. She wonders what it would be like, dying beneath his black-glittering eyes.
Beautiful, she decides.
'I think I once knew this,' he finally says. At first she cannot identify the passion twining through his voice. Achamian has told her much about the Nonmen, how their souls often move in ways counter to the tracks of human passion. She wants to say sorrow, but it seems more somehow…
She wonders if tragedy could be a passion.
'Now you know it again,' she says, smiling at the frigid gaze.
'No,' he replies. 'Never again.'
'Then why ask?'
'There is… comfort… in rehearsing the dead motions of the past.'
She finds herself nodding-as if they were peers discussing common knowledge. 'We are alike in this way.'
'Mimara,' he says, his tone so simple with astonishment that for an instant he seems a mortal man. 'Your name is… Mimara…' He turns to her, his eyes brimming with human joy. She shudders at the glimpse of his fused teeth-there is something too dark about his smile. 'Ages have passed,' he says wondering, 'since I have remembered a human name…'
Mimara.
Afterward, her thoughts racing, she ponders the absurdity of memory, the fact that so simple a faculty can make a being so powerful so pathetic in its faltering. But the Wizard has been watching, of course. He's always watching, it seems. Always worried. Always… trying.
Like Mother.
'What did he want?' he rasps in heated Ainoni.
'Why do you fear him?' she snaps in return. She is never sure where this instinct comes from, knowing how to throw men on their heels.
The old Wizard walks and scowls, frail against a murky background of colossal trunks and mossed deadfalls. Trees growing in a graveyard of trees.
'Because I'm not sure that I could kill him when the time comes,' he finally says. He speaks as much to the matted ground as to her, his beard crowded against his breastbone, his eyes unfocused in the manner of men making too-honest admissions.
'When the time comes…' she says in mocking repetition.
He turns to her profile, studies her.
'He's an Erratic, Mimara. When he decides he loves us, he will try to kill us.'
The words she overheard the previous night seem to clutch with their own fingers, to scratch with nails like quills…
'But who? They remind me of who?'
'Someone,' the Captain replies in his grinding voice, 'you once knew…'
She composes her face into the semblance of boredom. 'How can you be so sure?' she asks the Wizard.
'Because that is what Erratics do. Kill those they love.'
