She holds his gaze for an instant, then looks down to her trudging feet. She glimpses the skull of some animal-a fox, perhaps-jutting from the humus.
'To remember.'
She doesn't mean this as a question, and apparently understanding, the old Wizard says nothing in reply. He always seems preternaturally wise when he does this.
'But his memory…' she says. 'How could he be more powerful than you when he can barely follow the passage of days?'
Achamian scratches his chin through the wiry mat of his beard. 'There's more than one kind of memory… It's events and individuals he forgets, mostly. Skills are different. They don't pile on the same way across the ages. But like I told you, sorcery depends on the purity of the meanings. What makes magic so difficult for you to learn turns on the same principle that makes him so powerful-even if he has forgotten the bulk of what he once knew. Ten thousand years, Mimara! The purity that escapes you, the purity that I find such toil, is simply a reflex for the likes of him.'
He stares at her the way he always does when trying to press home some crucial point: his lips slightly parted, his eyes beseeching beneath a furrowed brow.
'A Quya Mage,' she says.
'A Quya Mage,' he repeats, nodding in relief. 'Few things in this world are more formidable.'
She tries to smile at him but looks away because of the sudden threat of tears. Worry and fear assail her. Over Cleric and the Captain, over the skin-spy and what it has insinuated. She draws a deep breath, risks looking at the old man. He grins in melancholy reassurance, and suddenly it all seems manageable, standing here at his gruff and tender side.
Akka. The world's only sorcerer without a School. The only Wizard.
'Akka…' she murmurs. A kind of gentle beseeching.
She understands now why her mother still loves him-even after so many years, even after sharing her bed with a living God. The uniform teeth behind his smile. The sheen of compassion that softens even his most hostile glare. The heart and simple passion of a man who, despite all his failings, is capable of risking everything-life and world-in the name of love.
'What?' he asks, his voice querulous, his eyes twinkling.
An unaccountable shyness climbs into her face. He is, she realizes, the first man to have ever made her feel safe.
'May our dooms be one,' she says with curt nod.
The old Wizard smiles. 'May our dooms be one, Mimara.'
The pebble it throws is round and chipped, drawn down from the high mountains, its surface cracked and polished by ages of blasting water and migrating gravel. It threads the sieve of dead branches, climbing its low- thrown arc, before sailing into the midst of supine company, over the slumbering form of Pokwas, into the tangle of hair about her head.
She awakens instantly, knows instantly.
Soma.
She recoils from the thought, knowing that Soma, the real Soma, lies dead somewhere near Marrow-that what awaits her in the black has no name because it has no soul.
She wanders from the camp, following a rare lane of low light, beyond the first ring of towering sentinels, beyond the reach of any incipient Wards. She feels more than sees the shadow atop the blunt limb above her. Breathless, she looks up…
The shadow leans down and forward, and she sees it, staring at her with wide, expectant eyes…
Her own face.
'I can smell the fetus within you…' she hears her voice say.
'Kill the Captain, and it will be saved.'
No. No. No.
Deceit! Devilry and deceit!
All her life she has thought in whispers. A habit of slaves, who must practise within what will save them without.
But her heart shouts as she tries to find her way back to sleep.
Lie. This is what they do, skin-spies. Uncertainty is their contagion; fear and confusion are their disease. 'They seduce,' her mother once told her. 'They play on your fears, your vulnerabilities, use them to craft you into their tool.'
But what if…
Coupling. It was something she did… A kind of blankness rose within her, an absence where human feeling should have been. Men always wanted her, and she almost always despised them for it. Almost always. Sometimes, when she needed things or when she simply wanted to feel dead, her body answered their want, and she took them into her. She held them while they laboured and trembled, she bore them as a burden upon her back. And she almost never thought about it afterward, simply continued running through her running life.
She had endured innumerable suitors while on the Andiamine Heights, an insufferable parade of dandies and widowers, some cruel, others despondent, all of them hungry for the peach of Imperial power. To a man she had spurned them, had even managed to provoke a handful of formal protestations. One, the Patridomos of House Israti, even brought a suit before the Judges, claiming that she should be forced to marry him as punishment for her slander. Mother had seen to that fool.
But she had been bedded nonetheless. And despite years of carrying a whore-shell, despite the chaos of her menstrual cycle, pregnancy was not impossible. The strong seed forces the womb…
Her mother was proof of that.
Three, she tells herself. There are only three occasions she can think of that would make the accursed creature true. There was the darling body-slave-little more than a boy-who attended to her ledgers before her flight. As absurd as it is, she owns estates across the Three Seas-as does everyone in the Imperial Family. There was Imhailas, the vain Captain of the Eothic guard, who helped her escape in exchange for a taste of her peach.
Then there was Achamian, who yearned so for the mother she so resembled. She had yielded and he had taken-their 'first mistake together,' he had called it-in exchange for a sorcery she no longer desired.
Three, she tells herself, when in fact there is only one.
She dwells on the skin-spy and its revelation, makes adversaries of its words and an arena of her soul.
'I can smell the fetus within you…'
She battles it with unvoiced denunciations. Liar! she rails within. Obscene deceiver! But hers is a treacherous heart, forever miring what should be simple with unwanted implications. So she hears the Wizard speaking in rejoinder…
'The Judging Eye is the eye of the Unborn…'
Trying to explain away the horror of her accursed sight.
'The eye that watches from the vantage of the God.'
On and on the voices tangle, until it seems they are one and the same, the sorcerer and the spy.
'Kill the Captain, and it will be saved.'
No, she tells herself. No. No. No. The brothel has taught her the power of pretense, the way facts will sometimes fade into oblivion, if you deny them with enough ferocity.
This is what she will do.
Yes. Yes. Yes.
Several days pass without sign of the thing called Soma. She tells herself she is relieved, yet she lingers in the lonely dark nonetheless, gazing up through the dead branches, listening to the blackness croak and creak.
One night she finds a small pool bathed in a miraculous shaft of moonlight. She crouches beside it, stares up through the hanging tunnel to consider the moon. She gazes at her image poised between floating leaves and finds herself troubled. The skin-spy, she realizes, was the last time she saw her own face. She wants to fret over her appearance in the old way, to primp and preen, but it all seems so foolish, life before this, the Slog of Slogs.
