"What is it?" Mimara asked from his periphery.
"Nothing," Achamian said, looking away from the Nonman, letting go the cramped meaning that was the Bar of Heaven. The line dimmed, as if it were a seam in a slowly closing door, then was clipped into nothingness. There was a moment of jeering cries and blackness, so utter it seemed to possess its own sound, followed by a sorcerous murmur and the reappearance of the twin points of light, like the eyes of two different races opening in the same invisible face.
The Skin Eaters resumed their work, though now many cast anxious looks into the darkness that leaned heavy about them.
The plan, Sarl announced after conferring with Lord Kosoter, was simply to continue with all possible haste. Odds were, he told them, they would encounter nothing at all, given the vast extent of Cil-Aujas. Odds were, whatever destroyed the Bloody Picks had withdrawn to the depths to lick their wounds and to count their spoils. Nevertheless, they were to march "on the sharp," as he put it, which meant without undue noise and with eyes and hearts and weapons held ready. "From here on in," he ground out, "we'll be the only ghosts in these halls."
These words, Achamian was quite certain, had been directed at him.
They resumed their march, skirting the flanks of the enormous collapse, walking for the most part beyond the tailings thrown by the catastrophe. The twin lights soundlessly mapped the tangle of debris, painting this or that clutch of monolithic stone, throwing double shadows that here and there resembled wings. The ancient slaughter, or whatever it was that had scattered so many dead across these reaches, continued to choke the floor, but the bones were so reed-brittle that the scalpers kicked through them the way they might humps of grass. With every step, Achamian saw knobs and shards of mouldered bone thrown free of the dust. He found himself wondering if this was the place…
The place where grief had burned through the rind of worldly things.
"How?" Mimara whispered in Ainoni from below his shoulder, her tone such that he immediately knew she referred to the dead scalper. "I saw no sorcery, and neither did you-I could see it in your face. So how could a heart have an eye in it?"
He found himself glancing to either side, counting those who might overhear. "Has anyone told you what happened when the First Holy War camped on the Plains of Mengedda?"
"Of course. The Battleplain. The earth began vomiting the dead within it. Mother told me that bones choked the grasses."
He swallowed rather than immediately reply. There was much he had intended to say, but a chorus of unwanted memories knelled through him, of how he and her mother had fled the Plains of Mengedda for the mountains, of how they had loved between sunlit trees…
And declared themselves man and wife.
"This is like that."
He could almost taste the sourness of her pause. "I feel enlightened already."
She had a Gift for smacking the generosity from him, he would grant her that much.
"Look," he said. "The boundaries between the World and Outside are like those between waking and sleep, reason and madness. Wherever the World slumbers or goes mad, the boundaries break down, and the Outside leaks through…" He glanced about to make sure no one was listening. "This place is a topos, like I already said. We literally walk the verge of Hell."
When she failed to immediately reply, Achamian congratulated himself on having silenced her.
"You mean the Dialectic," she said after several thoughtful steps. "The Dialectic of Substance and Desire…"
Though Achamian knew the phrase-knew it very well-it struck him as incomprehensible.
"You've read Ajencis," he said with more sarcasm than he intended. The Dialectic of Substance and Desire was the cornerstone of the great Kyranean philosopher's metaphysics, the notion that the differences between the World and the Outside were more a matter of degree than kind. Where substance in the World denied desire-save where the latter took the form of sorcery-it became ever more pliant as one passed through the spheres of the Outside, where the dead-hoarding realities conformed to the wills of the Gods and Demons.
Mimara was staring at her booted feet plowing through the dust. "Kellhus," she said. "You know, the man you hope to kill? He encouraged me to explore his library…" She stared at him, her expression mussed with conflicting passions. "I once thought I could be like my father."
The accusation in her voice called for pity, and yet he found himself with nothing but bitter words to answer. "Father? And who might that be?"
They walked without speaking for what seemed a long while. It was odd the way anger could shrink the great frame of silence into a thing, nasty and small, shared between two people. Achamian could feel it, palpable, binding them pursed lip to pursed lip, the need to punish the infidelities of the tongue.
Why did he let her get the best of him?
The Skin Eaters laboured in the circumscribed lights, leaning beneath the bulk of their packs like caste-menials beneath firewood. The younger ones led the mules in short trains of two or three, while the others walked the wary margins of the group, swords or spears drawn against the blackness. Though the memory of the Repositorium burned bright in his soul's eye, Achamian could not shake the sense that they marched into the void. If Cil-Aujas indeed plumbed the World to its very limit, as he had told Mimara, might they not simply wander into the precincts of Hell?
He occupied himself with this thought for a time, pondering his various readings of those who had allegedly passed alive into the Afterlife. The legend of Mimomitta from ancient Kyranean lore. The parable of Juraleal from The Chronicle of the Tusk. And of course the rumours his slave, Geraus, had told him about Kellhus…
Mimara walked beside him as before, but her damp presence had hardened into something prickling sharp. Is it true, he wanted to ask, that Kellhus wears the severed heads of demons about his girdle? These words, he was certain, would heal their momentary feud. As loath to encourage her as he had been, he had made a habit of avoiding her opinions.
The simple act of asking would say much.
Instead, he rubbed his face, muttering curses. What kind of rank foolishness was this? Pining over harsh words to a cracked and warped woman!
"I watched you," Mimara abruptly said, staring at the procession of chains through the upper reaches of his light. For a moment he assumed this was just more hounding, then she said, "You don't trust the Nonman. I could see it in your eyes."
Achamian scanned the distance to be sure Cleric was far enough away not to hear, then looked at her with the mixture of annoyance and mystification that was fast becoming his "Mimara-face," even as part of him recognized that this was her peace offering.
"Now is not the time, girl," he said brusquely. That she could worry about such a thing given what they had just heard-not to mention what they might find-was beyond Achamian. If anything made her seem crazed, he told himself, it wasn't so much her intellect as the disorder of her cares.
"Is it his Mark?" she persisted, again speaking in Ainoni. "Is that why you fear him?"
As though to match her absurdity with his own, Achamian began mumbling the song his slave's children had sung and sung until he had cried aloud for them to stop. It seemed he could even hear them, piping about the edges of his husky baritone, voices that had floated with innocence and chanting delight. Voices he dearly missed.
"Stinky feet, hide my sweet, walk the river cool…"
"Sometimes," Mimara persisted, "when I glimpse him in the corner of my eye…"
"Stinky bum, sniff your thumb, swim the water pool…"
"…he seems like something monstrous, a shambling wreck, black and rotted and… and…"