"What did he mean?" Mimara asked after she and the Wizard had curled onto their mats. They always slept side by side now. Achamian had even become accustomed to the point of absence that was her Chorae. Ever since that first Sranc attack, when she had been stranded with Soma beyond the protective circuit of his incipient Wards, he had been loathe to let her stray from his side.
"He means that he's not a… a self… in the way you and I are selves. Now go to sleep."
"But how is that possible?"
"Because of memory. Memory is what binds us to what we are. Go to sleep."
"What do you mean? How can somebody not be what they are? That makes no sense."
"Go to sleep."
He would lay there, his eyes closed to the world, while the image of the Nonman-mundane beauty perpetually at war with his arcane disfiguration-plagued his soul. The old Wizard would curse himself for a fool, ask himself how many watches he had wasted worrying about the Erratic. Cleric was one of the Pharroika, the Wayward. Whatever the Nonman once was, he was no longer-and that should be enough.
If he had ceased pondering Incariol altogether in the days following the battle in the ruins of Maimor, it was because of the skin-spy and what its presence implied. But time's passage has a way of blunting our sharper questions, of making things difficult to confront soft with malleable familiarity. Of course, the Consult had been watching him, the man who had taught the Gnosis to the Aspect-Emperor, and so delivered the Three Seas. Of course, they had infiltrated the Skin Eaters.
He was Drusas Achamian.
But the further Soma fell into the past, the more Cleric's presence irked his curiosity, the more the old questions began prickling back to life.
Even his Dreams had been affected.
He had lost his inkhorn and papyrus in the mad depths of Cil-Aujas, so he could no longer chronicle the particulars of his slumbering experience. Nor did he need to.
It almost seemed as if he had become unmoored when he pondered the transformations. First he had drifted from the central current of Seswatha's life, away from the tragic enormities and into the mundane details, where he had been delivered to knowledge of Ishual, the secret fastness of the Dunyain. Then, as if these things were too small to catch the fabric of his soul, he slipped from Seswatha altogether, seeing things his ancient forebear had never seen, standing where he never stood, as when he saw the Library of Sauglish burn.
And now?
He continued to dream that he and nameless others stood shackled in a shadowy line. Broken men. Brutalized. They filed through a tube of thatched undergrowth, bushes that had grown out and around their passage, forming vaults of a thousand interlocking branches. Over the stooped shoulders of those before him, he could see the tunnel's terminus, the threshold of some sunlit clearing, it seemed-the spaces beyond were so open and bright as to defeat his gloom-pinched eyes. He felt a dread that seemed curiously disconnected from his surroundings, as if his fear had come to him from a far different time and place.
And he did not know who he was.
A titanic horn would blare, and the line would be pulled stumbling forward, and peering, he would see a starved wretch at the fore, at least a hundred souls distant, stepping into the golden light… vanishing.
And the screaming would begin, only to be yanked short.
Again and again, he dreamed this senseless dream. Sometimes it was identical. Sometimes he seemed one soul closer to the procession's end. He could never be sure.
Was it the Qirri? Was it the deathless rancour of the Mop, or a cruel whim of Fate?
Or had the trauma of his life at last unhinged him and cast his slumber to the wolves of grim fancy?
For his whole life, ever since grasping the withered pouch of Seswatha's heart deep in the bowel of Atyersus, his dreams had possessed meaning… logic, horrifying to be sure, but comprehensible all the same. For his whole life he had awakened with purpose.
And now?
"So what was it like?" Achamian asked her as the company filed through the arboreal maze.
"What was what like?"
They always addressed each other in Ainoni now. The fact that only the Captain could comprehend them made it seem daring somehow-and curiously proper, as if madmen should oversee the exchange of secrets. Even still, they took care that he did not overhear.
"Life on the Andiamine Heights," he said, "as an Anasurimbor."
"You mean the family you're trying to destroy."
The old Wizard snorted. "Just think, no more running."
At last she smiled. Anger and sarcasm, Achamian had learned, were a kind of reflex for Mimara-as well as a fortress and a refuge. If he could outlast her initial hostility, which proved difficult no matter how much good humour he mustered, he could usually coax a degree of openness from her.
"It was complicated," she began pensively.
"Well then, start at the beginning."
"You mean when they came for me in Carythusal?"
The old Wizard shrugged and nodded.
They had slackened their pace enough to fall behind the others, even the dour file of Stone Hags, who stole longing glances as Mimara drifted past. Despite the chorus of birdsong, a kind of silence reared about them, the hush of slow growth and decay. It felt like shelter.
"You have to understand," she said hesitantly. "I didn't know that I had been wronged. The brutalities I endured… But I was a child… and then I was a brothel-slave-that's what I was… Something made to be violated, abused, over and over, until I grew too old or too ugly, and they sold me to the fullery. That was just the… the way… So when the Eothic Guardsmen came and began beating Yappi… Yapotis… the brothel master, I didn't understand. I couldn't understand…"
Achamian watched her carefully, saw a rare strand of sunlight flash across her face. "You thought you were being attacked instead of saved."
A numb nod. "They took me away before the killing began, but I knew… I could tell from the soldiers' manner, cold, as merciless as any of these scalpers. I knew they would kill anyone who had a hand in my… my fouling…"
She had the habit of slipping into Tutseme when she became upset, the rough dialect peculiar to menials and slaves from Carythusal. The clipped vowels. The singsong intonations. Achamian would have teased her for sounding like an Ainoni harlot, had the subject matter been less serious.
"They brought me to a ship-you should have seen them! Stammering, bowing and kneeling, not the soldiers, but the Imperial Apparati who commanded them. They asked me- begged me! — for some kind of request, for something they could do, for my health and my ease, they said. For my glory. I'll never forget that! My whole life my only prize had been the lust my form incited in men-the face of an Empress, the hips and slit of a young girl-and there I stood, the proud possessor of what? Glory? So I said, 'Stop. Stop the killing!' And they looked at me with long faces and said, 'Alas, Princess, that is the one thing we cannot do.' 'Why?' I asked them…
"'Because the Blessed Empress has commanded it,' they said…
"So I stood on the prow and watched… They had moored on the high river, on the quays typically reserved for the Scarlet Spires-you know those? — so I could see the slums rise to the north, all the Worm laid out for inspection. I could see it burn… I could even see souls trapped on their roofs… Men, women, children… jumping…"
The old Wizard watched her, careful to purge any hint of pity from his frown. To be a child-whore one moment and a Princess-Imperial the next. To be plucked from abject slavery and hurtled to the heights of the greatest empire since Cenei. And then to have your old world burned down around you.
Esmenet, he understood, had tried to undo her crime with the commission of another. She had mistook vengeance for reparation.