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Reread of The White-Luck Warrior: Chapter Six

Reread of The Aspect-Emperor Series

Book 2: The White-Luck Warrior

by R. Scott Bakker

Chapter Six

The Meörn Wilderness

Welcome to Chapter Six of my reread. Click here if you missed Chapter Five!

Everything is concealed always. Nothing is more trite than a mask.

—AJENCIS, THE THIRD ANALYTIC OF MEN

If you find yourself taken unawares by someone you thought you knew, recall that the character revealed is as much your own as otherwise. When it comes to Men and their myriad, mercenary natures, revelation always comes in twos.

—MANAGORAS, ODE TO THE LONG-LIVED FOOL

My Thoughts

So these two quotes are a riff on Bakker’s coin analogy. Where every person is like a coin. They have two faces. The face that they show themselves, how they see themselves. The second face is the one that you can’t see but is the one that everyone else sees. Ajencis is saying that everyone wears a mask, and that’s what’s so trite about it. It’s banal. The other one is that the face we see of another is often one that we project on them that can reveal our own biases.

Now, we are heading back to the Skin Eaters. Last time, Mimara realized that Soma is a skins-spy. A literal mask.

Late Spring, 20 New Imperial Year (4132 Year-of-the-Tusk), the “Long Side”

It tracked their blundering flight through the Wilderness. It watched and it hungered and it hated…

How it hated.

The thing that pretends to be Soma is following the Skin-Eaters by running through the tree limbs. It gleefully eats living creatures, especially a litter of wild kittens. It’s been following them for weeks now. It watches them march and sleep. Three times the Skin-Eaters have fought “the errant children of the Old Fathers.” Sranc.

Sometimes, it gets close to Mimara and dry-hump trees as it watches her. She saved it, and now it lusts at her with “a singularity unknown to Men.” At night, it climbs the tallest trees to scream so high pitch only rats can hear it.

Screaming. Until its mouth filled with blood.

The brutal pace of the Skin-Eaters is killing the surviving Hags. They can’t keep up with the brutal pass the qirri lets the Skin-Eaters maintain. When their de facto leader gets pissed about it, Lord Kosoter murders him. They are losing Hags one after the other. No one comments on the dead. That’s the Scalpers way.

The rains start, making it even harder, especially with the Hags. They drop. One develops a limp and is left behind with a look of panic, another is washed away crossing a river. One attacks Pokwas, tired of being called a cannibal jackal. Pokwas beats him to death. Only Mimara didn’t walk that. Sarl continues to be crazy.

Something was happening…

Achamian could feel it in his bones—catch glimpses of it in the eyes the others. Mimara especially. He had watched a human head hammered into a wineskin, and he felt nothing more than… curiosity?

It was the Qirri. It had to be. The medicine seemed to numb their conscience as much as it quickened their limbs and stretched their wind. Even as Achamian felt himself becoming closer to Mimara, he found himself caring less for surviving Skin Eaters and not at all for the wretched Hags.

Achamian’s experience with other narcotics lets him know he’s becoming an addict and how dangerous that was. But that’s counterbalanced by the fact they are covering lots of ground. They soon reach the ruins of a great bridge called Archipontus of Wûl, proving they had crossed a large distance in two weeks. At this pace, they’ll reach Sauglish by the end of summer. It was just killing the Hags.

The Hags are becoming crazed hostages, bewildered and frightened. A youth screams, demanding answers. When the Captain rises, he bolts into the dark. Galian claimed something grabbed him from the trees.

No one cares. “The dead had no place in their [the scalpers] history.” Every day, the Stone Hags drop as the Skin Eaters stay strong. They have no pity. It has no place on the slog. “You could not be wholly human and survive the Long Side, so you became something less and pretended you were more.”

In subsequent days Achamian would come to look at this leg of their journey with a peculiar horror, not because he had lived necessary lies, but because he had come to believe them. He was a man who would rather know and enumerate his sins, bear the pain of them, than cocoon himself in numbing ignorance and flattering exculpation.

You can only believe in so many lies before becoming one of them.

Receiving the Qirri has become a sacred ritual. What Mimara once called, “The Holy Dispensation.” Every night, the line up before Cleric. He would mostly give it out silently. He pushes his finger into their mouths so as not to waste it. Achamian would kneel when it was his turn. The euphoria it gives makes him think of kneeling before Kellhus. It disturbs him but how good he feels makes him stumble away and seeps into the thoughtless stupor.

One Stone Hag mocked it. They found him dead the next morning. None of them made fun of it again. Occasionally, Cleric would give a sermon, speaking of wonders and horrors.

Often he spoke of war and tribulations, of loves and unravelled and victories undone. But no matter how the scalpers pressed him with questions, he could never recall the frame of his reminiscences. He spoke in episodes and events, never ages or times. The result was a kind of inadvertent verse, moments too packed with engima and ambiguity to form the narrative wholes—at least none they could comprehend. Fragments that never failed to leave his human listeners unsettled and amazed.

Mimara keeps asking Achamian if he knows who Cleric is based on these stories. But he doesn’t because Cleric only speaks of “breaking of things.” He’s a puzzle missing pieces. Even he doesn’t know what he’s lost. And he’s older even than the Tusk, the earliest of human writing. Even their youngest were alive during those times, and Cleric was in his prime when the Ark crashed.

An actual contemporary Nin’janjin and Cû‘jara Cinmoi…

He tells her to go to sleep. Achamian thinks it doesn’t matter who it was. Another night, after Cleric says, “You look upon me and see something whole… singular…” Then says they’re mistaken. Mimara asks what that mean. Achamian asks that he’s not a self any longer like Mimara is.

Because of memory. Memory is what binds us to what we are. Go to sleep.”

But despite telling her to go to sleep, he can’t. He keeps seeing how ugly his Mark. He feels a fool for spending so much time worrying who Cleric was. But he’s an Erratic, one of the Wayward. Whoever he was, he’s not any longer. He stops even pondering Cleric, but more because he’s thinking about why a skin-spy was with them. And it’s simple. The Consult is watching Achamian, so infiltrated the Skin Eaters after he hired them.

He was Drusas Achamian.

But the further Soma fell into the past, the more Cleric’s presence irked his curiosity, the more the old questions began prickling back to life.

The Qirri is affecting even his dreams. Without ink or parchment, he can’t writ down how they’ve changed. He’s now dreaming of things that Seswatha had never dreamed of, like when the Library of Sauglish burned. This night, he’s once more dreaming that he’s in the line of chained, nameless others. Broken and brutalized men. He can see they are going to a brightly lit space before him. He feels a fear that seems to come from outside of him in time and space.

And he did not know who he was.

A horn blares and the line is pulled forward. Everyone who steps into the light vanishes. There’s a scream. Then the horn blows and the line is yanked forward again. He dreams this over and over again. It’s mostly the same. He would sometimes be closer to the end or farther.

Was it the Qirri? Was it the deathless rancour of the Mop, or a cruel whim of Fate?

Or had the trauma had the trauma of his life at last unhinged him and cast his slumber to the wolves of grim fancy?

For his whole life, ever since grasping the withered pouch of Seswatha’s heart deep in the bowel of Atyersus, his dream had possessed meaning… logic, horrifying to be sure, but comprehensible all the same. For his whole life he had awakened with purpose.

And now?

As they walk through the forest, Achamian asks Mimara what it was like living in the Andiamine heights “as an Anasûrimbor.” Mimara is skeptical since he’s the enemy of her family but he jokes, “Just think, no more running.” That brings a smile to her since anger and sarcasm are reflexive for her. It’s how she hides herself. But if he can weather her initial anger, a hard thing, he can get some answers out of her.

She says it’s complicated. He suggest starting at the beginning. She talks about the beginning in Carythusal when she was found in the whore house. As she talks, they let the others get ahead of them, even the Stone Hags. She explains that to her, she didn’t feel wrong. She was a brothel-slave from the time of a child. She just believed she was made to be “violated, abused over and over” until she was too old. That was how it was until the Eothic Guardsmen showed up and beat the brothel master. It made no sense to her that anyone would care about her. “You thought you were being attacked instead of saved.”

She nods numbly. She was taken away before the killing began, but she knew it would happen because the soldiers were “as merciless as any of these scalpers.” They were there to kill all who abused her. Her dictation grows rougher, her refined speech falling away. She sounds like an Ainoni whore now, and if it wasn’t such a serious matter, Achamian would teas her about that.

She was brought to a ship and suddenly everyone is kneeling before her. Imperial Apparati begged her to give them orders. They would do anything to make her comfortable. She will never forget how they she went from being valued only for being a young girl with the Empress’s face to someone to be worshiped. She begs them to stop the killing, which is the one thing they can’t do. Why?

“’Because the Blessed Empress has commanded it,’ they said…”

So she watched the Worm burn. Men, women, and children jumping from burning roofs. Achamian is careful to keep pity out of his expression as he realizes she watched her old world burn as she went from child-whore to Imperial Princess.

Esmenet, he understood, had tried to undo her crime with the commission of another. She mhad mistook vengeance for reparation.

“So you understand,” Mimara continued, swallowing. “My first years on the Andiamine Heights were hateful… shameful, even. You understand why I did everything I could to punish Mother.”

He nods after a moment. As he says he understand, the party enters a clearing and can see the sun, a rare thing. He and Mimara were “both victims of Esmenet.” They walk in silence until Mimara thanks him. He doesn’t know why.

“For not asking what all the others ask.”

“Which is?”

“How I could have stayed all those years. How I could have allowed myself to be used as I was used. Apparently everyone would have run away, slit their master’s throat, committed suicide…”

“Nothing makes fools of people quite like a luxurious life,” Achamian said, shaking his head and nodding. “Ajencis says they confuse decisions made atop pillows for those compelled by stones. When they hear of other people being deceived, they ‘re certain they would know better. When they hear of other people being oppressed, they’re certain they would do anything but beg and cringe when the club is raised…”

“And so they judge,” Mimara said sourly.

“They certainly picked the wrong woman in your case!”

This coaxed another smile—another small triumph.

She slowly starts talking about her siblings. She seems surprise as she talks, revealing her hatred of her family is more a way of propping up her own view of herself as being all alone. But as she reveals all the little, familiar details that contradicts it. She talks about Kayûtas, the child Esmenet was pregnant with when she chose Kellhus, would have been a god if she didn’t live with Kellhus. Kayûtas is like a more approachable Kellhus. Moënghus was both the most normal and most difficult. He had a temper. Mimara often had to babysit the two boys, a ploy on Esmenet’s to bring her children together.

The worst part was when she took them swimming because Moënghus would dive in the water and stay down so long, Mimara and the guards would think he’s drowning. Then he’d appear and treat it as a joke. He kept doing it until Kayûtas told Mimara that Moënghus wants “people to think him dead.” Mimara also reveals that no one questions the lie of Moënghus’s paternity.

Lies, Achamian mused. Deceit heaped atop deceit. In the early days of his exile, he would sometimes lie awake at night, convinced that sooner or later someone would see through Kellhus and his glamour, that the truth would win out, and all the madness would come crashing down…

That he could come home and reclaim his wife.

As the years passed, Achamian realized what a fool he was for thinking that. He studied Ajencis. “Truths were carved from the identical woods as lies—words—and so sank or floated with equal ease.” Worse, men don’t like truth. It doesn’t appeal to their vanities.

Theliopa was the only one that would have a true smile. Mimara describes how Theliopa’s autism keeps her from understanding social norms. She was also really smart, had a photographic memory. She became an Imperial Adviser at twelve, often at her mother’s side. Mimara pitied Theliopa even as she was in awe of her. Achamian asked if anyone gossiped about her autism, knowing how deformities would cause people to speculate maliciously about the cause. Mimara says only that her father’s seed was “too heavy for mortal women to bear.” His concubines all either had still births or died from complications. Only Esmenet could bear him children.

Achamian could only node, this thoughts roiling. Kellhus had to have known this, he realized. From the very beginning he had known Esmenet possessed the strength to survive him and his progeny. And so he had set out to conquer her womb as one more tool—one more weapon—in his unceasing war of word, insight, and passion.

You needed her, so you took…

Mimara has little to say on Serwa who was raised by the Sawayali and is no the Grandmistress. Esmenet has hated Kellhus for sending her away while Mimara was so jealous that Serwa was allowed to learn Sorcery, the one thing she wanted. Then then talks quite a lot about Inrilatas. She helped to look after him. He had the most of Kellhus’s strength and Esmenet’s weakness. He spoke as a baby and asw far too deep. She believed his madness was inevitable seeing only the “brute truths.” He would tell Mimara hateful things about how she didn’t punish her mother to avenge her slavery.

“Because what?” [asked Achamian.]

“Because I was broken inside,” she said, her lips set in a grim and brittle line. “Because I had suffered so much so long that kindness had become the only cruelty I could not endure—kindness!—and so suffering would be all I… all I would ever know…”

She trailed, turned her face to swat at the tears cltotign her eyes.

“So I told him,” she continued, avoiding Achamian’s gaze. “I told him that I had never known kindness because everything—everything!—i had been given had been just another way to take—to steal! ‘You cannot stroke a beaten dog,’ he replied, ‘because it sees only the raised hand…’ A beaten dog! Can you believe it? What kind of little boy calls his grown sister a beaten dog?”

A Dûnyain, the old Wizard thought in an unspoken reply.

She get angry at the sorrow he feels at it. She’s pissed he’s pitying her, attacking him now. He begs her not to do this. She demands to know what she shouldn’t do. “Make Inrilatas true.” This killed her anger. She stumbles forward with a look of “desolate horror.” Achamian asks about her other siblings to prod her out of the fugue. “The best way to retrieve a conversation from disaster, he often found, was to speak as if the disaster had never happened.”

She takes some time to collect herself, the company walked through what had been a stream bed, forming a channel. Finally, she says they were the only ones she knew from the beginning. Her mother became pregnant after Mimara was found. She was there for the birth and seeing that, Mimara truly loved her mother. The only time she ever felt that.

“You’ve never stopped loving her,” Achamian said. “You wouldn’t care to hate her otherwise.”

She gets angry but doesn’t lash out. She’s trying to earn his trust like she wants to understand how Achamian asks her. She then asks what he meant. He says no love worth anything is simple. She protests.

“But nothing,” he said. “Fart too many of us confuse complexity for impurity—or even pollution. Far too many of us mourn what we would celebrate as a result. Life is unruly, Mimara. Only tyrants and fools think otherwise.”

She rolls her eyes and asks if that’s Ajencis, his go-to philosopher. He says it’s just his own insight. He doesn’t borrow everything. They walk and her smile fades before she starts talking about Kelmomas and Samarmas, confirming the second one is actually an idiot, and both were feared to be idiots. They spent all day just staring at each other for years before a famed physician pried them apart.

They were normal boys after that, exposing she was fond of them. “They were innocent born into a labyrinth—a place devious beyond compare.” They didn’t see the Andiamine Heights for what it was, a prison, a carnival, and most of all a temple. It wasn’t where children should be raised. She told her mother to raise them somewhere else then trials off as they’re forced to duck beneath a fallen tree.

Once clear, she has lost her enthusiasm for the conversation. He nudges her by speculating Esmenet refused claiming they would have to learn about the dangers of politics. She agrees. He asks if she trusted Kelmomas. She is incredulous as she says he was only a child who adored her so much it annoyed her and drove her to find Achamian.

Something troubled the old Wizard about this, but as so often happens in the course of heated conversations, his worries yielded to the point he hoped to press home. “Yes… But he was a child of Kellhus, an Anasûrimbor by blood.”

“So?”

“So, that means he possesses Dûnyain blood. Like Inrilatas.”

They walk in silence before she gets pissy and says that Kelmomas just has to be “manipulative and amoral.” She thinks he’s been in the wilds too long. He’s just a child. He disagrees.

“That’s all they know, Mimara. The Dûnyain. They’re bred for it.”

But she dismisses that and he realizes she is as blind as everyone else to what Kellhus and his ilk are. Achamian, on the other hand, had spent so much time remembering over and over everything about Kellhus and Esmenet. The words Cnaiür told him. Now he has trouble remembering what it was like being in “the circuit of [Kellhus’s] glamour.” Achamian had still loved Kellhus even after Esmenet’s seduction. Achamian had rationalized it.

Worse, everything Kellhus has done since to prepare for the Great Ordeal proved he was serious about preventing the Second Apocalypse. He was doing what the Mandate—what Achamian—had begged every ruler in the three seas to do. He wonders if he has so biased he can’t see the truth about Kellhus.

He had seen it before: men who had borne perceived injustices so long they could never relinquish them and so continually revisited them in various guises. The world was filled with self-made martyrs. Fear goads fear, the old Nansur proverb went, and sorrow, sorrow.

Perhaps he was made. Perhaps everything—the suffering, the miles, the lives lost and taken—was naughty but a fool’s errand. As wrenching as this possibility was, and as powerful as the Scylvendi’s words had been, Achamian would have been entirely prepared to accept his folly. He was a true student of Ajencis in this respect…

Were it not for his Dreams. And the coincidence of the Coffers.

He mulls this over, troubled by learning that Kellhus’s children were a miss and he mostly absent. He feels pity for Mimara, a broken soul brought to a place she could never mend. The same place that Esmenet could not mend, either. Achamian wonders if that proves that Kellhus only brings pain and war. “Every life that fell into his cycle suffered some kind of loss or deformation.” Is that proof he’s evil? Achamian’s not sure. Pain is the price of revelation, something Achamian understands.

It is proof of Mimara’s feelings. How she talks about her family reveals much about herself. She paints herself as the victim. It’s how she wants to be seen by him. Achamian learned from Kellhus people present themselves as virtuous and innocent. She doesn’t want Achamian to see her as a full of shame and loathing for others for what happened to her as a child.

And he loved her the more for it.

That evening, she says it was foolish of her to speak. That makes him think of his own family in that poor Nroni fishing village. They’re strangers to him now. Not doting sister and a tyrannical father. He realizes that his true family are the “mad children of the man who had robbed him of his wife.” He’s a victim of Kellhus like they are which makes the “mad woman trekking beside him” his only family.

His little girl…

When he had been Proyas’s tutor, he would walk and think about his problem, an old Ceneian practice. He remembers on those walks a beggar he would see which always knocks Achamian out of his thoughts. The beggar just stared ahead beyond caring about anything. He sees a man truly alone and fears it as the man just waits and waits. Achamian then realizes his mother is probably dead.

Mimara finds having to relieve herself a challenge because she’s well aware that all the men are lusting for her. She can’t let them think she’s giving them a glimpse and stroke their lust, so has to go far from them. As she’s squatting, she realizes that Soma is watching her from the tree.

She isn’t afraid. Not really. She realizes if he wants to kill her, she’s dead, or to kidnap her, he’d already take her. He wants something else. She knows she should cry out and send it fleeing, but she’s doesn’t. She’s curious what it wants from her. So she stands slowly and draws up her pants. He studies her.

He’s kill you,” it coos. “The Nonman.”

She knows skin-spies. She’s been taught about them. How they sow discord and how violence turns them on. “They are, as her mother once told her, the consummate union of viciousness and grace.” She says she’ll kill Cleric first, shocked how resolute she is. It’s surprised by her reply and hesitates, thinking, and realizes it doesn’t want the Nonman dead. He finally says she doesn’t have the power. She starts to say her father, and he cuts her off and says he’ll die, too.

There is only one way to save yourself,” it rasps.

“And how is that?”

Kill the Captain.”

Mimara heads back to the others and doesn’t tell them even knowing she should. But this is her instinct to “hide and hoard,” a byproduct of her childhood. It flatters her that Soma approached her. She keeps thinking that as she plays with her Chorae. She can’t understand why it saved her at the cost of exposure nor why it’s following her. Talking to her.

Achamian had, understandably, that Soma was here to spy on Achamian. Here to kill Achamian if he found anything out important. She’s worried more than anything that Soma is here to help Achamian expose Kellhus. Achamian is the enemy of the Consult’s enemy. The Consult fear that there are more like Kellhus. The Consult needs to find Ishuäl and exterminate the Dûnyain. Why not help Achamian. He’s the enemy of their enemy. She can’t tell him that. She remember Achamian saying, “The only thing they found more terrifying than your stepfather was the possibility there could be more like him.”

The possibility of Ishuäl

The origin of the Aspect-Emperor. As much as Achamian desires this knowledge to judge Anasûrimbor Kellhus, would not the Unholy Consult covet it even more?

This makes her wonder if Achamian is damned for being a wizard, which contradicts Kellhus’s claim that sorcery was not an unforgivable sin, or if it’s his sin of blasphemy. That his damnation she witnessed with the Judging Eye is to strike Kellhus down for love only to unleash the very Apocalypse he fears will happen. She cannot tell him that all those who he killed have been in vain.

No. She will not speak what cannot be heard. Soma would have to remain her secret, at least for the immediate future. She needs to discover more before going to the Wizard…

Soma’s words about killing Kosoter echo in her mind. She knows that it’s a trickster, has seen the bones of its “false face.” She knows how to confuse the soulless creature with the right questions. For whatever reason, it needs Kosoter dead. Mimara needs to understand why to figure out what Soma’s true plans are.

So she watches the group and sees how things are changing. Sedition gleams in Galian’s eyes. Achamian is relying more and more of Kosoter’s ruthlessness. The man will get them to Sauglish, a man so driven that the world would yield to him. “He was the Captain.” A shadow on the periphery. Now, though, she’s probing at the men. Testing them. Soma hinted something would happen that she and Achamian weren’t seeing. So pretends to sleep to spy on conversations. She vows to figure it out.

The Mop seems never ending, covering hills and plains. It’s humid. Dark. She feels like a mole. She remembers the Stone Hags who have already died. Then one day, they find a massive stone formation that thrusts out of the earth. It lets them see the sky. The Captain wants them to climb it. So despite a few hours left before night, they camp.

Though there is relief in the sunlight, it seems to expose the suspicion on everyone’s faces. Covered in dirt, they seem damned. As the others break into small group, Kosoter motions Cleric to follow him and they leave. Mimara waits then follows at a crouch, hearing muttered voice. She manages to find a spot to spy on them.

They remind you…”

The Captain’s voice. It shocks her as surely as a knife pressed against the back of her neck.

She creeps along the outer circuit of the tortoise stone, nearer, nearer… As shallow as it is, her breath burns against the tightness of her high chest. Her heart thumps.

What’s happening?” the Nonman says. “I don’t… I don’t understand…”

You are truly a blasted idiot.”

Mimara stands up and stares at them. They can’t see her because they’re facing away. Cleric looks so dejected as he sits, Kosoter so close his Chorae is turning Cleric’s scalp to salt. Cleric begs to know why he’s here. Kosoter, annoyed, says because they remind him. Who? Cleric needs to know. Kosoter starts to say of someone you now when he senses Mimara and glares at her, murder in his eyes. She lies and says she needs Qirri. Kosoter decides not to kill her, and Cleric apologies and says it’s not time.

Later, she keeps seeing his lips moving as they spoke her name like a kiss.

She stays by herself the next day, much to Achamian’s obvious relief. She is lost in thought when Cleric walks beside her. She’s shocked, his “unearthly beauty” unsettling her as much as how deep and blasted his Mark is.

“Is it true,” he inexplicably asks, “that being touched by another and touching oneself are quite distinct sensations for Men?”

The question bewilders and embarrasses her, to the point of drawing even more heat to her flushed face. “Yes… I suppose…”

He doesn’t say anything for a while. He overwhelms her. Not in the martial prowess of the others, but that he’s just so much beyond them. He reminds her of Kellhus and “the way the world always seemed to bow at his passage.” She wonders what it would be like to die before him and thinks it would be beautiful.

He finally says he thinks he knew this once. She has trouble reading his emotions and remembers that Nonmen “souls often move in ways counter to the tracks of human passions.” She wonders if “tragedy could be a passion.” She smiles and says he knows again. He says he will never know it again. She asks why his question.

“There is… comfort… in rehearsing the dead motions of the past.”

She finds herself nodding—as if they were peers discussing common knowledge. “We are alike in this way.”

“Mimara,” he says, his tone so simple with astonishment that for an instant he seems a mortal man. “Your name is… Mimara…” He turns to her, his eyes brimming with human joy. She shudders at the glimpse of his fused teeth—there is something too dark about his smile. “Ages have passed,” he says wondering, “since I have remembered a human name…”

Mimara.

She thinks it’s pathetic that memory can make Cleric falter. She realizes Achamian is watching, which he always did. He’s always trying like her mother. He asks with heat what Cleric wanted. She snaps back, asking why he fears Cleric. She doesn’t understand why she knows how to “throw men on their heels.” Achamian scowls at her and says he doesn’t know if he’ll win “when the time comes.”

“When the time comes…” she says in mocking repetition.

He turns to her profile, studies her.

“He’s an Erratic, Mimara. When he decides he loves us, he will try to kill us.”

That reminds her of the conversation she overheard last night between Kosoter and Cleric and asks how he can know. Because Erratics kill their loved ones. She states, “To remember.” She asks if he has memory problems that he can’t keep track of the days, how can he beat Achamian. He answers there’s more than one type of memory. Remembering people and events is not like skills. “They don’t pile on the same way across the ages.” But worse, sorcery needs the “purity of meaning.” He’s had ten thousand years of embracing that purity. What Achamian finds a toil to do, meaning his sorcerery, it’s a reflex for Cleric.

