The World, the Zaudunyani poets called her. For as she died, so too had the innocence of Men. It seems a mockery unto sacrilege, that a skin-spy might wear her beauteous form.
The three of them watch in a stupor as the counterfeit woman begins barking commands into the night. The Scylvendi tongue is curious, at once as harsh as chipped flint and as slippery as flayed skin. Warriors, arms grilled in swazond, set out across the deformities of the little plateau. The Chorae Bowmen are dismissed—a fact Mimara would have celebrated were it not for the malign presence of Serw?—and the Trinket bound against her counterfeit navel.
With the boy in tow she draws Achamian into the firelight, does what she can to staunch the blood welling from his lower lip. Her head still spins for panic and confusion.
“He’s not through with us,” he murmurs. “Let me speak.”
“So you can get us killed?”
The amiable old face scowls.
“You don’t know him, Mimara.”
“The legendary Cnaiür urs Ski?tha …” she says on a gentle sneer. “I think I know him better than any …”
“How—?” the old scold begins, only to catch a glimpse of the truth in her look. He is beginning to understand the Eye, to accept what it means. “Then your silence is all the more crucial,” he says, spitting blood in the blackness.
She pauses in her ministrations, suddenly realizing Drusas Achamian will never entirely understand. And how can he, a Schoolman—worse, a Wizard—someone who works miracles of destruction with breath and intellect? He will always strive, always fight, and forever presume that events follow upon the acts of Men.
She glimpses the boy watching.
“I’ll keep my counsel,” she reassures the old Wizard. “What do you intend to do?”
He grimaces. “What Protathis bids all Men do in the court of a mad king: lick feet.”
Achamian wards away Mimara’s fussing, his eyes already fixed upon the thing-called-Serw?.
The flaxen-haired abomination observes them from a position some paces distant, her waifish beauty compelling for liquid conspiracies of light and shadow.
“So,” the old Wizard calls out to the creature, “are you his keeper?”
The thing-called-Serw? smiles in the demure manner of a girl too timid to admit her lust.
“Were I not his slave,” it coos, “I would love you, Chigra.”
“And how do you serve him, Beast?”
It raises a white hand, points beyond the glittering heap of fire, toward a yaksh set alone on the plateau’s eastern rim.
“As all women serve heroes,” it said smiling.
“Outrage!” the old Wizard spat. “Madness!” After glancing back to Mimara and the boy, he set out on a hobble toward the White Yaksh.
“That is what they are! Do you not see? With every breath they war against circumstance, with every breath they conquer! They walk among us as we walk among dogs, and we yowl when they throw out scraps, we whine and we whimper when they raise their hands …
“They make us love! They make us love!”
She follows, hands upon her gold-scaled belly. The thing-called-Serw? concedes Achamian the lead, falls in beside her instead. Even though they are of a height, the skin-spy turns only to glance at her extended belly, nothing else. Mimara ponders the perversity of lolling caught in the jaws of events twenty-years dead.
Such wonders, little one …
The interior is more gloomy for the barbarism of its accoutrements than the absence of light. A fire crouches shining in the centre, set in a circle of blackened stones for want of a hearth. Where the tent of a Three Seas King would have exhibited a bare minimum of luxury, all-important signs of significance, nothing that Mimara can see serves this capacity in the tent of Cnaiür, breaker-of-horses-and-men. Only the cushions set across the mats ringing the fire—little more than bolts of felt folded and stitched—signify any concession to comfort. And aside from a horse-tail standard whose intricacies defeat her, everything complicating the spare hollow is devoid of ornament. Bundles have been arrayed like pastries against the southern walls. Wood has been heaped along the northern. A nimil hauberk, Kianene helm, round-shield, and bowcase hang from hemp ropes opposite the entrance. A high-backed saddle lies askew to the left of the threshold. The ground itself is sloped and broken, lending the sense of a capsized sea vessel.
The old her, the embittered Princess-Imperial, would have seen only rubbish and banditry. But then the old her would have smelled of ambergis rather than the ripe of putrid fur and unwashed woman. Barbarism, she realizes with dark humour, had swallowed her life long ago.
The King-of-Tribes is the only true ornament here. He sits cross-legged opposite the entrance on the far side of the fire. Stripped to the waist, he is at once lean and gigantic, sinister for the way the firelight illuminates his punishing physique from below. Swazond craze his arms and torso, lined plots of scar-tissue that resemble beaded wax.