“They have suffered too much to trust anything we offer them. Even our capitulation.”
“Mrama kapu!” the woman cried, sweeping wide the blade of her right hand. Once again stumped by the violence of her ingenuity, the old Wizard stammered in reply.
He was losing this contest …
“I can hear them!” the Survivor cried, his tone modulated to provoke communal alarm.
The worldborn couple stared down at him, rimmed in the violet of incipient night. The burning scrub popped, to his right, coughed points of light, constellations drawn out on the wind.
“I can hear them in your womb,” the Survivor repeated—this time in the woman’s tongue. Though he was far from mastering the language, he knew enough to say at least this much.
She gawked at him, too shocked to be dismayed—to be anything other than disarmed.
“Taw mirqui pal—”
What do you mean … them?
One fraction registered the success of his stratagem. Others reaped the signs blaring from her form and face. And still others enacted the remaining articulations of this ploy …
The Survivor smiled the old Wizard’s most endearing smile.
“You bear twins … Sister.”
You are right to be terrified.
The D?nyain exceed any rule that you possess … We outrun your measure.
You are the neck of a bottle. The World but drips into your soul.
We dwell in the deluge.
You come to us as a cataract. You assume you are unitary and alone, when in sooth you are a mob of blind men, crying out words you cannot comprehend in voices you cannot hear. For the truth is that you are many—this is the secret of your innumerable contradictions.
This … This is where the D?nyain labour, in the darkness that comes before your souls. To converse with us is to submit to us—there is no other way for you to dwell in our presence. Given our respective natures, we are your slavers.
You were right to want to kill us …
Especially me, one who was broken in the deepest Deep.
Even this confession, this speaking of plain truth, is woven from knowledge that would terrify you, such is its penetration. My very voice has been fashioned into a key, using manner and intonation as teeth to unlock the tumblers of your soul. You are rapt because you have been so instructed.
Despite the brief span of our acquaintance, despite your will to conceal, I know so very much about you. I can name the Mission you call your mission, and I can name the Mission you know not at all. I know the twists of circumstance that shape and bind you; that for much of your life abuse was the only sincere rule; that you hide the tender beneath the bitter; that you carry your mother’s children …
But I need not enumerate what I know, for I see also that you know.
I see that you wonder what is to be done, for in speaking the truth, I also make the case for my destruction.
And so are my own limits made plain. Though the night ranges infinite above us, a fraction of me still wanders the Thousand Thousand Halls, a dark fragment, as obscure as it is elusive, one that argues death … death as the Shortest Path to the Absolute.
And I wonder, Is this what you call sorrow?
Thus are the limits of the D?nyain made visible … also. For the desire that burns so bright within you has been stamped into the merest embers within us, bred into insignificance with the passing of generations, leaving but one hunger, one flame, one mover to yoke the Legion-within …
A single Mission.
This, Sister … This is why I bare my throat to the blade of your judgment. This is why I would make myself your slave. For short of death, you, Anas?rimbor Mimara, wife-daughter of Anas?rimbor Kellhus, who is also my father … you, Sister, are the Shortest Path.
The Absolute dwells within your Gaze. You … a frail, worldborn slip, heavy with child, chased across the throw of kings and nations, you are the Nail of the World, the hook from which all things hang.
Thus do I kneel before it, awaiting, accepting, death or illumination—it does not matter which …
So long as I am at last known.
Cuts and cuts and cuts …
A fraction kneels before her, Anas?rimbor Mimara. And a fraction, one of a hundred stones, could see it … as if it were rising up, like lead pouring into the husk and tatter of a mortal frame, an immobility as profound as oblivion.
Zero.
Sranc squealing in the black, the air rancid with sweat and exhalation, cleavers whooshing, felling brothers for lunatic fear. Feet slapping stone.
Zero … Opening as an Eye.
The blackness, savage and greased. A point passes through it, plunging down lines and sweeping across curves. The shrieks are contagion, like fire upon the back of an arid hill.
Beauty … not of flowers or animal form, but of stillness, of vast mechanisms, the threshing, pounding, scraping, dwindling into the patter of mice.
Cuts and cuts and cuts …