Man, rot, feces, and… and something else…
Something at once alarming and alluring.
They formed fences about her, swaying and screeching, brandishing crude weapons, or mewling in confused apprehension. Their Chieftain approached, his arms thrown down and back to drag knives through the powdery turf. He stood before her, nearly as tall, flies buzzing about the rotted leathers that clothed him.
'What are you?' he barked.
'A child of the same father,' she said.
The Chieftain began stomping. He bared his teeth, gnashed them for the woman to see. 'Father… father! We have no fathers save the earth!'
She smiled a mother's smile. 'But you do. And they deny you this path.'
'Kill! Kill you! Kill-murder-fuck the others!'
'Yet you have no hunger for me…'
'No hunger…'
'Because we are children of the same fathers.'
'Kill!' the Chieftain shrieked. 'Kill-murder-fuck!' He shook his jaws like a wolf disputing a bone, raised his pitted knives to the featureless sky.
The thing called Mimara leapt high over the Chieftain's wagging head. Sunlight sparked from bared steel. It somersaulted with preternatural languor, landed in a warrior stance. Behind its back the Chieftain jerked, shrieked, clawed the air, as if trying to snatch at the violet blood spouting from his neck. The beast spun into the dust, little more than a twitching shadow behind screens of chalk.
'We are children of the same fathers,' the woman said to the others. 'Do you smell the truth-power of this?'
A raucous swell of howls…
'The Black Heaven will call you very soon.'
She smiled at the grovelling obscenities.
'He will call you very soon.'
'What was it like?' she asks. 'Meeting Kellhus for the first time, I mean.'
The old Wizard's reply is typically long-winded.
Ajencis, he tells her, was fond of chiding his students for confusing assent with intellect. Apparently this confusion was what made obviously profound souls so troubling-and so rare. 'You, my girl, are the ground of your assumptions. No matter how bent your cubit may be, it is the very definition of straight for you. So when another comes to you with their carpenter's string… Well, let's just say they will necessarily come up short the degree to which their assumptions deviate from yours-and it will strike you as obviously so. No matter how wrong, how foolish you are, you will think you know it 'in your stomach,' as the Galeoth say.'
'So true wisdom is invisible? You're saying we can't see it when we encounter it.'
'No. Only that we have great difficulty recognizing it.'
'Then what made my stepfather different?'
The old Wizard walked in silence for what seemed a long while, pondering the kick of his boots through the leathery grasses. 'I've spent many hours mulling this. Now, you see, he possesses the authority… He is the mighty, all-knowing Aspect-Emperor. His listeners come to him with their yardsticks in hand, actually seeking his correction. But back then… Well, he was little more than a beggar and a fugitive.'
His tone is halting, pensive. He has the manner of a man surprised by things so familiar they have become thoughtless.
'He had a gift for showing you the implications of things…' he says, then trails into the silence of second thoughts. His brow furrows. His lips purse within the shaggy profile of his beard. 'Ajencis was forever saying that ignorance is invisible,' he begins again, 'and that this is what fools us into thinking we know the truth of anything, let alone complicated matters. He thought certainty was a symptom of stupidity-the most destructive one. But at the risk of offending the Great Teacher-or his ancient shade, anyway-I would say that not all ignorances are… are equal. I think there are truths, profound truths, that we somehow know without knowing…'
Mimara glances around the way she often does when they have conversations like this. Pokwas is the nearest, his harness sagging, his black skin chalked by dust. Galian trudges nearby-the two have become inseparable. Cleric strides more than walks several paces ahead, his scalp gleaming white in the wide-sky sun. Sarl lags with Koll, his face pulled into a perpetual grimace. The Skin Eaters. They look more like a scattered mob of refugees than a warlike company on a quest.
'This…' Achamian says, still gazing into his reminiscences, 'this was Kellhus's noschi, his genius. He could look into your eyes and pluck these… half-known truths from you… and so, within heartbeats of speaking with him, you would begin doubting your own cubit, and begin looking more and more toward his measure…'
She feels her eyes arch wide in comprehension. 'A deceiver could ask for no greater gift.'
The Wizard's look is so sharp that at first she fears she has offended him. But he has that appreciative gleam in his eyes, the one she has come to prize.
'In all my years,' he continues, 'I have never quite understood worship, what happens to souls when they prostrate themselves before another-I've been a sorcerer for too long. And yet I did worship him… for a time. So much so I even forgave him the theft of your mother…'
He shakes his head as if trying to ward away bees, looks away to the stationary line of the horizon. A cough kicks through him.
'Whatever worship is,' he says, 'I think it involves surrendering your cubit… opening yourself to the perpetual correction of another…'
'Having faith in ignorance,' she adds with a wry grin.
His laughter is so sudden, so mad with hilarity, that fairly all the scalpers turn toward them.
'The grief you must have caused your mother!' he cries.
Even though she smiles at the joke, a part of her stumbles in errant worry. When has she become so clever?
The Qirri, she realizes. It quickens more than the step.
Wary of the sudden attention, they stay their tongues. The silence of endless exertion climbs over them once again. She stares out toward the northern horizon, at the long divide between sky and earth. She thinks of Kellhus and her mother making love in a distant desert. Her hand drifts to her belly, but her thoughts dare not follow… Not yet.
She has the sense of things bending.
The World is old and miraculous and is filled with a deep despair that none truly know. The Nonman, Mimara has come to understand, is proof of this.
'There was a time,' he says, 'when the world shook to the stamping chorus of our march…'
Dusk rolls the plain's farther reaches into darkness and gloom. The wind buffets, hard enough to prickle with grit. Thunderheads scrawl across the sky, dark and glowing with internal discharges, but rainless save for the odd warm spit.
The Nonman stands before them, naked to the waist, one held in the eyes of ten. His hairless form is perfect in cast and proportion, the very image of manly grace and strength, a statue in a land without sculptors.
'There was such a time…'
Thunder rolls across the mocking skies, and the scalpers crane their gazes this way and that. It alarms the soul, thunder on the plain. The eyes turn to shelter when the heavens crack, and plains are naught but the absence of shelter, exposure drawn on and on across the edge of the horizon. The plains offer no place to hide-only directions to run.
'A time when we,' Cleric says, 'when we! — were many, and when these depravities-these skinnies — were few. There was a time when your forefathers wept at the merest rumour of our displeasure, when you offered up your sons and daughters to turn aside our capricious fury!'
She cannot yank her gaze from him-Incariol. He is a mystery, a secret that she must know, if she and Achamian were to be saved. His aspect has become a compulsion for her, like a totem or even an idol: something that rewards the ardour of its observation.
