of mountain streams (an episode that would have occasioned hilarity had the expedition not been so battered), he still carries the stain of Sranc blood across his knuckles and his cheek. They all do.
And still he denies her. Still he complains, upbraids, and rebukes.
The only difference is that she loves him.
She remembers her mother's first descriptions of him, back when the Andiamine Heights had been her home, when gold and incense had been her constant companions. 'Have I ever told you about Akka?' the Empress asked, surprising her daughter in the Sacral Enclosure. There was always this twitch, a body-wide plucking of tendons, whenever her mother caught her unawares. Her jaw would tighten, and she would turn to see herself — as she knew she would be in twenty years' time. Mother, draped in white and turquoise silks, a gown reminiscent of those worn by Shrial Nuns.
'Is he my father?' she had replied.
Her mother shrank from the question, recoiled even. Asking about her father was Mimara's weapon of choice. Questions of paternity were at once accusations of whorishness. Woe to the woman who did not know. But this time the question seemed to strike her mother particularly hard, to the point where she paused to blink away tears.
'Your f-father,' she stammered. 'Yes.'
Stunned silence. Mimara had not expected this. She knows now that her mother lied, that Esmenet said this simply to rob her daughter of the hateful question. Well… perhaps not simply. Mimara has learned enough about Achamian to understand her mother's passion, to understand how she might name him her daughter's father… in her soul's heart, at least. Everyone tells lies to dull the world's sharper, more complicated edges-some more pretty than others.
'What was he like?' she asked.
Her mother never looked so beautiful as when she smiled. Beautiful and hateful both. 'Foolish, like all men. Wise. Petty. Gentle.'
'Why did you leave him?'
Another question meant to injure. Only this time, Mimara found herself flinching instead of celebrating. Hurting her mother where she herself was concerned was one thing: victims have rights over criminals-do they not? Hurting her for things entirely her own, however, said more about Mimara than Mimara cared to hear.
Few passions require quite so much certainty as spite.
'Kellhus,' Esmenet replied, her voice dim and damaged. You win, her eyes conceded as she turned to leave. 'I chose Kellhus.'
Now, watching the Wizard by moonlight, Mimara cannot stop thinking about her mother. She imagines the wrack that had to have been her soul, coming to her daughter again and again, each time with new hope, only to be punished and rebuked. Guilt and remorse crash through her, for a time. Then she thinks of the little girl who had shrieked in the arms of slavers, the child sobbing, 'Mumma!' into the creaking dark. She remembers the stink and the pillows, the child who wept within her still, even though her face had become as flat and chill as new fallen snow.
'Why did she leave you?' she asks the old Wizard the following afternoon on the trail. 'Mother, I mean.'
'Because I died,' the old Wizard says, his brown eyes lost in the fog of distant seeing. He refuses to say anything more specific. 'The world is too cruel to wait for the dead.'
'And the living?'
He stops and fixes her with that curious stare of his, the one that makes her think of artisans reviewing the work of more gifted rivals.
'You already know the answer to that one,' he says.
'I do?'
He seems to catch his smile, condense it into pursed lips. Galian and Sutadra file between them, the former frowning, the latter intent and oblivious. There are times when they all become strangers to one another, and now is one of them-though it seems that Sutadra has been a stranger all along. Bald stone ridges flange the distances beyond the Wizard, promising toil and arms bundled against high wind.
'Why…' the Wizard begins, then trails. 'Why didn't you leave me back in the pit?'
Because I lov 'Because I need you,' she says without breath. 'I need your knowledge.'
He stares at her, his beard and hair trembling in the breeze. 'So the old wineskin has a few swallows left,' he says inexplicably.
He ignores her glare, turns to follow the others. More riddles! She fumes in silence for the remainder of the afternoon, refuses to even look at the old fool. He laughs at her, she decides-and after acknowledging that she had saved him! Bent-back ingrate.
Some starve. Some eat. Disparity is simply the order of things. It's only when fat men make sauce out of other's starvation that it becomes a sin.
– | She belongs.
The others have shown this to her in ways numerous and infinitesimal. The pitch of their talk does not change when she enters their midst. They tease her with brotherly skepticism instead of masculine daring. Their eyes are less inclined to linger on her limbs and more inclined to remain fixed on her gaze.
The Skin Eaters are less and they are more. Less because of what Cil-Aujas has taken, more because she has become one of them. Even the Captain seems to have accepted her. He now looks through her the way he looks through all his men.
They make camp on a ridge that falls in a series of gravel sheaves into the Mop. She stares at the forests for a time, at the play of sunlight across the humped canopy. Birds like floating dots. She thinks of how the expedition will crawl across the landscape, like lice picking their way through the World's own pelt. She has heard the others mutter about the Mop, about the dangers, but after Cil-Aujas, nothing seems particularly dangerous, nothing that touches sky.
They dine on what remains of Xonghis's previous kill, but she finds herself more eager for the smudge of Qirri that Cleric dispenses. Afterward, she keeps to herself, makes a point of avoiding Achamian's many looks, some questioning, others… searching. He does not understand the nature of his crime-like all men.
Somandutta once again tries to engage her, but she simply glares at the young caste-noble until he slouches away. He had saved her in Cil-Aujas, actually carried her for a mad term, only to abandon her when her need was greatest-and this she cannot forgive.
To think she had thought the fool charming.
She watches Sarl instead: he alone has not bathed since climbing out of the Ziggurat's bowel, so he sometimes seems more shade than man. Sranc blood has soaked into the very texture of his skin. His hauberk is intact, but his tunic is as foul as rags worn by a latrine beggar. He huddles against a rust-stained boulder the size of a cart, huddles in a way that suggests hiding one moment, conspiring the next. The boulder is his friend, she realizes. Sarl now sits with everything as if it were his closest friend.
'Ah, yes…' he murmurs in the gurgle that is his voice. His small black eyes glitter. 'Ah… yesss…' The dusk carves his wrinkles so deep that his face looks woven of bundled string.
'The fucking Mop… The Mop. Eh, lads? Eh? '
Viscous laughter, followed by a snapping cough. The back of his thought is broken, she realizes. He can only kick and claw where he has fallen.
'More darkness, yes. Tree darkness…'
She does not remember what happened at the bottom of the Great Medial Screw, and yet she knows nonetheless, knows with the knowledge that moves limbs and drums hearts.
Something was open that should not have been open. She closed it…
Somehow.
Achamian, during one of his many attempts to sound her out on the matter, mentions the line between the World and the Outside, of souls returning as demons. 'How, Mimara?' he asks with no small wonder. 'What you accomplished… It should not have been possible. Was it the Chorae?'
No, she wants to say, it was the Tear of God… But she nods and shrugs instead, in the bored manner of those who pretend to have moved on to more decisive things.
She has been given something. What she has always considered a blight, a deformity of the soul, has become fraught with enigma and power. The Judging Eye opened. At the moment of absolute crisis, it opened and saw what
