At last the latch is thrown and she flees sobbing, clutching her belly as she runs.
She waddles and scrambles through the slum alleys, between camps that were little more than strewn belongings, beggars’ nests. She keeps her face down so none might see her resemblance to her mother, her pelts thrust forward to conceal her bulbous abdomen, but word of her presence has spread, and no matter what precinct she flees to, she is recognized; the infernal masses fall to their knees and cry out in wonder, utterly insensitive to the crushing yoke of Eternity.
She walks among them, the damned Men of the Ordeal, turning the Eye away as best as she can manage. And impossibly, she grows accustomed to the company of demons, the servile fawning of burning souls. For this, she realizes, is what it means to possess the Judging Eye, to walk among, and not flee, the damned, and to find some way to help them see. Why should she flee? And it astounds her, the disproportion of her return, how someone who was little more than a spark kicked from a worldly flame, could return as the very sun. It flabbergasts, even terrifies her, knowing that soon—so very soon!—she will stand before the Holy Aspect-Emperor, and that she will be the immovable one, the one most holy, the one to pass sentence …
Give voice to the Judging Eye. The Judgment of God.
And she stumbles for the realization … even though it seems to her that she has always known. All this … all the damned kings and warriors and sorcerers … the Great Ordeal … and its dread task …
All of it belongs to her.
No matter what she sees when the Eye falls upon Anas?rimbor Kellhus, upon the D?nyain who has usurped the whole of the Three Seas …
She, the child-whore, the waif, the mad, melancholy runaway—Mimara …
She is the only true Prophet here.
Achamian would never know what had compelled him, only that he had been a fool.
They had picked their way down the Occlusion then set out across the chill reaches of the Furnace Plain. He recalled feeling years accumulate with each and every footfall, and how announcing as much led to an inevitable feud over the Qirri. They paused, isolate in the vast expanse. Apertures opened in the woolen skies above, allowing shafts of lucid sunlight to trawl the distances. Silent pockets of summer, the kind that spark yearning, skimming into oblivion. The Horns of Golgotterath glowered more than gleamed … as they had in horror of his dreams.
Titanic gold.
The two of them partook of the Last Nonman King in the old way, with their mouths. The ash was sweet. Then they resumed their trek, skirting the wastes where they had watched the Great Ordeal roil and howl watches previous. Step after step they laboured, Golgotterath a nauseous looming to their left, the encampment a midden heap kicked and raked across the landscape before them, the Occlusion fencing all visible creation.
They walked.
The Qirri had restored their wind, but left their confusion intact. Perhaps it was the obscurity, the uncertainty of what was about to happen. Perhaps it was the finality. Perhaps their transit had damaged them too profoundly to countenance any destination, let alone the one pinioned between Golgotterath and the Aspect-Emperor.
His thoughts were too watery to congeal into memory, let alone anything resembling reason. Anxieties and images sluiced through senseless channels. Walking had become the one abiding thing, the myriad of aches and stings and discomforts. As was so often the case on the long trail, the toll of incessant movement became the one truly motionless thing, the blind anchor of blind being.
As they crossed the scuffed tracts he turned to peer at the thumb of stone where Kellhus had harangued the Great Ordeal. The Accusatory, he had realized on a dull flare of wonder, suddenly seeing the shadow of the Arobindant in the black whorls and encrustations across the surrounding slopes. Peering, he glimpsed the two figures hanging from its blunt terminus, as well as the loose collection of souls keeping vigil below. For some reason, he could not look away from the image, and as so often happens when vision strays, his path strayed as well. Something about the sight itched, for some reason. The great, chapped finger pointed not so much at him as over, toward Golgotterath beyond, two nameless victims strung from the point of its cryptic accusation. It was only as he neared that he had realized it was the figure trussed and hanging to the left, the paler one, that he sought …
He fairly panicked when he realized that Mimara had not followed his straying.
She had the Qirri.
Even still, his eye was drawn back to the wretch strung to the left—to the direction his strides already took him. The kernel of all madness resides in the clarity of its unreason. Doubt is ever the ballast of sanity, what opens the course of Men to the correction of other Men. This was why Achamian now feared more for his intellect than his sanity, because it seemed he had stepped out of void, that his origins had been stripped from him. Why? Why had he come here?
He walked, gums tingling, clamouring for more cannibal ash.
To find Ishu?l? To discover the truth of Anas?rimbor Kellhus?
He knew he was sane because confusion had always ruled him—he chased hazy inklings, not divine edicts.
He drifted to a stop below the promontory, peered up without blinking.
He knew he was sane.
No matter how disjoint it felt now, he had not stumbled across E?rwa in a stupor … but then neither had he sought out the origins of Anas?rimbor Kellhus.
He had come to recover what was stolen. A cherished wife.
A beloved student.
Head hanging down from shoulders wrenched back, elbows bound into the apex of an agonizing triangle. Creaking to and fro. Dripping blood.
Prosha …
He stood staring at the strangeness and the familiarity. Locks of black hair hanging, satin with filth. Eyes sealed in rheum and misery. The old Wizard was not alone. In his periphery, he sensed the gaze of the blond youth who knelt nearby, beneath the Zeumi wretch who hung opposite his once-beloved pupil. Achamian did not so much ignore as forget the youth, such was his grief.
There was shouting.
He could not look away. His neck clamoured. He wanted to weep, and somehow, the fact that he could not seemed the worst misery of all. He wanted to scream. He even wanted—for a heartbeat at least—to put out his own eyes …
Madness had its consolations.
But he was a Wizard far more than he was a Man, a soul bent to unceasing, unnatural toil. He understood that there was meaning here, meaning bound upon the tickle of the Inc?-Holoinas in the small of his back. The tutor and the student of days bygone were anything but alone on this accursed plain. Other reasons dwelt here, some written into the very ink of what happened.
He had come to deliver Mimara, the Judging Eye.