'The most foolish among us,' Cleric continues, 'has forgotten more than your wisest will ever know. Even your Wizard is but a child stumbling in his father's boots. You are but twig-thin candles, burning fast and bright, revealing far more than your span allows you to fathom.'
He bends back his head until the line of his jaw forms a triangle above the banded muscle of his neck. He shouts heavenward, mouthing words that pool blue and brilliant white… Then, miraculously, he steps into the sky, arms out, rising until the clouds become a kind of mantle about his shoulders, a windblown cloak of smoke and warring, interior lights.
'But now look at us,' he booms down to their astonished shadows. 'Diminished. Perpetually foundering. Lost without memories. Persecuted as false. Hunted by the very depths we warred to uncover, the very darkness we sought to illuminate.'
He hangs above them. He lowers his radiant gaze. His tears burn silver with refracted light. Thunder crashes, a thousand hammers against a thousand shields.
'This is the paradox-is it not? The longer you live, the smaller you become. The past always dwarfs the present, even for races as fleeting as yours. One morning you awaken to find now… this very moment… little more than a spark in a cavern. One morning you awaken to find yourself so much… less…'
Incariol, she thinks. Ishroi…
'Less than what you wanted. Less than what you once were.'
She is in love, she realizes. Not with him, but with the power and wonder of what he was.
'One day you, who have never been mighty or great, will ask where the glory has gone. Failing strength. Failing nerve. You will find yourself faltering at every turn, and your arrogance will grow brittle, defensive. Perhaps you will turn to your sons and their overshadowed ardour. Perhaps you will seal yourself in your mansion, as we did, proclaiming contempt for the world rather than face its cruel measure…'
She is more in his presence, she decides. She will always be more, whether he flees or dies or utterly loses himself in the disorder that is his soul. For knowing him… Cleric.
'One day you, who have never been mighty or great, will peer through the maze of your depleted life, and see that you are lost…'
He abandons his mantle of clouds, sinking as though on a wire. He sets foot upon powder-dry earth.
Mimara leans forward with the Wizard and the other scalpers. Their mouths hang slack with drool.
'Lost like us,' he murmurs, reaching for the wonder that hides in his pouch.
The thunderheads continue their march into the obscurity of night.
The rain, as always, refuses to fall.
– | Cil-Aujas, she decides. Something broke in Cil-Aujas. Something between them, something within. And now sanity is abandoning them, drip by lucid drip.
There's a new Rule of the Slog, and even though it has never been spoken, Mimara knows with utter certainty that violators will be punished as lethally as all the others. A rule that ensures no mention shall be made of the madness slowly possessing them.
No questions. No doubters on the slog.
The extraordinary thing about insanity, she has come to realize, is the way it seems so normal. When she thinks of the way the droning days simply drop into their crazed, evening bacchanals, nothing strikes her as strange-nothing visceral, anyway. Things that should make her shudder, like the nip of Cleric's nail as his finger roams the inside of her cheek, are naught but part of a greater elation, as unremarkable as any other foundation stone.
It is only when she steps back and reflects that the madness stares her plain in the eye.
'He's killing you…' the thing called Soma had said. 'The Nonman.'
She finds herself drifting to the rear of their scattered mob and approaching Sarl, thinking that someone wholly broken might know something about the cracks now riddling their souls. According to the old Wizard, the Sergeant has known Lord Kosoter since the Unification Wars-a long time, as far as life is measured by scalpers. Perhaps he can decipher the skin-spy's riddle.
'The Slog of Slogs,' she says lamely, not knowing where to begin with a madman. 'Eh, Sarl?'
The others have long since abandoned him to his crazed musings. No one dares glance at him, for fear of sparking some kind of rambling tirade. For weeks she has expected, and a couple of times even hoped, that the Captain would silence him. But no matter how long his harsh voice rattles on into the night, nothing is done, nothing is said.
Sarl, it seems, is the lone exception to the Rules.
'She talks to me,' he says, staring off to her right as if she were a phantasm that had plagued his ruminations too long to be directly addressed. 'The second most beautiful thing…'
He was easily one of the most wrinkled men she had ever seen when she first saw him. Now his skin is as creased as knotted linen. His tunic has rotted to rags, his hauberk swings unfastened from his knobbed shoulders, and his kilt has somehow lost its backside, baring withered buttocks to open daylight.
'Tell me, Sergeant. How long have you known the Captain?'
'The Captain?' The hoary old man wags a finger, shaking his head in cackling reproach. 'The Captain, is it? He-heeee! There's no explanation for the likes of him. He's not of this world!'
She flinches at the volume of his voice, reflexively lowers her own tone to compensate.
'How so?'
He shudders with silent laughter. 'Sometimes souls get mixed up. Sometimes the dead bounce! Sometimes old men awaken behind the eyes of babes! Sometimes wolves…'
'What are you saying?'
'Don't cross him,' he rasps with something like conspiratorial glee. 'He-he! Oh, no, girl. Never cross him!'
'But he's such a friendly fellow!' Mimara cries.
He catches her joke but seems to entirely miss the humour. So much of his laughter possesses the dull hollow of reflex. More and more he seems to make the sound of laughter without laughing at all…
And suddenly she can feel it, the lie that has been burrowing through all of them, like a grub that devours meaning and leaves only motions. Laughter without humour. Breath without taste. Words said in certain sequences to silence words unsaid-words that must never be said.
Her whole life she has lived some kind of lie. Her whole life she has charted her course about some contradiction, knowing yet not knowing, and erring time and again.
But this lie is different. This lie somehow eludes the pain of those other lies. This lie carves the world along more beautiful joints.
This lie is bliss.
She needs only look to the others to see they know this with the same deathless certainty. Even Sarl, who had long since fled the world's teeth, content to trade fancy for mad fancy, seems to understand that something… false… is happening.
'And Cleric… How did you fall in with him?'
There's something about the Sergeant's presence that winds her. His gait is at once vigorous and wide, his arms swinging out like a skinny man pretending to be fat.
'Found him,' he says.
'Found him? How? Where?'
Mischief twinkles in his gaze.
'Found him like a coin in the dirt!'
'But where? How?'
'After we took Carythusal, when they disbanded the Eastern Zaudunyani… they sent us north to Hunoreal, he-he!'
'Sent you? Who sent you?'
'The Ministrate. The Holies. Stack skinnies, they said. Haul the bales and keep the gold-they don't care about gold, the Holies. Just stay on the southeastern marches of Galeoth, they said. Nowhere else? No. No. Just there…'
This confuses her. She has always thought that scalpers were volunteers.
'But what about Cleric?' she presses. 'Incariol…'
