His tone is halting, pensive. He has the manner of a man surprised by things so familiar they have become thoughtless.
"He had a gift for showing you the implications of things…" he says, then trails into the silence of second thoughts. His brow furrows. His lips purse within the shaggy profile of his beard. "Ajencis was forever saying that ignorance is invisible," he begins again, "and that this is what fools us into thinking we know the truth of anything, let alone complicated matters. He thought certainty was a symptom of stupidity-the most destructive one. But at the risk of offending the Great Teacher-or his ancient shade, anyway-I would say that not all ignorances are… are equal. I think there are truths, profound truths, that we somehow know without knowing…"
Mimara glances around the way she often does when they have conversations like this. Pokwas is the nearest, his harness sagging, his black skin chalked by dust. Galian trudges nearby-the two have become inseparable. Cleric strides more than walks several paces ahead, his scalp gleaming white in the wide-sky sun. Sarl lags with Koll, his face pulled into a perpetual grimace. The Skin Eaters. They look more like a scattered mob of refugees than a warlike company on a quest.
"This…" Achamian says, still gazing into his reminiscences, "this was Kellhus's noschi, his genius. He could look into your eyes and pluck these… half-known truths from you… and so, within heartbeats of speaking with him, you would begin doubting your own cubit, and begin looking more and more toward his measure…"
She feels her eyes arch wide in comprehension. "A deceiver could ask for no greater gift."
The Wizard's look is so sharp that at first she fears she has offended him. But he has that appreciative gleam in his eyes, the one she has come to prize.
"In all my years," he continues, "I have never quite understood worship, what happens to souls when they prostrate themselves before another-I've been a sorcerer for too long. And yet I did worship him… for a time. So much so I even forgave him the theft of your mother…"
He shakes his head as if trying to ward away bees, looks away to the stationary line of the horizon. A cough kicks through him.
"Whatever worship is," he says, "I think it involves surrendering your cubit… opening yourself to the perpetual correction of another…"
"Having faith in ignorance," she adds with a wry grin.
His laughter is so sudden, so mad with hilarity, that fairly all the scalpers turn toward them.
"The grief you must have caused your mother!" he cries.
Even though she smiles at the joke, a part of her stumbles in errant worry. When has she become so clever?
The Qirri, she realizes. It quickens more than the step.
Wary of the sudden attention, they stay their tongues. The silence of endless exertion climbs over them once again. She stares out toward the northern horizon, at the long divide between sky and earth. She thinks of Kellhus and her mother making love in a distant desert. Her hand drifts to her belly, but her thoughts dare not follow… Not yet.
She has the sense of things bending.
The World is old and miraculous and is filled with a deep despair that none truly know. The Nonman, Mimara has come to understand, is proof of this.
"There was a time," he says, "when the world shook to the stamping chorus of our march…"
Dusk rolls the plain's farther reaches into darkness and gloom. The wind buffets, hard enough to prickle with grit. Thunderheads scrawl across the sky, dark and glowing with internal discharges, but rainless save for the odd warm spit.
The Nonman stands before them, naked to the waist, one held in the eyes of ten. His hairless form is perfect in cast and proportion, the very image of manly grace and strength, a statue in a land without sculptors.
"There was such a time…"
Thunder rolls across the mocking skies, and the scalpers crane their gazes this way and that. It alarms the soul, thunder on the plain. The eyes turn to shelter when the heavens crack, and plains are naught but the absence of shelter, exposure drawn on and on across the edge of the horizon. The plains offer no place to hide-only directions to run.
"A time when we," Cleric says, "when we! — were many, and when these depravities-these skinnies — were few. There was a time when your forefathers wept at the merest rumour of our displeasure, when you offered up your sons and daughters to turn aside our capricious fury!"
She cannot yank her gaze from him-Incariol. He is a mystery, a secret that she must know, if she and Achamian were to be saved. His aspect has become a compulsion for her, like a totem or even an idoclass="underline" something that rewards the ardour of its observation.
"The most foolish among us," Cleric continues, "has forgotten more than your wisest will ever know. Even your Wizard is but a child stumbling in his father's boots. You are but twig-thin candles, burning fast and bright, revealing far more than your span allows you to fathom."
He bends back his head until the line of his jaw forms a triangle above the banded muscle of his neck. He shouts heavenward, mouthing words that pool blue and brilliant white… Then, miraculously, he steps into the sky, arms out, rising until the clouds become a kind of mantle about his shoulders, a windblown cloak of smoke and warring, interior lights.
"But now look at us," he booms down to their astonished shadows. "Diminished. Perpetually foundering. Lost without memories. Persecuted as false. Hunted by the very depths we warred to uncover, the very darkness we sought to illuminate."
He hangs above them. He lowers his radiant gaze. His tears burn silver with refracted light. Thunder crashes, a thousand hammers against a thousand shields.
"This is the paradox-is it not? The longer you live, the smaller you become. The past always dwarfs the present, even for races as fleeting as yours. One morning you awaken to find now… this very moment… little more than a spark in a cavern. One morning you awaken to find yourself so much… less…"
Incariol, she thinks. Ishroi…
"Less than what you wanted. Less than what you once were."
She is in love, she realizes. Not with him, but with the power and wonder of what he was.
"One day you, who have never been mighty or great, will ask where the glory has gone. Failing strength. Failing nerve. You will find yourself faltering at every turn, and your arrogance will grow brittle, defensive. Perhaps you will turn to your sons and their overshadowed ardour. Perhaps you will seal yourself in your mansion, as we did, proclaiming contempt for the world rather than face its cruel measure…"
She is more in his presence, she decides. She will always be more, whether he flees or dies or utterly loses himself in the disorder that is his soul. For knowing him… Cleric.
"One day you, who have never been mighty or great, will peer through the maze of your depleted life, and see that you are lost…"
He abandons his mantle of clouds, sinking as though on a wire. He sets foot upon powder-dry earth.
Mimara leans forward with the Wizard and the other scalpers. Their mouths hang slack with drool.
"Lost like us," he murmurs, reaching for the wonder that hides in his pouch.
The thunderheads continue their march into the obscurity of night.
The rain, as always, refuses to fall.
– | Cil-Aujas, she decides. Something broke in Cil-Aujas. Something between them, something within. And now sanity is abandoning them, drip by lucid drip.
There's a new Rule of the Slog, and even though it has never been spoken, Mimara knows with utter certainty that violators will be punished as lethally as all the others. A rule that ensures no mention shall be made of the madness slowly possessing them.