He glared, challenging her to speak again. She simply blinked, wriggled as though to adjust her position. He could see her swallow behind the line of her lips.
"The only thing," he continued, his voice wrung ragged with conflicting passions. "The only thing I took with me from my previous life was a simple question: Who is Anasыrimbor Kellhus? Who?"
Achamian stared at the bed of coals pulsing beneath the blackened wood, paused to allow Mimara fair opportunity to respond, or so he told himself. The truth was that the thought of her voice made him wince. The truth was that his story had turned into a confession.
"Everyone knows the answer to that question," she ventured, speaking with a delicacy that confirmed his fears. "He's the Aspect-Emperor."
Of course she would say this. Even if she hadn't been Kellhus's adoptive daughter, she would have said precisely the same thing. They so wanted it to be simple, believers. "It is what is!" they cried, sneering at the possibility of other eyes, other truths, overlooking their own outrageous presumption. "It says what it says," spoken with a conviction that was itself insincerity. They ridiculed questions, for fear it would make their ignorance plain. Then they dared call themselves "open."
This was the iron habit of Men. This was what shackled them to the Aspect-Emperor.
He shook his head in slow deliberation. "The most important question you can ask any man, child, is the question of his origin. Only by knowing what a man has been can you hope to say what he will be." He paused, brought up short by an old habit of hesitation. How easy it was to hide in his old pedantic ruts, to recite rather than talk. But no matter how woolly, his abstractions always became snarled in the very needling particularities he so unwittingly tried to avoid. He had always been a man who wanted to digress, only to find himself bleeding on the nub.
"But everyone knows the answer to that question," she said with same care as before, "Kellhus is the Son of Heaven." What else could he be? her over-bright eyes asked.
"Yet he is flesh and blood, born of a father's seed and a mother's womb. He was reared. He was taught. He was sent out into the world…" He raised his eyebrows as though speaking something crucial but universally overlooked. "So tell me, where did all this happen? Where?"
For the first time, it seemed, he glimpsed real doubt gnawing her gaze. "They say he was a prince," she began, "that he comes from Atrith-"
"He does not come from Atrithau," Achamian snapped. "I know this on a dead man's authority."
The Scylvendi. Cnaiьr urs Skiцtha. As always, the man's words came back to him: "With every heartbeat they war against circumstance, with every breath they conquer! They walk among us as we walk among dogs, and we yowl when they throw out scraps, we whine and whimper when they raise their hand… They make us love!"
They. The Dыnyain. The Tribe of the Aspect-Emperor.
"But what about his bloodline?" Mimara asked. "Are you saying his name is false as well?"
"No… He is an Anasыrimbor, I grant you that-the coincidences would be stacked too high were it otherwise. That is our only clue."
"How so?"
"Because it means the question of his birthplace is the question of where the Line of Anasыrimbor could have survived."
She seemed to consider this. "But if not Atrithau, then where? The North is more than ruined, more than wilderness-or so my tutors always say. How could anyone survive with… them?"
Them. The Sranc. Achamian thought of the multitudes, clawing the earth in frustration, throwing up gouts of dirt in the absence of warding limbs, stamping and howling, stamping and howling across the endless tracts.
"Exactly," he said. "If the Line were to survive, it had to be within a refuge of some kind. Something secret, hidden. Something raised by the Kыniьric High Kings, ere the First Apocalypse…"
"Then listen!" the Scylvendi cried. "For thousands of years they have hidden in the mountains, isolated from the world. For thousands of years they have bred, allowing only the quickest of their children to live. They say you know the passing of ages better than any, sorcerer, so think on it! Thousands of years… Until we, the natural sons of true fathers, have become little more than children to them."
"A sanctuary."
Achamian knew he was speaking too desperately now, even though he measured his words the way hungry mothers dolloped out butter. Such words could not come slow enough. The Aspect-Emperor a liar? Her face was blank in the way of those grievously offended, whose retort remained bottled by the fear of unstopping too many passions. His soul's eye and ear cried out for her: Jealous old fool! He stole her, Esmenet! That is the sum of your pathetic case against him. He stole the only woman you've loved! And now you lust only for his destruction, to see him burn, though all the world is tinder…
He breathed deeply, leaned back from the fire, which suddenly seemed to nip him with its heat. He resolved to refill his pipe, but could only clench his fists against the tremors.
My hands shake.
His voice grows more shrill. His gesticulations become wilder. His discourse develops a pinned-in-place savagery that makes him difficult to watch and impossible to contradict.
Her heart rejoices at first, certain that he has relented. But the tone of his voice quickly tells her otherwise. The excitement. The wry delivery of his observations, as though to say, How many times? The way people speak is a bound thing, as far from free as a slave or a horse. Place binds it. Occasion binds it. But other people rule it most of all; the shadow of names lies hidden in every word spoken. And the longer he talks, the more Mimara realizes that he is speaking to someone other than her…
To Esmenet.
The irony stings for some reason. She had taken him to be her father, and now he takes her to be her mother. He's mad… Mad the same as me.
The Wizard is not so much her father, she realizes, as her brother. Another child of Esmenet, almost as broken, and every bit as betrayed.
She has been wrong about him in every way, not simply with regard to demeanour and appearance. Her mother styled him a scholar and a mystic, someone who spent his exile lost in arcane researches. Mimara has read enough about sorcery to know the importance of meanings, that semantic purity is a Schoolman's perennial obsession. And yet nothing could be further from the case. As he explains to her, he cares nothing for the Gnosis, not even as a tool. He has retired from the Three Seas for heartbreak-this much is true. But the reason, the rule that makes his life rational in his own eyes, is simple vengeance.
The truth of Anasыrimbor Kellhus, he insists, was to be found in the secret of his origins-in the secret of something called the Dыnyain. "The Scylvendi was his mistake!" Achamian cries, his eyes wild with unkempt passions. "The Scylvendi knew what he was. Dыnyain!" And the secret of the Dыnyain, he claims, though Mimara understands instantly that this is little more than a hope, was to be found in the detail of Seswatha's life.
His Dreams. His Dreams had become the vehicle for his vengeance. Here, on the very edge of the wilderness, he has bent all his efforts to decoding their smoky afterimages. Twenty years he has laboured, mapping, drawing up meticulous inventories, sifting through the debris, the detritus of a dead sorcerer's ancient life, searching for the silver needle that would see his wrongs avenged.
It's more than a fool's errand; it is a madman's obsession, on a par with those ascetics who beat themselves with strings and flint, or who eat nothing but ox-hides covered in religious writings. Twenty years! Anything that could consume so much life simply has to be deranged. The hubris alone…
His hatred of Kellhus she finds understandable, though she herself bears no grudge against her stepfather. She barely knows the Aspect-Emperor, and those rare times she found herself alone with him on the Andiamine Heights-twice-he seemed at once radiant and tragic, perhaps the most immediate and obvious soul she had ever encountered.