And Esmenet was nothing if not clever.
So he forgave her. He could even remember the precise moment. He had spent the bulk of the day searching his notes for the specifics of a certain dream, one involving a variant of Seswatha's captivity in Dagliash-he could no longer remember why it was important. Furious with himself, he had decided to climb down from his room to assist Geraus with his wood chopping. The odd blister, it seemed, helped focus his thoughts as well as steady his quill. The slave was doggedly hacking away at one of the several shorn trunks he had drawn to the crude hutch where they stored their wood. Grabbing what turned out to be the dull axe, Achamian began chopping as well, but for some bizarre reason he could not strike the wood without sending chips spinning up into Geraus's face. The first one went unmentioned. The second occasioned a frowning smile. The third incited outright laughter and a subsequent apology. The fifth chip caught the man in the eye, sent him to the water-bucket blinking and grimacing.
Once again Achamian apologized, but only so far as was seemly between master and slave. Strangely enough, he had come to prize the jnanic etiquette he so despised when travelling the fleshpots of the Three Seas. Afterward he stood there, watching the man he owned rinse his left eye time and again, feeling somehow guilty and wronged at the same time. After all, he had meant to assist the man…
Geraus turned toward him, ruefully shook his head, and commended him for his supernatural aim. Achamian's vague ire evaporated, as it always did in the face of the man's relentless good nature. And then, impossibly, he caught the scent of the desert, as if somewhere just beyond the arboreal screens that fenced his tower, he would find the dunes of the mighty Carathay.
And just like that, she was forgiven… Esmenet, the whore become Empress.
Numb to his fingertips, Achamian returned the axe to its nook. "Better to heed the Gods," Geraus had said in approval.
Of course habits, like fleas, are not so easy to kill, especially habits of thought and passion. But she was forgiven, nonetheless. Even if he wasn't finished accusing her, she was forgiven.
And somehow, while walking with a band of killers through the empty heart of a dead civilization, he managed to explain this to Mimara.
He told her about their very first meeting, about the bawdy way her mother had accosted him from her window.
"Hey, Ainoni," she had shouted down. It was the custom in Sumna to call all bearded foreigners Ainoni. "A man so swollen needs to take his ease, lest he bursts…"
"I was quite fat in those days," he said, answering Mimara's dubious look.
And he told her about herself-or at least the memory of her that continued to haunt her mother.
"This was the summer after the famine. Sumna, the whole Nansur Empire had suffered grievously. In fact, the poor had sold so many of their children into slavery that the Emperor issued an edict voiding all such sales between Nansur citizens the previous summer. Like most caste-menials, your mother was too poor to afford citizenship, but Exceptions were being issued by various tax farmers throughout the city. Your mother would have never told me about you, I think, were it not for the law… the Sixteenth Edict of Manumission, it was called, I think. She needed the gold, you see. She was mad for gold-for anything she might use as a bribe."
"You gave it to her."
"Your mother never dreamed she could get you back. In fact, she never thought she would survive the famine. She literally believed she was sparing you her doom. You simply cannot imagine the straits she was in, the chains that shackled her. She sold you to Ainoni slavers, I think, because she thought the farther she could deliver you from the Nansurium the better."
"So the Emperor's edict was useless."
"I tried to tell her, but she refused to listen… Really refused," he added with a chuckle, drawing a finger to the small scar he still sported on his left temple. "Even still, she managed to secure the Exception… from a man, a monster, named Polpi Tharias-someone I still dream of killing. The first day the law went into effect she went down to the harbour. I don't know about now, but back then the Ershi district-you know? the north part of the harbour, in the shadow of the Hagerna-was where the slavers held their markets. She refused to let me accompany her… It was something… something she needed to do on her own, I think."
It was a strange thing for a man to enter the world of a damaged woman. The apparent disproportion between event and evaluation. The endless sinkholes that punished verbal wandering. The crazed alchemy of compassion and condemnation. It was a place where none of the scales seemed balanced, where the compass bowl never settled and the needle never showed true north.
"You know, girl, I think that was when I truly fell in love with her… that day, so very hot, as humid as any day in the Sayut Delta. I sat on the very sill she used to accost men on the street below, watched her slender form swallowed by the mobs…"
For some reason, he could not conjure the image in his soul's eye. Instead he glimpsed the eunuch-fat man she had vanished behind in the press: his smile hooking his jowls, empires of dark soaking his armpits.
Such is the perversity of memory. Small wonder the Nonmen lapsed into madness.
"She wasn't the only one," he continued. "Apparently thousands of Exceptions had been sold, almost all of them counterfeit. Not that it would have mattered, given that you were in Carythusal, far beyond the sway of the Emperor and his ill-considered law. The slavers had hired mercenaries in anticipation. There were riots. Hundreds were killed. One of the slaver's ships was set alight. When I saw the smoke I went out into the city to try to find her."
He idly wondered whether anyone had seen as many smoking cities as he. Many, he decided, if the rumours he had heard regarding the Wars of Unification were true.
Sarl and the Captain among them.
"Men are fools at the best of times," he continued, "but when they gather in mobs they lose whatever little reason they can claim when alone. Someone cries out, they all cry out. Someone bludgeons or burns, and they all bludgeon and burn. It's remarkable really, and terrifying enough to send kings and emperors into hiding.
"I was forced to resort to the Gnosis twice just to reach the harbour, and this in a city where Chorae were rife and sorcerers had their tongues scraped out with oyster shells. I actually remember little, just smoke, shadows running, bodies in the dust, and this… this cold that seemed to burn in the bottom of my gut."
Even after so many years, the phantasmagoric feel of that afternoon still tickled. It had been one of the first times his waking life had approximated the shrieking madness of his Dreams.
"Did you find her?" Mimara asked. She had been walking with her head slouched, almost slung, from her shoulders. It was a unlikely posture, a peculiar combination of reflection and defeat.
"No."
"No? What do you mean, no?"
"I mean no. I remember thinking I found her. Along one of the Hagerna's walls, lying face first in her own blood…" The moment came back to him unbidden. He had been nauseated for smoke and worry, leaning his then fat body against what seemed a laborious incline. The sight of her struck all thought and breath and motion from him. He just stood there, teetering, while the screams and shouts continued to pipe in the near distance behind him. At first, he had simply known it was her. The same girlish form and piling black hair. Even more, the same mauve cloak-though it struck him now that it might have only seemed the same cut and colour. Fear has a way of rewriting things to suit its purposes. She had fallen facing up-hill, pigeon-toed, one arm slack along her side, the other bent beneath her torso. The blood had streamed along her edges, outlining her in black and crimson. He remembered horns sounding across the harbour-the Shrial Knights signalling-and how in their blaring wake a hush had fallen, allowing him to hear the tap-tap of her blood directly into the heart of the earth: she had fallen across one of Sumna's famed gutters.