Achamian could see the D?nyain’s body about thirty cubits below, a motionless swatch of skin and fabric draining crimson across fractured stone. He struggled to breathe. It seemed impossible … that a being so formidable … so unnerving … could break so easily.
“Sweet Seju!” he cried, retreating from the dizzy edge. “I told you! I told you not to give any to him!”
Mimara knelt beside the crab-clawed boy, held his blank face against her breast, a hand splayed across his scalp. “Told who?” she snapped, glaring. It belonged to her infuriating genius, the ability to condemn one instant then console the next.
The old Wizard grabbed his beard in frustration and fury. What was happening? When had this damaged girl, this waif, become a Prophet of the Tusk?
She began rocking the boy, who continued gazing at nothing from nowhere—witless.
Achamian cursed under his breath, turned from her glare, understanding, in a turbulent, horrified way, that the futility of arguing with her had become the futility of arguing with the God. He wanted nothing more than to call her on the rank contradiction of mourning a death she had clamoured for mere days previous. But all he could do was fume instead …
And shake.
The wisdom, as always, came after. And with it the wonder.
The Eye had always been a source of worry, ever since learning of it. But now …
Now it had become a terror.
There was her knowledge, for one. He could scarcely look at her without seeing the fact of his damnation in her look, the sluggish blank of someone wracked with guilt and pity for another. Between a woman’s scorn and her truth, the look of the latter was by far the most unmanning.
There was the monolithic immobility of her judgment, for another, the bottomless certitude that he had once attributed to impending motherhood. It was pondering this that he gained some purchase on his newfound fear. Before coming to Ishu?l, he had lacked any measure external to his exasperation, and so had the luxury of attributing her rigidity to obstinance or some other defect of character. But what he had witnessed these past few days … The madness of making—once again—a travelling companion of a D?nyain, only to watch him shatter like pottery against the iron of the Judging Eye … A D?nyain! A son of Anas?rimbor Kellhus, no less!
“The eye,” he had told her in the chill aftermath of Cil-Aujas, “that watches from the God’s own vantage.” But he had spoken without understanding.
Now he had no choice. He could no longer feign ignorance of the fact that in some mad, unfathomable manner, he walked—quite literally—with the God … with the very Judgment that would see him damned. Henceforth, he realized, his every step would be haunted by the shadow of his sacrifice.
“Do you know why?” he asked Mimara when they resumed their descent, the mute boy in stumbling tow.
“Why he killed himself?” she asked, either preoccupied with her downward footing or pretending to be. She was genuinely great with child now, and even with the Qirri, she seemed to find steep descents labourious in particular.
The old Wizard grunted his affirmation.
“Because the God demanded it,” she offered after several huffing moments.
“No,” he said. “What were his reasons?”
Mimara graced him with a fleeting glance, shrugged. “Do they matter?”
“Where do we go?” the boy interrupted from above and behind them, his Sheyic inflected with Mimara’s Ainoni burr.
“That way,” the startled sorcerer replied, nodding to the north. What did a D?nyain child feel, he wondered, in the watches following his father’s death?
“The world ends that way, boy …”
He hung upon that final word, gawking …
Mimara followed his scowl to the horizon—the cerulean haze.
The three of them stood transfixed, gazed with numb incomprehension. The forests of K?niüri swept out from the crumpled gum-line of the Demua mountains, green daubed across ancient and trackless black. Several heartbeats passed before Achamian, cursing his failing eyes, conjured a sorcerous Lens. And so they saw it, an impossibility painted across an impossibility, a vast plume, spewing its fell innards outward and upward, far above the reach of mountain or even cloud …
Like the noxious shadow of a toadstool, bulging to the arch of Heaven, drawn across the curve of the very World.
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
The River Sursa
No bravery is possible in Hell, and in Heaven, none is needed. Only Heroes wholly belong to this World.
—KORACALES, Nine Songs Heroic
Late Summer, 20 New Imperial Year (4132, Year-of-the-Tusk), the Urokkas
The monstrous plume sailed into dissolution above the Sea.
It seemed Hell itself had taken Dagliash.