And Mimara had sought only to punish her—her only blood!
Something—a horror—seized her breath at that moment, a sudden, cavernous accounting of all the harms she had authored. The time her mother had tried to teach her the rudiments of sowing, and Mimara had intentionally pricked her finger. How she used stories of her molestation to batter her mother with heartbreak and shame. The way she called out her mother’s fears and misapprehensions, accused her of being too weak, too polluted, to aspire to the glory of her Imperial station. “Empress? Empress? You can scarce rule your face, let alone an empire!”
The way she had laughed as her mother fled sobbing …
You can scarce rule your face …
She can see her mother weeping in her soul’s eye, curling about silk pillows in lieu of trust and love. Rebuffed, rebuked, shamed time and again. And alone, always alone, no matter whom she clung to …
Only this man, Drusas Achamian, had truly loved her, truly sacrificed for her. Only he had extended the dignity that was her due, and she had been tricked into betraying him …
Turned into another Whale Mother.
Mimara cannot swallow, cannot breathe, so overwhelming is the sense of commission, the weight of things tragic and irrevocable. She has seen it herself with the Eye, the inexplicable vision in the Mop, so she knows that she is saved. But that knowledge has become indistinguishable from skin-scratching, hair-rending shame. She should be damned, cast into everlasting fire …
A ship creaks on the wine-dark sea, a slaver ship …
Mummy … the little girl sobs, listening to the shuffle of boots across the timber floors.
“Anas?rimbor Kellhus is D?nyain,” the woman says to the old Wizard, speaking to silence the riot that is her heart.
Mummeeee please!
“As much as these two.”
Please make them stop.
The old Wizard has seen through her anger, glimpsed the hope-cracking turmoil beneath. She can tell by his hesitation.
“What are you saying?” he finally asks.
Her voice shocks her, it sounds so measured and cool. “That you must kill them.”
He knew. He knew all along that this was what she demanded. She could tell—like a D?nyain.
“Murder.”
She turns to the two onlookers, knowing they could see her dark intent, and not caring in the least. She barks with laughter, a sound that earns a look of scowling alarm from the old Wizard.
She smiles at the man, husband and father, and feels at once vicious and victorious.
“There’s no murdering a D?nyain.”
They sat side-by-side on the rump of what had been the northwest tower, observing the old man and his pregnant woman arguing below. The sun glared from between eastern peaks, cool for the emptiness and the wind, climbing inexorably from the pockets of night. The spruce breathed. Rising light etched the ridge-lines and branching ravines, drawing angles steep with the contrast of encroaching shadow.
“What do they say?” the boy asked.
The Survivor replied without interrupting his study. Their language defeated him, yet the other, nonverbal tongues of their souls spoke with an almost painful clarity—like the Shriekers, only more complicated. The pounding hearts and wringing hands. The rictus of muscle about their eyes their lips. The frequency of blinks …
“The woman argues our destruction.”
The boy was unsurprised. “Because she fears us.”
“They both fear us—the man more than the woman. But she hates us in a way the old man is not capable.”
“She is stronger?”
The Survivor need only look to nod. “She is stronger.”
The implication was plain. If she were stronger, then she would carry the dispute.
“Should we flee?” the boy asked.
The Survivor closed his eyes, glimpsed bodies convulsing in holes—memories, not possibilities.
“No.”
“Should we kill them?”
For all the complexities of this extraordinary turn, the Survivor had no need of the Probability Trance to dismiss this course of action.
“The old man is a Singer. We are overmatched.”
He had been among those on the battlements when the invaders had floated from the forest galleries, advanced across empty space, their mouths and eyes afire. He need not blink to see his brethren tossed from the walls, pinioned by lines of scorching white.
“Then we should flee,” the boy concluded.
“No.”
Ignorance. This had been the cornerstone of the Brethren, the great rampart they had raised against what comes before. They had raised darkness against darkness, and it had proven a catastrophic miscalculation. Only so long as the World remained ignorant of them, could they remain secure against it, let alone isolate and pure.