It was a strange thing for a man to enter the world of a damaged woman. The apparent disproportion between event and evaluation. The endless sinkholes that punished verbal wandering. The crazed alchemy of compassion and condemnation. It was a place where none of the scales seemed balanced, where the compass bowl never settled and the needle never showed true north.
'You know, girl, I think that was when I truly fell in love with her… that day, so very hot, as humid as any day in the Sayut Delta. I sat on the very sill she used to accost men on the street below, watched her slender form swallowed by the mobs…'
For some reason, he could not conjure the image in his soul's eye. Instead he glimpsed the eunuch-fat man she had vanished behind in the press: his smile hooking his jowls, empires of dark soaking his armpits.
Such is the perversity of memory. Small wonder the Nonmen lapsed into madness.
'She wasn't the only one,' he continued. 'Apparently thousands of Exceptions had been sold, almost all of them counterfeit. Not that it would have mattered, given that you were in Carythusal, far beyond the sway of the Emperor and his ill-considered law. The slavers had hired mercenaries in anticipation. There were riots. Hundreds were killed. One of the slaver's ships was set alight. When I saw the smoke I went out into the city to try to find her.'
He idly wondered whether anyone had seen as many smoking cities as he. Many, he decided, if the rumours he had heard regarding the Wars of Unification were true.
Sarl and the Captain among them.
'Men are fools at the best of times,' he continued, 'but when they gather in mobs they lose whatever little reason they can claim when alone. Someone cries out, they all cry out. Someone bludgeons or burns, and they all bludgeon and burn. It's remarkable really, and terrifying enough to send kings and emperors into hiding.
'I was forced to resort to the Gnosis twice just to reach the harbour, and this in a city where Chorae were rife and sorcerers had their tongues scraped out with oyster shells. I actually remember little, just smoke, shadows running, bodies in the dust, and this… this cold that seemed to burn in the bottom of my gut.'
Even after so many years, the phantasmagoric feel of that afternoon still tickled. It had been one of the first times his waking life had approximated the shrieking madness of his Dreams.
'Did you find her?' Mimara asked. She had been walking with her head slouched, almost slung, from her shoulders. It was a unlikely posture, a peculiar combination of reflection and defeat.
'No.'
'No? What do you mean, no?'
'I mean no. I remember thinking I found her. Along one of the Hagerna's walls, lying face first in her own blood…' The moment came back to him unbidden. He had been nauseated for smoke and worry, leaning his then fat body against what seemed a laborious incline. The sight of her struck all thought and breath and motion from him. He just stood there, teetering, while the screams and shouts continued to pipe in the near distance behind him. At first, he had simply known it was her. The same girlish form and piling black hair. Even more, the same mauve cloak-though it struck him now that it might have only seemed the same cut and colour. Fear has a way of rewriting things to suit its purposes. She had fallen facing up-hill, pigeon-toed, one arm slack along her side, the other bent beneath her torso. The blood had streamed along her edges, outlining her in black and crimson. He remembered horns sounding across the harbour-the Shrial Knights signalling-and how in their blaring wake a hush had fallen, allowing him to hear the tap-tap of her blood directly into the heart of the earth: she had fallen across one of Sumna's famed gutters.
'But it wasn't her?' Mimara was asking.
Several young men had raced past without so much as seeing them. With nerveless fingers he had reached down, certain she would be as light as bundled rags. She was not, and it reminded him of pulling stones out of wet beach sand as a child. He heaved the woman onto her back, revealed her sodden face, and stumbled back against the wall, falling to his rump.
Joy and relief… unlike anything he would experience until the First Holy War.
'No,' he replied. 'Just some other unfortunate. Your mother had found her way back with nary a scrape.' She had been sitting on her sill when he returned, staring down the slots between the opposing tenements, toward the harbour. The room was dark, so that she seemed to glow from where he stood in the doorway.
'She never spoke of you again… Not to me or anyone.'
Not until she succumbed to Kellhus.
They both fell silent for a trudging time, as though struggling to absorb the sideways significance of his tale. They stared at the sparse crowd of scalpers before them: Pokwas with a vole carcass slung across his great tulwar, which he wore holstered diagonally across his back. Galian bobbing at his side, his stride as quick and nimble as his tongue. Conger and Wonard shuffling like hurried ghosts, their Galeoth war-knots so haphazard that their hair fell in filthy rags to their shoulders. Koll lurching and limping, his shoulders as sharp as sticks.
'Your mother is a survivor, girl,' Achamian finally hazarded. 'Same as you.'
He found himself thinking that perhaps she had died that day in the harbour-or a part of her. The Esmenet he had found was not the Esmenet who had left him, that much was certain. Her melancholy had lifted, if anything. He remembered thinking that she had actually healed in some way. Before that day, a kind of inward lethargy had always blunted the appetite of her curiosities, the wicked edge of her witticisms. Or so it seemed at the time.
'Let the Outside sort her sins,' he added.
He typically shied from this kind of talk. The World seemed too much a rind pulled across something horrific, and death loomed as the only terror. Someday his sins would be sorted as well, and he did not need Mimara and her Eye to know his ultimate fate.
He walked, waiting for Mimara to pinch him with more questions and unflattering observations. But she kept her face turned to the distances before them, the wind-whisking openness, the endless lines. You would not know the world was crooked, he thought, living on the plains.
Perhaps because they had been speaking Ainoni, he found himself recalling the time he had spent in Carythusal spying on the Scarlet Spires, and of this old drunk-Posodemas, he called himself-who would ply him with stories at a tavern called the Holy Leper. The man, who claimed to have survived seven naval battles and no less than five years as a captive of the Shirise pirates, would speak of nothing but his wives and mistresses. He would describe, in excruciating detail, how each had betrayed him in this or that humiliating respect. Achamian would sit listening to the cow-eyed wretch, alternately scanning the crowd and nodding in false encouragement, telling himself that few things were more precious to a man than his shame — the very sense endless drink stripped from him.
And that, he realized with no small amount of dismay, was what seemed to be happening here, on the long road to Ishual.
Endless intoxication. And with it, the slow strangulation of shame. What good was honesty when it carried no pain?
Dust on the horizon. Human smells on the hot wind.
Fleet, they sprinted across the grasses, running low so that the weeds clawed their shoulders, their numbers scattered wide so that the dust of their approach would not alert their prey. They howled insults at the hated sun. They were sleek creatures, tireless and unrelenting in the prosecution of their dread appetites. They took dirt for sustenance, violence for bliss. They wore the faces of their enemy, inhumanly beautiful when calm, twisted grotesqueries when aroused.
Sranc… Weapons of an ancient war, ranging a dead world.
They could smell them, the trespassers. They could see the lobes of flesh, the bloody pockets they would cut for their coupling, the eyes wide with unspeakable horror. Though generations had passed since their ancestors had last encountered Men, the fact of them had been stamped into their flesh. The aching splendour of their screams. The heat of their bleeding. The twitching glory of their struggles.
They loped like wolves, scuttled like spiders. They ran for truths they did not know, for verities written in their blood. They ran for the promise of violation…
Only to be astonished by a human figure rising from wicks of scrub and grass.
A woman.
Baffled, they tripped to a walk, closed about her in a broad arc. The wind flowed over her limbs, rifled through her hair, her rags, drawing with it the sediment that was her scent.