He stars at her and she says, “A Quya Mage.” He repeats it and adds very few things are more dangerous. Tears assault her followed by worry and fear. She tires to small, but is overcome by emotion and looks away. It’s all too much until she sees Achamian giving her a sad but reassuring smile. She suddenl feels like they can survive because she stands “at his gruff and tender side.”

Akka. The world’s only sorcerer without a School. The only Wizard.

“Akka…” she murmurs. A kind of gentle beseeching.

She understands now why her mother still loves him—even after so many years, even after sharing her bed with a living God. The uniform teeth behind his smile. The sheen of compassion that softens even his most hostile glare. The heart and simple passion of a man who, despite all his failings, is capable of risking everything—life and world—in the name of love.

He asks what? She feels shy as she realizes no other man has ever made her feel safe. “May our dooms be one,” she tells him. He smile and agrees.

The skin-spy Soma throws a pebble that wakes up Mimara and only her. She knows it’s Soma, not the real one who’s dead near Marrow. This thing has no soul. She moves from the camp, out of the incipient Wards, and finds Soma wearing her face telling her it can smell her baby and that if she wants her child to live, she has to kill the Captain.

She doesn’t believe she’s pregnant. She thinks this is a deceit. Normally, her thoughts whisper, a habit from her time as a slave. Now it shouts at her. This must be a lie. Skin-spies “play on your frears, your vulnerabilities, use them to craft you into their tool.”

Words echo in her mind. The skin-spy claiming she’s pregnant, that only pregnant women have the Judging Eye, and what the skin-spy wants. She denies it vehemently. She is knows if she embraces the lie, she’ll believe it. Which is what she’ll do.

Days have passed without seeing Soma. She feels relived by that. One night, she finds a solitary pool. She stars into it, the moonlight letting her see her own face. She needs to see her reflection after the skin-spy wore her appearance. Part of her wants to primp and preen like she used to.

Then, in the empty interval between breaths, the Judging Eye opens.

For a time she gazes in stupefaction, then she weeps at the transformation.

Her hair cropped penitent short. Her clothing fine, but with the smell of borrowed things. Her belly low and heavy with child…

And a halo about her head, bright and silver ans so very holy. The encircling waters darken for its glow.

She can’t believe she is good. This is more than she can handle. She returns and Achamian pesters like he always does, especially seeing evidence of tears. She pushes him away, which hurts and confuses him because he sees her as his daughter. But she knows they aren’t because they had sex.

So she spurns him, even as she allows him to curl about her.

To shelter.

Weeks pass as the Skin Eaters keep marching and fighting Sranc. Weeks of feeling her stomach. And then they left the Mop. Everyone stares in awe at it. There’s thirteen of them, including the three surviving Hags. They’re all filthy and disheveled. They stare out at the Cerish Sea and the salt marches around it. They see some ruins that Achamian declares it to be Kelmeol, the capital of Meöri.

She stares at him as she absently rubs at her belly and thinks, Your father, as she fights off throwing up.

Achamian is thrilled to see the Kelmeol. It’s proof that this is working. His mission has a chance. Doubt’s gnawed at him since leaving the Marrow. It’s a miracle they made it this far. He can’t believe he’s done something this momentous, but he has.

The company has to wade through the mire assaulted by mosquitoes, to cross the salt marsh. They reach the ruins of Kelmeol on the other side. Most is buried beneath the ground. This is the oldest ruins Achamian has ever been in. Seswatha had come here. It makes him feel discombobulated thanks to Seswatha’s dreams, it feels like the city just fell. He spots reminders, monuments and remains of prominent buildings from his dreams.

They make camp in the spot in the ruins that provided some defense. Achamian feels grief as he stares at the great city destroyed by the No-God two thousand years ago. He almost feels like he’s walking through one of the Three Sea’s great cities in ruin. That no matter how far he travels, this is all he’s going to find. He feels alone.

Without thinking he reached out for Mimara’s hand. He did not answer her wondering gaze.

He finds himself walking with one of the surviving Stone Hags, Hurm, and Galian. So far, Hurm has kept up with ease. He has constitution that doesn’t need the Qirri. Galian was pressing the man about which scalapers the Stone Hags had murdered. Pokwas warns Galian to back off, but Galian is furious. He wants to know how this man can kill men when there are plenty of srancs. He replies a scalp is a scalp. They still get paid. Galian cries, “The Bounty is the Holy Bounty, is it not?” Hurm asks if it is. What else is it?

It’s merely gold to Hurm. To buy drink. Food. And women. He stares at Mimara with lust. Achamian senses madness brewing now as Galian asks if the man would risk damnation for comforts. The man is skeptical he’ll be damned. Galian grins slyly and says Kellhus declared it is holy. Hurm has a bad view on Kellhus, and Galian is eager to here it.

What was happening here?

The Tydonni thane grinned with alehouse cruelty. “I think his gold was born to burden my urse. I think he overlooks the likes of me… and of you! I think all those prayers, all those little wire circumfixes, are naught but wasted effort! Because in the end,” he continued with a conspiratorial lean, “I think he’s no different than you or me. A sinner. A dog. A demon when too deep in his cups! A fool. A fraud. A scalper of sou—!”

Kosoter appears and stabs Hurm in the neck. Mimara screams. Achamian just watches in shock as Kosoter hacks off the head while Sarl chortles, “No blasphemers on the slog!” Achamian realizes Galian goaded Hurm to get him killed. The captain raves about how Kellhus is god and cutting off Hurm’s head was Kellhus’s work.

Achamian could only watch with detached wonder, the kind that afflicts the survivors of sudden catastrophes. He saw well enough. He knew well enough. And yet none of it made the slightest sense.

He found himself wondering how long before Cleric called on them to dispense the Qirri. He needed it. To the point of wringing hands and clenched teeth, he needed it.

The Captain, it seemed, was a Believer.

Zaudunyani.

Soma the skin-spy runs through grass with only the “pretense of thought.” He glories in the destruction of the city that the Old Fathers had unleashed here. He is aroused by the thought of the thousands who died here. “These were holy facts—sacred.” It has to stay hidden instead of thinking about these things because Xonghis and Cleric had keen eyes.

Soma has his mission, but he stops at Hurm’s headless corpse. He pauses to savor how erect it makes him before he follows the trial. He finds the camp, smelling where they set. He finds Mimara urniated but the scent of her unborn child sickens him. The “sour musk” of Cleric gives him pause.

Something was happening… Something unanticipated by the Old Fathers.

Unnerved, Soma shouts in his “second voice.” This summons the Synthese who has been following all day. Soma bows as the Synthese is not happy because he was only supposed to watch. He says things have changed because Achamian hired the Skin Eaters to go for the coffers. The Synthese is amused that he “old fool” is back in the game. He is surprised Achamian uncovered Soma, but it was Mimara who’s been trained to spot skin-spies. A pregnant woman. The Synthese questions to make sure Mimara is pregnant. Soma is sure.

“Then she cannot be harmed. All the prophecies must be respected, the false as much as the true.”

He says she does. The Synthese asks if she ever leaves the safety of the group. Only to pass waste. Soma has spoken to her and thinks she will yield “their” secret soon. The Synthese is surprised Achamian hasn’t interfered, but he doesn’t know. That makes the Syntheses laugh.

Brave girl…” the Old Father cooed, still considering the crumbs of the age-long feast that was the Meörn Empire. “Continue tracking them, Tsuör. At the very least, they will take you home.”

My Thoughts

Nice to see the Skin-Spy POV and see just how Consult creatures think.

The qirri effect is interesting. It’s a subtle drug that’s altering Achamian’s brain chemistry in a way he’s starting to find negative. He’s feeling the cravings. The addiction. It’s not a good thing. It’s making him even harder.

And the poor hags. They ran to the wrong people for sanctuary. It’s cruel what’s being done to them. The Skin Eaters are showing their darker nature. Perhaps it’s the qirri. Things are breaking apart, though. We’ve seen the signs that these are not men. They’re beasts. They’re little more than Sranc, and when they spot weakness in Kosoter later in the novel, they pounce.

That youth was killed by Soma. I’m ninety-percent sure you all know that, but just putting it out there. A nice way to remind us that Soma is still following the party.

There is nothing more dangerous than a man who believes his own lies.

Memory is what binds us. Without memory, we are not us. We are made up of our experiences. I’ve read some great fiction to cover this. Including one series where five books in we learn that main character’s little sister isn’t just terrified of going out because of how bad she was bullied in junior high. She was bullied so badly that she disassociated and formed a new personality. She forgot her whole life and became a new version of her. One that her mother and father had trouble accepting. They wanted their original daughter back, meaning the new personality would have to die. The problem is the main character came to love this new version of his sister, to care for her, so when her original memories start coming back he has to deal with the fact that one of his little sisters is going to die.

Was the Skin-Spy here for Achamian or to keep tab on Cleric and why he was here with this Skin-Spy. To figure out what Kellhus is up to. But Achamian thinks it must be about him. He must be important since he taught Kellhus Gnosis.

I never caught that the qirri is why Achamian’s dreams are going beyond Seswatha. He’s dreaming things he couldn’t have seen, and now he’s dreaming of being Nau-Cayûti, Seswatha’s son though not even Nau-Cayûti knows that. We’re seeing the moments leading up to Nau-Cayûti becoming the first No-God.

Mimara’s explanation at being raised in a brothel is heartbreaking. She just accepted that the abuse was natural. How the world worked. She knew no better so how can she understand that anyone would come to rescue her. That’s not why men came to her.

It’s easier to commit another sin than to face what we did. To act out of anger instead of remorse. We don’t want to face the evil that we do, so we do more evil to avoid it.

Mimara had every right to be angry at her mother for selling her into slavery, but the real crime was putting the guilt of all those thousands of deaths on that small child.

I love the part about the delusions of living a luxurious life. It’s so easy to say what you would do when the stakes don’t matter. But when you’re facing life or degradation, must people pick life. They choose to survive. To bend the knee. To even rationalize what is happening to them to cope with it.

Moënghus has a very sad childhood. His mother never wanted to admit who his real father was, and everyone pretended he was Kellhus’s son even when it was so obvious. He was surrounded by fake humans. He’s Cnaiür’s son and seems to be pretty intelligent and has figured this out.

Mimara has endured so much at a young age, it truly has broken her. But Achamian told her something interesting there. She had a choice to make what Inrilatas said was true or to do something else. That changed her.

I like Achamian’s self-doubt. Is he wrong about Kellhus? That’s the central question of this series. Is what Kellhus doing ultimately to save the world or to save himself?

The relationship between Achamian and Mimara is transforming more and more into that father/daughter relationship that Mimara had craved and her own self-loathing and hatred of her mother had perverted that night they had sex.

Walking is a good way to think. It occupies part of your mind with the rhythm of walking while leaving you to think. Doing something that can occupy your body but not conscious mind is a great way to think. Plus, you’re pulled away from other distractions.

I can get Mimara’s curiosity. As a reader, I wanted to know what’s up with the skin-spy. It’s always nice when a character can naturally act in a way to satiate the reader’s desire. It makes sense why she wants to know. Skin-spy shouldn’t act like this.

Soma doesn’t want the Nonman dead. That’s what he’s here. To keep an eye on Cleric.

Mimara’s logic is great here, and feeds into us readers who remember how the Warrior-Prophet ended with Aurax hunting of the Dûnyain among the tribes of barbarous humans that survive out in the wilderness feuding with the Sranc claims. But as we find out in the next book, the Consult already wiped out the Dûnyain save for the few they spared and took as prisoner. The Mutilated who took them over. Soma is not here to aide Achamian or kill him. He’s here for Cleric. And for reasons of a prophecy, he sees Mimara as someone that has to be protected for the Consult’s plans.

Mimara wanting to protect Achamian is further driven by the love that’s growing for him. Not romantic love, but familial love. She wishes to spare him pain.

So we can see that not only was Kosoter put here to wait for Achamian by Kellhus, but that Cleric is here for that same reason. The deal he made with Kellhus to remember what he’s forgotten. Achamian will be Seswatha for Cleric. Mimara wasn’t supposed to be here, though. She was sent here by Kelmomas after Kellhus had already left.

The nonman is curious about human masturbation and sex, huh?

Mimara thinks it’s pathetic that losing his memory has destroyed Cleric, but she hasn’t made the connection that memories are identity. Without your memories, are you you any longer?

The part where Mimara realizes she can be safe with Achamian is powerful. She’s truly becoming his daughter. She sees why her mother loved him. She knows that he’ll protect her. That he won’t hurt her like all those men who came to the brothel, by the slave traders. Even by her own mother. This man will risk the World for someone he loves, and he loves her.

Achamian wondering if he’ll only ever find ruined cities, that one day he’ll see Momemn in ruins, might come true in the next series.

It’s interesting how Soma world view is seen through a religious one. That what the No-God and the Consult does is holy and sacred.

What are these prophecies about a pregnant woman that must be respected even if it is false? I don’t know. I hope we’ll get back to this in the next series. Or I have missed it in my readings of the series.

And the Synthese is back. I can never remember which one is the Synthese, but it’s interesting to see that the Mutilated aren’t aware of what Achamian is up to. They’re here to figure out the deal Kellhus has made with Cleric. It’ll matter for the next book when we go to Ishterebinth.

Want to keep going, click here for part seven!

And you have to check out my fantasy novel, Above the Storm!

Now it’s been turned into an Audiobook!

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

When the Stormriders attack …

…Ary’s people have little chance.

Can he find a way to defeat them?

At 19, Ary has spent ten years mourning his father’s death. The aftermath of the attack still haunts him. Now, on the eve of the draft he faces his greatest fear, being sent to become a marine.

He knows the cost of war.

All he wants is to marry Charlene, who he has loved since they were kids. Building a farm and starting a family sounds perfect. There’s just one problem, his best friend Vel adores her, too. He’d give anything for peace.

But wanting the Stormriders to stop attacking…

…isn’t going to make it happen.

For love, for his people, and especially for the life he wants, Ary makes a decision that will change everything.

The adventure begins.

You’ll love this beautifully creative dark fantasy, because James Reid knows how to create characters and worlds you’ll grow to adore.

Get it now.

You can buy or burrow The Storm Below Box Set today!

Reread of The White-Luck Warrior: Chapter Five

Reread of The Aspect-Emperor Series

Book 2: The White-Luck Warrior

by R. Scott Bakker

Chapter Five

The Western Three Seas

Welcome to Chapter Five of my reread. Click here if you missed Chapter Four!

As death is the sum of all harms, so is murder the sum of all sins.

—CANTICLES 18:9, THE CHRONICLES OF THE TUSK

The world has its own ways, sockets so deep that not even the Gods can dislodge them. No urn is so cracked as Fate.

—ASANSIUS, THE LIMPING PILGRIM

My Thoughts

The first quote is interesting. What are the sum of all sins? What is a sin? When your selfish action impact another. And what is more impactful to another than ending their life? What does this have to do with the chapter? We’ll find out.

Then the next quote is about how there are events that not even the Gods can handle. That Fate is cracked and broken. You can’t possibly control everything You can’t hold everything in your urn. Things are going to leak out.

Even for someone like Kellhus. Or a god like Yatwer.

And since this chapter opens with the White-Luck Warrior’s POV, that’s a very interesting quote for the chapter. That Yatwer’s plans are not perfect even if she thinks they are.

Then we go to Malowebi who sees the costs of war and thinks that humans are like Sranc.

And the third part, we have Kelmomas plotting Maithanet’s death.

Late Spring, 20 New Imperial Year (4132 Year-of-the-Tusk), somewhere south of Gielgath…

That which comes after determines what comes before—in this World.

The Gift-of-Yatwer walked across ordained ground. His skin did not burn, thanks to the swarthiness he had purchased with his seed. His feet did not blister, thanks to calluses he had purchased with his youth. But he grew weary as other men grew weary, for like them, he was a thing of flesh and blood. But he always tired when he should grow tired. And his every slumber delivered him to the perfect instant of waking. Once to the sound of lutes and to the generosity of traveling mummers. Another time to a fox that bolted, leaving the goose it had been laboriously dragging.

Indeed, his every breath was a Gift.

He crossed the exhausted plantations of Anserca, drawing stares from those slaves who saw him. Though he walked alone, he followed a file of thousands across the fields, for he was always stranger he pursued, and the back before him was forever his own. He would look up, see himself walking beneath a solitary, windswept tree, vanishing stride by stride over the far side of a hill. And when he turned, h,e would see that same tree behind him, and the same man descending the same slope. A queue of millions connected him to himself, from the Gift who coupled with the Holy Crone to the Gift who watched the Aspect-Emperor dying in blood and expressionless disbelief.

He sees how he’s going to kill an assassin, an army besieging Shimeh, and how he’ll kill the Holy Shriah. He sees Esmenet dying. He walked alone but is “stranded in the now of a mortal soul.” He walks day after day. When he sleeps, he hears Yatwer whispering to him. He follows his own footprints leading to Kellhus being murdered.

The River Sempis

Malowebi finds comfort in his errand that at least he’d seen a ziggurat. Could his rival, Likaro, say that. Nope. He watches bands of cavalry crossing a land broken by irrigation dikes and over fields of millet and groves. Smoke rises on the horizon. One leads to the city of Iothiah.

Fanayal ab Kascamandri mentions that its dangerous to parley with “the enemies of dangerous men.” And Kurcifra is very dangerous. That confuses Malowebi until her realizes Kurcifra is Kellhus.

Malowebi is also a Mbimayu sorcerer and old enough to remember when Fanayal’s father ruled these lands. He remembers how Fanim missionaries were so frustrating when they entered Zeüm and call them sinful for worshiping their ancestors and the Gods. Instead of being repulsed, many Zeümi embraced it. “Not a month passed, it sometimes seemed, without some public flaying.”

Despite even that, when Fanayal’s father sent a delegation to attend the coronation of Malowebi’s cousin. The sight of the Kianene Grandees were seen as exotic with their simple garb and pious demeanor. It got so bad, the ancient Grooming Laws were enforced one more to stop Kianene goatees from being cultivated.

Now Fanayal’s men in the now would not have inspired such an uproar. They are ragged bandits. Horse-thieves and rapists. This was not what Malowebi had expected to find. Only Fanayal has that same demeanor. He wears helm of gold and one of the finest coats of mail. “His curved sword was obviously a family heirloom.” Using an old diplomat’s trick, he asked if the blade was Fanayal’s father’s.

Relationships went much smoother, Malowebi had learned, in the absence of verbal holes.

Fanayal says Kurcifra means, “The light that blinds.” Malowebi finds the Bandit Padirajah impressive and not an outlaw like his name suggests. Malowebi asks if Fanayal truly believes Kellhus is a man. He laughs and says while he knows that the Empress is a woman, and a former whore, but he does believe Kellhus can be killed. Malowebi asks how he knows.

“Because I am the one doomed to kill him.”

Malowebi is not so certain Kellhus is man considering how he appeared out of the wilderness with a Scylvendi savage and in half a year, is worshiped as a god and ruler of the Three Seas. It was too mad for human plans which are mean and stupid. That’s not Kellhus.

“This is how Men reason in the Three Seas?” he asked. He repented the words even as he spoke them. Malowebi was Second Negotiant for no small reason. He was forever asking blunt questions, forever alienating instead of flattering. He had more teeth than tongue, as the menials would say.

But the Bandit Padirajah showed no outward sign of offence. “Only those who have seen their doom, Malowebi! Only those who have seen their doom!”

Fanayal, the Mbimayu sorcerer noted with no small relief, was a man who relished insolent questions.

Malowebi changes the subject, asking why Fanayal has no bodyguards. He responds why Malowebi cares. Despite the men rampaging around them, the pair are alone as they ride across the field. There is one man wearing a hood that is following them. Not a bodyguard, but someone strange. Malowebi is surprised that there’s no one to protect Fanayal while he treats with an “outland sorcerer.” After all, Fanayal does have a ten thousand gold kellics bounty on his head.

Perhaps it spoke to the man’s desperation…

Malowebi answers that if Fanayal died, so does his insurrection. Why gamble on him becoming a martyrdom. But Fanayal believes he can’t die. Malowebi likes Fanayal because he’s always liked “vainglorious fools.” But he won’t let that cloud his judgment. Malowebi is here to assess Fanayal not to negotiate with him. The Satakhan knows that Kellhus’s empire is the first threat to Zeüm in a thousand years. But despite that, Zeüm’s future was not something that can be gambled with. Not with Zsoronga held as a hostage. Malowebi needs to see that Fanayal has a chance before committing to his aide.

Iothiah, the ancient capital of Old Dynasty Shigek. Iothiah would be an impressive demonstration. Most assuredly.

Fanayal says Kellhus is a punishment to his people for losing their faith and growing fat in their conquered lands. Now they are hard again, and he is anointed and chosen. But Malowebi says “Fate has many whims.” Fanayal laughs and says he has Meppa and tells him to show his face.

The hooded man reveals he wears a blindfold that’s held on by a silver circlet. He pulled it off. He has white hair and no eyes. Malowebi gasps in shock as he realizes he’s an idiot for missing the fact the man wore ocher robes.

Cishaurim.

Fanayal seems to think this revelation is all that Malowebi needs to be confident in the rebellion. He then adds that his very presence in this land inspires revolt and he just has to ride fast to spark of more fires than the New Empire can handle. But Malowebi is too shocked to think. The Cishaurim were supposed to be extinct, something every other school was thrill to learn. It explained how Fanayal had such luck.

Malowebi asks what he wants from Zeüm, trying to hide how flustered he is, but Fanayal had noticed. Nothing escapes his notice. “Perhaps he was the first foe worthy of the Aspect-Emperor. Fanayal says he is still just one foe, but if Zeüm joins, then others will find the courage to rise up and destroy the New Empire.

The Zeümi Emissary nodded as though acknowledging the logic, if not the attraction, of his argument. But all he really could think was Cishaurim.

So… the accursed Water still flowed.

“Discord is the way of imperial power.” The words of Triamis the Great on why his empire lacked peace. He says it’s better that you war on your enemies then to let them war on you. Strife is spreading across the New Empire.

In Carythusal, a slave is whipped by the judges in public. A lenient punishment for her blasphemy. They don’t notice that the crowd watching is unruly. They are not prepared for the mob to swarm them, the judges are soon hung from the Imperial Custom House. A riot consumes the city, forcing the Imperial Garrison to fight slaves and caste-menials. An eight of the city burns.

In Oswenta, a high ranking Imperial Apparati is found in bed with a slit throat. The start of many Shrial and Imperial functionaries being assassinated, some even by their own body-slaves or roaming mobs of angry menials.

Riots abound. In Aöknyssus, Proyas’s wife and children had to be evacuated during the riots that killed tens of thousands. Everywhere, insurrection flared. All the old foes hunger for blood. Fanayal seized the fortress of Gara’gûl. Alarmed, Esmenet sent four columns to defend Nenciphon. In the east, Famiri tribes revolt, killing administrators and converts. The Scylvendi raid Nansur that hasn’t been seen in decades. Veterans are called up. Militias formed. Skirmishes fought. Temples of Yatwer closed. The Slave Laws, which had given protection to the lowest, are revoked. “Speaking at public fountains became punishable by immediate execution.”

The nobles are united like never before in fear of their slaves. Enemies are now allies. Maithanet urged the Cultic priests to remember is the “God behind the Gods.” The faithful start murdering the sinners.

Sons and husbands simply vanished.

And though the New Empire tottered, it did not fall.

Momemn

Kelmomas sits in the Prince’s Box, his place at the Imperial Synod. His older siblings once set here, even Theliopa. Esmenet reminds Pansulla that he’s addressing the Empress. The room houses seats for the thirty Great Factions of the Empire. Cutias Pansulla, the Nansur Consul, paces in the “Slot” before everyone. He’s a fat man sweating through his clothes.

The man protests and saying that he must speak that the people claim the Gods have turned against the Empire. Kelmomas loves the Synod (so long as Kellhus isn’t there), but he pretends that he finds it boring with his mother. There is real conflict here with real consequences that can leave thousands of dead. “This was where real cities were burned, not ones carved of balsa.”

Esmenet demands to know if they’ll be remembered as craven? They will be judged for their actions one day, and they need to stop thinking she’s weaker then Kellhus. Kelmomas hides his smile, loving his mother showing her anger. He wonders if the fat man knows he’s in danger.

He certainly hoped not.

Pansulla says does not assuage their fears. He wants Esmenet to release a statement to the people. Kelmomas isn’t quite sure why Pansulla’s words were important, only that his mother had made a mistake and she’s no hesitating.

That one, the secret voice whispered.

Pansulla?

Yes. His breathing offends me.

Pansulla senses it and presses his advantage, saying they need tools to carry out her will. She glares at Pansulla, then gazes at the watchers and looks nervous. She tells him to read The Sagas about the First Apocalypse and ask why the Hundred allowed it to happen. This shuts everyone up. Esmenet tells Theliopa to tell everyone what the Mandate Schoolman believe.

