I fear more horrific souls have claimed me.
I shall kindle a furnace in thine heart! Sup on thi—!
Discharge your obligation!
Vile angel.
It screams, for the Slaver has spoken a word and the sharp-sharp needles of this World have answered. Kakaliol, the great and dreadful Reaper-of-Heroes, Seducer-of-Thieves, screams sulphur, weeps pitch for fury, and punishes the pageant of soulless meat, visits destruction on the mewling animals that scurry and squeal from its path. It stalks the great corridor, a crimson light in the smoking dark, trailing sizzling ruin in its wake. The flesh now flees before it, gibbering and yammering as if it were real. A different flesh replaces it, far greater in height and girth, draped in clanking gowns of iron. Bellowing they fall upon Kakaliol, spear and cudgel its scaled limbs, but they too fall away, puling hoarse and glutinous, burning and broken.
And it strides forward, stone cracking beneath its feet …
Vile angel.
The meat lies smashed and smoking about it. Nothing opposes it—save a lone hooded figure occupying the centre of the grand hall …
Beware … the Blind Slaver whispers.
A roar shivers up through rotted stone.
At last … Kakaliol croaks on a poisonous fume.
A soul.
Helplessness was fury for Men.
“She is your wife!” Esmenet cried.
Words meant to scratch the heart.
The old Wizard gazed at her incredulous. Despite everything he had endured, despite all the deprivations and indignities of the trail, it seemed nothing compared to the night he had suffered: the slurry of the watches, slipping into slumber only to be yanked clear, riven by alarm, gazing helpless as Mimara, stumbling to and fro to discharge Esmenet’s commands, sometimes barked, sometimes gentle, fetching water, boiling water, cleansing rags, wringing and applying, always confused, always anxious, always out of place, an interloper, always averting his eyes for no good reason, save the contradiction of the girl’s posture, whorish and natal, the lustful and lascivious turned inside out, transformed into something too round, too deep, not to pain the flat hearts of men, force unwanted wisdom upon them, knowledge of the primal, feminine toil that stood at the very origin of life, the mealy divinity, swollen and bleeding and anguished beyond masculine comprehension …
A World ending. A life beginning.
“I’ll be right back,” he explained. “I just-just need to see.”
Something was wrong. With Mimara, Esmenet was nothing but reassuring, cooing encouragement as the seizures waxed in cruelty, then telling stories of her own travails in the lulls between, especially regarding the birth of her beloved first, Mimara herself. She cajoled her terrified daughter, made her laugh and smile with whimsical appraisals of her fetal obstinance. “Two days!” she would cry, her look one of laughing adoration. “Two days you denied me! ‘Mimara!’ I would cry, ‘Please, my Sweet! Please be born!’ but, noooo …”
But for every indulgence she afforded her daughter, she exacted some penance from him, the man who had quickened her womb, the man she still loved. Several times now, at the grinding pinnacle of some particularly torturous seizure, she had all but stabbed him with her eyes, so hateful was her look. And each time, it seemed Achamian could read the movements of her soul as plainly as he could his own …
If she dies …
The stakes were mortal—he knew as much. The stakes were always mortal where childbirth was concerned. And for all the times Esmenet contradicted her daughter’s tearful protestations that something was wrong, it was plain that she too believed as much. Her daughter’s travail was too taxing, her seizures too ferocious …
Something was wrong. Horribly wrong.
And this made Drusas Achamian a murderer in waiting.
“I need you here!” Esmenet spat in reply, her indignation imperial. “Mimara needs you!”
As was often the case in familial feuds, exhaustion had become indistinguishable from selfish will.
“Which is why I’ll return!”
Esmenet blinked, obviously shocked. An answering wildness animated her look, but only for a heartbeat. At the draw of a single oar, she became remote, cool—looking down far more than up, as if he were but another petitioner begging favour at the foot of the Blessed Empress.
“You need to change out of that filth,” she said. “I need you to be clean …”
“I’m informing,” the furious old Wizard replied, “not begging your permission, Emp—!”
And with that, they found themselves standing in a different future, one where Esmenet had struck him. Hard enough to bloody his mouth …
So much lay between them. A lifetime bound by common desperations, the half-mad ferocity of souls that have nothing but each other. And then a second lifetime, constant in the manner of ascetics and potentates, bound by nothing save that continuity, be it the wilds of H?noreal, or the splendours of the Andiamine Heights. A new lifetime condemned to dwell in the ruins of the old.
And now here they stood … reunited in turmoil at long last.
Achamian wiped his mouth across a filthy sleeve.
“You owe me this,” Esmenet said softly.
“I fear you are the debtor,” he replied on a momentary glare.
“You owe me your life!” she exclaimed. “Why do you think Kellhus suff—?”
“Mother!”
It was Mimara, her voice frayed to the hemp for grunting and screaming. Both of them flinched for the realization that she lay watching.
“Leave him, Mother … Let him be …”
She had sensed it as well, Achamian realized. The smell of sorcery borne on a different wind.
“Mim …”
“Someone, Mother …” the girl gasped, at once irked and beseeching. “Someone must see.”
It fell upon their skin, seized them hair by hair. It rose from the nethers of their gullet, steamed from the margins of their sight. It fell as mist from the heavens, shivered up as tremors from the sands. It twisted hearing, bewildered heartbeats. It cracked thought wide open, allowed the ink of madness to seep in …
And it wrung light and destruction from vacant air.
Sorcery.
The Triunes advanced into the roiling veils they had swept into the air, vanished one by one. Not a soul among them hesitated. The long months fencing with the Horde had taught them how to estimate shrouded locations and distances, how to count off paces in the air. Their enemies screeched and clamoured across immovable walls, their positions fixed, known, while they ranged high and low, all but invisible.