grasp non-paradoxical approximations. In this case, 'strange.' Only a soul can comprehend contradictory truths.'
'If I'm not a soul, then what am I?'
How? How has everything become such a farce?
'An abacus crafted of skin, flesh, and bone. A monstrous, miraculous tool. A product of the Tekne.'
'That too is something special, is it not?'
Something is wrong, she realizes. Their voices have waxed too loud. And the Wizard, she knows, will be peering into the darkness after her, wondering. Worrying.
'I must go… I've tarried too long.'
Cleric saw it first, scooped along distant tentacles of wind. A scarf of white and gold-the colours of the Thousand Temples-floating, coiling and uncoiling. The first sign of humanity they had encountered since passing the last of the Meori ruins weeks previous.
Of course Achamian was among the last to pick it out against the dun monotony of the distance. 'There,' Mimara repeated time and again, pointing. 'There…' At last he glimpsed it, twisting like a worm in water. He clenched his teeth following its meandering course, balled his fists.
The Great Ordeal, he realized. Somewhere on this very plain, the host of Kellhus and his Believer-Kings marched the long road to Golgotterath. How close would they pass?
But this worry, like so many other things, seemed uprooted, yet another scarf floating across parched ground. Everything seemed to float lately, as if yanked from its native soil and carried on a slow flood of invisibility.
Few men returned the same after months or years of travel-Achamian knew this as well as anyone. Sheer exposure to different sights, different customs, different peoples, was enough to alter a man, sometimes radically. But in Achamian's estimation, the real impetus, what really changed men, was the simple act of walking and thinking, day after day, week after week, month after month. Innumerable thoughts flitted through the soul of the long traveller. Kith and kin were condemned and pardoned. Hopes and beliefs were considered and reconsidered. Worries were picked to the point of festering-or healing. For those who could affirm the same thoughts endlessly, men like the Captain, the trail typically led to fanaticism. For those with no stomach for continuous repetition, men like Galian, the trail led to suspicion and cynicism, the conviction that thought was never to be trusted. For those who found their thoughts never quite repeating, who found themselves continually surprised by novel angles and new questions, the trail led to philosophy-to a wisdom that only hermits and prisoners could know.
Achamian had always considered himself one of the latter: a long-walking philosopher. In his younger days, he would even take inventory of his beliefs and scruples to better judge the difference between the man who had departed and the man who had arrived. He was what the ancient Ceneian satirists called an aculmirsi, literally, a 'milestone man,' one who would spend his time on the road forever peering at the next milestone-a traveller who could not stop thinking about travelling.
But this journey, arguably the most significant of his long life… was different somehow. Something was happening.
Something inexplicable. Or something that wanted to be…
His Dreams had changed as well.
The night they had camped atop the Heilor, he once again found himself one of many captives chained in an ever-diminishing line, still toothless for scarce-remembered beatings, still nameless for the profundity of what he suffered-and yet everything was different. He glimpsed the flash of memories when he blinked, for one, images of ghastly torment, obscenities too extreme to be countenanced. The glimpse of Sranc hunched in frenzied rutting. The taste of their slaver as they arched and drooled across him. The stench of their black seed…
Degradations so profound that his soul had kicked free his body, his past, his sanity.
So he pinned his eyes wide in false wakefulness, stared over the wretches before him with a kind of mad glaring, toward the opening that marked his destination. Where scrub and brush had enclosed the file before, he now saw gleaming bulkheads and curved planes of gold: a corridor of metal, canted as though part of an almost toppled structure or some great boat dragged ashore. Where the tunnel had ended in a clearing of some kind, he now saw a chamber, vast in implication, though he could see naught but the merest fraction, and illuminated with a kind of otherworldly light, one that rinsed the walls in watery arrhythmia, and sickened for staring.
The Golden Room, he called it. And it was the sum of all horrors.
The unseen horn would blare, scraping across intonations no human ear was meant to suffer. Shadows would rise from the threshold, and the procession would be heaved staggering forward-two steps, never more. He would listen to the shrieks, infant in their intensity, as the Golden Room devoured yet another damaged soul.
Thinking, Please… Let it end here.
The trees, he had realized upon awakening. The Dream had been refracted through their lethargic wrath, distorted. A forest tunnel. A forest clearing. Now the barked skin of the Mop had fallen away, revealing the true locus of his dream captivity, one that he recognized instantly, yet was long in admitting…
The Dread Ark. Min-Uroikas. He now dreamed the experiences of some other soul, a captive of the Consult, shuffling to his doom in the belly of wicked Golgotterath.
And yet, despite the mad significance of this latest transformation, despite all the care and scrutiny he had heaped upon his Dreams over the years, he found himself dismissing these ethereal missives with an inexplicable negligence. Even though their horror actually eclipsed his old dreams of the Apocalypse, they simply did not seem to matter… for some reason… for some reason…
The old Wizard laughed sometimes, so little did he care.
– | Seventeen days into the Istyuli Plains, the day following the scarf, Mimara suddenly asked him why he had fallen in love with her mother.
Mimara was forever talking about the 'Empress,' as she called her, always describing her in ways that lampooned and criticized. Often she would adopt her mother's tone and voice-lips pulled into a line, eyelids wary and low, an expression that strove to look impervious yet seemed brittle instead. It was a habit that amused and alarmed the old Wizard in equal measure.
Although Achamian was forever defending Esmenet, as well as chiding Mimara for her lack of charity, he had always managed to avoid revealing his true feelings. His instinct was to keep his counsel when talking mothers to their children-even when adult. Motherhood, it seemed, meant too much to be trusted to something as sordid as truth.
So he would tell her pleasant lies, the kind of polite observations designed to discourage further discussion. If she insisted or, worse yet, pestered him with direct questions, he would bark and bristle until she relented. Too much pain, he would tell himself. And besides, he had become quite fond of acting the crabby old Wizard.
But this time he did neither.
'Why?' she asked. 'Out of all the women you had lain with, why love her?'
'Because she possessed a sharp wit,' he heard himself reply. 'That was why I… why I returned, I think. That and her beauty. But your mother… She was always asking me questions about things, about the world, the past- even my Dreams fascinated her. We would lie in her bed sweating, and I would talk and talk, and she would never lose interest. One night she interrogated me until dawn gilded the cracks of her shutters. She would listen and…'
He trailed into the marching silence, not so much stymied by the difficulty of what he wanted to say as astonished by the fact he spoke at all. When had confession become so easy?
'And what?'
'And she… she believed me…'
'Your stories, you mean. About the First Apocalypse and the No-God.'
He glanced about, as though wary about being overheard, when in truth he really did not care.
'That… But it was more, I think. She believed in me.'
Could it be so simple?
And so he continued. He heard himself explaining things he never knew he understood, how doubt and indecision had so ruled his soul and intellect that he could scarce act without lapsing into endless recriminations. Why? Why? Always why? He heard himself explaining the horrors of his Dreams, and how they had frayed his nerves to the quick. He heard himself telling her how he had come to her mother weak, a man who would sooner