“The Gods are-are finite,” Theliopa declared in a voice that contradicted the start angularity of her frame. “They can only apprehend a finite proportion of existence. They fathom the future-future, certainly, but from a vantage that limits them. The No-God dwells in their blind spots, follows a path-path they are utterly oblivious to…” She turned, looking from man to man with open curiosity. “Because he is oblivion.”

Much to Kelmomas’s delight, Esmenet gives Theliopa a “thoughtless gesture of thanks” proving she loves him the most. The voice agrees. Esmenet talks about how there’s a hidden world concealed from the Gods and they now are walking in it. This confuses everyone, even Pansulla. Kelmomas is so proud of his mother. Tûtmor, Consul to Ce Tydonn, asks about the Hundred.

Their Empress graced them all with a sour smile. “The Gods chafe, because like all souls, they call evil what they cannot comprehend.”

That’s even more shocking. Kelmomas thinks it’s funny anyone would fear the Gods, especially these powerful men. The voice adds the Gods are old and dying. Pansulla asks if the Gods have turned against them. This is a disaster and Esmenet’s cheeks pale. The voice hates Pansulla. Esmenet gathers herself and warns Pansulla not to voice “heretical supposition” and to remember Kellhus is the “God of Gods and his Prophet.”

It’s an obvious threat. Everyone’s whispering. Pansulla kneels and agrees. Hatred momentarily flashes on Esmenet’s face before she tells him and the others to have courage. Not to put their faith in the Hundred but Inri Sejenus and Kellhus.” Pansulla staggers to his feet and agrees then adds, “We must remind ourselves that we know better… than the Gods.”

His sarcasm angers Esmenet which makes Kelmomas almost giddy with joy. He loves seeing her infuriated and is thrilled because he’s never killed a fat man before. Esmenet reminds Pansulla that they don’t know better but it is Kellhus that does. Esmenet always uses Kellhus’s authority when challenged, but Kelmomas realizes it undermines her own power.

Pansulla agrees and says they will put their faith in the Thousand Temples than asks when Maithanet will ever appear and give his counsel. Then Pansulla is interrupted by an Eothic Guardsmen charging in, flushed faced, gasping that Fanayal has attacked. She asks where.

“He has struck Shigek.”

Kelmomas watched his mother blink in confusion.

“But… he’s marching on Nenciphon…” A frantic not climbed into her voice. “Don’t you mean Nenciphon?”

The messenger shook his head in sudden terror.

“No, most Holy Empress. Iothiah. Fanayal has taken Iothiah.”

Kelmomas is with his mother as she heads through the labyrinthine Andiamine Heights. She prefers “discreet routes” even if it takes twice as long. Not Kellhus. She does this because she hates people bowing to her. With the Synod over, Esmenet and her son are heading back to a remote part of the palace with Theliopa and Lord Biaxi Sankas following.

Kelmomas asks if Maithanet will be mad at her again. She asks why he would say that. “Because he blames you for everything that goes wrong! I hate him!” She ignores him, angered by it. The voice warns Kelmomas is being too greedy. Sankas says that the strain between her and Maithanet is a problem, but she snaps that Fanayal is more pressing. Sankas presses her to speak with Maithanet but she shouts, “No!”

“He must never see my face,” she said more evenly. The shadow of an arch divided her from waist to shoulder so that her lower gown shimmered with light. Kelmomas pressed his face into the warm, scented fabric. She combed his scalp out of maternal reflex. “Do you understand, Sankas? Never.”

Sankas begs her forgiveness before asking why. Kelmomas almost chuckled and hides it by feigning boredom and looking to the roofs. Esmenet answers by asking Theliopa to confirm a skin-spy hasn’t replaced her. Sankas gasps that’s not it but Theliopa confirms it. Esmenet just says that her relationship with Maithanet is complicated and asks for his trust, which he assures her she has, but…

“But what, Sankas?”

“Maithanet is the Holy Shriah…”

Kelmomas watched his mother smile her calm, winning smile, the one that told everyone present that she could feel what they felt. Her ability to communicate compassion, he had long since realized, was easily her strongest attribute—as well as the one most likely to send him into jealous rages.

Esmenet then points out that Kellhus didn’t put his brother the Shriah in charge but her. She asks him why he did that. Sankas understands then and nods. Kelmomas realizes that men gamble all the time, wagering any and everything. “Once the gambit was made, you need only give them reasons to congratulate themselves.”

After that, Esmenet dismisses Theliopa and Sanaks, leaving her alone with the jubilant Kelmomas. He’s excited to be the only one she brings to her apartments. He’s exultant as they head to her room, passing Inrilatas’s room on the way. He’s not screaming much right now, going through phases. Kelmomas thinks Inrilatas has his ear to the door hearing them. It worries Kelmomas he doesn’t hear Inrilatas doing this, remembering that Inrilatas is the smartest of all his siblings. Kelmomas is glad he’s insane for having all that intelligence.

And so he hated Inrilatas as well.

Slaves attend to his mother once in her rooms, but she ignores them. She isn’t a fan of being helped, which Kelmomas never understands since his father never had a problem with it. Kelmomas just loves it because it lets him be alone with his mother and hug and cuddle with her.

Ever since he had murdered Samarmas.

He looks around her apartments and thinks this is where he’ll always live. He expects to be picked up and hug him, instead she is frightened. Reeks of fear. She slaps him on the cheek and hisses, “You are never to say such things!”

A tide of murderous hurt and outrage swamped him. Mummy! Mummy had struck him! And for what? The truth? Scenes flickered beneath his soul’s eye, strangling her with her own sheets, seizing the Gold Mastodon set upon the mantle and—

“But I do!” he bawled. “I do hate him!”

Maithanet. Uncle Holy.

She hugs him and shushes him, crying. She says he shouldn’t hate his uncle. And it’s even worse, a sin, to hate the Shriah. He keeps struggling until she stares him in the eye. Kelmomas protests that Maithanet is against Esmenet. And Kellhus. He asks if that makes him their enemy, but she cuts him off and says he can never say these things. He’s a prince and an Anasûrimbor. He shares blood with Maithanet.

Dûnyain blood… the secret voice whispered. What raises us above the animals.

Like mother.

She asks if he understands that it’s bad for others to hear him badmouth his family. He says yes. She continues that these are dangerous times. He asks if it’s Fanayal. She hesitates and says many things then says she wants to show him something that Kellhus had added when rebuilding the Andiamine Heights. She pushes a spot on the wall and it opens up to reveal a secret passage.

The next morning, Kelmomas is with Esmenet as she takes her “morning sun.” She’s sitting with Theliopa on the same bench, Theliopa sitting very close. You’d think it meant that mother and daughter were close, but really Theliopa just doesn’t get social cues and personal space. She wears a dress that looks made of many other dresses. Esmenet tells her daughter she doesn’t trust Maithanet.

Kelmomas is playing in the nearby garden, making buildings from dirt he could smash. Then he finds a line of ants and is having fun killing them. As he does, Theliopa asks why Esmenet thinks this. She thinks he’s behind the Yatwer cult’s rebellion, using them to seize power.

Of all the games he played, this was the one the young Prince-Imperial relished the most: the game of securing his mother’s constant attention while at the same time slipping beneath her notice. On the one hand, he was such a sad little boy, desolate, scarred for the tragic loss of his twin. But he was also just a little boy, too young to understand, too lost in his play to really listen. There was a time, not so long ago, when she would have sent him away for conversations such as this…

The real ones.

Esmenet asks if Theliopa is surprised, and she says doesn’t think she can feel surprise. That troubles Esmenet that her daughter isn’t complete. Kelmomas thinks he doesn’t hate Theliopa, one like Mimara, because Theliopa can never love his mother back. Mimara is the real problem, but the secret voice assures Kelmomas that Esmenet will love him more soon.

Theliopa asks if Esmenet has spoken with Kellhus. A look of pain crosses her face, easy to read, but Kelmomas thinks Theliopa can’t feel any stirring of sympathy. He can’t tell because, like Maithanet, Kelmomas can’t read Theliopa. But she’s harmless. Esmenet says that sorcerous contact has been lost with the Great Ordeal. That actually causes Theliopa as flicker of surprise and horror.

Esmenet reassures her daughter that’s all is fine. Kellhus has ordered an Interdiction. All the Schoolmen with the Ordeal are forbidden from speaking to anyone in the Three Seas. The way Far-calling works is the person traveling has to contact the other end and they have to be asleep in the same place. A spot known to the traveler.

Theliopa asks if Kellhus is drawing out spies in the school. Esmenet answer makes Theliopa realize that not even the empress knows why. Kellhus has told her nothing. Kellhus follows his own orders which makes Theliopa ask if he’s abandoned them.

The young Prince-Imperial abandoned the pretense of his garden play. He even beheld his breath, so profound was his hope. For as long as he could remember, Kelmomas had feared and hated his divine father. The Warrior-Prophet. The Aspect-Emperor. The one true Dûnyain. All the native abilities possessed by his children, only concentrated and refined through a lifetime of training. Were it not for the demands of his station, were he more than just a constantly arriving and departing shadow, Father would have certainly seen the secret Kelmomas had held tight since his infancy. The secret that made him strong.

As things stood, it was only a matter of time. He would grow as his brothers and sisters had grown, and he would drift, as his brothers and sisters had drifted, from Mother’s loving tutelage to Father’s harsh discipline. One one day Father would peer deep into his eye and see what no one else had seen. And that day, Kelmomas knew, would be his doom…

But what if Father had abandoned them? Even better, what if he were dead?

The voice cautions Kelmomas that they will never be safe until Kellhus is dead. It’s in this moment that Kelmomas realizes why his mother slapped him the other day. She’s afraid that with Father abounded him and it’s Maithanet’s fault. Kelmomas thinks he’s save while Theliopa tries to postulate that it’s a test or that the Consult has found out how to listen in on the conversations. It might not be Maithanet, but Esmenet is certain. “I can feel it.”

“I can rarely fathom Father,” Theliopa admitted.

“You?” the Empress cried with pained hilarity. “Think about your poor mother!”

Kelmomas laughed precisely the way she wanted.

Esmenet tells Theliopa to think. Kellhus knows that Esmenet and Maithanet’s relationship is strained and now chooses this moment to cut them off. Theliopa counters that Kellhus trusts Esmenet to solve this problem on his own. Esmenet starts to say that Kellhus thinks her ignorance will help before she trails off into anger. She curses Kellhus for his machinations. Theliopa asks if she’s okay. She is, calming down and says she doesn’t care what Theliopa sees in her face. Then asks if Theliopa can read Maithanet. She says only Kellhus and, after hesitating, Inrilatas. He was trained for a time.

Kelmomas interjects like a jealous bother only to be admonished by his mother. But he presses, and she says that Kellhus had tried to teach Inrilatas to master himself. This makes her wonder if Inrilatas if he can see if Maithanet is plotting treachery.

“Perhaps, Mother,” the pale girl replied. “But the real-real question, I think, is not so much can he, as will he.”

The Holy Empress of all the Three Seas shrugged, her expression betraying the fears that continually mobbed her heart.

“I need to know. What do we have to lose?”

Forced to dine alone because Esmenet has state business to attend, Kelmomas takes out his annoyance on the slaves. He blames his mother for the harm he inflicts. Then he works on his model of the city, focusing on Temple Xothei His mother had given him the knives and materials instead of a model, telling him he’ll treasure it more if he makes it himself. He makes his miniature perfect by eye.

He never showed his work to Mother. It would trouble her, he knew, his ability to see places just once, and from angles buried within them, yet to grasp them the way a bird might from far above.

The way Father grasped the world.

But even worse, if he showered his little city to her, it would complicate the day when he finally burned it. She did not like the way he burned things.

When that day came, he would fill the city with bugs. Like those ants then thinks about the Pillarian Guardsmen patrolling outside. He thinks about nearing around them “more shadow than little boy.” That reminds him of murdering the Yatwerian matriarch. When he kills, he sees another person in the eyes of the dying that’s begging not to be killed. The Worshipper is what Kelmomas calls this person and loves them more than his mother.

Kelmomas finds the Worshipper strange and wonders how he can move from person to person. The voice thinks that he’s locked in a room and dying frees him. Kelmomas finds that clever and sneaks off to Inrilatas’s room. His door is the one that the servants can’t clean his room until it’s safe.

Today, they’re into her cleaning. They have to wait for lulls in his tantrums then follow a precise schedule to clean and feed him at noon and midnight. He waits outside, afraid. But soon his curiosity overcomes his fear, since only Father terrifies Kelmomas more than Inrilatas, and he peers inside.

His brother is crouched in the corner and held by chain that ran to a hole in the wall where it can be winched back to hold him while the attendant scrubs the walls. For a moment, it seems as if Inrilatas wasn’t moving only to realize his brother was making faces, mimicking the expressions of the cleaner. The deaf-mute cleaning would stare fearfully at his expression.

Inrilatas then speaks that most of the attendants flee, talking to Kelmomas without glancing at them. “Sooner or later, they choose the whip over my gaze.” Kelmomas says they are fools, too scared to go into the room. Inrilatas says they are what they appear to be. He turns to Kelmomas. “Unlike you, little brother.”

Inrilatas is a strong, young man, muscled by fighting his restrains, and his voice is “deep and beguiling” like Kellhus. He beckons to Kelmomas and leaps for the entrance, scaring the Attendant. Inrilatas then squats and defecates before returning to the corner. He tells Kelmomas he wants “to discuss the shit between us.”

With anyone else, Kelmomas would have thought this a mad joke of some kind. Not so with Inrilatas.

He enters and smells the poop. He stops near it. The slave is alarmed to see him, but he then just goes back to his cleaning, his terror keeping him to his task. Inrilatas comments that Kelmomas isn’t disgusted. Not knowing what to say, Kelmomas keeps his mouth shut. Inrilatas says Kelmomas is like him.

Remember your face, the secret voice warned. Only father possesses the Strength in greater measure!

“I am nothing like you,” the little Prince-Imperial replied.

It seemed strange, standing on the far side of the Door. And wrong. So very wrong.”

Inrilatas adds that all of them have some of Kellhus’s intelligence but mangled. Inrilatas possesses “his sensitivities, but utterly lack his unity… his control.” He is a slave of his desires. He isn’t bound by shame, free. He points to feces and says, “I shit when I shit.” Kelmomas goes to speak but the Voice stops him. Inrilatas asks, “Do you shit when you shit?” The secret voice panics at being noticed, saying Kelmomas has been reckless.

“Who?” Inrilatas laughed. “The shadow of hearing moves through you—as it so often does when no one is speaking. Who whispers to you, little brother?”

“Mommy says you’re mad.”

“Ignore the question,” his older brother snapped. “State something insulting, something that will preoccupy, and thus evade a prickly question. Come closer, little brother… Come closer and tell me you do not shit when you shit.”

Kelmomas lies and says he doesn’t understand, but Inrilatas knows it. Inrilatas wants to know who that voice is. Kelmomas retreats, realizing Inrilatas has crept closer. So Kelmomas blurts out Maithanet is coming to see Inrilatas. This gives the madman a heartbeat of pause. Again, Kelmomas is sidestepping the question but uses truth. Inrilatas thinks Esmenet is behind this visit.

The boy found strength in her mere mention.

He says Esmenet wants Inrilatas to read Maithanet’s face because she fears he plots against them. Inrilatas beckons him closer as Kelmomas says, “But Uncle has learned how to fool you.” The moment the words come out, Kelmomas knows he was clumsy. He’s speaking to an Anasûrimbor. A fellow Divinity.

“Kin,” Inrilatas crowed. “Blood of my blood. What love you possess for Mother! I see it burn! Burn! Until all else is char and ash. Is she grudge you bear against Uncle?”

But Kelmomas could think of nothing else to say or do. To answer any of his brother’s questions, he knew, was to wander into labyrinths he could not hope to solve. He had to press forward…

Kelmomas tries to convince Inrilatas that Maithanet will lie, charging forward. The only option with such a “monstrous intellect.” This voice says this is a mistake which Inrilatas instantly recognizes. He adds, “You do not like sharing… Such a peevish, devious little soul.” The voice is panicked.

Kelmomas tries to use pride to goad his brother by implying he can’t read Maithanet, but Inrilatas ignores that and keeps talking about the voice hiding in Kelmomas, asking if the voice wants Maithanet dead. Kelmomas keeps saying Inrilatas will want to kill Maithanet and he needs Kelmomas’s help. That just makes Inrilatas laugh.

“You will want to kill Uncle Holy,” Kelmomas repeated, his thoughts giddy with sudden inspiration. “Think brother… The sum of sins.”

And with that single phrase, the young Prince-Imperial’s dogged persistence was rescued—or so he thought.

Where his brother had fairly radiated predatory omniscience before, his manner suddenly collapsed inward. Even his nakedness, which has been that of the rapist—lewd, virile, bestial—lapsed into its chill and vulnerable contrary. He actually seemed to shrink in his chains.

Suddenly, Inrilatas seemed as pathetic as the human shit breathing on the floor between them.

Inrilatas then asks if Kelmomas knows why he does crazy things. Kelmomas doesn’t. He does it to make himself as damned as possible. Curiosity seizes Kelmomas. He wasn’t to know while the voice is cautions. Inrilatas answers, “Because I can think of no greater madness.” Kelmomas avoids really thinking about how mad it is to trade a fleeting life for an eternity of pain.

Kelmomas doesn’t understand why Inrilatas doesn’t just follow the rules so Mother releases him. Inrilatas studies his brother then asks who “rules the rule?” The voice is worried as the boy answers the God. Who rules the God? No one.

He breaths as you breathe, the secret voice whispered, blinks as you blink—even his heartbeat captures your own! He draws your unthinking soul into rhythms of his making. He mesmerizes you!

Inrilatas says the God is not bound. He stands up and smears his feces with his foot while saying, “So the God is like me.” In that moment, it all makes sense. His brother’s madness made sense and this place is holy. He is enraptured by his brother’s gaze.

Inrilatas then says that the worse you are, the worse God punishes you. Inrilatas says Kelmomas resembles the God. Kelmomas realizes he’s in a trap as he cries he’s not mad like Inrilatas. His brother laughs like Esmenet, warm and gentle. He then shouts that Kelmomas wants to add more pain to this world.

“I would…” Anasûrimbor Kelmomas admitted. “I would.” His limbs trembled. His heart hung as if plummeting through a void. What was this crashing within him? What was this release?

The Truth!

And his brother’s voice resonated, climbed as if communicating up out of his bones. “You think you seek the love of our mother, little brother—Little Knife! You think you murder in her name. But that love is simply cloth thrown over the invisible, what you use to reveal the shape of something so much greater…”

He remembers killing the beetle and the Yatwerian Matriarch. It makes him feel like he’s assuming glory. That he’s becoming a God. As he revels in it, Inrilatas croons to Kelmomas to come closer and cross “the line others have etched for you.” He starts to, but the deaf-mute slave grabs him from behind and pulls him back while Inrilatas laughs, telling his brother to flee. Inrilatas gets angry. He starts shouting and fighting the chains. He can feel himself coming closer to being divinity.

The boy stood astounded. At last he yielded to the Attendant and his shoulder-tugging hands, allowed the wretch to pull him from his brother’s cell…

He knew Inrilatas would find the little gift he had left him for him, lying along the seam between floor-stones.

The small he had stolen from the palace tinker… not so long ago.

Iothiah

Malowebi rides through smoke and screams with Fanayal beside him. It’s Malowebi’s first time a city being asked. Iothiah burns. It reminds him that his nation doesn’t know much of war and that the Men of the Three Seas “warred without mercy or honour.” All that matters is the goal.

“They fought the way Sranc fought.”

He sees bodies lying every where, several rapes in progress, and executions. Fanayal attempts to justify these atrocities by speaking of what the First Holy War had done. He speaks as if all this is right. “The Bloodthirsty Excuse,” as Memgowa had named retribution. Fanayal adds this is more than just vengeance but a lesson. Kill the first man and show mercy to the second. “The Honey and the Goad.”

Malowebi thinks how it’s easy to mix them up as he sees the Kianene reveling the atrocities and thinks he is among savages. Fanayal, perhaps sensing Malowebi’s disgust, cuts short their tour. The screams of a baby haunt Malowebi as they return to the section of city wall where Meppa had brought down. Malowebi gawks at it.

Fanayal points out that Cishaurim Psûkhe frightens him because he can’t see any evidence of sorcery like he should. Malowebi remembers Meppa’s fight with the sole Imperial Saik Schoolman guarding the city had “astounded, and mortified,” him.

To be sorcerer was to dwell among deformities.

He plays it off that while extraordinary, sorcerers like him are used to miracles. He says it almost like a bigger joke. He is impressed by Meppa’s power and Fanayal’s skill. What he most saw was how weak the New Empire was. Kellhus had gutted the Empire for the Great Ordeal, leaving behind the dregs to guard a disaffected population. Even more interesting, not a single Chorae was found in the city. He has to tell his people.

“The people call him Stonebreaker,” Fanayal said. “Meppa… They say he was sent to us by the Solitary God.”

Malowebi turned to him, blinking.

“What do you say?”

“I say he was sent to me!” the hawk-faced Padirajah cried laughing. “I am the Solitary God’s gift to his people.”

“And what does he say?” the Second Negotiant asked, now genuinely curious.

“Meppa? He does not know who he is.”

My Thoughts

Are very first line of this chapter stands in direct opposition to the Dûnyain supposition that the Darkness Comes Before. The White-Luck Warrior violates Cause and Effect. He is the Effect that precedes the Cause. As we see, he sees time in its totality. All of his actions he will take and has taken are with him in the present.

It reminds me of something called a TAS. This is a Tool Assisted Speedrun of a video game. If you ever see one, you’ll see the game being played in ways that are impossible. Well, not impossible but so improbable no human being can do it. It requires inputs performed on frame specific moments. When you view it, it seems almost like the person playing it is predicting the future.

In reality, a TAS is made by playing on emulators and using tools to manipulate the game often frame by frame and program it to do button presses and other inputs. This is how the White-Luck Warrior works. Yatwer can see all of time. She can know how every one of his actions will play out and change with the White-Luck Warrior does to give her the most optimal gameplay. To have the perfect route to beat the game (kill Kellhus).

Sorry for quoting so much, but it’s so telling to how the White-Luck Warrior works. How he can see himself going all the way to Kellhus’s death.

Flaying people for converting to another religion. Very nice, Zeüm. Very nice. And you’re going to be all judgmental on the sacking soon.

Fanayal is a fanatic. He thinks he has a destiny, and nothing is going to stand in the way. Why be mad that Malowebi is doubtful. It’s natural to be doubtful of such claims, but Fanayal is special. He doesn’t have the level of narcissism that Conphas had, but there is an ego there. A purity of belief.

The problem with expanding fast. It’s hard to keep what you take. It can take generations for a people to change their tribal identities, and if you can’t hold it, things will erupt. And even then, future generations will start to remember that they were abused and want their freedom again.

But the New Empire was made for a purpose. It has served it. Kellhus never cared if it survived. He just pretended he did for the sake of the men marching off to die for their families.

Good explanation from Theliopa on why the Gods can’t see the No-God. (Or a certain young psychopathic Dûnyain.)

We’re seeing Esmenet’s paranoia with Maithanet that Kelmomas is nurturing. He just wants mommy all to himself. He can do the manipulation, but he doesn’t understand about seeing beyond tomorrow. He lives in the now the way a child does.

I’m sure that Kellhus would be content not to have slaves wait on him, but he understands trappings. It’s his place to have it, part of his power, so he uses even that. Esmenet doesn’t play the role of caste noble. She’s not one at heart. She’s not the chameleon that Kellhus is.

Also, Bakker takes a moment to point out a sycamore visible from the balcony of Esmenet’s quarters and how its “limbs forking through the air.” Trees are symbols of the Dûnyain and the Probability Trance. We see it in Kellhus’s opening way back in The Darkness that Comes Before when he’s entranced by a tree. When Kellhus was taught how to fight as a child, he was told he must be a tree, reaching in all directions. Trees are possibilities that all have to accounted for and controlled. They spread wide, covering the land in their shadows.

We see that he is full of murderous anger at being slapped by his beloved mother. He doesn’t really love her. He is too much of a narcissist. Everything has to be about his desires. His id. He’s a child, and all he needs is his mother, but one day, he would have tired of her as he matured.

The whole exchange between Inrilatas and Kelmomas shows that, despite all of Kelmomas’s intellect, he’s still a child. He’s not ready to take on someone with his talents matured.

And there is something else that Inrilatas says he’s is the only “unbound soul.” Even Kellhus is bound by something, but Inrilatas can’t understand it. That’s Kellhus’s neutered love for Esmenet. He’s saving the world for her instead of destroying it. And in loving Esmenet, he spares Kelmomas which leads to Kellhus’s own downfall.

Kelmomas is not an unbound soul, though. He’ll be very bound.

Remember that beetle that Kelmomas killed in the first book? Yeah, we’re being reminded about it. Killing a beetle before the statue of Ajokli, the very god that is working with Kellhus. We are introduced to Kelmomas killing a beetle like he’s God. He plays at God, but Kelmomas is No God.

“They fought the way Sranc fought.” Bakker is setting the stage for what is to come after Dagliash.

