One of the scalpers moans in carnal frustration… Galian.
'I never forget the dead.'
Then he is standing, drawn like a puppet by invisible strings. The Holy Dispensation is about to begin. Strange shouts crease and crumple the windy silence, like the yelping of leashed dogs. She can see hunger leaning in their avid eyes. She can see manly restraint give way to clutched arms and rocking gesticulations. And she does not know when this happened, how awaiting the pouch had become a carnival of fanatic declarations, or how licking a smudged fingertip had become carnal penetration.
She sits rigid and estranged, watching Cleric, yes, but watching his pouch even more. As meagre as their rations are-scarce enough to blacken the crescent of a pared fingernail-she wonders how long they have before the purse fails them altogether. Finally he towers before her, his bare chest shining with hooks of light and shadow, his outstretched finger glistening about the nub of precious black.
She cannot move.
'Mimara?' the Ishroi asks, remembering her name.
He calls to both of her selves, to the one who knows but does not care and to the one who cares but does not know.
But for once it is the third incarnation that answers…
'No,' it says. 'Get that poison away from me.'
Cleric gazes at her for a solemn moment, long enough for the others to set aside their singular hunger.
There is horror in the Wizard's look.
Lord Incariol gazes at her, his eyes watery white about coin-sized pupils. 'Mimara…'
She repeats herself, finding new wind in her unaccountable resolution. 'No.'
Desire, she has come to understand, is not the only bottomless thing…
There is motherhood.
She dreams that an absence binds her, a hole that claws at her very substance. Something is missing, something more precious than jewels or celebrated works, more sustaining than drink or love or even breath. Something wonderful that she has betrayed…
Then she is gasping, swallowing at sour consciousness, and blinking at the visage of Incariol leaning over her.
She does not panic, for everything seems reasonable.
'What are you doing?' she coughs.
'Watching you.'
'Yes. But why?'
Even as she asks this, she realizes that only sorcery, subtle sorcery, could have made this visitation possible. She thinks she can even sense it, or at the very least guess at its outlines, the warping of the Wizard's incipient Wards. It was as if he had simply bent the circumference of Achamian's conjuring, pressed into his arcane defences as if they were no more than a half-filled bladder.
'You…' the flawless face said. 'You remind me… of someone… I think…'
There is something old about this reply. Not dead nation old, but doddering old… frail.
'What is it?' she asks. She does not know where this question comes from, nor which traitor gives voice to it.
'I no longer remember,' he replies with a grave whisper.
'No… The Qirri… Tell me what it is!'
The Wizard murmurs and stirs beside her.
Cleric stares at her with ancient, ancient eyes. The Nail of Heaven traces a perfect white sickle along the outer rim of his brow and skull. He has a smell she cannot identify, a deep smell, utterly unlike the human reek of the Wizard or the scalpers. The rot that softens stone.
'Not all of my kind are buried… Some, the greatest, we burn like you.'
And she understands that she has been asking the wrong question-the wrong question all along. Not what, but who?
'Who?' she gasps. Suddenly his hand is all that exists. Heavy with power, gentle with love. Her eyes track its flying path to his hip, to the rune-stitched pouch…
'Taste…' he murmurs in tones of distant thunder. 'Taste and see.'
She can feel the weight of him, the corded strength, hanging above her, and a part of her dreams she is naked and shivering.
His finger lowers toward her, pointing to something that cannot be seen…
She leans back her head, parts her lips. She closes her eyes. She can taste her breath, moist and hot, passing from her. The finger is hard and cold. She closes the pliant lobes of her mouth about it, warming and wetting its stubborn white skin. It comes alive, pressing down the centre of her tongue, tracing the line of her gums. It tastes of strength and dead fire.
In the corner of her eye she glimpses the Captain through overlapping lattices of dead grass-a wraith watching.
Above her, Cleric's face dissolves into a porcelain blur. Relief tunnels like lightning through her, swelling the slack hollows about her heart, flushing her extremities. Thin clouds race overhead, black trimmed in starlight, swept into the shapes of wings and scythes. They lend the illusion of surface across the infinite plummet of Heaven like froth drawn along a stream.
He draws his finger back, and a reflex rises within her. She clamps her lips about his knuckle, takes the tip between her teeth, pad and nail. Her tongue soaks whatever residue remains.
He places his hand across her face, thumb against her chin, fingers along her jaw and cheek. He withdraws the penetrating finger slowly, rolling down her lower lip. The Nail of Heaven gleams along its glazed edges. He stands in a single motion, at once swift and utterly soundless. She cannot tear her eyes from him, nor can she smother the longing that wells through her-so profound the ground itself seems to move.
Her mouth tastes of ash and soot and glory…
Glory everlasting.
The old Wizard walked.
Once, while travelling between Attrempus and Aoknyssus, he saw a child of no more than ten summers fall from the willow he had climbed in the hope of stealing honey from a great hive. The child broke his neck, died in his father's arms, mouthing inaudible words. Another time, while walking the endless paddies of the Secharib, he saw a woman accused of witchcraft stoned to death. They had bound her with rose wicks so that her struggles scored her skin. Then they cast stone after laughing stone, until she was little more than a crimson worm writhing through the mud her bleeding had conjured from the dust. And once on the road between Sumna and Momemn, he camped at the ruins of Batathent, and in the cool of morning, glimpsed the shadow of Fate cast across the First Holy War.
Adversity lay in all directions, the Nilnameshi were fond of saying. A man need only walk.
'I know what it is,' Mimara said from his side. The sun spiked his eyes when he turned to her. Even when he squinted and raised his hand, it framed her with fiery white, blackened her with encircling brilliance. She is a shadow. A judging shadow.
'The Qirri…' her silhouette continued. 'I know what it is…'
An angel-of-the-sun delivering tidings of woe.
'What is it?' he asked. But not because he cared. He had outrun all caring.
'Ashes…' she almost whispered. 'Ashes from the pyre.'
Something in this stirred him, as if she had kicked a long-gutted fire and discovered coals-deep burning coals.
'Ashes? Who?'
He slowed, allowing her to outrun the sun's glare. He blinked at the immobility of her expression.
'Cu'jara Cinmoi… I think…'
A name drawn from the root of history.
There was nothing to say, so he turned to the trackless world before them. Great flocks of tern rose like steam from the far-ranging folds of dust and grasses.
