Mimara’s eyes fluttered open, glittered for tears in white lantern-light. She somehow failed to see him, stared at what seemed to be Eternity instead. It sickened him, how much she looked like Mother.
“I’m sorry, Momma,” she whispered through a shudder. “I’m so-so sorry!”
She blinked tears, peered as if through a sudden gloom, then with a perplexed air gazed directly at him.
“Mim!” Mother cried. “Oh, sweet-sweet Mim!”
Kelmomas saw the old, familiar tenderness crest his sister’s expression, the insipid compassion that made her such a rank fool—as well as his most galling foe. Mimara smiled through her grimace … smiled at him.
Something kicked bile into the back of his throat.
Mother’s hand had roamed her daughter’s shoulder and arm, as if confirming reality. Now it paused upon the bulge of her belly. “How, sweetness?” she asked, pressing her head back the merest degree. “What … What—?”
Mimara beamed at him. Kelmomas felt his face reciprocate, grin, even as murderous urges romped wild through his veins.
“Just hold me, Momma …”
“Pregnant whore!” Kelmomas heard himself cry.
The joy simply dropped from Mimara’s face, like a burden bound to be jettisoned with ease.
He could spit for the outrage of her impersonation.
Mother went rigid, slowly pressed herself from her daughter’s embrace—then whirled, flew at him. He could have blinded her, or crushed her throat, watched her choke on the meat of her own neck. Instead, he stood numb, motionless. She seized his arm, struck him full across his mouth and cheek with a clawed hand. He allowed the force to draw his head back and to the side, nothing more.
“Mother!” Mimara cried, bolting forward to catch a second eye-scratching blow.
“You have no inkling!” The Blessed Empress shrieked at her wayward daughter. “No idea what he has done!”
He savoured the sting where her nails had notched him, the welling.
“Viper!”
A thread of blood spilled hot from his nose. He grinned at the taste.
“Abomination!”
Mimara pulled Mother away, wrestled her wrists to her breast. A moment passed between them, or a look—a recognition of something. Sanctuary? Permission?
Mother went slack, slumped weeping into her daughter’s arms.
“D-deeeead …” she keened. “All deeeead …”
Inconsolable sobbing. She clutched Mimara’s shoulders, violently, suddenly, then screamed into her breast, breaking, at long last, about the savagery of all she had suffered.
Anas?rimbor Kelmomas retreated from the grotesque spectacle, slipped from chamber to chamber, gloom to gloom.
“He killed them, Mim … murdered …”
The little boy gazed at the portal that now lay between them, leather for iron. He saw his father upon the Circumfix, etched across what had once been living, bleeding skin.
Nobody … it whispered on an airless, inner breath.
Nobody loves us.
“Enough,” the Grandmaster of the Mandate resolved on an exhalation. “He would not approve.”
“There are things I must tell you,” Achamian said.
“You have told me quite enough.”
A croak of laughter. “Your Dreams … Have they been changing?”
This arrested the Schoolman’s attention, if only momentarily.
“My Dreams have …” Achamian continued. “Utterly.”
Saccarees held his gaze a long instant, sighed audibly. “You are no longer Mandati, Wizard.”
“And neither are my Dreams.”
Apperens Saccarees pressed himself to his feet with a scowl, affecting the manner of someone disgusted for misspent generosity. Achamian reeled. The old desperation fumbled for his heart, the one he had all but forgotten, so long had it been: the wild need to be believed.
“Saccarees! Saccarees! All the World’s wheels grind about this place—this moment! And you choose ignorance ove—?”
“Over what?” the Grandmaster snapped. “Blasphemy? Deceit?”
“I no longer suffer the past through Seswa—!”
“Enough, Wizard.”
“I know the truth of Him! Saccarees, I know what He is! I know what He—!”
“I said, enough!” the Mandate Grandmaster cried, slapping both hands hard across the camp table.
The old Wizard glared up, matched the ferocity of his gaze. The fool!
“Why?” the Grandmaster exclaimed. “Why do you think He’s suffered you all these long years?”
The question obliterated the horde of scathing retorts rising within, for it was one that had plagued him throughout the entirety of his Exile: Why he had been spared?
“Why do you think I have suffered you?” Saccarees continued. “A Gnostic Wizard?”
Achamian had always counted his life a bargain—but a sufferance?
“Because,” he replied, his voice far more frail than he wished, “I always lose at benjuka?”
An old joke belonging to Xinemus.
Apperens Saccarees did not so much as blink. “The Empress …” he said. “The Blessed Empress is the only reason you live, Drusas Achamian. Count yourself lucky she is here.”
The Grandmaster drew out a crimson-clad arm, gestured to the sagging exit. But Achamian had already lurched to his feet, only to discover he needed to pause to recall the brute facts of breathing, walking …
Yes-yes! a fraction reassured.
Mimara had the Qirri.
Such a lonely little flute he had been, an isolate soul twisting in the black, wicks of wane smoke on the Void.
Such a chorus he had become.
Standing with a stork upon his shoulder, and sitting alone in his tent, looking up, seeing Harweel, his expression rent between outrage and fear for his son, saying, “My priests call him a demon …”
A cataract that transcended all glory …
The White-Luck Warrior.
Wandering, following his own back through weltered alleys, across fields of slumbering human garbage, scavenge for the Ciphrang, turning to an insistent prod, seeing–as it happened–Porsparian standing upon mounds of dead Sranc, smiling as he dropped, the spearhead slipping into his glottis like a hand into a pocket. Only to crouch in the grass with Eskeles, squinting–as it happened–at the pottery shattered into shark teeth, the obese Schoolman saying, “Our God … the God, is broken into innumerable pieces …” rolling across the pinch of filth, hearing–as it happened–Serwa’s hooked cries, seeing her buck and heave upon Mo?nghus, as Zsoronga squeezes tight his throat, feeling–as it happened–his iron thrust making delirium of his own, the Princess-Imperial saying, “we can see the dead stacked about us all,” as Nin’ciljiras ladled chill oil upon his scalp, gleaming like something furnace-glazed, heavy-lidded, pretending to be anything other than wrecked, saying, “Do you think this is why the Anas?rimbor sent him to us?” and he was there… as it happened…
Walking. Sleeping. Murdering. Making love.
Rushing in fathomless cataracts. Now and now and now and now …
The White-Luck Warrior.
Alone on the edge of the encampment, looking out across the darkling plain at the carcass of a long dead evil, the pretext that would make a glutton of Hell.
Do you see? the stork whispered.
Harweel clasped his son’s shoulder, grinned in paternal affirmation.
Ever has it been.
Shut the World? How, when all the future was drawn upon the same skin as the past … Stamped. Written. When beauty and horror were bottomless.
And the ground so thin.