“Meppa? He does not know who he is.” The line that launched the is Meppa Kellhus’s father. Is Moënghus who had some how survived. But this chapter proves he’s not. He has too much Water to be Moënghus. Meppa is a Primary, the best of the Cishaurim. It takes emotions to do that. Psûkhe is a dead-end for Dûnyain. Who is Meppa? I don’t actually remember what the books give other than I’m pretty sure he dies.

Want to read more, click here for Chapter Six!

And you have to check out my fantasy novel, Above the Storm!

Now it’s been turned into an Audiobook!

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

When the Stormriders attack …

…Ary’s people have little chance.

Can he find a way to defeat them?

At 19, Ary has spent ten years mourning his father’s death. The aftermath of the attack still haunts him. Now, on the eve of the draft he faces his greatest fear, being sent to become a marine.

He knows the cost of war.

All he wants is to marry Charlene, who he has loved since they were kids. Building a farm and starting a family sounds perfect. There’s just one problem, his best friend Vel adores her, too. He’d give anything for peace.

But wanting the Stormriders to stop attacking…

…isn’t going to make it happen.

For love, for his people, and especially for the life he wants, Ary makes a decision that will change everything.

The adventure begins.

You’ll love this beautifully creative dark fantasy, because James Reid knows how to create characters and worlds you’ll grow to adore.

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Reread of The White-Luck Warrior: Chapter Four

Reread of The Aspect-Emperor Series

Book 2: The White-Luck Warrior

by R. Scott Bakker

Chapter Four

The Istyuli Plains

Welcome to Chapter Four of my reread. Click here if you missed Chapter Three!

All ropes come up short if pulled long enough. All futures end in tragedy.

—CENEIAN PROVERB

And they forged counterfeits from our frame, creatures vile and obscene, who hungered only for violent congress. These beasts they loosed upon the land, where they multiplied, no matter how fierce the Ishroi who hunted them. And soon Men clamoured at our gates, begging sanctuary, for they could not contend with the creatures. “They wear your face,” the penitents cried. “This calamity is your issue.” But we were wroth, and turned them away, saying, “These are not our Sons. And you are not our Brothers.”

—ISÛPHIRYAS

My Thoughts

An interesting quote. All futures end in tragedy. The tragedy of death, certainly. But also the tragedy of history. The cycles of violence because we cannot see each other as brothers and we cannot take responsibility for our mistakes as we see in the second quote.

The Nonmen didn’t want to admit their responsibility in the Inchoroi’s survival nor did they want to ally with those they thought were their lessers. Especially those who are being harmed by their mistake. They could have helped them, but didn’t. Not until it was the ruin of them all.

And now we find ourselves back with Sorweel heading out on their patrol. And where does his future end?

Tragedy.

Spring, 20 New Imperial Year (4132 Year-of-the-Tusk), The High Istyuli

The Scions are crossing the plain to the southwest looking for game to drive towards the Army of the Middle-North. But they find so little, they’re barely feeding themselves. The Parching Wind doesn’t cease. Sorweel, despite being “bred to the plains, to open endless skies” feels so small on the barren, flat plain. It’s a reminder to Men that the World is far bigger than their ambition.

Sorweel can’t ever shake how small he feels, not even during the embarrassing language drills with Eskeles. Sorweel feels like a schoolboy around Eskeles not the King of Sakarpus despite Eskeles saying he’s here to chaperon all the members of the Scions. But he is because they are special to their parents, the enemies of Kellhus that remain a threat to the New Empire. Sorweel finds the fat man with no armor or weapons with them ridiculous and yet believes that Eskeles is there to protect them with his sorcerery.

At night, he pretends that those around him are his father and uncles out hunting pumas, a costume called the Lioning that the men of his family do during the planting season. He had loved that more than anything.

The Lioning was how he learned his father was truly funny… and genuinely beloved by his men.

SO he would lie with these memories, curl about their warmth. But whenever it seemed he could believe, some dread would lurch out of the nethers and the pretense would blow away like smoke before gusting apprehensions. Zsoronga. The Aspect-Emperor. And the Mother—the Mother most of all.

He wonders what Yatwer wants from him. He spends many sleepless nights trying to understand what happened. How he could pray to Yatwer and have never wondered what “Lay behind the ancient names.” What does her name even mean? He had not paid too much attention to her. She had been something “dark and nebulous.” Too near to the beginnings of things.

All children come to temple with a fear of smallness, which the priests then work and knead like clay, shaping it into the strange reconciliation-to-horror that is religious devotion, the sense of loving something too terrible to countenance, too hoary to embrace. When he thought about the world beyond what his eyes could see, he saw souls in their innumerable thousands with only frayed threads to hold them, dangling over the gaping black of the Outside, and the shadows moving beneath, the Gods, ancient and capricious, reptilian with indifference, with designs so old and vast that there could only be madness in the small eyes of Men.

And none were so old or so pitiless as the dread Mother of Birth.

That was what her name was: childhood terror.

He feels pinched between Yatwer and the Aspect-Emperor. “Gods and Demons.” He wants to escape the Great Ordeal and all of this madness. He’d rather be out here on the plains. One night, he asks Zsoronga his fear with as much care as he can, using the discussion of omens and portents that proclaim that Kellhus’s dynasty is doomed for overreaching.

“What happens,” Sorweel finally ventured, “if we fail the Gods simply because we don’t know what they demand?”

Tzing says, damnation. “The Gods care for nothing for our excuses.” Zsoronga disagrees and says only if they fail their ancestors. They decided who gets into heaven, not the gods. Charampa gets mad, calling that Inrithi nonsense and saddened the Zeumi believe it. Zsoronga says honoring ancestors predates Inrithism. “Family survives death.” Sorweel, listening hard to what is being said, and realizes that as a conquered people, he’s turning to foreign beliefs. He asks, what if his family is damned? Through Obotegwa, Zsoronga has an answer.

“Then you must do everything in your power to discover what the Gods do want. Everything.”

Sorweel understands that the Zeumi see death as the “great life.” So it’s important to have ancestors that got your back. Sorweel asks what happens if you don’t have that. Zsoronga studies him to see if he can trust Sorweel.

“Otherwise you are lost.”

Morning comes, making the world seem larger as night if banished. It’s a bright day. Sorweel, bred to this land, finds it dizzying because he is “beyond the Pale.” Beyond Sakarpus’s domain. Not only that, but the Place feels like a “moral boundary.” He thinks of all the miles between him and his holy city. He finds it insane that such a small company is riding out here alone.

However, his respect for Captain Harnilas brings him comfort. Old Harni is a veteran of the Kidruhil, and it shows. He had tried to hate the man, like the other Scions, but the man is too good and full of “warlike wisdom.” The man so didn’t care what others thought of him. Zsoronga calls him a nkubaru, “stone-hewers.” A man has to be stronger than stone to cut it. Eskeles added, “Or smarter.”

Sometimes they chat. Other times they ride in silence. Usually, it would be a momentary spark then snuffed out. On the tenth day, they sighted the tracks of elk. A huge one, thousands of hoofs crossing the vastness of the world.

Sorweel cursed himself for a fool, such was his relief.

They track the elk for two days and spot crows. They are excited until Sorweel understands what it means. He rides up to the front where Captain Harnilas snaps at him. But the says the word that “transcended all languages of Men.”

“Sranc.”

As he stares Captain Harnilas in the eyes, Sorweel realizes this man is much like his father’s bondsmen. A man who quarantine’s his compassion from clouding his senses, loving only “in the cracks and crevices of a warring world.” Eskeles joins them. Sorweel says those are not crows but storks, holy birds that only follow Sranc. Captains Harnilas believes him.

Through Obotegwa, Sorweel learns there is a debate between Captain Harnilas and Eskeles. The Schoolman wants to use Gnosis on them while Captain Harnilas wants to attack with the Scions to give them a taste of real combat even if some will die. “Better to begin with an easy blooding, he says, then a hard one.”

They track the storks and realize that it’s a warband of three hundred, not a migrating clan. They travel at an angle and close within a mile of the enemy. It’s here that the argument happened. It’s been a thrilling afternoon, everyone smiling and eager for the fight. They’re gleeful for the first fight. Sorweel feels no fear and is glad for that. He’s eager for the fight, too. Even his pony is hungry for it.

“Of course Eskeles was intent on ruining everything. Blasphemer, Sorweel found himself thinking.

Rumor says Mandate Schoolman outrank even the Judges, but Sorweel hopes Captain Harnilas can outrank Eskeles. Especially since the captain wasn’t a political man, hence his position leading the Scions. Intrigue, as Sorweel’s father always said, kills more men than battle.

Captain Harnilas loses his temper at Eskeles, driving off the Schoolman who calls him a fool. Sorweel sings out, “Practice-practice,” as the Schoolman always said during their language drills. Zsoronga chuckles while Eskeles glares as Sorweel before regaining his composure. He hopes Sorweel is right.

A chill seemed to creep into the shadow.

Captain Harnilas gives orders and they ride out in a wedge formation. The Sranc don’t move as they approach which surprises Zsoronga who is shocked that their group hasn’t been seen. Sorweel says the Sranc are probably resting since they like traveling at night. Zsoronga is confused why they wouldn’t camp on a hilltop. Closer to the sun they hate. Zsoronga points out that men hate the night and keep watch only for Sorweel to counter no men have walked this land in thousands of years. “Why should they keep watch for myths and legends?”

His earlier eagerness seemed to slip out of him, plummet through the soles of his boots. They climbed a slope, riding into their shadows at an angle to the dust that pealed away from them. Everywhere he looked he saw the ground, and yet it seemed he rode the lip of a perilous chasm. Vertigo leaned out from him, threatened to pull him from the saddle. There was no certainty, he realized. Anything could happen on the field of war.

Anything.

The Sranc all cry together at once then fall off into individual squeals as they mob together. They draw weapons and raise their standards of human skulls attached to bison hide. They bated them into attacking and the Scions know it.

For a moment, the two sides face each other before they charge. Sorweel whispers in his pony’s ear, “One and one are one…” The two sides crash together. His lance strikes a shield, deflects to the other side, and kills a different Sranc. He draws a sword and swings, killing them with ease. It was no “different from practice melons.”

Then he’s cut through the horde and finds Zsoronga grinning at him. Sorweel grabs a lance gutting from the ground and turns for the next charge, howling his war cry. The Sranc flee and are run down. Sorweel felt joy in the pursuit. He finally feels like he’s a Horselord. He was born for this.

There was joy in the race. Ecstasy in the kill.

One and one were one.

The Scions exterminated the Sranc, losing three with another nine wounded. Eskeles isn’t happy, but Harnilas is thrilled. They are all exultant, slapping each other on the back. Including Sorweel. He ends up climbing to the top of a hill and stares across the plain. He thinks about his ancestors doing this, killing Sranc. Killing “those who did not belong.”

The darkening sky was so broad that it seemed to spin with slow vertigo. The Nail of Heaven glittered.

And the World towered beneath.

Harnilas busts out the rum so the Scions can celebrate. They are “boys drunk on the deeds of men.” They only get two swallows. They also stake a surviving Sranc down. Most of them were “youths of gentle breeding” who don’t do more than kick the Sranc. Sorweel finally gets fed up and puts out its eye. Some love it, but others say torture is a crime. Part of their “effeminate and obscure laws of conduct.” Sorweel is shocked by this and Captain Harnilas moves to his side and tells Sorweel to explain just what the Sranc really are.

Through Eskeles, not Obotegwa, he tells how the Sranc usually attack in winter when they can’t dig grubs out of the frozen ground. This is why his people have a strong defense on their border. But one tower is almost always overwhelmed and the Sranc will reach a village. They mostly kill the men. But women and especially children are taken for their rape. He trails off, remembering that day when he was fourteen and his father showed him the aftermath of one of those pillages.

We could torment a thousand of these creatures for a thousand years,” his father had told him that night, “and we would have repaid but a droplet of the anguish they have visited upon us.”

He repeated those words.

When he hears silence, Sorweel thinks they hated it and Eskeles’s continued speech is him trying to undo the damage. But Obotegwa translates the Eskeles is saying Sorweel peaks true. That Sranc are “beasts without souls” and “flesh without spirit.” They are not beings with feelings, but things no different from dirt. Despite Eskeles’s strong words, the Scions look at Sorweel. He realizes they weren’t condemning him.

Respect. Admiration, even.

Only Zsoronga seemed to watch him with troubled eyes.

The sport began in earnest after that. The Mannish laughter was as shrill as the inhuman screams were crazed.

What was left twitched and glistened in the blood-sodden grasses.

The next day, they are surprised vultures aren’t feasting on the Sranc. They ride out laughing and joking, acting like veterans but they still are talking like boys. “Easy victories, as a Horselord would say, grow no beards.” They resume tracking the elk only to find them slaughtered and left to rot in the hot sun. None of the Scions can utter a world as they stare at fields of dead elk. Vultures feast and fill the air with their cries. Sorweel sees they have been gutted and their entrails strewn across the ground.

They descend into the massacre which unnerves Sorweel because they’ll be seen for miles, alerting anyone that their feast was disturbed. Zsoronga doesn’t understand this. It’s madness. Eskeles say it’s a Hording. Sorweel can see the Sranc massacring the elk.

“In ancient days,” his Mandate tutor continued, “before the coming of the No-God, the Sranc would continually retreat before hosts too powerful for any one clan to assault. Back and back, clan heaped upon clan. Until their hunger forced them to take game, until their numbers blackened the very earth…”

“And then?” Sorweel asked.

“They attacked…”

They realize the Great Ordeal has forced the Sranc back and back until the Hoarding is now happening. Eskeles tells Captain Harnilas about the danger of this. Sorweel stares at the destruction and it worries him at how many it would take to do this to the elk. Sranc clans never numbered more than a few hundred. Rarely, a chieftain would enslave a few other clans then besiege Sakarpus. It happened five times. Still, this slaughter is something more.

Only some greater power could have accomplished this.

Sorweel realizes that Kellhus’s war is real. Zsoronga concedes it might be, but still questions Kellhus’s motivation.

Zsoronga’s warning that Sorweel is lost without his ancestors echoes in his mind over the coming days. Zsoronga, despite being young, has “salt.” He’s mature. He can’t deny that Yatwer has possessed him even though he was “trothed to her brother Gilgaöl” since he was five. It’s strange because he’s a warrior, a Taker and a thief in her eyes. It was a humiliation that she had chosen him, and one he was worthy of. He just wants to know why.

Porsparian would know. The slave is clearly some priest even though Sorweel thought only women “attended to the worldly interests of the Ur-Mother.” He was never educated on Yatwer. She’s a goddess for the poor. He feels an idiot for not realizing that Porsparian would be the key. Sorweel just had to learn Sheyic to get his answers.

That night, Sorweel remembers Porsparian making the face in the mud only to realize he’s doing it right now. It is insane and makes his stomach churn. He has trouble making the face in the dry soil. But he works to form it. Once done, he stares at it. “For a mad moment, it seemed the whole of the World, all the obdurate miles he had travelled, multiplied on and on in every direction, was but the limbless body of the face before him.” Instead of Yatwer, he realizes he made his father’s face. And his father speaks to him, calling him “son.”

He felt himself bend back… as if he were a bow drawn by otherworldly hands.

Water,” the image coughed on a small cloud of dust, “climbs the prow…”

Eskeles’s words?

Sorweel raised a crazed fist, dashed the face into the combed grasses.

Sorweel hovers between waking and sleeping, remembering what Eskeles said about the Sranc building up like water before the prow of the ship. Despite never seeing many boats, he understands the metaphor. Sorweel realizes that they are very far from the prow tracking game. Something doesn’t make sense about the massacre. So he waits for dawn to tell the others what he’s realized.

“With all due respect, my King…” the sorcerer said with a waking sneer. “Kindly go fuck your elbows.”

Eskeles is not happy to be woken by this and snaps out, letting his rare temper ride free. Captain Harnilas watches, but Sorweel doesn’t speak Sheyic well enough. He explains how the Sranc had no sentries. Eskeles just wants to go back to sleep, but he persists and asks how water piles behind the boat. That has Eskeles blinking. Then he groans and gets up. They go to Captain Harnilas and Eskeles takes too much time. Impatient, Sorweel snarls, “We’re tracking an army!”

That raises alarms. Harnilas asks why he thinks that. Because the Sranc can’t be Hoarding. Something is driving them. He speculates the Consul knows about the Hoarding and is using that knowledge. Eskeles admits the Consult would know about it. Sorweel continues to explain the Consult will know when the Hoarding reaches critical mass and attacks the Great Ordeal. Eskeles concedes that’s possible.

Sorweel through of his father, of all the time she had heard him reason with his subjects, let alone his men. “To be a worthy King,” Harweel had once told him, “is to lead, not to command.” And he understood that all the bickering, all the discourse he had considered wasted breath, “tongue-measuring,” was in fact central to kingship.

Sorweel says that their expedition is a joke. They are patrolling a safe place where you wouldn’t have patrols to keep them busy and safe. But then they stumble on a war party with no sentries who are not afraid of the Great Ordeal. They think they are safe. And the fact they slaughtered the elk is something they shouldn’t be doing here. Eskeles encourages Sorweel to keep talking, to give his thoughts, but he doesn’t know what is happening. He feels unsure.

Sorweel guesses that they have stumbled onto elements of a Consult army. They’re using the elk to hide their passage and shadow the Ordeal. This army will attack the Great Ordeal from behind when they fight the Hoarding. But this confuses Sorweel. The Sranc don’t do this. They don’t plan. Use tactics. This worries Harnilas and Eskeles. They ask what Sorweel thinks they should do. He says to ride for the Ordeal and sound the alarm. Harnilas agrees and approves.

Sorweel asks if his theory is possible because it makes no sense. Sranc don’t use tactics. Eskeles has a fatherly gleam in his eyes as he thinks. Then he talks about the time before the No-God was activated. Back then, the Consult would chain Sranc into massive armies called Yokes and drive them like slaves. They starve them. When they’re famished and desperate for food, they strike their chains and let them rampage.

Something within the Sakarpi King, a binding fear and hope, slumped in relief. He almost reeled for exhaustion, as if alarm alone had sustained him through all the sleepless watches.

Eskeles asks if he’s okay. He dismisses the worry then glances at the horizon. He asks what Harnilas said. Eskeles replies that he thinks Sorweel has “the gifts of a great king.” Eskeles has a look of fatherly pride that makes Sorweel feel guilty.

Gifts? something within him wanted to cry. No…

Only things the dirt had told him.

My Thoughts

We see Yatwer working on Sorweel to do what she wants him. Through Zsoronga and his talk of honoring ancestors and families surviving death, he is saying what Sorweel needs to embrace Yatwer and be her Narindar. He just doesn’t see how the circumstances are being manipulated from the outside by a being that can see past and future all at the same time. The Darkness that Comes Before as a weapon being turned against Kellhus. Sorweel doesn’t even know it.

The “Our smarter” line from Eskeles is a nice point to his character and contrasts with the captain who is strong while Eskeles is smart. Two different ways to come at something.

Why does he curse himself for a fool? Because he’s relieved that they found food for his enemy. He is bouncing between two people: the rebel and the conquered.

Come on Eskeles, let’s not be a party pooper!

Interestingly, we see our hero is the one who does the most vicious act. He is shocked they don’t want to torture the monster. This is not the first parallel we’re going to be drawn between Sranc and Men. But you’ll never see Sranc hesitating. Men are trapped between Intellect and Desire. The Dûnyain and the Inchoroi. Some are closer to one end of the other. Both lead to bad decisions. The balance has to be struck.

“Go fuck your elbows?” There’s a phrase.

Yatwer continues guiding him. She’s positioning him as someone insightful and knowledgeable. She’s winning him respect. Bringing him more into the notice of Kellhus so he could be in a position to strike when the time came.

Not a lot to say, but we are seeing those strings being pulled. It puts Sorweel on a very typical journey, but it’s out of his control. He’s not a hero who’s answered the call. He’s just dragged along on the journey by the will of a goddess that will end up with him dying.

And yet, I think he has a big impact on Serwa. But we’ll get to that when we get to the fourth book.

Not a lot to say. Pretty straightforward chapter.

Want to read more, click here for chapter 5!

And you have to check out my fantasy novel, Above the Storm!

Now it’s been turned into an Audiobook!

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

When the Stormriders attack …

…Ary’s people have little chance.

Can he find a way to defeat them?

At 19, Ary has spent ten years mourning his father’s death. The aftermath of the attack still haunts him. Now, on the eve of the draft he faces his greatest fear, being sent to become a marine.

He knows the cost of war.

All he wants is to marry Charlene, who he has loved since they were kids. Building a farm and starting a family sounds perfect. There’s just one problem, his best friend Vel adores her, too. He’d give anything for peace.

But wanting the Stormriders to stop attacking…

…isn’t going to make it happen.

For love, for his people, and especially for the life he wants, Ary makes a decision that will change everything.

The adventure begins.

You’ll love this beautifully creative dark fantasy, because James Reid knows how to create characters and worlds you’ll grow to adore.

Get it now.

You can buy or burrow The Storm Below Box Set today!

Writing Your First Novel with Andy Peloquin: Authors in Focus Episode 108

Hi! Welcome to this episode of Authors in Focus Podcast. I’m James Reid, a fantasy author publishing as JMD Reid. This podcast is all about getting to know writers, their books, and what makes them tick.

We all have a storyteller inside of us. Join me as we find out what the rising stars and established voices in publishing have to say about their craft and inspiration.

My new book, Mask of Guilt (Mask of Illumination Book 1), is out!

We all wear masks. Some of us to hide our guilt. Lady Foonauri, lost in the malaise of depression, finds purpose with a group of all-women thieves, the Cracked Gems. Intrigue, romance, betrayal, and adventure swirls around her in this epic fantasy tale!

Today, I’m joined by Andy Peloquin! He is the best-selling author of the grimdark fantasy novel Assassin (Darkblade 1)! Follow him on Facebook and on Twitter. Check out his website and his books on Amazon!

Reread of The White-Luck Warrior: Chapter One

Reread of The Aspect-Emperor Series

Book 2: The White-Luck Warrior

by R. Scott Bakker

Chapter One

The Meörn Wilderness

Without rules, madness. Without discipline, death

—NANSUR MILITARY MAXIM

Welcome to Chapter One of my reread. Click here if you missed the Intro!

My Thoughts

That is a very apt quote considering we’re picking up with the Skin Eaters. Rules impart order on the chaos of the world. And nothing is more chaotic than battle (or traveling through Cil-Aujas). Discipline keeps soldiers standing when they would have broken. The belief instilled in them, and the training they’ve gone through lets a person endure situations they could not without it.

Now going into Meörn Wilderness, we’re going to see that the Rules and Discipline of the Skin Eaters have been broken. They are going to fall into madness and death by the end of this book. Not even Kosoter will keep them in line.

The Skin Eaters are broken.

Spring, 20 New Imperial Year (4132 Year-of-the-Tusk), the “Long Side”

Even when the Skin Eaters walked ways sheeted in sunlight, some shadow of Cil-Aujas lingered in their eyes. The reflection of friends lost. The glint of things not quite survived.

Two days have passed since the Skin Eaters have escaped Cil-Aujas. “There was madness in the deep, and the scalpers wore it more as fact than trophy.” They’ve been decimated. Men who have survived years of hunting Sranc have cracked from the strain. Whether sunny or rainy, they rejoice in seeing the open sky through the trees they march through.

They walked with the wonder of those who could not fathom their breath, their heartbeat. Who could not believe they still lived.

Achamian thinks they’re too few to have discipline and not sure any Rules of the Slog remain. They would have to find a new way. Kosoter is still in command but in an even more dominating way. Sarl skulks at the rear, no longer Kosoter’s mouthpiece. He mutters all the time but speaks with no one. Mostly he mutters about Hell and “The Slog of Slogs!” Galian has become the second. The Nansur soldier seems unscathed. He, Pokwas, and Xonghis have become “a nucleus of sorts, like a conspiracy of the sane within the greater company.” They maintain authority by not giving their opinion. Whenever Kosoter gives an order, everyone looks to Galian. He would pause and then nod his head, never dumb enough to contradict Kosoter.

Xonghis is the scout, moving ahead. Only he, and Cleric, move with any energy. The others trudge. Pokwas, his head wound gruesome, stays by Galian’s side. The three eat apart from the others, devouring meat cooked by sorcery. Xonghis eyes never stop moving. Pokwas polishes his sword while nursing a grudge. Galian sits between them, watching the other scalpers like a worried father. Soma and Sutadra were now excluded from the group for no reason Achamian can see. Sutadra is silent but is waiting for something to set off his temper. Soma seems the most the same and seems oblivious to how his friends snub him.

Nothing should be the same after Cil-Aujas.

The other survivors are the Galeoth that are both mutinous and complacent. They complain and object until Kosoter looks at them. Then they shut up. They are the ones most broken by Cil-Aujas. Wonard’s wounds are infected, Hameron cries in his sleep, and injured Conger is getting better. His limp has vanished.

But no one had been more transformed in the collective eye than Cleric. Where before they had walked with an enigma, one rounded warm and smooth by local acquaintance, now they walked with a Nonman Ishroi… a Quya Mage.

