So many calluses where he had only tender skin.
"Everything…" she said in a wistful tone. Her eyes seemed to track the passage of ghosts.
"Everything what?"
"The walls… The ceilings. Everywhere, limbs and people cut out of stone-images atop images… Think of the toil!"
"It wasn't always such. The Wolf Gate is an example of how they once adorned their cities. It was only when they began forgetting that they turned to this… this… excess. These are their annals, the accounting of their deeds-great and small."
"Then why not simply paint murals the way we do?"
Achamian found himself approving of this question-another long-dead habit, tingling back to life. "Nonmen can't see paintings," he said with an old man's shrug.
A frowning smile. Despite the anger that always seemed to roll about the nethers of her expression, her skeptical looks always managed to promise a fair accounting.
"It's true," Achamian said. "Paintings are naught but gibberish to their eyes. The Nonmen may resemble us, Mimara, but they are far more different than you can imagine."
"You make them sound frightening."
An old warmth touched him then, one that he had almost forgotten: the feeling of carrying another, not with arms or love or even hope, but with knowledge. Knowledge that made wise and kept safe.
"At last," he said, closing eyes that smiled. "She listens."
He felt her fingers press his shoulder, as though to poke in friendly rebuke but really just to confirm. Something swelled through him then, something that demanded he keep his eyes shut in the pretence of sleep.
He had been lonely, he realized. Lonely.
These past twenty years…
"A place where my line can outlive me," the High-King said.
Seswatha frowned in good-natured dismissal. "You have no need to fear…" Achamian leaned back in his chair, forced his thoughts from the conundrum facing him on the benjuka plate between them. Most of the private rooms in the King-Temple Annexes were little more than slots between walls of cyclopean brick, and Celmomas's study was no exception. The towering scroll-racks only added to the cloistered air. "Our foe has no hope against the Ordeal you have assembled. Think. Nimeric… Even Nil'giccas marches."
The names seemed to relax his old friend.
"Ishuдl," Celmomas said, smiling at his own wit-or lack of it. He reached for his chalice of apple mead. "That's what I call it."
Seswatha shook his head. "Is it stocked with beer or with concubines?"
"Seeds," Celmomas replied, his eyes smiling over the rim of his cup. The golden wolf's head braided into the centre of his beard seemed to glower from beneath his wrist.
"Seeds?"
The High-King's demeanour faltered. There was always such an aura of care about him, at least when it came to the little things, like making sure he replaced his cup on the same ring of condensation.
He could be so reckless otherwise.
"For the longest time," he said, "I refused to believe you. And now that I believe…"
"Yes?"
Celmomas had a long face, one that suited the dynastic glory of his name. Solemn. Nimble yet strong-jawed. But it was too given to expressions of melancholy, especially in rooms where the gloom lay heavy. He laughed as much as the next man, Seswatha supposed, but the looks that inevitably followed-eyes slack with quiet sorrow, lips drawn into a pent line-always seemed more primitive somehow, closer to the native tenor of his heart.
"Nothing…" the High-King said with a release of old and weary air. "Just premonitions."
Seswatha studied him with new concern. "The premonitions of kings are never to be taken lightly. You know that much, old friend."
"Which is why I have built a ref-"
The creak of bronze hinges. They both yanked their gazes to the shadows that concealed the entrance. The fires pulled and twirled in the tripods set to either side of the game-table. Achamian heard the scuff of little feet, then suddenly Nau-Cayыti hurtled into his father's arms and lap.
"Whoopa!" Celmomas cried. "What warrior leaps blindly into the arms of his foe?"
The boy chortled in the grinding way of children fending fingers that tickle. "You're not my foe, Da!"
"Wait till you get older!"
Nau-Cayыti grinned with clenched teeth, struggled against his father's ringed hand, growling as much as laughing. The boy surprised him by jerking and twisting like a summer pike, clutched his white-woollen robe in an effort to brace his feet on his father's thighs. Celmomas pulled back, nearly toppled in his chair.
Achamian roared with laughter. "A wolf, my King! The boy's a wolf! You better hope he's never your enemy!"
"Cayы-Cayы!" the High-King cried, holding his hands out in surrender.
"What's this?" the young Prince asked, fumbling in the interior pockets of his father's robe. With a little grunt, he pulled a golden tube into the wobbling light. A scroll-case, cast in the likeness of twining vines.
"For me?" he gasped at his grinning father.
"Nay," Celmomas replied with mock gravity. "It's a great and powerful secret." The High-King's look found Seswatha past the boy's flaxen curls. Nau-Cayыti turned as well, so that both faces-the one innocent, the other careworn-hung motionless in the pale light.
"It's for your uncle Seswa," the High-King said.
Nau-Cayыti clutched the golden tube to his breast, more in a delighted than a covetous way. "Can I give it to him, Da?" he cried. "Please?"
Celmomas nodded in chuckling assent, but a gleam of seriousness lingered in his gaze. The Prince bounced from his father's lap, made both men start in alarm when he almost bowled into one of the tripods, then he was leaning against Seswatha's knee, beaming with pride. He held out the scroll-case in hands too small not to be clumsy, saying, "Tell me, Uncle Seswa. Tell-me-tell-me! Who's Mimara?"
Achamian bolted from his blanket with a gasp…
…only to find Incariol kneeling over him in the deep shadow. A line of light rimmed his scalp and the curve of his cheek and temple; his face was impenetrable otherwise.
The Wizard made to scramble backward, but the Nonman clasped his shoulder with a powerful hand. The bald head lowered in apology, but the face remained utterly obscured in shadow. "You were laughing," he whispered before turning away.
Achamian could only squint, slack-mouthed.
As dark as it was, he was certain that Cleric had sobbed as he drew away.
Achamian awoke far older, it seemed, than when he'd fallen asleep. His ears and teeth ached, as did every joint he had words to describe. While the Skin Eaters busied themselves preparing to depart, he sat cross-legged on his crude mat, forearms heavy against his knees, glaring more than watching. The twin lights hung above them as before, the differences in their cast as subtle and as profound as the differences in their casters. His eyes traced the verge of their illumination, from the hanging bronze of the fallen lantern wheel, along the slot-windowed walls, to the great fragments of face leaning in the debris of the ruined head. Part of him was horrified, even affronted, to discover that the previous day had not been a dream-that Cil-Aujas was real. He breathed deep the indescribable must hanging in the air, fought the urge to spit. It seemed he could feel the black miles hanging above them.
When Mimara asked for a third time what was the matter, he decided that he hated the young. Smooth faces and lithe strong limbs. Not to mention the certainty of ignorance. In his soul's eye he saw them doing jigs down blasted halls, while all he could do was hobble after them. Pompous wretches, he thought, with their dark hair and hundred-word vocabularies. Pissants.
"Huppa!" Somandutta called to him at one point, shouting the word they used to goad their mules. "Huppa-huppa! No bones are so heavy!"