Beauty … the effortlessness of freefall, the reduction of all riddles to a single, far-falling line.
The point is sentient. It speaks, spinning tales of hewn ribs and deflected cleavers, punctured bowels and broken teeth, extremities sent spinning into the void of irrelevance.
The Survivor gazes into the Gaze, sees the lie that is sight.
Cuts and cuts and cuts …
Judge us, a fraction whispers.
Raise us up.
Strike us down.
Anas?rimbor Mimara stands above him, little more than a halo, a smear of meat and hair about the Judging Eye. An excuse. An occasion …
Holding, a fraction notices, a sorcerous knife.
Thronging, mewling blackness. A path picked—pursued. A calligraphy too murderous to be real. Threats isolated, plucked from the deluge, pinched like candle wicks—snuffed.
So many cuts.
Zero, trembling with feminine mortality.
Too many.
“You are broken,” she sobs. “The same as me …”
A fraction reaches out, makes a pommel of the slender hand about the pommel of the knife. Judge, a fraction murmurs. End our ingrown war …
But she is weeping—openly now. Why does she weep?
The Gaze knows no sorrow.
“But I do,” she whispers.
Cuts and cuts and cuts …
The knife clatters against stone. And somehow she is kneeling with him, embracing him, so that he can feel the sphere of her belly enter the cavity of his own. A fraction counts four heartbeats: one ponderous and masculine, another fleet and feminine, and two prenatal. She exhales into his neck, and a fraction tracks the creeping bloom of heat and humidity. She shudders.
I am lost, a fraction whispers …
Though her face is buried in his shoulder below his jaw, the Gaze has not moved. It watches as before, infinite scrutiny hanging from the memory of where her eyes had been.
“Yes …” she says. “As are we.”
Zero, glaring from nowhere, showing him his measure … and how disastrously far the D?nyain had wandered.
The rank folly of the Shortest Path.
I am damned.
Her small fists twist knots into his tunic, make rope of a portion. The boy watches, for once immaculate and inscrutable. “I forgive you,” she cries into his shoulder.
I forgive.
Awareness has no skin.
No fists or fingers.
No arms.
So much must be ignored.
The boy watches him stare into the bowl of night—watches him float. “So you have succeeded?” he whispers.
A fraction hears. A fraction responds.
“Everything I have taught you is a lie.”
All that you know … another murmurs without voice. All that you are.
And another …
And another …
They deferred to the old Wizard’s reckoning, following the northward wend of a great valley rather than pass out of the mountains.
“Beyond lies K?niüri,” he explained, “and Sranc without number.”
The meaning was plain …
And invisible.
Crime, a fraction postulated. Crime divides the innocent from the ignorant.
The four of them sat cross-legged, knees touching knees, upon a promontory overlooking the black velvet folds of yet another valley. Jackpine clung to the outcrop’s lip, leaning out like ravaged antlers. The chill made fog of their mingling breath. The old Wizard, who had not yet grasped let alone accepted what had happened, hefted the pouch he guarded so jealously in his left palm. A fraction sorted through the varieties of alarm that muttered through his look and gesture, plucked the one belonging, almost in its entirety, to the substance in the pouch. A puling spark, a greed almost infant in extent, poised to set the horizon aflame …
But there was veneration as well, the wince of hard memories … unwanted lessons.
The great project of the D?nyain was conceived by Men, worldborn souls bent on pursuing an inkling of their own finitude. Their impulse was imperial. They had seen the encroaching darkness, the oblivion from which their every thought and passion had sprung; they had reckoned the servile fact of their dependency, and they would undo it if they could.
Thus had they transformed the Absolute into a prize.
“Qirri,” the pregnant woman said, her voice a bolt of silk, a banner for her mongrel fortitude. “Pa thero, Qirri …”
She touched the tip of her index finger to the bulb of her tongue, then reached into the interior of the pouch.
The boy watched witless—and trusting.
Ignorance, a fraction resolved. Ignorance was the foundation. The First Principle.
Proof of this lay in the very meat of the D?nyain, for they had been bred in pursuit of deception. No intellect is orphaned, despite all the foundling hearts. All sons are born stranded because all fathers are sons. Every child is told, even those suckled on the teats of wolves. Even D?nyain children. To be born is to be born upon a path. To be born upon a path is to follow that path—for what man could step over mountains? And to follow a path is to follow a rule …
To find all other paths wanting.