Even for men so bitten, it was no small thing to walk with a legend. And for a Wizard steeped in the ancient ways, it was cause for more than a few sleepless watches…

Night comes suddenly with the Osthwai Mountains to the west. They don’t make fires or other lights because they’re in skinny country. “They became a company of shadows, skulkers between the trees, loath to speak.” Their losses are so apparent when they camp. Cleric dispenses Qirri reach night, his armor still clotted with blood. He seems more animal than before. Then he would sit by the Captain who either sat like a stone or lecture the Nonman in a low voice.

The Qirri would soak through their bodies, relaxing them. Then the mutters and complaints would start until Cleric began his next sermon. They all fall silent, Skin Eaters, Wizard, and girl. “A silence not of expectation, but of men who awaited tidings of themselves.”

During one sermon, Cleric speaks about how they have wandered “out of light and life.” As he speaks, he seems like he’s judging their mistakes. Cleric speaks about how they have seen things few humans ever have. They will understand how power and history piles upon themselves.

“Ever are Men stranded on the surface of things. And ever do they confuse what they see with the sum of what matters. Ever do they forget the rank insignificance of the visible. And when they do honour the beyond—the beneath—they render it according to what is familiar… They disfigure it for comfort’s sake.

The old Wizard sat rigid.

“But you… you know… You know that what lies beyond resembles us no more than the potter resembles the urn…”

A sudden mountain gust swept the high ridges, whisked through the gnarled jack pine that crooked the stone about them. Mimara raised a hand to brush the hair from her face.

“You who have glimpsed Hell.”

“The Slog!” Sarl exclaimed in hoary tomes. “The Slog of Slogs—just as I told you!” His laugh was half gurgle and half rasp.

Everyone ignored Sarl’s cackling as Cleric continues, saying all things has their place, including death. They have seen what only dead men do. Achamian flinches from Cleric’s gaze. The Nonman hopes that death will “greet you as an old friend.” Silence follows until Sarl cackles again.

Achamian feels the weight of those who have died, those he knew, and those he didn’t. This is the price of his conviction. His quest is paid for by the blood of men he has tricked into this quest. “Distance and abstraction are ever the twin lures of disaster.” He realizes it was so easy to take that first step from his tower. Absurdly so. Now he had come so far through so much suffering because of that first step.

All for the sake of finding Ishuäl… The name spoken by a mad barbarian so many years ago. The Cradle of Anasûrimbor Kellhus. The hidden refuge of the Dûnyain.

Achamian had promised these men riches in the Coffers of Sauglish, the sorcerous vaults. It’s a lie, but these “wrecked and heartbroken” men don’t know that. He has held back his map and the Dreams. He knows the Whore of Fate is on them. Mimara’s presence is proof of that. He had known his “mad mission” would have a heavy toll, but he had deceived himself anyways.

The truth, he had told himself. The truth demanded sacrifice, from him and from others.

Could a man be called a murderer when he killed in the name of truth?

At night, he looks at the men he is deceiving, men who are crippled. No longer the strutting braggarts before Cil-Aujas. Men boasting about the riches they would find and how they would return as princes. Those men were gone. Achamian fears what will happen to them next to pursue his goal.

Mimara often watches him watching them. She was a woman who had skill reading men’s emotions and was always guessing at his. She thinks he feels remorse. He says Cil-Aujas proved her right, referencing how she called him a murderer when she learned of his real goal and had threatened to tell the others. She replies that it “has wronged me more.”

In the absence of consequence, lies were as easy as breathing, as simple as song. During his days as a Mandate Schoolman, Achamian had told innumerable falsehoods to innumerable people, and a fair number of fatal truths as well. He had destroyed reputations, even lives, in the pursuit of an abstraction, the Consult. He had even killed one of his beloved pupils, Inrau, in the name of what could not be touched or seen. He found himself wondering what it must be like for his former brothers now that the Consult had been revealed. What would it be like to belong to an Imperial School, to have princes and kings stammer in your presence? According to Mimara, they even carried Shrial Warrants, holy writ that exempted them from the laws of the lands that hosted them.

Mandate Schoolmen with Shrial Warrants! What would that be like?

Achamian would never know because he had left the Mandate just as Kellhus made the Consult’s existence concrete. Now Achamian seeks Kellhus’s origins through his Dreams. He’s “[s]acrificing the actual for the possible.” He both believes and doubts, and he has more men to kill.

You can only possess a dream while awake. They can take over your entire existence. “Dreams are the darkness that only slumber can illuminate.” Achamian is dreaming of walking through the Library of Sauglish, the home of the first School, the Sohonc. The place is heaped with Wards, making the place ugly “the way all sorcery is ugly.” And yet the perfection of it, like a ship’s great rigging, is beautiful. No invaders had ever attacked this place. They had always brought gifts because this “was the Library!”

Achamian is dreaming of Seswatha carrying the map of Ishuäl through the Library. He uses the Cant of Sideways Stepping to pass through stone. He enters the Upper Pausal, a part of the library the Nonmen had carved when they taught humans Gnosis. It is carved out of “living rock.” Seswatha is almost overwhelmed by all the marks of Sorcery, especially from the Great Gate of Wheels which is both a portal and a lock into the Coffers.

To the mundane eyes, it was a wonder of scale and machination. To arcane eyes it was nothing less than a miracle of interlocking deformities: enormous incantation wheels carved from milk-white marble, turning through a frame of bronze set with constellations of faces carved of black diorite, instilled animata—or proxies, as they called them—enslaved souls, whose only purpose was to complete the circuit between watcher and watched that was the foundation of all reality, sorcerous or not. So hideous was the Mark of the thing, so metaphysically disfigured, that bile bubbled to the back of his throat whenever he found himself before it.

Quya magic. Deeper than deep.

He pauses at the stairs and feels no alarm to see the golden map case was now a dead infant’s body. “Such is the madness of dreams that we can assume the continuity of even the most jarring thing.” To the dreamer, he always had a dead baby. He marches down the stair and stops before the Gate which the proxies open at a command. The baby starts squirming and now the Archmage glances down. He feels revulsion at the dead baby reaching for him. He throws it to the floor. Only it floats in place.

“This,” Seswatha gasped, “is not what hap—!”

The gate opens. The infant falls to the ground and becomes the map case. Achamian stands still, the wind gusting out of the Coffers rippling around him. It’s then that Achamian sees there’s no roof. The Pausal is open to the sky. The Whirlwind has arrived.

TELL ME… the Whirlwind said.

WHAT DO YOU SEE?

WHAT AM I?” The No God’s question echoes in Achamian’s minds as the scalpers cross the Meörn Wilderness, or the Long Side, as they call it. They knew they walked through lands once cultivated and had been through the ruined cities of the Meöri Empire. Once upon a time, the wildlands were on the other side of the Osthwai Mountains. Ten years ago, the first companies had been overwhelmed by the Srancs. The “Stick Days” because you were tossing number-sticks on where you would survive. After five years, the Sranc were driven back to a forest called the Great Mop. They were so successful, the Holy Bounty had to be halved to keep the New Empire from going bankrupt.

The reconquest of the Great Meöri Empire had begun, albeit by Men who resembled the Sranc more than otherwise. When Fatwall, or Maimor, was discovered, the Holy Aspect-Emperor sent a Judge and a company of Ministrate Pikeman to occupy the abandoned fortress over the summer months. Many among the Imperial Apparati spoke of reclaiming all the ancient Meöri provinces—from the Osthwai Mountains to the Sea of Cerish—with ten scant years. Some even argued the Holy Bounty should take precedence over the Great Ordeal. Why wage war against one, they dared ask, when with mere gold you could battle against all?

But the Great Mop changed things. No matter how many Sranc were killed, their numbers were not diminishing. They did not retreat. One mathematician believed these Sranc were reproducing as fast as they were killed. It was a futile endeavor. “He would be imprisoned for his impious accuracy.” The scalpers didn’t care. They understood. The Mop’s dense canopy strangled out the underbrush. It was always dark and dim, perfect for Sranc and the grubs they fed on. “It provided for all but their most dread appetites.

That is, until the coming of men.

With Xonghis in the lead, they planned to march to the ruins of Maimor (nicknamed Fatwall) and hope of getting resupplied. Mimara clings to Achamian, often leaning against him even though she’s not injured. Achamian remembers Esmenet doing the same during the First Holy War. If it wasn’t for the trauma of the last few days, he would have felt the pain of her loss. He asks her about how she drove off the Wight-in-the-Mountain with a Chorae, but she can’t give a satisfactory answer. He doesn’t understand why Kosoter’s didn’t do anything. “Well, I’m not the Captain, am I?” He keeps coming back to it, like an itch that never goes away.

The School of Mandate had long eschewed the Daimotic Arts: Seswatha had believed Ciphrang too capricious to be yoked to human intent. Still, Achamian had some understanding of the metaphysics involved. He knew that some agencies could be summoned shorn of the Outside, plucked whole as it were, while others bore their realities with them, swamping the World with porous madness. The shade of Gin’yursis, Achamian knew, had been one of the latter.

Chorae only negated violations of the real; they returned the world to its fundamental frame. But Gin’yursis had come as figure and frame—a symbol wedded to the very Hell that gave it meaning…

Mimara’s Chorae should have been useless.

He begs her to explain, knowing the Judging Eye somehow made it happen. She just gets mad, calling it madness and not understanding it herself. He says she must know more. She glares at him and calls him a hypocrite. He was equally as evasive when she asked for information about the Judging Eye. He suspects she’s getting back at him. He doesn’t want to burden her with the doom of her future. He doesn’t want her to “forget hope.”

The old Wizard knew this as much from his Dreams as from his life. Of all the lessons he had learned at life’s uncaring knee, perhaps this was the most hard won. So when she pestered him with questions—gazing at him with Esmenet’s eyes and airs—he would bristle. “The Judging Eye is the stuff of witches lore and old wives’ tales! I have no knowledge to share, only rumours and misapprehensions.”

She would ask to know those, but he would tell her to leave him alone. He told himself he did it to spare her. “There is mercy in ignorance.” This is something are born appreciating. The less they know, the happier they are.

Soma also receives Mimara’s anger. When he tries to talk to her, she ignores him. He’s trying to rekindle their old banter in a way to earn her forgiveness. “His approach was at once cowardly and eminently male: he was literally asking her to pretend that he had not abandoned her in Cil-Aujas.” She does not forgive. Finally, he tries to explain himself, saying things just happened so fast.

“But that’s the way it is with fools, isn’t it?” she said, her tone so light it could only be scathing. “The world is quick and they are slow.”

Soma is shocked by her words and looks dumbfounded. Galian mocks him. Later, Achamian joins Soma on the trail and tells him to give her time and let her anger die down because she is a forgiving woman. He adds she’s too smart not to understand the difficulties. Soma is confused and Achamian agrees with Mimara that he’s a fool. He tells him, “Courage for men is fodder for dragons.” Soma doesn’t get it.

“That courage is more complicated than simple souls credit… Mimara may be many things, Soma, but simple isn’t one of them. We all need to build fences about what… what happened.”

Soma just stares with that same affable gaze repeats that she needs more time like he’s taking it to heart. Achamian agrees and keeps walking while fearing that the “daft fool” would take Achamian’s advice as permission. Strong in the same ways, Achamian feels she needs protection. She’s has something beautiful that should not have survived her experiences. “This realization, if anything, made her company more irritating.”

Pokwas believes it’s significant that Mimara saved Achamian’s life. In his lands, a woman saving you means “deep things.” Achamian says she said them all, but Pokwas reiterates that she saved his several times while awe creeps in his expression. Achamian scowls and asks what. Pokwas makes a joke about who would save someone so old and used up. He snorted and jokes back that only a daughter would. At the same time, he flinches from the lie that he’s telling a man who he had shared such abject hardship with.

Maybe this lie had also come true.

Mimara studies Achamian like a “mother reviews her children: the counting of things beloved.” Before he infuriated her by withholding knowledge, starving her of information. Needing him was unforgivable before, but things are different now even though he still denied her. “Still he complains, upbraids, and rebukes.”

The only difference is she loves him.

She recalls her mother, back in the Andiamine Heights, telling her about “Akka.” Mimara asked if he was her father which caused her mother to recoil. Mimara used her father as a weapon since her mother, being a whore, couldn’t answer it. It reminds her of her past. This time, the words hurt and she has tears before answering that he is her father. The response stunned Mimara even as she knew it was a lie. Though she gets why her mother wants it to be Achamian. “Everyone tells lies to dull the world’s sharper, more complicated edges—some more pretty than others.”

This prompts Mimara to ask what Achamian is like. “Foolish, like all men. Wise. Petty. Gentle.” To hurt her mother, she asks why she left Achamian. But Mimara is the one flinching, feeling guilty for it. It’s one thing to hurt her mother over being sold into slavery, this is different, and shows how ugly Mimara is.

Few passions require quite so much certainty as spite.

Defeated and hurting, Esmenet says she choose Kellhus. Mimara remembers that as she watches Achamian she thinks of Esmenet being terrified for her safety. Mimara feels guilt until she remembers being that little girl shrieking “Mumma!” as the slavers took her away. The child still weeps in her.

She asks Achamian why Esmenet left him. He answers that he died, that it’s too hard to “wait for the dead.” She asks about waiting for the living. He stares at her and says you already know that answer. She’s surprised. He smiles at her as Galian and Sutadra walk between Wizard and girl, the pair feeling like strangers to her now. Then Achamian asks her why she didn’t abandon him in Cil-Aujas.

Because I lov—

“Because I need you,” she says without breath. “I need your knowledge.”

He stares at her, his beard and hair trembling in the breeze. “So the old wineskin has a few swallows left,” he says inexplicably.

He’s unfazed by her gaze as she’s annoyed by more riddles. She ignores him for the rest of the afternoon, offended that after she saved him he laughed at her. She is furious because he’s holding out on what she hungers for. She understands that some starve and some eat, that’s life. “It’s only when fat men make sauce out of other’s starvation that it becomes a sin.”

Mimara is no one of them. She belongs. They treat her differently. They tease her with “brotherly skepticism instead of masculine daring” They don’t stare at her with lust. They are lessened because of Cil-Aujas and greater because she’s one of them. Even Kosoter appears to accept her, staring at her like his men do.

They camp for the night and she realizes that they’re like lice, and the Mop is the world’s pelt. The others talk about its dangers, but it seems safe after Cil-Aujas. They eat, but she’s aching for the Qirri that is handed out after supper. She keeps ignoring Achamian who is confused about what he’s done, just like all men are. Soma tries to talk to her, but she glares at him. Though he had saved her in Cil-Aujas, he had abandoned her when it was the most desperate.

To think she had thought the fool charming.

She finds herself watching Sarl. The madman hasn’t bathed, his skin sainted with Sranc blood. His clothes are filthy though his hauberk is well maintained. He looks like he’s hiding as he crouches by a boulder. He talks to it like it were his friend.

“The fucking Mop… The Mop. Eh, lads? Eh?”

Viscous laughter, followed by snapping cough. The back of his thought is broken, she realizes. He can only kick and claw where he has fallen.

“More darkness, yes. Tree darkness…”

Mimara can’t remember what happened with the Wight-of-the-Mountain, but she feels that something “was open that should not have been open.” And she closed it. Once during one of the many attempts by Achamian to learn what is going on, he talks about how there’s a line between the World and the Outside and souls can return as a demon. He says it was impossible and asks if it was the Chorae. She wants to say it was the Tear of God. Instead, she shrugs, feigning that she doesn’t care.

She had been given something. What she has always considered a blight, a deformity of the soul, has become fraught with enigma and power. The Judging Eye opened. At the moment of absolute crisis, it opened and saw what needed to be seen…

A tear of the God, blazing in her pal. The God of Gods!

She had been a victim her whole life. So her instinct is the immediate one, to raise a concealing hand, to turn a shoulder in warding. Only a fool fails to hide what is precious.

The irony is using the Tear of God is incompatible with her desire to be a witch. She needs to understand this so it frustrates her that Achamian won’t tell her anything. “Frustration and torment is the very shape of her life.” It’s all she can trust.

She wakens to Sarl crooning. She peers at the Nail of Heaven, listening to his nonsense. She realizes he is old and dying. This makes her worried for Achamian. She looks around and realizes he’s sleeping near her. This comforts her, and she falls asleep staring at him.

I understand, Mother… I finally see… I really do.

She dreams of Kellhus as if he were the wight. “Not a man but an emblem.” He says, “You are the eye that offends, Mimara…” She wants to talk to Achamian about in the morning, but she’s still mad at him. She thinks how caste-noble wives would pay augurs fortunes to interpret dreams while the poor would pray to a god-like Yatwer. In the brothel, the girls would drip wax on pillow-beetles. If it trapped them, it was true. She knows dozens of other ways. But she doesn’t know what to believe. Achamian’s skepticism is wearing off on her.

The eye that must be plucked.”

This morning, the scalpers seem renewed. They’re almost their old selves as they ready for camp. Achamian even senses that the Skin Eaters have returned. “Somehow, they have recovered their old ways and roles.” Though there are signs they are afraid. It’s the Mop, she realizes. It’s worrying them enough to drive out Cil-Aujas. Sarl cackles about killing skinnies and that receives a cheer, but it’s half-hearted. Reminding them that they are so small and Sarl isn’t one of them.

Kosoter slings his shield, announcing the march has started. It’s treacherous terrain, and she annoys Achamian by steadying him as they head lower down the mountain and into the Mop. She starts gasping at how big the trees are. The air is alive with birds. It’s dark, a “piling on of shadows.”

It will swallow us, she thinks, feeling the old panic buzzing through her bones. She has had her fill of lightless bellies. Small wonder the scalpers were anxious.

Tree darkness, Sarl had said.

It finally clicks in Mimara just how enormous Achamian’s mission is. Cil-Aujas is just the beginning. There will be more trials ahead. The company keeps marching into the Great Mop.

Into the green darkness.

My Thoughts

We can see how Kosoter’s discipline has fractured. He needs Galian’s unspoken support now. He alone isn’t good enough to lead. What they went through has shattered the Skin Eaters. They are not the same. And we’ll see that by the end of the book how badly things have changed.

Only Soma is unchanged by Cil-Aujas, and he shouldn’t be. He’s acting the same. More subtle clues that he’s a skin-spy.

Cleric talking about “pilings of powers” is something humans rarely see because we’re always standing on the surface. We have no real appreciation of the past. We might know about it but we truly don’t understand how our present will one day be buried by something different. That all we think is important, all our great works, will one day be the foundation of another civilization. We think the collapse can never come to us, but every other civilization thought the same thing as they stood on the ruins of what came before them.

“May it [death] greet you as an old friend when you return.” Now isn’t that interesting. Harry Potter burst into my head reading that. The Tale of the Three Brothers has the last brother greeting death as the old friend. A joyful reunion. Not something tragic, but something inevitable and a part of life. Not something to be feared but treasured. And here we have a Nonman who can only be killed, he can’t die. He’ll live on and on, never getting to meet Death at all. Never getting to greet his old friend unless someone murders him. Is that what Cleric is looking for on this journey? Is he looking to be killed by an old friend? By Seswatha?

“Distance and abstraction are ever the twin lures of disaster.” What a great sentence. It’s easy to make decisions that affect those far away. Like ordering a drone strike from the Oval Office. Simple. You don’t have to see the effects. Aren’t going to be living where that missile falls. It won’t be the peace of your day shattered by an explosion. It’s the abstraction. Reducing things to simple, ignoring all the complexity, and then making decisions that you cannot possibly understand what the ramifications will be. Worse, you won’t even suffer the consequences for them.

Then he talks about how his first step is easy. It reminds me of Tolkien where Bilbo talks to Frodo about how you never know what will happen when you step foot outside of your home. That the road before their house can take you all the way to the Lonely Mountains.

“Could a man be called a murderer when he killed in the name of truth?” Yep. That’s the worst sort. The ones who think this is all for the greater good. But as we see, what Achamian learns in Ishuäl does not matter one bit. His quest for truth killed all these men for nothing. Isn’t that usually how it goes?

“In the absence of consequence, lies were as easy as breathing, as simple as song.” What a great quote. That is so true about humans. When nothing on the line, just lie. Media, government, corporations, individuals. When you’re not held to account, why behave responsibly?

Cant of Sideways Stepping allows you to walk through stone. That is fascinating. It’s such an evocative name to slip through the atoms of an object. I believe this is the only time we see it used. Maybe you have to do it with specially prepared stone? The library is surrounded by Wards and such. It seems really useful to use like when you’re trapped in another library and the Scarlet Spire is closing around you. Or, perhaps, it was lost to time and Achamian is seeing it for the first time since he’s dreaming one of the special Seswatha Dreams.

Living Rock is how Seswatha describes what the Nonmen carved the Pausal out of. I think this is just saying it’s natural rock, not actually alive. But, perhaps, to the Nonmen, it is alive in its own way. Maybe that is why they delve into the rock and adorn it with so much iconography.

Animata, or enslaved souls, are exactly what we saw with the Wathi doll Achamian had and later used to escape the Scarlet Spire. They are needed to observe reality. This implies that the foundation of reality is observation. If nothing of intelligence observes it, does it even exist? This allows the gate to open without the use of actual sorcery. They observe the spell and hold it ready to be activated.

The baby is the No-God. And since that is Nau-Cayûti is secretly Seswatha’s son, the soul of the No-God, of Nau-Cayûti, is reaching out to Achamian. At the end of the next book, Achamian will even dream Nau-Cayûti’s final moments before being thrown into the Golden Sarcophagus.

I like how they’re moving through the wilderness that used to be cultivated lands after leaving cultivated lands that used to be wilderness.

On the Mathematician who delivered bad news. Just remember, your political masters will only support the experts that agree with them.

That’s the problem with sparing people’s feelings. It pisses them off. No one likes it. She’s an adult. Tell her what’s coming, Achamian. It’s going to happen. Let her make informed decisions. I get Achamian likes her and all. She’s the step-daughter he couldn’t help molesting.

“His approach was at once cowardly and eminently male: he was literally asking her to pretend that he had not abandoned her in Cil-Aujas.” Yeah, sounds right. Why just speak about it? Well, that leads to talking and shit. Why not let it go and be cool. I’m for it, Soma. I mean, I know you’re an evil skin-spy and all, but I’d let it pass. I mean, I’d probably abandon your ass in the same situation. Course, I’m not a woman. It’s the wrong approach with a woman. Soma failed her shit-test. Hard to come back from that.

“But that’s the way it is with fools, isn’t it?” Mimara tells Soma. “The world is quick and they are slow.” See, failed that shit-test, and now she has no respect for him. And it was a big one. If he had rescued her from a horde of murdering and raping Sranc, things would be really different.

“Courage for men is fodder for dragons.” This is saying it’s easy to be courageous but it’s hard when you’re facing real danger. Then that courage is devoured. All men have their breaking point. I think Soma is struggling to understand why he was afraid. He was a skin-spy. Those Sranc would not have killed him on purpose. But he succumbed to the same terror as the others. He stopped being a hunter and became prey. And he doesn’t understand it. He can’t. He isn’t human. Worse, he’s playing at Soma. He needs to keep being Soma, but he doesn’t know how to play a Soma who went through such trauma. It’s why he’s unchanged and everyone else is different. He’s trying the same things and it’s not working with Mimara any longer. More confusion. He’s grappling with things beyond him.

Achamian has definitely grown to see Mimara as his daughter. Which makes their one time having sex a creepy problem in the relationship because, even then, the pair sensed that was what they were. Not biological father and daughter, but adopted through Esmenet, the woman who betrayed them both. In Cil-Aujas, they both came to understand their feelings for the other. As Pokwas said, Mimara saved Achamian. That means something. Yes, she saved the others, but that was to save herself. She risked a horrific fate to keep Achamian alive.

More pretty Bakker? Prettier is a word. I’m glad I’m not the only one that sometimes uses the adjective more instead of the -er ending.

Mimara wants to hurt her mother, but only when it concerns what happened to herself. She is a nice person at her core. She feels bad about using other weapons to hurt her mother. She’s so full of pain and hurt that it’s drowning out that compassionate core of her.

You can only hate so long as you are confident in the truth. You have anything that puts doubt, that makes you consider why the other person wronged you, or to see them as a person hurting like you, and it blunts that spite. Shatters it. So you have to keep honing it on pain. Like Mimara does when she remembers the day she was sold to the slavers.

She cannot admit she loves him because she hates being vulnerable, but it’s there. She knows it.

“It’s only when fat men make sauce out of other’s starvation that it becomes a sin.” This is so profound. Disparity is life. There’s no way to avoid it. It’s a law that the more you have the more you accumulate. It’s true of stars, cities, and wealth. 1% of the stars in the universe have 99% of the mass, 1% of the cities of Earth have 99% of the population, and 1% of people have 99% of the wealth. It’s when you are miserly with it, when you can share it and don’t, that’s when it’s a bad thing.

We see our first signs of addiction to Qirri. Mimara wants it more and more.

Shit tests, guys. You fail a woman’s shit test, and it changes how she sees you.

Want to read more, click here for Chapter 2!

And you have to check out my fantasy novel, Above the Storm!

Now it’s been turned into an Audiobook!

