She had it then, their relationship. Only confusion over their apparent ages had misled her.
‘It was unforgivable, I know,’ Orothellin said gently.
Another long, melancholy silence from the Hermit, unticlass="underline" ‘Why can’t you just leave well enough alone?’
‘The great failure of my kinden is that we always think we know best. Will you do this, for me?’
She pictured the two of them sitting in the darkness, side by side, those two men, and neither with anything similar to them in the whole of this closed-off world: the bloated father; the withered son.
‘I will take her. I will show her. And then she will beg me to remove the knowledge from her mind.’ The Hermit’s tone was suddenly fierce. ‘I will bring her to the Worm in all its glory. She wants to understand? I will make her regret her curiosity tenfold. I will kill her hope within the Worm’s coils. I will smother it in the pits.’
‘If it dies so easily, it cannot truly be hope,’ was all Orothellin would say.
Eighteen
What does it mean?
What can it mean, that she saved me?
The question turned over and over in Maure’s head like her very own unquiet ghost.
She had been in that dark place, that terrible place of no escape. Che had been conducting her ritual. Maure had given her all – that little all she had to give. She had felt the others, from each according to their ability, and at the end she had sensed Che’s desperation and despair: Not enough! Not enough, though it was all the power they had in the world. Maure had resigned herself to defeat, even then.
And, somehow . . . this.
She had felt the curtain tear, just for one moment; the world around her had twisted and tensed, furiously unwilling to let even one of its multitude of captives free. But she had been sprung free, nonetheless. Che had freed her.
She had been the only one. She was enough of a magician to know that. No chance that the others had made it out, too, only to be scattered to the four winds. The Weaponsmaster, the Assassin, Che and her Wasp lover, they were all condemned to the dark.
But me she freed. And why?
Maure could not imagine. She had been nothing to Che, not sister, not lover, not even a friend, truly. Merely an acquaintance, an unasked-for follower.
Looking on the sun, now, she wanted to weep. The tears did come, a little, and not for the first time. There is no sight more beautiful than this. And that was true despite the fact that her Moth eyes could pierce that lightless abyss. After what she had seen below, blindness down there might be considered a mercy.
So what does it mean? Because that was always the curse of the Inapt: everything had meaning. Nothing was pure chance. The world fell the way it was because human thought nudged and interpreted and read it. Divination saw the web of the future and wove it at the same time, the seer’s vision collapsing all the myriad paths the world might take into fewer and fewer, until the truly gifted magician might look towards autumn and know where every leaf might fall. In theory, anyway. It was true that the science had decayed somewhat since the revolution, the toys of the Apt tearing holes in that predictable web with their mechanistic cosmos that was, paradoxically, so much harder to foretell.
But Maure was a child of the old days, of the Commonweal and other places where divination was still a tool to live by, not a sham to gull the foolish with. She searched for meaning. Why me? Why here? Why him? There must be reasons.
There was a town ahead, or perhaps just a collection of shacks crouching on the shore of the Exalsee. Her companion, Totho, had put on an extra stumble of speed, fixing his eyes on it, ignoring Maure, making it plain that she was just an unwanted woman trailing his footsteps.
He had spoken to her precisely twice since their first meeting. The first time had been to ask what she was eating, as she started gnawing something grey and fibrous left over from the supplies that Messel had foraged for them. Maure had scrutinized the unappetizing fare and confessed she was not entirely sure. For a moment Totho had just stared at her, and she had thought that he would say something more, as though some great revelation was just on the tip of his tongue. Her expectant expression had frightened him off, though – he had seen Che’s name written there and had shied away from it, turning his shoulder and stomping off once more, trying to leave her behind.
The second time, not long after that, he had rounded on her without warning and just demanded, ‘Why are you following me?’
Maure had blinked at him. ‘For a lot of complicated reasons,’ she told him; then, as he was turning away once more, she found herself desperate to keep him talking in case she could prise that meaning from him. ‘And one simple one: I don’t have the first idea where I am. Following you’s better than nothing.’
‘You’re by the Exalsee,’ Totho had spat back.
‘Good.’ She had nodded, desperately earnest. ‘What’s an exalcy? Is it like a principality?’
He had just stared. ‘It’s this.’ A gauntleted hand waved across the water that ran all the way to the horizon. ‘It’s basically the thing people know about this part of the world. How can you not know this?’
‘I was never here before!’ she snapped at him, feeling the keen unfairness of it all – she, who had counted herself well-travelled once. ‘I come from the Commonweal, understand? I have not the first idea where any of this is!’
For a moment she thought that he might even be sympathetic – but, no, it was just that she had now furnished him with an excuse to explain her away. ‘What, you’re an escaped slave? The Imperials brought you here?’
‘No, I told you. Che—!’
He had snapped, lunging for her – she had skipped back out of his way the first time but his armour didn’t slow him half as much as she expected and, on the second try, he had one of her wrists in his metal grip.
‘You don’t know Che!’ He had bellowed into her face. ‘Shut up about Che! You don’t know her and you don’t know me! I’ll . . .’ Looking into that incandescent expression, it was easy for Maure to finish that bitten-off sentence: I’ll kill you if you say her name again. He must have seen something in her frightened face – a woman only a few years his senior, and just as lost as he was – and he had just flung her hand away and marched on, bunching his shoulders against her inevitable, unsheddable presence, now dogging his heels like some part of his shadow that had become detached but would not just go away.
Totho had been walking for too long, and each step he took just emphasized the fact that he was going nowhere. He might as well tread round and round the Exalsee’s vast circumference like a clockwork toy, until he wound down forever. With that thought, the woman’s constant trailing acquired a sinister connotation, as if she was patiently waiting for him to drop so that she could rob or dismember his corpse. Certainly there seemed something of the dead about her, impossible to put his finger on, but just as impossible to ignore.
Now there was something ahead that spoke of other people, after what seemed an eternity of lonely journeying with only the maddening, unwanted company of this inexplicable woman. Totho had never been fond of people, as a general rule – a trait born out of their general lack of feeling for him. Nowhere in the world loved a halfbreed.