The eastern sky is a luminous silver plate behind the mountains, but the world in the interval remains gloomy and cool. The old Wizard sits for a time, his head slung from his shoulders, his hair a ragged curtain about his lap. He snuffles from time to time—evidence of weeping. As much as it shames her, some inner miscreant scoffs. Never has it taken so long for him to recover.
She waits, trying to smooth the irritation and impatience from her expression. Unknowingly, her hands clutch the globe of her lower belly—rest where they belong.
How, she wonders. How can she compel him to be as hard as he has to be? As strong as she needs him to be.
“I-I dreamed …” he finally offers in a voice strung with phlegm. He flinches as if she has thrown something sharp with her gaze, falls silent. He does not so much as glance at the D?nyain. “I dreamed in-in the … old way,” he continues with greater resolution …” His look turns inward, becomes even more haggard, more put upon. “I had almost forgotten. The visions, the smell and sound … Everything vanishes upon awakening …” He licked his lips, gazed at the gnarled back of his left hand. This is another of his weaknesses: his need to explain his weakness. “Everything save the passions …”
At last she replies. “You mean you dreamed of the First Apocalypse?”
“Aye,” he said, his voice fading to a murmur.
“You were Seswatha once again?”
This yanked his chin upward. “No … No … I was Celmomas! I dreamed his … his Prophecy.”
She stares at him with flat, expectant eyes.
No. Your father isn’t mad. He just sounds that way—even to himself!
“I know …” he begins, pausing to rub his eyes despite the filth of his fingers. “I know. I know what it is we must do …”
“And what is that?”
He purses his lips. “The Eye …”
For some reason this fails to alarm her. “What about it?”
He studies her for a careful moment, far more himself, now.
“We must continue north, intercept the Great Ordeal …” He pauses to gather wind. “You must … You must gaze upon Kellhus with the Eye.”
He speaks with the air of entreaty, as if convincing her to undertake yet another mad gambit. But there is finality in his voice also, a weary sense of coming, despite stubbornness and stupidity, to an obvious conclusion.
“And for what?” she asks, her tone more clipped than she wishes. “To see what I already know?”
He frowns about popping eyes. “Know?”
The perversity is not lost on her. To doubt his words, his mission, for so long, then to suddenly see it with a clarity that he could never hope to attain—only to discover that she does not believe in him.
She sighs. “That the Aspect-Emperor is evil.”
The words hang on idylls of mountain breeze. The old Wizard fairly gapes.
“But how could you … how could you know such a thing?”
She turns to the D?nyain where they sit above them, gazes in a bold manner. The two merely return her regard with a kind of absolute immobility.
“Because he is D?nyain.”
She can see the old Wizard glaring in her margins, baffled and alarmed.
“No, Mimara,” he says after what seems a long moment. “No. He was D?nyain.”
This sparks a surprising fury in her. Why? Why must he always—always!—give away the coin of his doubt? He would make the world rich and himself a pauper, if he could.
She turns back to him with a kind of sly anger.
“There’s no outrunning what they are, Akka.”
“Mimara …” he says, as if she were her tutor. “You’re confusing acts for essences.”
“It’s a sin to use!”
They are truly arguing now. He parses his words with careful condescension.
“Remember Ajencis. ‘Use’ is simply a way to read … Everybody ‘uses’ everybody, Mimara—always. You need only look with certain eyes.”
Certain eyes.
“You cite Ajencis?” she scoffs. “You make arguments? Old fool! You dragged us all the way out here. You! The truth of man lies in his origins, you said. And now, when I have gazed upon those origins—with the very Eye of God, no less!—you argue that they mean nothing?”
Silence.
“You were right about him all along!” she presses, at once upbraiding and beseeching. “You, Akka! You turned to your heart in your pain, in your outrage, and your heart spoke true!”
The Aspect-Emperor is evil.
“But—?”
“Can’t you see? That room—the bones of the Whale Mothers!—that is the truth of what Kellhus has done to my mother—to your wife! He has made a tool of her womb, a bauble of her heart! What greater crime, greater monstrosity, could there be?”
And for the first time she glimpses the deeper tracts of her own outrage, the stab and twinge of her own sins against her mother. Esmenet, undone by her own astrologer mother, ruined by the famine that forced her to sell her daughter, undone by the masculine cruelty of the Imperial Court, and ruined by her false husband most of all …
Her false God.