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

When the Stormriders attack …

…Ary’s people have little chance.

Can he find a way to defeat them?

At 19, Ary has spent ten years mourning his father’s death. The aftermath of the attack still haunts him. Now, on the eve of the draft he faces his greatest fear, being sent to become a marine.

He knows the cost of war.

All he wants is to marry Charlene, who he has loved since they were kids. Building a farm and starting a family sounds perfect. There’s just one problem, his best friend Vel adores her, too. He’d give anything for peace.

But wanting the Stormriders to stop attacking…

…isn’t going to make it happen.

For love, for his people, and especially for the life he wants, Ary makes a decision that will change everything.

The adventure begins.

You’ll love this beautifully creative dark fantasy, because James Reid knows how to create characters and worlds you’ll grow to adore.

Get it now.

You can buy or burrow Above the Storm today!

Reread of The Judging Eye: Interlude-Momemn

Reread of The Aspect-Emperor Series

Book 1: The Judging Eye

by R. Scott Bakker

Interlude: Momemn

Welcome to the Interlude of my reread. Click here if you missed Chapter Sixteen!

Kelmomas is listening to a riot from a balcony. He watches the moon and the clouds drifting around it. “The Nail of Heaven flared white from a sailing summit.” He hears more shouts and cries.

He had no name for his rapture. Clam and slow breathing. Stationary. Stationary amid the clash of all things. The repose of a soul peering out from the world’s shrouded centre. The unmoved mover.

The ruler unseen.

As he hears the sounds of fighting, the voice in him murmurs, “You made this.” His mother asks what he’s doing and he says he’s scared. “Her smile was too fraught to be reassuring.” She tells him he’s safe and holds out her arms. He hugs her the way little boys did. Then they head to his bed. It’s dark because his new nurse, Emansi, had snuffed out the candles. Only a lantern burns.

Esmenet tucks in Kelmomas. Her gentleness was “yet one more thing he cherished with the ferocity of tears.” She slips in with him and holds him tight. He reads her emotions and thoughts. She thinks she’s here to give him comfort for the loss of Samarmas because of “how intense their bond had been in infancy!

This was what she told herself, he knew.

He starts to fall asleep encased in her love. He finds it an “oblivion indistinguishable from bliss.” He has no cares. There’s here and now. He doesn’t care about anything else. He turns over to lie on his side and stare into her eyes. This is the only thing that can be real. He lies that he misses “Sammi.” She does, too.

A part of him, the snake-sneaky part, laughed. Poor Samarmas. Poor poor Samarmas.

He comments he didn’t get to see Kellhus. She explains it’s the war and everyone, even “darling little boys” have to make sacrifices. She falls silent and he reads her thoughts that Kellhus feels nothing that Samarmas is dead.

Hesitantly, Kelmomas brings up Uncle Maithanet. And she asks what about him. He hesitates as she presses him until he says, “He [Maithanet]… watches you funny.” She asks what he means. He asks if Maithanet is angry at her. She says no, but he sees her worried. She adds Maithanet is her brother and then cups his face with her left hand, “the one bruised by what she called her ‘ancient tattoo.’”

The Prince-Imperial fluttered his lids as though overpowered by warmth and weariness. “But he has more power…” he whispered, pretending to fall asleep. He would open his eyes later, when her breathing slipped into the long trough of dreams.

Unseen rulers never slumbered, not truly.

My Thoughts

The riots are the people angry about the Matriarch’s death. And since Kelmomas killed her, he most definitely caused all that pain and suffering. But as we see, nothing is real to him but Esmenet. Nothing else matters but her. It’s all just a game.

Now we see him manipulate his mother. Twisted the dagger of her grief, driving a wedge between her and Kellhus, then throwing fuel onto the fires of her own fears and doubts about Maithanet. Kelmomas sees himself as the real ruler of Momemn, his mother his puppet. He needs her all to himself. Everything else can burn. He doesn’t care. They’re just amusements to be crushed.

And thus ends The Judging Eye.

I had to wait a few years to read this. I had the good fortune of finding The Darkness that Comes Before just when all three books of the first series were out. I could read from one to the next. But I had to wait for The Judging Eye. I had just lost my job in the middle of the Great Recession, but I still bought this book. I was reading the middle of it sitting at St. Claire’s emergency room after driving my roommate there. He ended losing a gall bladder. I can still remember sitting in that uncomfortable waiting room to find out what was going on and trying to distract myself.

It mostly worked.

This book sets the stage. It wasn’t what I expected. I found Sorweel’s character to be a strange choice, but seeing his entire story now, I get it. And he’s our outsider POV to get us into the Great Ordeal.

It was a delight to read this book. To see the story threads being set up. I remember all the speculation about the book: we’d see a crazy Dûnyain, a female one. There was all the speculation about what Kellhus would be doing. Achamian. The twenty-year jump works, but there are a lot of questions I have about what went on between. In the final book, there’s an expanded glossary and a lot of people die in the same year.

Wonder what that’s about?

This book does a great job of setting up what is to come, has some amazing sequences, and does one of the most brilliant things: denies us a Kellhus POV. Of the “surviving” major POVs of the last book, Kellhus, Esmenet, and Achamian, we only are given those two. We do not know what Kellhus’s intentions are with the Great Ordeal. His conversation with Moënghus at the end of The Thousandfold Thought echoed in my mind.

The Dûnyain will always side with the Consult because it’s the most logical course of action. The Shortest Path to escape Damnation and to make that world where they can become self-moving souls. How can you be a self-moving soul when the Outside destroys Cause and Effect. When the Darkness can come AFTER.

So that is the Judging Eye. I’ll be heading into The White-Luck Warrior. Thank you all for the encouragement. It’s what’s gotten me this far in the reread after all these years. I hope you’ll keep leaving a comment every now and then. It really, really helps.

JMD Reid, 3/17/21

And you have to check out my fantasy novel, Above the Storm!

Now it’s been turned into an Audiobook!

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

When the Stormriders attack …

…Ary’s people have little chance.

Can he find a way to defeat them?

At 19, Ary has spent ten years mourning his father’s death. The aftermath of the attack still haunts him. Now, on the eve of the draft he faces his greatest fear, being sent to become a marine.

He knows the cost of war.

All he wants is to marry Charlene, who he has loved since they were kids. Building a farm and starting a family sounds perfect. There’s just one problem, his best friend Vel adores her, too. He’d give anything for peace.

But wanting the Stormriders to stop attacking…

…isn’t going to make it happen.

For love, for his people, and especially for the life he wants, Ary makes a decision that will change everything.

The adventure begins.

You’ll love this beautifully creative dark fantasy, because James Reid knows how to create characters and worlds you’ll grow to adore.

Get it now.

You can buy or burrow Above the Storm today!

Reread of The Judging Eye: Chapter Fourteen

Reread of The Aspect-Emperor Series

Book 1: The Judging Eye

by R. Scott Bakker

Chapter Fourteen

Cil-Aujas

Welcome to Chapter Fourteen of my reread. Click here if you missed Chapter Thirteen!

The world is only as deep as we can see. This is why fools think themselves profound. This is why terror is the passion of revelation.

—AJENCIS, THE THIRD ANALYTIC OF MEN

My Thoughts

What an interesting quote to start the chapter of Achamian’s company moving through Cil-Aujas.

I think we all have met people who think they are smarter than they are, who believe they know everything, or think the pretentious and inane things they are posting on Twitter (cough Jayden Smith cough) are mind-blowing. Now, the second half of this quote about terror being revelation’s passion is the intriguing part.

It implies, to me, that terror is what drives revelation. The fear of the unknown drives us to want answers. To have the darkness revealed to be something that we can understand. The fool will latch onto ideas that are not logical. The divine, for instance.

Bakker uses REVELATION. That carries the connotation of Moses and the Burning Bush. God telling you what’s up. The fool, terrified of what is around him, latches onto anything to make his fears lessen. Any explanation that their small minds see as profound. Even if it is shallow.

So, how does this fit into the chapter?

Well, we definitely have a lot of small minds heading into a place of sheer terror. Let’s not even consider the fact that it’s a topoi that has trapped the souls of the Nonmen murdered by treacherous humans and that hell itself is bleeding into the place. Just being underground is unnerving. If you’ve ever been in a cave or a mine shaft, it can creepy with all that stone over your head. And you do not know what darkness is until you find yourself in a lightless mine shaft. When I was a boy scout back in New Mexico, we went into an abandoned cinnabar mine on a camping treat. Most of us had flashlights. I did not. Everyone turned theirs off.

It was a complete darkness and it had weight. It was terrifying, and I knew there were people around me that had light sources.

Then we take into account the messed up stuff that’s about to happen and, as I assume we’ll see, we’re going to find scalpers (cough Sarl cough) making up stories to explain the strange things. The horrors. They will latch onto a revelation to carry them through the darkness.

And now reading the chapter, it’s a perfect quote because revealing what is really going on only inspires terror and threatens to break the Skin Eaters.

Spring, 20 New Imperial Year (4132 Year-of-the-Tusk), south of Mount Aenaratiol

Age. Age and darkness.

The Chronicles of the Tusk is the measure of something ancient to humans, but now in Cil-Aujas, the Skin Eaters are discovering a place older than the language of the Tusk. “Here was glory that no human, tribe or nation, could hope to match, and their hearts balked at the admission.” Achamian sees it in their eyes. All their boasting is now proving lies.

Cil-Aujas, for all its silence, boomed otherwise.

The company is moving through a subterranean. The trails after the Cleric and Achamian who both have sorcerous lights before them to illuminate the dark. Every sound brings cringes. Every inch of wall is covered in images, the tunnel hacked out of the mountain.

It was the absence of weathering that distinguished the hall from the Gate. The detail baffled the eye, from the mail of the Nonmen warriors to the hair of the human slaves. Scars striping knuckles. Tears lining supplicants’ cheeks. Everything had been rendered with maniacal intricacy. The effect was too lifelike, Achamian decided, the concentration too obsessive. The scenes did not so much celebrate or portray, it seemed, as reveal, to the point where it hurt to watch the passing sweep of images, parade stacked upon parade, entire hosts carved man for man, victim for victim, warring without breath or clamour.

This is Pir-Pahal, a room memorializing the Nonmen’s war with the Inchoroi. Achamian spots the traitor Nin’janjin (the guy who gave sold immortality to the Nonmen) and Cû’jara-Cinmoi. Even Sil, the Inchoroi King, is shown holding the Heron Spear which makes Achamian stumble. Mimara is unnerved by the sight of the Inchoroi. Achamian realizes, remembering the Great Ordeal marches for Golgotterath, that the war shown here has never ended.

Ten thousand years of woe.

Achamian explains that the Nonman carved their memories into the walls to last as long as they. Many are not happy that Achamian broke the “sacred” silence. They head deeper, covering miles. Then they come across a gate carved with a pair of wolves. These are more totemic than past carvings, each wolf carved three times to show them flowing from three different emotions to capture a living creature in stone. The writing here is Auja-Gilcûnni, the First Tongue. So ancient, not even the Nonmen can read it which “meant this gate had to be as ancient to Nonmen as the Tusk was to Men.” Achamian’s excitement quickly dwindles. He feels light-headed. He feels something here.

Something abyssal.

The gate swam in the Wizard’s eyes, not so much a portal as a hole.

Cleric increases his light’s brightness and tells them all to kneel. The Skin Eaters are shocked as Cleric kneels. The Nonman looks at them and shrieks at them to Kneel. Sarl, looking amused, can’t believe Cleric is serious.

“This was the war that broke our back!” the Nonman thundered. “This… This! All the Last Born, sires and sons, gathered beneath the copper banners of Siöl and flint-hearted King. Silverteeth! Our Tyrant-Saviour…” He rolled his head back and laughed, two lines of white marked the tears that scored his cheeks. “This is our…” The flash of fused teeth. “Our triumph.”

He shrunk, seemed to huddle into his cupped palms. Great silent sobs wracked him.

Embarrassed looks are traded by the humans. Everything looks strange, too, the shadows not lining up. Maybe a trick of the light or maybe not. “It was as if everyone stood in the unique light of some different morning, noon, or twilight.” Only Cleric, though, looks like he belongs here. Lord Kosoter kneels at Cleric’s side, putting his hand on the Nonman’s back and whispers to him. Sarl looks shocked by the intimacy of their captain’s action. Then the Nonman hisses out, “Yessss!”

“This is just a fucking place,” Sarl growled. “Just another fucking place…”

All of them could feel it, Achamian realized, looking from face to stricken face. Some kind of dolour, like the smoke of some hidden, panicked fire, pinching them, drawing their thoughts tight… But there was no glamour he could sense. Even the finest sorceries carried some reside of their artifice, the stain of the Mark. But there was nothing here, save the odour of ancient magicks, long dead.

Then, with a bolt of horror, he understood. The tragedy that had ruined these halls stalked them still. Cil-Aujas was a topoi. A place where hell leaned heavy against the world.

Achamian says this place is haunted but is cut off by Kiampas telling everyone to shut up. This is a dangerous place. All those companies had vanished in here. They might have Cleric and a guide, but that doesn’t mean they can’t lose control. They need to be ready to fight. It’s “a slog, boys, as deadly as any other.” Xonghis agrees from the rear. He picks up the bone of a dead Sranc that’s been eaten. More bones little the floor like “sticks beneath silt.” Lord Kosoter still whispers to Cleric, but the words sound hateful, complaining of a “miserable wretch.” Achamian stares at the wolves towering over the black hole and feels something.

When he blinked, he saw yammering figures from his Dreams.

A scalper asks what eats Sranc. At that moment, they realized that all the other companies saw this portent and still march on deeper. “Never to be seen again.” Then Galian wants to know why the gates have no doors.

But questions always came too late. Events had to be pushed past the point of denial; only then could the pain of asking begin.

They sleep near the Wolf Gate, Achamian’s light glowing down on them to “provide the illusion of security.” Kiampas arranges sentries while Cleric sits alone. Lord Kosoter falls asleep immediately, though Sarl sits beside him muttering insanely. Achamian sits by Mimara who stares at his light. She asks if he can read the script. He says no and she mocks his knowledge. He says no one can read it and realizes she’s teasing him.

“Remember this, Mimara.”

“Remember what?”

“This place.”

“Why?”

“Because it’s old. Older than old.”

“Older than him?” she asked, nodding towards the figure of Cleric sitting in the pillared gloom.

His momentary sense of generosity drained away. “Far older.”

They grow silent while Mimara stares at the Cleric. She asks what’s wrong with him. Achamian realizes he’s afraid to even think about Cleric let alone talk about him. He’s an Erratic and “every bit as perilous as traveling these halls, if not more so.” It reminds Achamian just how far he’ll go to unmasks Kellhus and all the lives he’s willing to risk. He tells her to hush and that Nonman has better hearing. He is irritated by Mimara’s presence. She threatens his twenty years of work, risking all “for a hunger she could never sate.” She switches to Ainoni and asks him to speak in a tongue he doesn’t know. He asks her if she was taken to Ainoni.

The curiosity faded from her eyes. She slouched onto her mat and turned without a word—as he knew she would. Silence spread deep and mountainous through the graven hollows. He sat rigid.

When he glanced up he was certain he saw Cleric’s face turn away from them…

Back to the impenetrable black of Cil-Aujas.

Achamian drams of the Library of Sauglish burning. Skafra, a dragon, swoops over it. Only it’s not Seswatha he’s dreaming as. It’s himself hanging all alone in the skies. “Where was Seswatha?”

The next day, they find a boy’s mummified corpse huddled like a kitten against the wall. There are offerings to Yatwer around his body meaning he had been here for a while. Soma added a coin and prays in his native tongue. He then looks to Mimara to see if she saw his “gallantry.” Achamian warns her to watch out for Soma. This is the first time they’ve spoken since last night. He finds it absurd considering the circumstances but “the small things never went away, no matter how tremendous the circumstances.” She disagrees saying it’s the quiet ones you have to worry about. Those men bide their time. She learned that in the Ainoni whorehouse. As they speak, some of the scalpers are arguing over who and how the child had died, sparking a sense of normalcy to the group.

The group continues. The scalpers, weirdly, start talking about which “trades were the hardest on the hands.” In the end, deciding to count feet, that fullers had it the worst spending their day in piss. (The ammonia in stale piss is used to wash clothes and the fullers mash the clothes up with their feet). Soma claims he saw a no-armed beggar. No one believes him since he always is telling stories. Galian has to outdo him saying he saw a headless beggar. That brings some laughter. Pokwas tells more chokes and everyone is laughing.

Judging by her expressions, Mimara found the banter terribly amusing, a fact not lost on the scalpers—Somandutta in particular. Achamian, however, found it difficult to concede more than a smile here and there, usually at turns that escaped the others. He could not stop pondering the blackness about them, about how garish and exposed they must sound to those listening in the deeps. A gaggle of children.

Someone listened. Of that much he was certain.

Someone or something.

Cleric, Lord Kosoter at his side, leads them through a labyrinth of the underground city. Some passages are straight or others are serpentine. The place smells of a tomb but the air is more than breathable, though “something animal within him cried suffocation.” He figures it’s the lack of sky and not his earlier fear. Soon, the joking falls into silence.

Water roars and they entered into a large room with a waterfall. Cleric leads them into a shrine. There are animals on the friezes that look more like demons to the scalpers. “It wasn’t monsters that glared from the walls, he knew, but rather the many poses of natural beasts compressed into one image.” The Nonman used to be obsessed with time especially “the way the present seemed to bear the past and future within it.”

Long lived, they had worshiped Becoming… the bane of Men.

The company refills their waterskins while Achamian drags Mimara around the room to stare at all the images. There are indents worn into the wall from Nonmen foreheads. Mimara asks what they pray to. He spots Cleric standing with his head bald, before a statue of a Nonman on a throne. The Nonman is speaking in his language to the statute, not praying. Achamian starts translating what he says. He is speaking to the king, saying how strong and mighty he is and then asking, “Where is your judgment now?”

The Nonman began laughing in his mad, chin-to-breast way. He looked to Achamian, smiled his inscrutable white-lipped smile. He leaned his head as though against some swinging weight. “Where is it, eh, Wizard?” he said in the mocking way he often replied to Sarl’s jokes. His features gleamed like hand-worn soapstone.

“Where does all the judgment go?”

Then without warning, Cleric turned to forge alone into the black, drawing his spectral light like a wall-brushing gown. Achamian gazed after him, more astounded than mystified. For the first time, it seemed, he had seen Cleric for what he was… Not simply a survivor of this ruin, but of a piece with it.

A second labyrinth.

Mimara asks who the Nonman on the throne is. He says the greats of their kings, Cû’jara-Cinmoi. She asks how he can tell since they all look exactly the same. He says they can tell the difference between each other. She asks how he knows, though. He points out it’s written on the throne. He cuts off her next question, saying he has to think. He’s worried since their lives are in an Erratic’s hand. “To someone who was not only insane but literally addicted to trauma and suffering.” Cleric says he’s Incariol, but Achamian still wonders who he is and “what would he do to remember.”

Kuss voti lura gaial, the High Norsirai would say of their Nonmen allies during the First Apocalypse. “Trust only the thieves among them.” The more honourable the Nonman, the more likely he was to betray—such was the perversity of their curse. Achamian had read accounts of Nonmen murdering their brothers, their sons, not out of spite, but because their love was so great. In a world of smoke, where the years tumbled into oblivion, acts of betrayal were like anchors; only anguish could return their life to them.

The present, the now that Men understood, the one firmly fixed at the fore of what was remembered, no longer existed for the Nonmen. They could find its semblance only in the blood and screams of loved ones.

Beyond the shrine, they move through a residential area. They soon find a thoroughfare that moved through the heart of the mountain. Seswatha had walked through them two thousand years ago and Achamian mourns what was lost. They are walking through the part of the mansion where the Nonmen had built their palaces and shown off their riches. Now it’s all ruined and the scalpers finally realize the scale of the place and how vulnerable they are to attacks.

They camp for the night, a few of the more adventurous poking around the nearby streets but staying within the sorcerous light. They start making camp, the scalpers sleeping in armor. Achamian finds himself with Galian and Pokwas. They ask him questions, clearly the pair had worked to corner him to get some answers out of the sorcerer. They’re eager to know about dragons and if one lived in here.

“Men have little to fear from dragons,” he [Achamian] explained. “Without the will of the No-God, they are lazy, selfish creatures. We Men are too much trouble for them. Kill one us today, and tomorrow you have a thousand hounding you.”

Galian asks if any dragons live and he says they certainly do. Many survived and they’re immortal. Galian presses and asks if you wander into its lair. The Wizard answers that they would just wait to leave. Especially if they think you have strength. Galian is still not convinced but Pokwas gets mad and says they’re not wild animals who would attack not knowing they’re a mistake. Dragons are smart. Achamian confirms that. He feels a reluctance to speak. Not shyness but, he soon realizes, shame. He didn’t want to be like the scalpers. Worse, he didn’t want their trust or admiration, which he’s now earned because they “risked their lives for his lie.”

Pokwas then asks what happened to the Nonmen, clearly worried about Cleric. Achamian is confused since he’s told this but Galian asks why their race has dwindled. Achamian grows angry at the belief of these men and snaps about how their Tusk calls Nonmen “False Men.” They’re cursed and their ancestors destroyed many of the Mansions out of religious fervor. Pokwas is confused, saying the Nonmen were already broken when the Five Tribes crossed the mountains. What did that to them. Achamian says the Inchoroi, and Galian asks if he means the Consult.

Achamian stared at the man, not quite stunned, but speechless all the same. That mere scalper could mention the Consult with the same familiarity as he might mention any great and obvious nation seemed beyond belief. It was a sign, he realized, of just how profoundly the world had changed during his exile. Before, when he still wore the robes of a Mandate Schoolman, all the Three Seas had laughed at him and his dire warnings of the Second Apocalypse. Golgotterath. The Consult. The Inchoroi. These had been names of his disgrace, utterance that assured the mockery and condescension of any who might listen. But now…

Now they were religion… The holy gospel of the Aspect-Emperor.

Kellhus.

Achamian explains that this was before the Consult and talks about the thousand-year-long war between the Nonmen and the Inchoroi. Achamian finds himself feeling the same awe as the scalpers as he discussed this in Cil-Aujas. “Voices could stir more than the living from slumber.” This causes Achamian not to be long-winded but concise, speaking about the Womb-Plague and the “bones of the survivors’ immortality.” Galian, it turns out, had trained for the Ministrate so knew much of this. As he spoke, he would keep an eye on Mimara. She’s talking with Soma. He’s very sociable and absurdly confident, the effects of his caste-noble upbringing. If they were at a king’s court, he would be a fawning courtier. Though he seems harmless, Achamian won’t let his guard down around the scalpers.

Galian asks why he hunts Sranc. He can’t imagine it’s the money since they all spend what they make in vice right away. Galian says Xonghis leaves his money with the Custom House. Pokwas cuts off Galian’s explanation saying Xonghis will never spend it.

But Galian was shaking his head. “Your question, sorcerer, is not so wise. Scalpers scalp. Whores whore. We never ask one another why. Never.”

“We even have a saying,” Pokwas added in his resonance, accented voice. “‘Leave it to the slog.’”

Achamian smiled. “It all comes back to the slog, does it?”

“Even kings,” Galian replied with a wink, “shod their feet.”

They then start talking about mundane stuff, arguing over inane things in “good-natured rivalry.” Just a way to pass the time. Achamian thought it strange that Cil-Aujas would be the host to such petty words after all these eons. “Perhaps that was why the entire company seemed to fall mute sooner than their weariness merited.” They can tell there are ears that are listening. Soma looks disappointed when Mimara settles down to sleep beside Achamian, like she had every night since joining the scalpers. This night, the pair end up sleeping face to face which feels uncomfortably intimate to Achamian and doesn’t bother Mimara. It reminds him how Esmenet could sit around casually nude talking about sex the way a professional would his craft.

“So many calluses where he had only tender skin.

Mimara is awed by how much effort it took to carve all those images. He says that they only started piling all those images on each other when they began forgetting. It’s their history. She asks why not paint a mural and he says they can’t see paintings. She frowns. She might get angry easy but she looks like she’ll be fair with what he says. “The Nonmen may resemble us, Mimara, but they are far more different than you can imagine.” She finds that frightening.

An old warmth touched him then, one that he had almost forgotten: the feeling carrying another, not with arms or loves or even hopes, but with knowledge. Knowledge that made wise and kept safe.

“At last,” he said, closing eyes that smiled. “She listens.”

He felt her fingers press his shoulder, as though to poke in friendly rebuke but really just to confirm. Something swelled through him, then, something that demanded he keep his eyes shut in the presence of sleep.

Had had been lonely, he realized. Lonely.

These past twenty years…

Achamian dreams of High King Celmomas telling Seswatha about Ishuäl where Celmomas’s “line can outlive me.” Seswatha thinks it’s not needed, confidence in the Ordeal being successful. They even have Nil’giccas, the Nonman king, with them. Seswatha asks if he stocked it with beer or concubines, and he says seeds. The High King smile falls and he says he hadn’t wanted to believe Seswatha, but now that he does believe. But he trails off, saying it’s just a premonition that has him worried.

