well, she imagines. His beard is matted with grime, making a sphincter of his mouth, which hangs perpetually open. His eyes stare down, always down, but even still they possess the glint of desperation.
'It just came to me,' she lies, for in truth, she came to it. 'It had my face…'
'You could have been killed! Why? Why would you wander so far?'
Koll. Only Koll. Of all his brother Hags, only he has yet to succumb to the rigours of the trail. He is, she realizes, the last pure thing in their mad company.
The measure, the cubit of their depravity. The only one who has not tasted Qirri.
'It meant to replace you!'
As she watches, the man's shaggy head jerks as if to a gnat's sting. The bleary eyes squint and struggle, as if trying to sort shadows from the darkness…
He can't see, she realizes. Not because his eyes fail him, but because it is a moonless night and clouds obscure the Nail of Heaven. He can't see because his eyes remain human…
Unlike theirs.
'Fool! Fool of a girl! It would have strangled you. Stripped and replaced you!'
At last she turns to look up at the Wizard. He stands with his back to the wind so the edges of him-rotted hide and tangled hair-seem to fly toward her.
'What is it?' she asks in Ainoni.
He blinks, and even though his fury continues to animate him, she somehow knows that a kernel of him simply does not care, that a hunger lies balled like a greased marble in his soul, waiting for the watches to pass and for the pouch to be drawn again.
'What is what?' he cries. He is troubled, she knows, because she has spoken in Ainoni, the tongue of their conspiracy. 'I'm talking to you, girl!'
In her periphery she can see the hoary aspect of the Captain, his hair and caste-noble braid lashing the air above his right shoulder, his eyes as bright as Seleukaran steel. His knife slumbers in its scabbard, hanging high on his girdle, but she sees its curve glint above his bloodstained knuckles nonetheless.
'Nothing,' she says to the Wizard, knowing that he does not know.
Qirri is Qirri…
The desire that forever slips the leash of your knowing. The hunger that leaves no trace in your trammelled soul.
'Water before food,' Xonghis says to them.
They walk an undeviating line now that their water-skins are empty. Nothing can be more simple, it seems, than walking straight across never-ending flatness. And yet all is turmoil and confusion, not the kind that quickens hearts or wrings hands, but the kind that simply hangs like a chrysalis in her soul, suspended, motionless. Everything, it seems-her voice, her scissoring step, her expression-is as assured as it has ever been, save that the world they confront has become a dream.
Everything possesses a nagging lightness. The colours, the maroon swirls of different weeds drying and dying, the patches of sienna dust, the black of some recent grass fire. The swagger of the land piling without height, as if some god had poured mud atop mud just to watch the edges spread over the horizon. The drama of the sky, the clouds climbing in ranges, here tangled into luxuriant locks, there swept up and around in a snowy melange of wings. A kind of disbelief plagues everything she sees, as if existence were foam, and the world nothing more than a titanic bubble…
What was happening?
'You have the look,' a voice gurgles from behind.
She turns and sees teeth and gums, eyes pinched into besotted creases. Sarl, somehow shadowy though all the world is bright, looking like a filthy gnome.
'You have the look… Aye!'
She can hear phlegm snap in his cackle. The peril of speaking to madmen, she realizes, is that it permits them to speak to you.
'Don't dispute me, girl, it's true. You have the look of a path long mudded. Am I wrong? Am I? Tell me, girl. How many men have marched 'cross your thighs?'
She should hate him for saying this, but she lacks the inner wind. When has feeling become an effort?
'Many fools. But men… Very few.'
'So you admit it!'
She smiles out of some coquettish reflex, thinking she might use his carnal interest to learn more about Lord Kosoter.
'What am I admitting?'
The grin drops from his face, enough for her to glimpse a sliver of his bloodshot eyes. He leans close with a kind of wonder-too close. She fairly gags at his buzzing reek.
'She burned a city for you-didn't she?'
'Who?' she replies numbly.
'Your mother. The Holy Empress.'
'No,' she laughs in faux astonishment. 'But I appreciate the compliment!'
Sarl laughs and nods in turn, his eyes once again squeezed into invisibility. Laughs and nods, trailing ever farther behind her…
What was happening?
She is not who she is…
She is already two women, each estranged from the other. There is the Mimara who knows, who watches the old motives, the old bonds, gradually disintegrate. And there is the Mimara who has gathered all of the old concerns and set them in a circle about an unspeakable pit.
She is already two women, but she needs only touch her bowing abdomen to become three.
They laugh at her for all the food she eats. More and more, she is ravenous come evening. She chides the Wizard for loitering when he should be preparing the humble field Cants he uses to cook their spoiling game. She scolds Xonghis when he fails to secure them enough game.
Whatever speech they possess leaks away as the sun draws down the horizon. They sit in the dust, their beards lacquered with grease, the entrails of their victims humming with flies. Vultures circle them. They sit and they wait for rising darkness… for the melodious toll of Cleric's first words.
'I remember…'
They gather before him. Some come crawling, while others shuffle, kicking up ghostly trails of dust that the wind whips into quick oblivion.
'I remember coming down from high mountains, and treating with Mannish Kings…'
He sits cross-legged, his forearms extended across his knees, his head hanging from his shoulders.
'I remember seducing wives… healing infant princes…'
Stars smoke the arch of Heaven paint the Nonman's slouching form in strokes of silver and white.
'I remember laughing at the superstitions of your priests.'
He rolls his head from side to side, as if the shadow he cradles possesses hands that caress his cheeks.
'I remember frightening the fools among you with my questions and astounding the wise with my answers. I remember cracking the shields of your warriors, shattering arms of bronze…'
And it seems they hear distant horns, the thunder of hosts charging, clashing.
'I remember the tribute you gave to me… The gold… the jewels… the babes that you laid at my sandalled feet.'
A hush.
'I remember the love you bore me… The hatred and the envy.'
He raises his head, blinking as if yanked from a dream inhumanly cruel for its bliss. Veins of silver fork across his cheeks… Tears.
'You die so easily!' he cries, howls, as if human frailty were the one true outrage.
He sobs, bows his head once more. His voice rises as if from a pit.
'And I never forget…'
