She was six when it began infecting people as well. Her mother had been the first to succumb, but only because she was the nearest, the most damaged. The Empress’s periodic furies were famous among the siblings. Father terrified them, but like a God, his perpetual absence made that terror easy to ignore. Mother, on the other hand, had afflicted them. She would tolerate no “little Ikureis”, she continually said, her term for children spoiled for luxury and the fawning of others. And so she harried them for minutiae, small failures in expression or demeanour that she alone could perceive. “What child speaks thus?” became her refrain.
And so they learned from a very young age to be the sons and daughters their mother perpetually demanded they be … to no avail, of course. It was enduring yet another one of these maternal sermons that Serwa suddenly found she understood. The giddy clarity of the insight made her laugh aloud—which in turn had earned her a horrified slap, one which would have sent her bawling before, but merely served as evidence on this occasion. The endless defects Mother enumerated were nothing but pretexts, the little girl realized, excuses to provoke and to punish. The Blessed Empress wanted them to feel as she felt—she needed them to be helpless because she needed them to need her. The weeping child clings with the most desperation, loves with immolating fierceness …
Mother punished not to educate or to redress any of the innumerable wrongs alleged, but to uncover evidence of herself in her children, some portion that did not belong to her hated husband.
Her mother, young Serwa had realized, was not real. She acted for reasons she knew not, spoke words she did not understand, pursuing ends that she could neither fathom nor bear. The mother she had loved (as far as she could love) quite simply did not exist. That mother, Serwa realized, was a puppet of something larger, darker, something that merely manufactured scruple to prosecute its base demands.
The Empress did not change because she could not change: she had borne too many injuries to learn from any one of them. She chided and struck her children the way she always had. But never again would Serwa—or her siblings (for they shared everything)—suffer her affliction. They knew her the way an old miller might know an even older mill: as a mechanism grinding the same grains in the same ways. Understanding her particular Unreality had allowed them to rule her as profoundly as Father had ruled her—even more!
After apprehending the Unreality in her mother, Serwa began glimpsing it in other souls as well—all souls, in fact. Slaves or potentates, it did not matter. Soon everyone had become a motley of loose things, scraps bound in uncertainties, like the rag bundles that beggars scrounged and bartered for drink. Mimara most of all. Mo?nghus certainly. Thelli. Even Kay?tas when he was taxed. Their words, their resolutions, their hatreds and their loyalties, were all things she could draw out as she pleased, scrutinize, knot to some other scrap or throw away.
Soon the Unreality had come to possess everything and everyone … except, of course, Inrilatas (who had never been real in the first place). And Father.
In all the World only Father was real.
The episode with Mother had occurred while he was away campaigning in Ce Tydonn, but he would see it instantly upon his return two months later. “Ho, now, little Witch,” he had said, bidding her to leap into his arms. “How is it you’ve grown so much taller than your brothers?”
“But I have Mother’s bones!” she had protested.
“No, Serwa. You do not.”
And so she learned that hers was a greater eye watching from a mightier angle. She could see around the things that outran the limits of lesser souls. And to see a thing was to possess power over it—this was the truth behind the Unreality. The World was Real only to the degree it resisted Desire, and she, like her D?nyain father, could crush the resistance of the Real. More importantly, she desired what she willed—and nothing more.
“You have outgrown the Andiamine Heights, little Witch.”
“But where can I go?”
“To Orovelai, so that you might outgrow the Swayali as well.”
“And then, Papa?”
“Then you will find your own place, dwell where none can touch you.”
“Where?”
“Why, here,” Father said, grinning—for her benefit she now knew. He had placed the pad of his index finger between her brows—to this very day she could feel the boring pressure of that touch. “Only for Real.”
So it was the ghouls looked and looked and could not find her.
So it was that she sang to them in the murk—mundane songs, for the Agonic clasped about her throat, but no less sorcerous in effect. Songs conceived in Nonman souls, spoken in Nonman tongues, recalling Nonman sins, Nonman losses. The more monstrous the indignity, the more frantic, the more gentle, the more loving her song.
And it appalled as much as terrified her tormentors, the fact that a mere mortal, a frail daughter of Man, could so transcend their age-old cunning and art.
That she could forgive them their crimes, let alone their ancient hatred of Men.
Sorweel had lost the numbers of the days.
There had been much screaming and animal terror at first, passages through tunnels, tunnels upon tunnels, some slung through ruin, some utterly black, and leering, ghoulish faces, a carnival of anguished passion. He remembered dreaming of suffocation.
How long had it been? Watches? Months?