This concerns Seswatha and says a king’s premonitions should “never be taken likely.” They are then interrupted by a young Nau-Cayûti who jumps into his father’s lap. Celmomas jokingly cajoles his son by saying, “What warrior leaps blindly into the arms of his foe?”

The boy chortled in the grinding way of children fending fingers that tickle. “You’re not my foe, Da!”

“Wait till you get older!”

The boy fights off the tickles. Achamian starts laughing, calling the boy a wolf. Nau-Cayûti finds a scroll in his father’s pocket and asks if it’s for him. Nope. It’s a “great and powerful secret” for Uncle Seswa. The boy begs to give it to Seswatha and, humoring his son, Celmomas agrees. The boy runs over and climbs into Seswatha’s lap saying, “Tell me, Uncle Seswa. Tell-me-tell-me! Who’s Mimara!”

Achamian bolted from his blanket with a gasp…

…only to find Incariol kneeling over him the deep shadow. A line of light rimmed his scalp and the curve of his cheek and temple; his face was impenetrable otherwise.

The Wizard made to scramble backward, but the Nonman clasped his shoulder with a powerful hand. The bald head lowered in apology, but the face remained utterly obscured in shadow. “You were laughing,” he whispered before turning away.

Achamian could only squint, slack-mouthed.

As dark as it was, he was certain that Cleric had sobbed as he drew away.

Achamian wakes up feeling far older. Every bit of him aches. He is envious of the Skin Eaters moving about with ease as they readied to depart. Worse, he’s horrified to realize he is in fact in Cil-Aujas and it wasn’t a dream. He feels the weight of the earth over him. Mimara asks him three times what’s wrong and “he decided he hated the young.” He envies their strength and their “certainty of ignorance.” He imagines them dancing happily down the halls while he limps after them. So make it worse, Soma treats him like a mule needing to be goaded. He snaps at him and regrets it as people laugh and feels a petty satisfaction for his retort even as he wonders if he’s getting a cold.

This does drive him into picking up his stuff. As he falls into the rhythm of marching, he relaxes and his mood improves, proving an old aphorism “one need only walk to escape them.” As he walks, he struggles to remember what Seswatha knew about Cil-Aujas, building a map in his mind. But it’s hazy. Even when Seswatha had been here, the place had been mostly abandoned. Still, Achamian thinks Cleric knows where they’re going. He feels they’re closer to the northern exit.

Within a watch, they leave behind the residential area and are back in the tunnels covered in friezes. This opens into a huge room that’s dark presses in, squeezing the party close together out of nervousness. Still, though it’s unnerving, Achamian feels relieved because this must be the Repositorium where the Nonmen “had shelved their dead like scrolls.” This proves Cleric knows where they’re going because Achamian knows where this place lies.

It takes time to cross the distance seeing nothing but the dust around their ankle. At one point, Cleric stops them and they just stand there listening to nothing. Not long after, they pass bones lying scattered. They’re so ancient they crumble. Evidence of a battle that had been fought here. Sarl laughs to cheer up his “boys” but no one responds.

Suddenly, they find a slop of debris blocking them. This is surprising to Cleric who starts talking with Kosoter. They can’t tell how big this obstruction is. Asward, one of the Scalpers, begins to babble in fear. Sarl watches as Galian and Xonghis try to talk the man down looking ready to kill the panicking man for breaking the Rule of the Slog.

Tired and annoyed, Achamian simply walked into the blackness, leaving his sorcerous light hanging behind him. When Mimara called out, he simply waved a vague hand. The residue of death stirred no horror in him—it was the living he feared. The blackness enveloped him, and when he turned, he was struck by an almost gleeful sense of impunity. The Skin Eaters clung to their little shoal of light, peered like orphans into the oceans of dark. Where they had seemed so cocksure and dangerous on the trail, now they looked forlorn and defenseless, a clutch of refugees desperate to escape the calamities that pursued them.

This, Achamian thought to himself, is how Kellhus sees us…

Knowing his voice chanting the words of sorcerery from the dark would frighten them, he wants to remind the scalpers who he was. He conjures the Bar of Heaven. A light so bright it revealed the entirety of the room. “The ruined cemetery of Cil-Aujas.” This reveals the debris before them is the collapsed ceiling. “The way was barred.” Lord Kosoter doesn’t seem pleased as the light goes out. Kiampas orders them to pitch camp though it was impossible to say if a day had passed.

Mimara grabs Achamian arm and, greedily, asks to learn that. He realizes she’s going to pester him for hours with her questions. For the first time, he feels like her interest is genuine and not angry calculations. “To be a student required a peculiar kind of capitulation, a willingness not simply to do as one was told, but to surrender the movements of one’s soul to the unknown complexities of another’s.” To let yourself be “remade.” He can’t resist being a teacher despite his misgivings.

But it’s not the time. He gently tells pushes her aside because he has to speak with Cleric and find out if the Nonman knew another way out or if they had to head back the way they came and abandon his mission. Worse, if Cleric pretends he knows a way or isn’t remembering things right, they will most likely die. As he’s explaining this to Mimara, Lord Kosoter grabs Achamian, pissed at the wizard’s antics.

It was impossible not to be affected by the man’s dead gaze, but Achamian found himself returning his stare with enough self-possession to wonder at the man’s anger. Was it simple jealousy? Or did the famed Captain fear that awe of another might undermine his authority?

Mimara comes to Achamian’s defense, asking if they should have just stumbled about blind. Lord Kosoter glances at her, making Mimara pale in fear. Achamian, however, agrees to not do anything else like that. Lord Kosoter maintains the stare for a few more heartbeats then glances at the Wizard and nods. Not at Achamian’s concession, but that Mimara will suffer in his place.

Your sins, the dead eyes whispered. Her damnation.

The scalpers sit around their fires. Lord Kosoter ran her whetstone across his sword, acting indifferent “as though he sat with a relative’s hated children.” The chatter is quiet, more whispers between people sitting beside each other. No one talks about their dire circumstances. Soon, though, everyone is quiet and stares at Cleric.

He suddenly stands up and says he remembers. Achamian thinks he means how to get them through Cil-Aujas but then he sees how the others react. Sarl is staring at Achamian and not Cleric as if to say “Now you shall understand us!”

“You ask yourselves,” Cleric continued, his shoulders slumped, his great pupils boring into the flames. “You ask, “What is this that I do? Why have I followed unknown men, merciless men, into the deeps?’ You do not ask yourself what it means. But you feel the question—ah, yes! Your breath grows short, your skin clammy. Your eyes burn for peering into the black, for looking to the very limit of your feeble vision…”

His voice was cavernous, greased with inhuman resonance. He spoke like one grown weary of his own wisdom.

Fear. This is how you ask the question. For you are Men, and fear is ever the way of your race questions great things.”

He speaks of a wise man, though he’s not sure if it was a year or a thousand years ago. He asked the wise man why humans feared the dark. The wise man says it’s because the darkness is “ignorance made visible” and men prize ignorance but only so long as they do not see it. Cleric sounds accusatory, a preacher castigating his flock. He explains how Nonmen find the dark holy, or they used to “before time and treachery leached all the ancient concerns from our souls…” Galian is shocked, asking about that. Cleric smiles.

“Of course… Think on it, my mortal friend. The dark is oblivion made manifest. And oblivion encircles us always. It is the ocean, and we are naught but silvery bubbles. It leans all about us. You see it every time you glimpse the horizon—though you know it not. In the light, our eyes are what blinds us. But in the dark—in the dark!—the line of the horizon opens… opens like a mouth… and oblivion gapes.”

Though the Nonman’s expression seemed bemused and ironic, Achamian, with his second, more ancient soul, recognized it as distinctively Cunoroi—what they called noi’ra, bliss in pain.

“You must understand,” Cleric said. “For my kind, holiness begins where comprehension ends. Ignorance stakes us out, marks our limits, draws the line between us and what transcends. For us, the true God is the unknown God, the God that outruns our febrile words, our flattering thoughts…”

He trails off. Only a few scalpers look Cleric in the eye. Most stare at the fire, the only thing making a sound. Then Cleric asks if they now understand why this journey is holy, a prayer. No one even breathed. “Have any of you ever knelt so deep?” After a few heartbeats, Pokwas asks how can they pray to something they don’t understand. Cleric scoffs at there being prayer. There is only worship of “that which transcends us by making idols of our finitude, our frailty…” He trails off and slumps.

Achamian fights his scowl. “To embrace mystery was one thing, to render it divine was quite another.” The words are too close to something that Kellhus believed and different from Nonmen mystery cults. Achamian can’t believe he’s never heard of Incariol before considering the depth of Cleric’s mark and how there are only a thousand or so Nonmen left alive.

Sarl makes a joke about the Nonmen’s god swallowing them while Lord Kosoter had spent the sermon sharpening his sword “as though he were the reaper who would harvest the Nonman’s final meaning.” Finally, he finishes and sheaths his sword. The fire makes his bearded face look demonic.

A sparking air of expectancy—the Captain spoke so rarely it always seemed you heard his voice for the first vicious time.

But another sound spoke in his stead. Thin, as if carried on a thread, exhausted by echoes…

The shell of a human sound. A man wailing, where no man should be.

With a new Bar of Heaven lighting the Repositorium, the scalpers search for the source of the cry. Cleric had pointed at the direction of the sound. No one speaks as they march in a line. They spend almost a watch walking. The darkness grows as they get further from the light. They don’t speak, sword and shields at the ready.

And the might Repositorium gaped on and on.

They find a man kneeling and staring at the Bar of Heaven. They encircle him, nervous. He doesn’t seem aware of them. He is covered in blood. Sarl yells at them to form a perimeter. Achamian, holding Mimara behind him, and the Captain approached with the other officers. Mimara notes the madman is holding onto a woman’s severed hand. Kiampas recognizes the man as a member of the Bloody Picks. That makes the men flinch then he croons to the severed hand that he had promised her light.

Xonghis asks what happened. The man is confused and Xonghis presses for more, asking about Captain Mittades. The man starts to stutter, struggling to speak, then babbles about how it’s too dark to see the blood. “You could only hear it!” the man cries. Sarl asks who he heard dying.

“There’s no light inside,” the man sobbed. “Our skin. Our skin is too thick. It wraps—like a shroud—it keeps the blackness in. And my heart—my heart!—it looks and looks and it can’t see!” A shower of spittle. “There’s nothing to see!”

He begins having a seizure and rants how you can only see by touch, waving the woman’s hand. He held onto Gamarrah’s hand. He never let go of her. He shrikes that he held on. Lord Kosoter rams his sword through the madman. The severed hand rolls away from the dead man’s grip.

Lord Kosoter spat. In a hiss that was almost a whisper, he said, “Sobber.”

Sarl’s face crunched into a wheezing laugh. “No sobbers!” he cried, bending his voice to the others. “That’s the Rule. No sobbers on the slog!”

Achamian glances around. Cleric stands with his mouth open as if tasting the air and Xonghis and Kiampas have expressionless faces Achamian wants to fake. He knows something is wrong. He tells Xonghis to cut the man open. Achamian needs to see his heart, the madman’s words echoing in his mind. Sarl orders Xonghis to do it while Lord Kosoter watches. He uses his heavy knife to crack open the ribs and then cuts out the heart. As he washes it, he suddenly stops and notices a scar or suture. He pushes it open.

A human eye stared at them.

Sarl curses and stumbles back. Xonghis carefully puts it on the man’s stomach as Kiampas asks what is going on. Achamian looks at Cleric and asks if he remembers the way. Cleric, after a moment, says yes while Kiampas wants to know what is going on and how Achamian knew. He answers, “This place is cursed.” Kiampas is not satisfied. He wants answers. Achamian starts to explain.

“What happened here—”

“Means nothing,” Lord Kosoter grated, his voice and manner as menacing as the dead eye watching. “There’s nothing here but skinnies. And they’re coming to shim our skulls.”

That settles matters. They don’t discuss it, but they all knew something had happened. Sarl keeps stalking about how Sranc had killed the Bloody Picks, but the Skin Eaters had Lord Kosoter and two “light-spitters.” He continues about how this is the “slog of all slogs” and nothing will stop them from getting to the Coffers.

Certainly not skinnies.

However, those who saw the heart trade worried looks. They can feel the threat of this place now. Mimara clutches at Achamian’s hand. She stares upward at the dark ceiling and seems young and fragile. He notices her skin is lighter than Esmenet’s and wonders who Mimara’s father was and why she had overcome the whore-shell’s magic to be born.

They would survive this, he told himself. They had to survive this.

They head back, the men left behind to watch the pack animals had worked themselves into a fright. Sarl and Kiampas orders them to ready to march despite how everyone is exhausted. “There would be no more sleep in the Black Halls of Cil-Aujas.” Hell is invading.

Achamian is hesitant to dispel his bar despite how maintaining it takes some concentration. As they ready to leave, Mimara asked what this is but he says nothing and releases the Bar of Heaven. Sarl then announces the plan he and Lord Kosoter had come up with, saying odds are this place is huge and they won’t run into what killed the Bloody Picks, but they’re marching “on the sharp.” They’ll march like ghosts.

These words, Achamian was quite certain, had been directed at him.

The walk around the collapse and leave it behind. Mimara presses him for answers on the eye. She saw no Sorcery. He asks what she knows of the Plains of Mengedda and what the First Holy War found there. She talks about how the earth vomited the dead. He is momentarily remembering how he and Esmenet fled the Plains and camped by themselves. They had loved each other.

And declared themselves man and wife.

He says this place is like Mengedda. She makes a sarcastic remark like that explained anything. He explains how the boundary between here and the Outside are breaking down and that this is a topoi. “We literally walk the verge of Hell.” She doesn’t immediately answer and he thinks he silenced her.

“You mean the Dialectic,” she said after several thoughtful steps. “The Dialectic of Substance and Desire…”

Achamian is shocked to hear her say that phrase and sarcastically says she’s read Ajencis. That work was one of the philosopher’s great treaties on metaphysics. He saw the difference between the World and the Outside was in degrees. “Where substance in the World denied desire—save where the latter took the form of sorcery—it became ever more pliant as one passed through the spheres of the Outside, where the dead-hoarding realities conformed to the wills of the Gods and Demons.” Mimara starts talking about how Kellhus had encouraged her to read from his library. She thought she could be like her father. She’s looking for pity but he feels bitter and asks who that would be.

They walked without speaking for what seemed a long while. It was odd the way anger could shrink the great frame of silence into a thing, nasty and small, shared between two people. Achamian could feel it, palpable, binding them pursed lip to pursed lip, the need to punish the infidelities of the tongue.

Why did he let her get the best of him?

As they walk through the Repositorium, Achamian wonders if they’re not walking deeper into hell. He distracts himself by thinking about what he’s read about the Afterlife both from the Tusk and other treaties. He even wonders if Kellhus truly went into the Outside as rumors suggest. The entire time, Mimara walks beside him and he could ask her if Kellhus truly has the severed heads of demons hanging from his belt. If he asked, it would heal the hurt, but he had tried not to learn her opinions. “The simple act of asking would say much.”

Instead, he rubbed his face, muttering curses. What kind of rank foolishness was this? Pining over harsh words to a cracked and warped woman!

Mimara breaks the silence by saying Achamian doesn’t trust the Nonman. He adopts an expression of “annoyance and mystification.” It’s his “Mimara-face.” But he realizes she’s making the overtures of peace. He tells her, brusquely, it’s not the tame. He’s shocked she could care about that given what was happening around them. He thinks this makes her seem crazier. That’s the problem. She’s smart but her personality is broken. She doesn’t give up and asks if it’s his Mark that makes Achamian afraid.

Achamian instead mumbles a song from his childhood. He misses those innocent times as Mimara says when she glimpses Cleric out of the corner of her eye he appears “like something monstrous, a shambling wreck, black and rotted and… and…”

Horror at her words focuses her attention on him. She gives him a helpless look, failing to better describe. Then he asks her is she can “taste his [Cleric’s] evil.” She always not always. Then he continues on that he sometimes looks that way to her as well. She asks if he sees the same.

He shook his head in a way he hoped seemed lackadaisical. “No. What I see is what you see typically, the shadow of ruin and decay, the ugliness of the deficient and incomplete. You’re describing something different. Something moral as opposed to merely aesthetic.” He paused to catch his breath. What new madness was this? “What antique Mandate scholars called the Judging Eye.”

He watches to see if that pleases her but he sees concern. She’s been worried about this for a while. She asks what it is. He tells her that she sees sin. He starts laughing. She grows indignant at that. He is laughing at the irony of her having this power and being Kellhus’s step-daughter. She proves that Kellhus has lied about the Old Law being revoked. He remembers the Mandate Catechism: “Though you lose your soul, you shall gain the world.”

“Think,” he continued. “If sorcerery is no longer abomination, then…”Let her think it was this, he told himself. Perhaps it would even serve to… discourage her. “Then why would you see it as such?”

Achamian realizes they’ve stopped walking and the Skin Eaters have left them behind. He can just see them at the edge of his light, Cleric’s even dimmer. He’s alone with Mimara. “Silence sealed them as utterly as the blackness.” She admits that she knows there’s something wrong with what she sees. It’s not how any book she’s read described the Mark. She explains that “when I see it, it burns so… so… I mean, it strikes me so much deeper than at any other time.” This feeling is too strong not to have been recorded. She thought something was wrong with her. Achamian is shaken by not only having her show up but that she can see the damnation of sorcery. He thought the Whore of Fate had left him alone.

“And now you’re saying,” she began hesitantly, “that I’m a kind of… proof?” She blinked in the stammering manner of people find their way through unsought revelations. “Proof of my stepfather’s falsity?”

She was right… and yet what more proof did he, Drusas Achamian, need? That night twenty years ago, on the eve of the First Holy War’s final triumph, the Scylvendi Chieftain had told him everything, given him all the proof he would ever need, enough to fuel decades of bitter hate—enough to deliver these scalpers to their doom. Anasûrimbor Kellhus was Dûnyain, and the Dûnyain cared for naught but domination. Of course he was false.

It was for her sake that the Wizard trembled. She possessed the Judging Eye.

He remembers that night where they had sex and how sordid it was. He sees her as a pale image of her mother that he’s delivered unto this torment. He says they have more immediate concerns. Cleric. She doesn’t agree but he has to be careful how he tells her about her ability. As he does, he sees the irony that he has to protect everyone from Cleric’s madness while leading everyone to their deaths. He tells her he’s Ishroi, a noble. She can tell he’s hiding something because he’s talking about his fears to her, something he doesn’t do.

He tells her how Ishroi are remembered in history. He’s never heard of Incariol, not even in the Nonmen’s Pit of Years. She glances to Cleric’s light in the distance, making the Skin Eaters shadows moving in the dark.

They had traveled past the point of study grounds.

Resigned, she says the Judging Eye is a curse. Achamian can feel fate driving him forward. He’s not in control of what’s happening. He feels trapped by them. He says he only knows legends about it. Instead of answering, he points out they’re getting left behind. Then they realize Sarl is in the dark watching them. He says they’ll speak later. Mimara glares “naked fury” at Sarl.

Wanting to head off any confrontation, he tells her to take his light. She’s shocked, but he says she can “grasp it with your soul, even without any real sorcerous training…” She should already feel the possibility of doing it.

For the bulk of his life, Achamian had shared his calling’s contempt of witches. There was no reason for this hatred, he knew, outside of the capricious customs of the Three Seas. Kellhus had taught him as much, one of the many truths he had used to better deceive. Men condemned others to better celebrate themselves. And what could be easier to condemn than women?

But as he watched her eyes probe inward, he was struck by the practicality of her wonder, the way her expression made this novelty look like a recollection. It was almost as if women possessed a kind of sanity that men could only find on the fir side of tribulation. Witches, he found himself thinking, were not only a good thing, they could very well be a necessity. Especially the witch-to-be before him.

She can feel it. Sarl just watches, and Achamian is grateful that he has a chance to explain this to her. He says it’s the Surillic Point, a small Cant. He explains how she can focus on it, how to take it, as if she was walking together with it. For a while, it’ll be difficult, but she’ll get used to it “like any other reflex.” She grabs it and almost trips in her excitement. Then she marches past Sarl not hiding her contempt as she heads to catch up with the others with grace.

And she glowed, the old Wizard thought, not only against the stalking black, but against so man memories of harm.

Achamian moves to Sarl, the pair falling more and more into darkness, and asks what the man wants. It’s a message from Lord Kosoter. Achamian fights the urge to punch the man, a common reaction when he’s near Sarl. The message is that Achamian is too honest and arrogant. Achamian repeats those words. “There was something deadening about the discourse of fools.” He’s losing patience. Sarl then says he and Achamian are “learned men” which he scoffs out. Sarl bemoans his diplomacy being met with rudeness. He then explodes, snarling, “Fine fucking words spoken to fine fucking fools!”

Achamian believes Sarl is a threat. That the man is mad. He contemplates killing him with sorcery. Sarl berates Achamian for lighting up the Repositorium. Lord Kosoter knew what this place was and didn’t need Achamian scaring the men. The darkness was a shield. Sarl then tells Achamian to remember the first rule.

There was reason in what he was saying. But then that was the problem with reason: It was as much a whore as Fate. Like rope, you could use it to truss or snare any atrocity…

Another lesson learned at Kellhus’s knee.

He asks what is the first rule. “The Captain always knows.” Achamian realizes that Sarl worships Lord Kosoter. It disgusts Achamian to be marching with fanatics again. Achamian shouts belligerently asking if Sarl thinks he can intimidate him. He’s a Holy Veteran like Kosoter. “I have spat at the feet of the Aspect-Emperor himself!” He has his Gnosis and Sarl thins to threaten him. But Sarl just says you’re outside your expertise. “This is the slog, not the Holy War…” or a school. He explains their survival depends on all of them having resolve. Achamian risks breaking the men and dragging them all down. This is his only warning.

Achamian knew he should be polite, conciliatory, but he was too weary, and too much had happened. Wrath had flooded all the blind chambers of his heart.

“I am not one of you! I am not a Schoolman, and I am certainly not a Skin Eater! This is, my friend, is not your—”

His anger sputtered, blew away and outward like smoke. Horror plunged in.

Sarl takes a few more steps before he realizes that they’re not alone. He asks what it is. In the past, Achamian has tried to tell people what it’s like seeing the Mark, how he could see more. It’s hard to describe. Right now, he’s sensing something. He looks down and feels all the miles of tunnels beneath them. He can sense them because something is moving through them. A “constellation of absences” travels them.

Chorae…

Tears of God, at least a dozen of them, borne by something that prowled the halls beneath their feet.

The riot of thought and passion that so often heralded disaster. The apprehension of meaning to be had where no sense could be found, not because he was too simple, but because he was too small and the conspiracies were too great.

Sarl was little more than a direction in the viscous black. “Run!” the Wizard cried. “Run!”

My Thoughts

First off, we have gone to Spring and now it’s no longer the 19 New Imperial Year but 20. However, it’s still 4132 of the Tusk. So it looks like these calendars have different new years.

We all like to boast. We are rarely confronted with the situation that proves us liars. Skin Eaters are realizing they are not the biggest bads strutting around the land.

We see Sarl trying to deny this place is special, but they are all feeling it. This leads us to the chapter’s epigram. Small men like Sarl are feeling the terror. It’s going to feed the passion of revelation. What will they make of it? Right now, Sarl is clinging to the fact that places weren’t special. He’s refusing to see the things like the weird way the light only seems to fall naturally on Cleric. Only he belongs. This place recognizes the humans as interlopers.

The quote about questions always come too late is great. They’ve jumped into a situation and only now are asking questions they should have before. But it’s too late. They’re in the topoi. They’re about to walk through hell. “Terror is the passion of revelation.” Questions are only asked when fear gives you pause.

Achamian is as dangerous to the scalpers as the Nonman is. That’s why he doesn’t want to think about Cleric being an erratic. He’s using the scalpers and leading them to their deaths. Mimara, too. His obsession is as insane as Cleric’s madness.

Now that is an interesting dream. Achamian, not Seswatha, dreaming of the past. I suspect this is the effect of the topoi. It can cause weird stuff.

“…the small things never went away, no matter how tremendous the circumstances.” If there’s one thing 2020 has taught me is the truth of that statement.

The quiet ones are always thinking. They’re simmering. Bottling up their emotions.

We see that Soma, though, is taking interest in Mimara. The Skin-Spy must be figuring out she’s needed for the prophecy. (Which one, I don’t recall ever getting an answer on this, but I need to reread the later books more).

“Long-lived, they had worshiped Becoming… the bane of Men.” I am honestly not understanding what Bakker means here. The Nonmen worship Becoming. They worship the entirety of existence. The past, present, and future. They see it all at once. They want to be it all. Men don’t want to think about the future. Not really. We live in the present. We forget the past, remembering only the good stuff, and we don’t think about the future so we can do the things in the present we know are bad for ourselves.

Cleric is like a second labyrinth because he’s a Nonman, which means how he thinks is inscrutable to a human. Then he’s an Erratic after that, so even Cleric doesn’t know his own mind. He’s lost, forgotten so much that he has lost himself.

