"No," she replies. "You must believe me when I tell you I've only seen him a handful of occasions. Prophets have scarce the time for real daughters, let alone the likes of me."
This is true. For most of her years on the Andiamine Heights, the Aspect-Emperor was scarce more than a dread rumour, an unseen presence that sent hoards of perfumed functionaries scurrying this way and that through the galleries. And in a manner, she realizes with a peculiar numbness, very little has changed. Was he not the hidden tyrant of this very expedition?
For the first time, it seems, she sees things through Drusas Achamian's eyes: a world bound to the machinations of Anasurimbor Kellhus. Looking out, she has a sudden sense of loads borne and stresses diffused, as if the world were a wheel spoked with mountains, rimmed with seas, one so vast that the axle lay perpetually over the horizon-perpetually unseen. Armies march. Priests tally contributions. Ships leave and ships arrive. Emissaries howl in protest and wriggle on their bellies…
All at the pleasure of the Holy Aspect-Emperor.
This is the world the old Wizard sees, the world that frames his every decision: a singular thing, a living thing, nourished by the arteries of trade, bound by the sinew of fear and faith…
A leviathan with a black cancer for a heart.
"I believe you," he says after a time. "I was just… just wondering."
She ponders this image of the Aspect-Emperor and his power, this hellish seal. It reminds her of the great Nilnameshi mandala that hangs in the Allosium Forum below the Andiamine Heights. For more than a thousand years, the artisan-sages of Invishi sought to capture creation in various symbolic schemes, resulting in tapestries of unparalleled beauty and manufacture. The Allosium Mandala, her mother had told her once, was famed for being the first to use concentric circles instead of nested squares to represent the hierarchies of existence. It was also notorious for containing no image whatsoever in its centre, the place typically reserved for the God of Gods…
Innovations that, her mother explained, saw the artisan stoned to death.
Now Mimara sees a mandala of her own manufacture in her soul's eye, one more temporal than cosmological but every bit as subversive in its implications. She sees the million-panelled extremities, the tiny lives of the mob, each enclosed in ignorance and distraction. And she sees the larger chambers of the Great Factions, far more powerful but just as oblivious given their perpetual scramble for prestige and dominance. With terrifying clarity she sees it, apprehends it, a symbolic world thronging with life yet devoid of nerves, utterly senseless to the malignancy crouched in their absent heart…
A dark world, one battling a war long lost.
As thin as her passions have become, it seems she can feel it: the impotence, the desolation, the gaping sense of hopelessness. She walks for a time, tasting, even savouring, the possibility, as if doom were a kind of honey-cake. A world where the Aspect-Emperor is evil…
And then she realizes that the opposite could just as easily be true.
"What would you have thought," she asks the old Wizard, "if I had told you he was wreathed in glory when I saw him, that he was, without any doubt, the Son of Heaven?"
This is it, she realizes. The rat that hides in his gut, gnawing and gnawing…
"Hard questions, girl. You have a talent for them."
The overthrowing fear.
"Yes. But the dilemmas remain yours, don't they?"
He glares at her, and for the merest heartbeat, she glimpses hatred. But like so much else, it drops away without residue. Simply another passion too greased with irrelevance to be clutched in the hands of the present.
"Strange…" he replies distantly. "I see two sets of footprints behind me."
There is this sense of unravelling.
A sense of threads worn and abraded, until snipped by their own tension. A sense of things hanging, as if they were nothing more than fluff skipping across the wind. A sense of things tying, of newborn anchors, novel tautnesses yanked across old seams, old straps, as if they were spiderwebs become kites, soaring high and free, batted by falcon winds, pinned to the earth by a singular string…
Qirri.
Qirri the holy. Qirri the pure.
Each night they queue before the Nonman, suck from the teat that is his finger. Sometimes he clasps their cheek with his free hand, gazes long and melancholy into their eyes, while his finger probes their tongue, their gums and teeth.
And it is right and proper to taste the spittle of another.
They have found a new Tusk to guide them, a new God to compel their hearts and to bend their knees. Qirri, as rationed and apportioned by its prophet, Incariol.
During the day they walk, utterly absorbed in the blessed monotony. Like beetles, they walk with their faces to the earth, step after step, watching their boots hooking through haloes of dust.
During the night they listen to Cleric and his incoherent declarations. And it seems they grasp a logic that binds disjointed absurdities into profound wholes. They revel in a clarity indistinguishable from confusion, an enlightenment devoid of claim or truth or hope…
And the plains pass like a dream.
"The Qirri…" she finally manages to blurt. "It's beginning to frighten me."
The Wizard's silence has the character of a breach. She senses his alarm, the effort of will it takes for him to stifle his rebuke. She knows the words warring for control of his voice because they are the same words that continue to nag and accuse the corners of her thought. Fool. Why throw stones at wolves? Everything is as it must be. Everything will turn out fine…
"How so?" he says coldly.
"In the brothel…" she hears herself reply and is amazed because she is usually so loathe to speak of the place. "Some of the girls, the ones who broke, mostly… They would feed them opium-force them. Within weeks they would… would…"
"Do whatever they needed to get more," the Wizard says dully.
Trudging silence. Coughing from somewhere ahead of them.
"Could that be what the Nonman is doing to us?"
Speaking this question is like rolling a great stone from her chest. How could it be so difficult to stand square in the light of what was happening?
"Why?" the Wizard asks. "Has he been making… making demands?"
"No," she answers. Not yet.
He ponders the ground, his stride, and the resulting exhalations of dust.
"We have nothing to fear, Mimara," he finally says, but there is something false in his manner, as if he were a frightened boy borrowing the assured tone and posture of a priest. "We're not the same as the others. We understand the dangers."
She does not know how to reply, so she simply continues pacing the Wizard in silent turmoil. Yes! something cries within her. Yes! We know the danger. We can take precautions, refuse the Qirri anytime we wish! Anytime!
Just not now.
"Besides…" he eventually continues, "we need it."
She has anticipated this objection. "But we've travelled so far so fast already!"
Why so harsh? a voice-her voice-chides her. Let the man speak at the very least.
"Look at the Stone Hags," he replies. "Men bred for the slog, eaten up in the matter of weeks. How well do you think an old man and a woman would fare?"
"Let the others go ahead then. Or even better, we could steal away in the heart of night!"
Or best of all, it occurs to her, just take the Nonman's pouch… Yes! Steal it! This makes so much sparkling sense to her that she almost laughs out loud-even as a more sober part of her realizes that one does not take anything from a Quya Mage-ever. As quick as her smile leaps to her lips, her eyes tear in frustration.