Her skin.
"Surrogation," she says. "Consult skin-spies typically begin with a servant or a slave-someone who allows them to study their real target, learn their mannerisms, voice, and character. Once they've learned enough, they begin transforming themselves, sculpting their flesh, moulding their cartilage bones, in preparation for the subsequent assassination and replacement of the target."
It has even replicated the lean, starved look that has begun to afflict them all.
"Your father has told you this?"
"Yes."
And the growing curve of her lower belly…
"You think this is what I'm doing?"
"What else could you be doing?" A sudden sharpness pokes through her manner. She will show this thing… this beautiful thing.
"Declaring your beauty," it replies.
"No, Soma. Do not play games with me. Nothing human passes through your soul because you have no soul. You're not real."
"But I speak. How could I speak if I had no soul?"
"Parrots speak. You are simply a cunning parrot."
"I fear I am far more."
"I can even prove it to you."
"Can you now?"
Now she's playing games, she realizes, games when she has so many burning questions-ones crucial to their survival. Every night she rehearses them, but for some reason they no longer seem… pertinent. If anything, they suddenly feel absurd, bloated with unreality, the kinds of questions fat priests might ask starving children. Even the central question, when she thinks of it, leaves her leaden with reluctance…
And yet she needs to ask it, to lean heedless into the thing's menace and demand an answer, to blurt, "What do you mean, the Nonman is trying to kill us?"
But she cannot.
And it has become as proper as proper can be, avoiding things troubling and obvious. To play games with inhuman assassins.
"A man comes to you saying," she begins with a sly smile, "'Do not believe anything I say, for I am liar…'" She pauses to allow the words to resonate. "Tell me, thing, why is this a paradox?"
"Because it's strange for a liar to say such things."
The response occasions a small flare of triumph. It's remarkable, really, witnessing things learned in the abstract happen in actuality-and yet further proof of her stepfather's divinity. She can even see the Aspect-Emperor's luminous face, smiling and gentle, saying, "Remember, Mimara… If you fear, simply ask this question…"
The thing before her truly possesses no soul. But as dread as the fact is, it seems… a farce.
"There. That is my proof."
"Proof? How?"
She feels as if she pretends the water has boiled even though the fire has long since guttered, as if everyone raises stone-cold bowls, smacks their lips, and spouts some homily about the way tea warms the soul even as they shudder at the chill lining their collective gut.
"Only a soul can hold a paradox," she explains. "Since the true meaning of paradox escapes you, you can only grasp non-paradoxical approximations. In this case, 'strange.' Only a soul can comprehend contradictory truths."
"If I'm not a soul, then what am I?"
How? How has everything become such a farce?
"An abacus crafted of skin, flesh, and bone. A monstrous, miraculous tool. A product of the Tekne."
"That too is something special, is it not?"
Something is wrong, she realizes. Their voices have waxed too loud. And the Wizard, she knows, will be peering into the darkness after her, wondering. Worrying.
"I must go… I've tarried too long."
Cleric saw it first, scooped along distant tentacles of wind. A scarf of white and gold-the colours of the Thousand Temples-floating, coiling and uncoiling. The first sign of humanity they had encountered since passing the last of the Meori ruins weeks previous.
Of course Achamian was among the last to pick it out against the dun monotony of the distance. "There," Mimara repeated time and again, pointing. "There…" At last he glimpsed it, twisting like a worm in water. He clenched his teeth following its meandering course, balled his fists.
The Great Ordeal, he realized. Somewhere on this very plain, the host of Kellhus and his Believer-Kings marched the long road to Golgotterath. How close would they pass?
But this worry, like so many other things, seemed uprooted, yet another scarf floating across parched ground. Everything seemed to float lately, as if yanked from its native soil and carried on a slow flood of invisibility.
Few men returned the same after months or years of travel-Achamian knew this as well as anyone. Sheer exposure to different sights, different customs, different peoples, was enough to alter a man, sometimes radically. But in Achamian's estimation, the real impetus, what really changed men, was the simple act of walking and thinking, day after day, week after week, month after month. Innumerable thoughts flitted through the soul of the long traveller. Kith and kin were condemned and pardoned. Hopes and beliefs were considered and reconsidered. Worries were picked to the point of festering-or healing. For those who could affirm the same thoughts endlessly, men like the Captain, the trail typically led to fanaticism. For those with no stomach for continuous repetition, men like Galian, the trail led to suspicion and cynicism, the conviction that thought was never to be trusted. For those who found their thoughts never quite repeating, who found themselves continually surprised by novel angles and new questions, the trail led to philosophy-to a wisdom that only hermits and prisoners could know.
Achamian had always considered himself one of the latter: a long-walking philosopher. In his younger days, he would even take inventory of his beliefs and scruples to better judge the difference between the man who had departed and the man who had arrived. He was what the ancient Ceneian satirists called an aculmirsi, literally, a "milestone man," one who would spend his time on the road forever peering at the next milestone-a traveller who could not stop thinking about travelling.
But this journey, arguably the most significant of his long life… was different somehow. Something was happening.
Something inexplicable. Or something that wanted to be…
His Dreams had changed as well.
The night they had camped atop the Heilor, he once again found himself one of many captives chained in an ever-diminishing line, still toothless for scarce-remembered beatings, still nameless for the profundity of what he suffered-and yet everything was different. He glimpsed the flash of memories when he blinked, for one, images of ghastly torment, obscenities too extreme to be countenanced. The glimpse of Sranc hunched in frenzied rutting. The taste of their slaver as they arched and drooled across him. The stench of their black seed…
Degradations so profound that his soul had kicked free his body, his past, his sanity.
So he pinned his eyes wide in false wakefulness, stared over the wretches before him with a kind of mad glaring, toward the opening that marked his destination. Where scrub and brush had enclosed the file before, he now saw gleaming bulkheads and curved planes of gold: a corridor of metal, canted as though part of an almost toppled structure or some great boat dragged ashore. Where the tunnel had ended in a clearing of some kind, he now saw a chamber, vast in implication, though he could see naught but the merest fraction, and illuminated with a kind of otherworldly light, one that rinsed the walls in watery arrhythmia, and sickened for staring.
The Golden Room, he called it. And it was the sum of all horrors.
The unseen horn would blare, scraping across intonations no human ear was meant to suffer. Shadows would rise from the threshold, and the procession would be heaved staggering forward-two steps, never more. He would listen to the shrieks, infant in their intensity, as the Golden Room devoured yet another damaged soul.