The Unholy Consult (Aspect-Emperor #4)

She gazed at him, devoid of expression for a long moment.

Every human act has its season, its effortless stage, even determinations of the heart. Nothing guarantees judgments made in one age will be applicable in the next, that piety and justice will remain pious and just come what may. We all understand this, somehow. We all possess the joints required to bend this way and that, to be what our circumstances sometimes gently, sometimes violently, demand. If hatred renders us inflexible it’s because, like love, it commits us to others. To hate is to sin against … What soul was so execrable as to wish evil on the innocent? Or worse yet, the heroic.

Nautzera had to be criminal, lest Achamian himself stand charged.

“Your student …” Mimara said, picking her words as if fearing what she saw in his mien. “Inrau … You do understand that he perished for a reason, Akka … that his life had more meaning than he could possibly fathom.”

“Of course!” he cried out, his ears buzzing.

It was happening! The Second Apocalypse was happening!

Which meant that Nautzera had been right all along …

The Wizard hung breathing, every pinch of his being a tingle, a sting.

Nautzera had been right all along. Inrau’s pulse had proven a bargain.

Achamian turned from her, the mother of his unborn child, lest she see him weep. He plunged down the spine of the ancient road, into the wilds of Far Wuor …

Some two thousand years after the light of Men had been extinguished in this corner of the World.



They had taken to snorting the Qirri the way the Survivor had before leaping to his death. Neither of them made mention of this, though both of them understood it with the clarity of monumental inscription. Instead, they told each other that the Scylvendi pursued them, that Cnaiür urs Ski?tha peered into the horizon, seeking some glimpse of their furtive forms. More than wisdom or even hope, Qirri was necessity. After all, the People of War galloped in their wake …

So they raced through the night, trotting through wooded galleries, wading across rushing, roaring, moon-silvered streams. Mimara fell picking her way across one particularly evil tributary. She lost her footing on the mossed lip of a boulder, swung about in an attempt to recover, then simply vanished into the gushing blast. For a heartbeat, Achamian could scarcely breathe, let alone call out or leap into sorcerous action. By time he recovered his wits, she was already hauling herself onto the far shore some twenty lengths away, hacking water. He rushed to her side, fussed in the speechless way of one who ministers to disasters of their own making.

“What of the pouch?” he finally managed to ask.

She swatted through her sodden pelts, her eyes wide, but quickly found the rune-embroidered thing flattened against the purse she used to hold her two Chorae. They crouched upon a moonlit rock, hunched to inspect the contents, with their nostrils if not their eyes. She looked beautiful for the way the damp flattened her hair into jet—so very much like her mother. He could do no more than glance at her gold-scaled belly.

“Why?” the Scylvendi barbarian raved in his soul’s eye. “Why have you come, Drusas Achamian? Why have you dragged your bitch across a thousand screaming, rutting leagues? Tell me, what moves a man to cast number-sticks across his woman’s womb?”

Though Mimara was the one sodden, Achamian would be the one wracked with chills when they resumed.

So they crossed Far Wuor in fits and sprints. Mosquitos plagued them during certain watches, hung so thick as to form scribbling haloes around the moon and the Nail-of-Heaven, and left them almost entirely unmolested during others. Walking had ceased taxing them at some point, becoming something far nearer sleep—or at least something less wakeful, more automatic, more effortless. Achamian did not so much own or experience his strides as he floated on them, like an indolent Ketyai prince borne upon the litter of his own body. He found himself wandering at right angles to the world, both walking, negotiating pitched ground and rugged terrain, and dreaming in a peculiar, frenetic sense, hearing a voice that he recognized as his own voice, and suffering desires more obstinate than his own.

“No!” he heard himself cry. “What you say …”

He found himself walking into the Scylvendi’s apparition, the wraith of Cnaiür glaring into his eyes, grating in the voice of floods and landslides, the heat of him, the stink, promising at once murder and congress.

“Twenty winters have thawed, and now you find yourself in my tent, sorcerer, every bit as lost, as baffled and dismayed! Every bit as blind to the darkness that comes before!”

He wandered far from his walking.

The Qirri was there, of course, a prop for the canvas ceilings of his heart and soul. It alone cleared the spaces within and about him, made it possible for his body to march where his will could not hope to follow. It was always there, not so much lurking as mooning about, sulking for being bound within a sack, desiccate, inert. A nagging in the background. Free me! Give me life!

And for all the madness, nothing, it seemed, could be more proper. If they consumed Nil’giccas, then Nil’giccas imbibed them, the residue of one soul blown across the coals of another, flickering into a brighter flame. Consuming Qirri, the old Wizard realized, was a form of giving, not taking, a way to resurrect the Last Nonman King—Cleric!—to bear his being upon the back of their own living life.

He caught himself shouting aloud at one point, crying, “What choice? What choice?” The Qirri was the only reason they had found Sauglish, the only reason they had survived Ishu?l, the only reason they trod the skirts of Golgotterath. They had no choice. So why was he arguing? Because it was evil? Because it amounted to cannibalism, eating another sentient soul? Because it was slowly twisting their sensibilities in ways they could scarce conceive? Because it was beginning, ever so slowly, to own their thoughts, let alone their passions?

What did any of this matter to someone damned always already?

This was his death march, his long and anguished climb to the Golden Room. His Dreams even augured as much! This!—this was his death, his doom and damnation!

To die the death allotted to Seswatha.

“No,” Mimara was gasping, from somewhere—behind? The whole world was walking now, angular shadows massed into scissoring forests. “No, Akka, no!” Had he been speaking aloud? All that distinguished them was their direction, how they walked toward what all Creation fled.

“We march for life!” she cried, her tone as absolute as prophecy. “For hope!”

He would remember nothing else until dawn gilded the wild rim of the East, save laughing at her declaration.



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