What was happening?
"You have the look," a voice gurgles from behind.
She turns and sees teeth and gums, eyes pinched into besotted creases. Sarl, somehow shadowy though all the world is bright, looking like a filthy gnome.
"You have the look… Aye!"
She can hear phlegm snap in his cackle. The peril of speaking to madmen, she realizes, is that it permits them to speak to you.
"Don't dispute me, girl, it's true. You have the look of a path long mudded. Am I wrong? Am I? Tell me, girl. How many men have marched 'cross your thighs?"
She should hate him for saying this, but she lacks the inner wind. When has feeling become an effort?
"Many fools. But men… Very few."
"So you admit it!"
She smiles out of some coquettish reflex, thinking she might use his carnal interest to learn more about Lord Kosoter.
"What am I admitting?"
The grin drops from his face, enough for her to glimpse a sliver of his bloodshot eyes. He leans close with a kind of wonder-too close. She fairly gags at his buzzing reek.
"She burned a city for you-didn't she?"
"Who?" she replies numbly.
"Your mother. The Holy Empress."
"No," she laughs in faux astonishment. "But I appreciate the compliment!"
Sarl laughs and nods in turn, his eyes once again squeezed into invisibility. Laughs and nods, trailing ever farther behind her…
What was happening?
She is not who she is…
She is already two women, each estranged from the other. There is the Mimara who knows, who watches the old motives, the old bonds, gradually disintegrate. And there is the Mimara who has gathered all of the old concerns and set them in a circle about an unspeakable pit.
She is already two women, but she needs only touch her bowing abdomen to become three.
They laugh at her for all the food she eats. More and more, she is ravenous come evening. She chides the Wizard for loitering when he should be preparing the humble field Cants he uses to cook their spoiling game. She scolds Xonghis when he fails to secure them enough game.
Whatever speech they possess leaks away as the sun draws down the horizon. They sit in the dust, their beards lacquered with grease, the entrails of their victims humming with flies. Vultures circle them. They sit and they wait for rising darkness… for the melodious toll of Cleric's first words.
"I remember…"
They gather before him. Some come crawling, while others shuffle, kicking up ghostly trails of dust that the wind whips into quick oblivion.
"I remember coming down from high mountains, and treating with Mannish Kings…"
He sits cross-legged, his forearms extended across his knees, his head hanging from his shoulders.
"I remember seducing wives… healing infant princes…"
Stars smoke the arch of Heaven paint the Nonman's slouching form in strokes of silver and white.
"I remember laughing at the superstitions of your priests."
He rolls his head from side to side, as if the shadow he cradles possesses hands that caress his cheeks.
"I remember frightening the fools among you with my questions and astounding the wise with my answers. I remember cracking the shields of your warriors, shattering arms of bronze…"
And it seems they hear distant horns, the thunder of hosts charging, clashing.
"I remember the tribute you gave to me… The gold… the jewels… the babes that you laid at my sandalled feet."
A hush.
"I remember the love you bore me… The hatred and the envy."
He raises his head, blinking as if yanked from a dream inhumanly cruel for its bliss. Veins of silver fork across his cheeks… Tears.
"You die so easily!" he cries, howls, as if human frailty were the one true outrage.
He sobs, bows his head once more. His voice rises as if from a pit.
"And I never forget…"
One of the scalpers moans in carnal frustration… Galian.
"I never forget the dead."
Then he is standing, drawn like a puppet by invisible strings. The Holy Dispensation is about to begin. Strange shouts crease and crumple the windy silence, like the yelping of leashed dogs. She can see hunger leaning in their avid eyes. She can see manly restraint give way to clutched arms and rocking gesticulations. And she does not know when this happened, how awaiting the pouch had become a carnival of fanatic declarations, or how licking a smudged fingertip had become carnal penetration.
She sits rigid and estranged, watching Cleric, yes, but watching his pouch even more. As meagre as their rations are-scarce enough to blacken the crescent of a pared fingernail-she wonders how long they have before the purse fails them altogether. Finally he towers before her, his bare chest shining with hooks of light and shadow, his outstretched finger glistening about the nub of precious black.
She cannot move.
"Mimara?" the Ishroi asks, remembering her name.
He calls to both of her selves, to the one who knows but does not care and to the one who cares but does not know.
But for once it is the third incarnation that answers…
"No," it says. "Get that poison away from me."
Cleric gazes at her for a solemn moment, long enough for the others to set aside their singular hunger.
There is horror in the Wizard's look.
Lord Incariol gazes at her, his eyes watery white about coin-sized pupils. "Mimara…"
She repeats herself, finding new wind in her unaccountable resolution. "No."
Desire, she has come to understand, is not the only bottomless thing…
There is motherhood.
She dreams that an absence binds her, a hole that claws at her very substance. Something is missing, something more precious than jewels or celebrated works, more sustaining than drink or love or even breath. Something wonderful that she has betrayed…
Then she is gasping, swallowing at sour consciousness, and blinking at the visage of Incariol leaning over her.
She does not panic, for everything seems reasonable.
"What are you doing?" she coughs.
"Watching you."
"Yes. But why?"
Even as she asks this, she realizes that only sorcery, subtle sorcery, could have made this visitation possible. She thinks she can even sense it, or at the very least guess at its outlines, the warping of the Wizard's incipient Wards. It was as if he had simply bent the circumference of Achamian's conjuring, pressed into his arcane defences as if they were no more than a half-filled bladder.
"You…" the flawless face said. "You remind me… of someone… I think…"
There is something old about this reply. Not dead nation old, but doddering old… frail.
"What is it?" she asks. She does not know where this question comes from, nor which traitor gives voice to it.
"I no longer remember," he replies with a grave whisper.
"No… The Qirri… Tell me what it is!"
The Wizard murmurs and stirs beside her.
Cleric stares at her with ancient, ancient eyes. The Nail of Heaven traces a perfect white sickle along the outer rim of his brow and skull. He has a smell she cannot identify, a deep smell, utterly unlike the human reek of the Wizard or the scalpers. The rot that softens stone.
"Not all of my kind are buried… Some, the greatest, we burn like you."
And she understands that she has been asking the wrong question-the wrong question all along. Not what, but who?
"Who?" she gasps. Suddenly his hand is all that exists. Heavy with power, gentle with love. Her eyes track its flying path to his hip, to the rune-stitched pouch…
"Taste…" he murmurs in tones of distant thunder. "Taste and see."
She can feel the weight of him, the corded strength, hanging above her, and a part of her dreams she is naked and shivering.