Nonmen kill because then they will remember the person they’ve killed since the betrayal will be a trauma, and those they remember after everything else has gone. It’s messed up. Cruel. They are a dead race that is just taking such a long time in dying. It’s a terrible thing the Inchoroi did to them. They killed all the women (there never seem to be female Inchoroi besides maybe their Ark), and let the men live forever to slowly become like the Inchoroi: living only for bestial needs.

Lazy dragons. It’s a good reason why they aren’t out marauding. Too much work. It sounds exhausting to me. I’d be there with those dragons.

Achamian has lived all his life with the Consult being the Mandate’s secret. What they war against and what they’re mocked for believing. Now these unlettered scalpers know about it. Know enough to ask if the Inchoroi are the Consult. That would be surreal for anyone. He has been out of the loop for twenty years. It’s like when you’re mom knows what a Karen is. Things have changed.

“Even kings […] shod their feet.” That reminds me of the origin of high-heeled shoes. There was a time, especially at the Parisian court, where a symbol of power was wearing ridiculous shoes that were not comfortable to walk in for any length of time. Men, including the king, would wear high heels to show that they didn’t have to walk around all day like the commoners.

I like this bit about Nonmen not being able to see paintings. It shows how human and Nonmen brains work differently. They have no trouble seeing an image carved to show different poses all at once as a complete entity where it seems chaotic and abstract to humans, but the ability to see shapes on flat surfaces is impossible. Pareidolia, it seems, doesn’t exist for Nonmen. Pareidolia is what lets humans see shapes in flat or flat-seeming objects like clouds or stains on the wall or a collection of oils on a canvas. Pareidolia is also what lets us read, though. So clearly the Nonmen had a way to read that used some other principal. Or, perhaps, the simplicity of their alphabet or syllabary they use is easy for them to tell apart.

I think the moment that Mimara pokes him in the shoulder they’ve become that father and daughter relationship they have for the rest of the series. He’s her step-father. Of course, it’s Bakker, so she’s pregnant with his kid. But it’s that moment where he stops being lonely. He’s missed out on his family for twenty years, what he had with Esmenet for these few months.

A father telling his son that when he’s an adult, they might be enemies. Sons have to rebel against their fathers to find their own way. They can war with each other. Maybe it never comes more to arguments, but when you’re dealing with royalty, well, sons have deposed fathers before.

So, Achamian’s dreams are blending with Seswatha’s. I am convinced Kellhus hypnotizing Achamian to speak with Seswatha broke down the walls between them. So Achamian’s desires are guiding what Seswatha dreams about and now it’s getting worse and worse. We’ll see Achamian dream as Nau-Cayûti.

I’d be terrified of walking up to a crazy Nonman over me. How long has it been since Cleric laughed? Erratics can only laugh in madness, not out of the simple joy brought about by a child’s innocence. Who wouldn’t cry deprived of those memories?

I think a watch is a few hours.

“…fear is ever the way your race questions great things.” Cleric’s quote feeds right back to our epigram from Ajencis. Fear is how we react. It’s how we’re controlled. How governments get us to go against our best interest, how media beats us into the path of knowledge they want to master. Fear is ingrained in us, our survival instinct that can be so easily twisted and abused by the callous, the greedy, and the sociopaths. Fear is what keeps the scalpers from asking themselves why they’re doing this insanity. Fear of being different. Fear of consequences of questioning why they’re doing this insanity. Fear of losing out on all the treasures of the coffers. Achamian has lied to them. He’s a merciless man leading them all to their deaths for his selfish goals.

Humans like not knowing how things work but we hate to have this pointed out to us. Every day, we use devices we do not know how they work, eat food that we do not know how they were manufactured, and receive news without understanding how the journalist crafts their narratives. We like ignorance. Being blissfully unaware just how blissfully unaware we truly are about how the world works around us. Politics, media, culture, food production, manufacturing practices, and more. That wise man was right about us humans.

The Nonmen believed in oblivion after death. This appears to be the same thing that the Inchoroi and the Dûnyain Mutilated are after. Even Kellhus, perhaps, wants oblivion. But Kellhus doesn’t want to commit genocide to achieve. Neither do the Nonmen, interestingly. At no time did they try to wipe out the humans who’s collective belief created Damnation for the entire universe.

Cleric is speaking almost Dûnyain theology. A departure from Achamian knows about the Nonmen mystery. This is another clue that Kellhus has been in contact with the Nonmen, Cleric in particular. Who is, of course, the King of Istherebinth. The last great Nonman who has fallen finally into being an Erratic. He was then placed in Achamian’s path for his mission.

Why does Kellhus want Achamian to succeed at his mission? I suspect that Kellhus always intended to die at Golgotterath. He just didn’t die the way he planned. Achamian was supposed to be the start of breaking down the mythology of Kellhus after he had accomplished his mission of ending Damnation. Or, so I think.

The Nonmen knew the direction the shout came from. Humans would have a hard time in such a vast space with all the echoes. Bakker doesn’t point this out, but it’s a nice bit of world-building about Nonmen. They like living underground. They’re a blend of dwarves and elves, so having the ability to deal with echoes would be useful.

Really want to know how long a watch is. An hour? They’re creeping along, but still, how far away was that shout if they’ve walked an hour and not found the source.

I remember reading this part the first time and finding a human eye on the guy’s heart was freaky. Bakker had really captured the eeriness of being underground. The fear and terror of the unknown and then throws somebody horror in to ramp up the tension. They’ve gone too deep and are now trapped with something evil.

Light-spitters. What a great slang for sorcerers in this world.

Mimara clutches at Achamian’s hand. Just as the woman Gamarrah had held to the dead Pick’s hand. Makes you think if the same will happen to Mimara. Nice bit of writing there. Subtle but it can eat at the back of your mind and ramp up the tension.

Achamian is really starting to see Mimara as a daughter as she holds his hand. We also see that Mimara is a fighter. She survived the birth control that should have prevented her conception.

I would be a bad wizard if I had to maintain a spell the same way as holding a number in my mind for more than a few minutes.

“Where substance in the World denied desire—save where the latter took the form of sorcery—it became ever more pliant as one passed through the spheres of the Outside, where the dead-hoarding realities conformed to the wills of the Gods and Demons.” This is probably one of the clearest descriptions of Bakker’s cosmology of his afterlife system. Substance versus Desire. And topoi, then, is where the two meet.

You could say it is the difference between Intellect and Passion. Dûnyain versus Inchoroi. And where do they meet? The No-God. The goal both the Mutilated and the Consult work towards.

I think Mimara represents everything Achamian lost when Esmenet chose Kellhus. His family. Mimara wants him to be her father, but he’s bitter because she’s not really his father. They’re both broken by Esmenet in different ways and though they get close, they can’t help but hurt each other, either.

We have our first hint of the Judging Eye from her. Seeing how damned Cleric is, when she describes what she sees out of the corner of her eye.

I think sorcery is still damned because not enough people truly believe that. I think normal people might have heard it, but in their hearts, they don’t. Most probably never really have. All those millions of peasants that just are trying to survive, many of them in the grip of old cults like the Yatwerians.

When Achamian sees Mimara as a “pale image of her mother” right after thinking about the night they had sex, he realizes she’s pregnant. It’s her destiny to have a stillborn child because she possesses the Judging Eye.

Sarl and Achamian both think the others are fools, though for a different reason. Sarl’s all about survival, and Achamian does things that endanger it because he has his Gnosis. Lighting up the Repositorium, for instance, could have drawn so much death on them if the place is full of Sranc. Sarl, of course, acts as the jester to prod and cajole and prick at people to keep them off-balance so Lord Kosoter can maintain his control. Both men have their reasons for doing things.

“There was reason in what he was saying. But then that was the problem with reason: It was as much a whore as Fate. Like rope, you could use it to truss or snare any atrocity…” This reminds me of an epigram from the first series that, essentially says, Reason is the slave to Desire. We use reason to rationalize the acts we do no matter how evil so that we can live with the fiction that we’re not evil and are doing nothing wrong.

People can be strong, but take them out of what they know, they can become weak. The intelligent foolish. And in those circles, the foolish can suddenly become wise. It’s easy for the arrogant to think they are the master of all their circumstances, but they’re not.

This was a great chapter of building tension from all sources. Cleric’s growing threat, Lord Kosoter, and the topoi around them.

If you want to read more, click here for Chapter Fifteen!

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When the Stormriders attack …

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All he wants is to marry Charlene, who he has loved since they were kids. Building a farm and starting a family sounds perfect. There’s just one problem, his best friend Vel adores her, too. He’d give anything for peace.

But wanting the Stormriders to stop attacking…

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For love, for his people, and especially for the life he wants, Ary makes a decision that will change everything.

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Reread of The Judging Eye: Chapter Thirteen

Reread of The Aspect-Emperor Series

Book 1: The Judging Eye

by R. Scott Bakker

Chapter Thirteen

Condia

Welcome to Chapter Thirteen of my reread. Click here if you missed Chapter Twelve!

Damnation follows not from the bare utterance of sorcery, for nothing is bare in this world. No act is so wicked, no abomination so obscene, as to lie beyond the salvation of my Name

—ANASÛRIMBOR KELLHUS, NOVUM ARCANUM

My Thoughts

So we have Kellhus’s justification for why sorcerery is cool these days. And, if I understand the rules of this world, if enough humans believe this, it will happen. We know the Inchoroi wrote the Tusk to make their task easier, and before the Tusk there were Shamans. Prophets and Sorcerer both. But then the Tusk comes along and condemns them. It’s the dominant belief, and now Sorcery is damned. However, I don’t think Kellhus accomplished his goal of actually making sorcery not damnable. Too many people still believe the opposite. Either way, he is convincing the Few that they are not going to be damned and that’s all he cares about.

Now, how does this quote relate to the chapter? Well, Sorweel is getting to know his new tutor in this chapter. A Mandate Schoolman. He’s dealing with something he considers an abomination. This is to give us the start of the New Empire’s view on it versus Sorweel’s, which he’ll be grappling with.

Is Kellhus God and thus able to make that proclamation?

Early Spring, 19 New Imperial Year (4132 Year-of-the-Tusk), Momemn

Sorweel’s people despise scholars, calling them hunched ones and see it as a disease. None are weaker than a “hunched one.” Sorweel’s new tutor isn’t just a hunched one but a Three Seas Schoolman. This is a problem. Sorweel believes the Tusk that “sorcerers were the walking damned.” Still, he has always been secretly fascinated with sorcery. He wonders, “What kind of man would exchange his soul for that kind of diabolical power?”

As a result, Eskeles was both an insult and a kind of illicit opportunity—a contradiction, like all things Three Seas.

Not long after the day’s march started, Eskeles would begin teaching Sorweel Sheyic. It’s mind-numbing tedium. He comes to dread these lessons. He even asks Zsoronga to hide him, but the Successor-Prince betrays Sorweel, wanting to be able to speak to Horse-King without going through Obotegwa. Sorweel finds Eskeles strange. He’s fat by Sakarpi standards but there are fatter men in the Great Ordeal. Despite wearing silk and leggings, his robe is open leaving his chest exposed to the cold. But he never seems cold. He’s a friendly and merry man. He’s hard to dislike despite being a sorcerer and a Ketyai.

Eskeles learned Sakarpi while being a Mandate spy posing as Three Sea traders to the city. He says it was a dreadful time. Sorweel thinks because it doesn’t have “Southron luxuries” but it’s because of the Chorae horde. He calls them trinkets.

“Trinkets?”

“Yes. That’s what we Schoolmen like to call them—Chorae, that is. For much the same reason you Sakarpi call Sranc—what is it? Oh, yes, grass-rats.”

Sorweel frowned. “Because that’s what they are.”

Despite his good humour, Eskeles had this sly way of appraising him [Sorweel] sometimes, as if he were a map fetched from the fire. Something that had to be read around burns.

“No-no. Because that’s what you need them to be.”

Sorweel understood full well what the fat man meant—men often used glib words to shrink great and terrible things—but the true lesson, he realized, was quite different. He resolved never to forget that Eskeles was a spy. That he was an agent of the Aspect-Emperor.

Sorweel discovers learning another language is hard as he discovers grammar for the first time. He learns how his own language is constructed so he can then learn how others are. He pretends to be aloof (he is with a hunched one) but is disturbed how he could know grammar without knowing it. “And if something as profound as grammar could escape his awareness—to the point where it had simply not existed—what else was lurking in the nethers of his soul?”

So he came to realize that learning a language was perhaps the most profound thing a man could do. Not only did it require wrapping different sounds around the very movement of your soul, it involved learning things somehow already known, as though much of what he was somehow existed apart from him. A kind of enlightenment accompanied these first lessons, a deeper understanding of self.

It still was boring. Luckily, even Eskeles would tire of it by afternoon. Then Sorweel could satisfy his own curiosity. All save the one that fascinated him the most: sorcerery. He learned about the various people of the Great Ordeal. As he did, Sorweel realized that Eskeles “discussed all these people with the confidence and wicked cynicism of someone who had spent his life traveling.” And, despite being vain, Eskeles wasn’t arrogant. He’s honest about the strengths and weaknesses of each nation.

Finally, after several days, Sorweel dares to ask about Kellhus, starting with an abridged version of the emissaries to Zeüm who slit their throats. He’s awkward as he wants to know what Kellhus is. Eskeles nods as if he had worried this question would come up and tells Sorweel to come with him. Since the Kidruhil ride on the front of the left flank, it doesn’t take the pair long bore they are riding ahead of the host. They climb a knoll from where the plains stretch to the horizon, the land looking dead. No longer the green of the lands to the south. Eskeles point out and asks what is out there. He peers out and then sees the great herds of elk that cover the plains in countless numbers. Then Eskeles turns and points back at the Great Ordeal and asks what that is. He turns back and is confused. He sees countless men stretching back to the horizon.

“The Great Ordeal,” he heard himself say.

“No.”

Sorweel searched his tutor’s smiling eyes.

“This,” Eskeles explained, “this… is the Aspect-Emperor.”

Sorweel keeps staring at them but he doesn’t understand. Eskeles says there are many ways to divide up the world, saying this part belongs to this man and so on. But what if you did that with his thoughts. Where does a man’s idea begin and end? Sorweel’s brain hurts, still confused. Eskeles dismounts and starts fishing in his mule’s rump pack. He produces a small vase. Sorweel is dismissive of it as “another luxury of the Three Seas.” Eskeles tells him to come and then searches for a stone rising out of the grass. He calls the vase a philauta used for sacramental libations. As he raises it, Sorweel sees little golden tusks on it and hears something rattling inside. Sorweel flinches when Eskeles shatters it on the stone. He tells Sorweel to stud the various pieces. Eskeles picks a splinter up.

“Souls have shapes, Sorweel. Think of how I differ from you”—he raised another splinter to illustrate the contrast—“or how you differ from Zsoronga,” he said, raising yet another. “Or”—he plucked a far larger fragment—“think of all the Hundred Gods, and how they differ from one another, Yatwer and Gilgaöl. Or Momas and Ajokli.” With each name, he raised yet another coin-sized Fragment.

“Our God… the God, is broken into innumerable pieces. And this is what gives us life, what makes you, me, even the lowliest slave, sacred.” He cupped several pieces in a meaty palm. “We’re not equal, most assuredly not, but we remain fragments of God nonetheless.

He asks Sorweel if he understands. The boy does. More than he wanted. “The Kiünnatic Priests had only rules and stories—nothing like this.” Eskeles makes too much sense. He wants to object, but he can’t. Eskeles continues his lesson by asking what is the Aspect-Emperor. He gathers up a chipped replica of the original that had been inside rattling around.

“Huh?” The Schoolman laughed. “Eh? Do you see? The soul of the Aspect-Emperor is not only greater than the souls of Men, it possesses the very shape of the Ur-Soul.”

“You mean… your God of Gods.”

Our God of Gods?” the sorcerer repeated, shaking his head. “I keep forgetting that you’re a heathen! I suppose you think Inri Sejenus is some kind of demon as well!”

Sorweel feels embarrassed and says he’s trying to understand. Eskeles says they’ll discuss Inri Sejenus and says Kellhus is soul is the same shape as the God. He prompts Sorweel to say, “He is the God in small…” That terrifies Sorweel saying it. Eskeles is proud and says this is why people cut their throats for him and all these tens of thousands march behind him. “Anasûrimbor Kellhus is the God of Gods, Sorweel, come to walk among us.” This causes Sorweel to collapse to his knees. He feels fragile, on the verge of falling apart.

Eskeles continues how sorcerers used to be damned. “We Schoolmen traded a lifetime of power for an eternity of torment… But now?” Sorweel thinks of his father being killed by sorcery and wonders if Harweel is still burning from it because sorcerery is damned. However, Eskeles’s eyes are full of “uncompromising joy.” It’s the look of someone who has been rescued. He speaks with worship now.

“Now I am saved.”

Love. He spoke with love.

He keeps thinking that Kellhus is God walking among them as he eats his meal with Porsparian. “Men often make decisions in the wake of significant events, if only to pretend they had some control over their own transformations.” So Sorweel decides to ignore it, as if being rude to Eskeles would stop the process. Then the youth laughs but it peters out.

Then he finally decided to think Eskeles’s thoughts, if only to pretend they had not already possessed him. What was the harm of thinking?

As a boy, he once found a poplar seed beneath a bush. He would watch it as it slowly grew, destroying the bush in the process. When his city fell, it had become a big tree and he realizes, “There was harm in thinking.” He feels what Eskeles has spoken is true. The Mandate Schoolman’s explanation makes too much sense. That even Sorweel is a piece of God. He realizes this is why the Kiünnatic Priests had demanded Kellhus’s missionaries to be burned.

Had they been a bush, fearful of the tree in their midst?

As he lies beneath his blankets, he relieves his first meeting with Kellhus and fears that he’ll come to believe in Kellhus like the others.

When he wakes up, he feels relief instead of a clutch of fear. For a moment, there is only silence and then the Interval tolls for morning prayers. Soon there are drills and his pony is finally responding to Sakarpic riding commands. He has no problem with the drills this morning and is called Horse-King.

When chance afforded he leaned forward to whisper the Third Prayer to Husyelt into the pony’s twitching ear. “One and one are one,” he explained to the beast afterward. “You are learning, Stubborn. One horse and one man make one warrior.”

He suddenly feels shame. He’s not a man since he never has, and never will, go through his Elking. “A child forever without the shades of the dead to assist him.” He glances at the wonder of the Great Ordeal and feels small.

Later, as he’s riding with Zsoronga and Obotegwa, he asks what the Successor-Prince thinks of the Ordeal. Zsoronga thinks it’s their end. Sorweel asks if Zsoronga thinks their goal is a real one. The Ordeal believes it. He’s not sure how Sorweel sees it from his one city, but Zeüm is a nation mightier than any other and he’s never seen anything like this. No Satakhan could ever have gathered so many and marched them to the world’s end. This event will be “[r]ecalled to the end of all time.” After some silence, Sorweel asks what Zsoronga thinks of the Anasûrimbor.

The Successor-Prince shrugged, bunt without, Sorweel noticed, a quick glance around him. “Everyone ponders them. They are like the mummers the Ketyai are so found of, standing before the amphitheater of the world.”

Everyone thinks he’s a Prophet or God. Sorweel asks but what does Zsoronga think. He quotes the treaty Kellhus made with Zsoronga’s father. Kellhus is the “Benefactor of High Holy Zeüm, Guardian of the Son of Heaven’s Son.” Sorweel presses for a real answer. Zsoronga asks what Sorweel thinks about Kellhus.

“He’s so many things to so many people,” Sorweel found himself blurting. “I know not what to think. All I know is that those that time with him, any time with him whatsoever, think him some kind of God.”

As Zsoronga confers with Obotegwa in their tongue, Sorweel realizes that Zsoronga is a spy and he, Sorweel, is but a distraction to the Successor-Prince. Zsoronga looks at Sorweel like the Successor-Prince wants the Horse-King to be a trustworthy ally.

Finally, Zsoronga asks if Sorweel’s heard of Shimeh’s fall in the First Holy war. Sorweel shrugs and says not much. Zsoronga brings up Achamian’s “forbidden book.” Zsoronga explains that Achamian had been Kellhus’s teacher and that the Empress had been Achamian’s wife, stolen from him by Kellhus. He adds how Achamian declared Kellhus a fraud and a liar. Sorweel has heard something of that. Achamian only lives because “the love and shame of the Empress prevent his execution.” Zsoronga laments that while his book rings true, it’s also the bitter account of a cuckold that casts doubt on it. Still, Sorweel has to know if Achamian thought Kellhus a demon but learns he doesn’t. Sorweel begs to know exactly what Achamian, pleading his friendship with Zsoronga to get the Successor-Prince to speak.

The Successor-Prince somehow grinned and scowled at once. “You must learn, Horse-King. Too many wolves prowl these columns. I appreciate your honesty, your overture, I truly do, but when you speak like this… I… I fear for you.”

Obotegwa had softened his sovereign’s tone, of course. No matter how diligently the Obligate tried to recreate the tenor of his Prince’s discourse, his voice always bore the imprint of long and oft-examined life.

Still, Sorweel wants to know what Achamian wrote. Zsoronga finally answers him that Kellhus is a mortal man with a vast intellect that makes others seem children. Sorweel presses for more. Zsoronga says, “The important thing, he [Achamian] says, isn’t so much what the Anasûrimbor is, as what we are to him.” Sorweel is frustrated by the answer. He urges Sorweel to remember what being a child was like and how you believed nursemaid’s tales and your emotions always were on your face. How adults had molded you. Kellhus is the adult and everyone is a child.

Zsoronga dropped his reins, waved his arms out in grand gesture of indication. “All of this. This divinity. This apocalypse. This… religion he has created. They are the kinds of lies we tell children to assure they act in accord with our wishes. To make us love, to incite us to sacrifice. This is what Drusas Achamian seems to be saying.”

These words, spoken through the lense of wise and weary confidence that was Obotegwa, chills Sorweel to the pith. Demons were so much easier! This… this…

How does a child war against a father? How does a child not… love?”

This dismays Sorweel and shames him, though he realizes Zsoronga feels the same way. Sorweel then asks what Kellhus’s true goal is. Achamian never said, though Zsoronga fears they’ll learn by the end.

Sorweel dreams of his father arguing with Proyas from the earlier chapter when Proyas came to parley. They are feuding about bondage. Proyas says there is slavery that sets one frees, which Harweel denounces, “So says the slave!” Harweel shouts while burning. Sorweel thinks, “How beautiful was his [Harweel’s] damnation.”

Porsparian wakes Sorweel from his nightmare and soothes the prince. He tells the uncomprehending slave he saw his father burning. Porsparian’s touch feels grandfatherly and comforting. He asks if his father is damned. “A grandfather, it seemed, would know.” Porsparian forms the feminine face of Yatwer in the dirt of the tent floor. He then rubs dirt on his eyes and prayers, rocking back and forth “like a man struggling against the ropes that bound him.” The sun rises, lighting up the tent as the slave keeps praying. Porsparian’s movement grows jerky. Violent. He spasms and convulses. Worried, Sorweel leaps to his feet and cried out in concern.

But he feels the ritual’s rules demand he not interfere, so he just watches. Porsparian is writhing on the ground like he’s being beaten. Then, he suddenly springs upright and pulls his dirty hands from his eyes. They are stained red. Then he looks down.

Gazed at the earthen face.

Sorweel caught his breath, blinked as though to squint away the madness. Not only had the salve’s eyes gone red (a trick, some kind of trick!), somehow the mouth pressed into the soil face had opened.

Opened?

There’s water pooled in the mouth that pours into Porsparian’s palm, his eyes no longer red. “Muck trailed like blood from the pads of his [Porsparian’s] fingers.” Sorweel backs away. Suddenly, the slave seems made of river mud. He says this is spit to keep face clean. It will hide him. Suddenly, Sorweel understands that the Old Gods are protecting him. He closes his eyes and the mud is smeared on his cheeks. “He felt her spit at once soil and cleanse.”

A mother wiping the face of her beloved son.

Look at you…

Somewhere on the plain, the priests sound the Interval: a single note tolling pure and deep over landscapes of tented confusion. The sun was rising.

My Thoughts

Grass-rats. I do like that name for Sranc. Sorweel, is of course, right. We give glib names to terrible things. Or grand things. We like to minimize. Like America and England like to call the Atlantic “the Pond” as if it was just this small thing separating our two countries.

There is a lot of things humans do without thinking about it. Language is the most unique trait of our species. No other creature on earth has language. They can communicate, but even the gorillas and chimpanzees who have been taught sign language can only string together a few words to form a very basic idea. They can’t speak with the complexity and nuance of grammar. This is hard-coded into human beings when we’re young. English, despite its large vocabulary, has had its grammar flattened to an extent. You would not realize this if you only spoke English, but our complicated grammar is simple compared to a many other languages. Some can have such a complexity to it only native speakers can ever grasp its nuance. It actually seems the more a language is spoken by only a small group of people, the more and more complicated it becomes.

While Sorweel has this vast revelation about knowledge, I know when I studied German, I didn’t have any profound epiphany on the nature of reality. However, it does tie into the greater theme of the Second Apocalypse: how little men understand why they do the things they do. Language has always been a large part of the series. Just notice the appendix at the end of The Thousandfold Thought that shows the family tree of the languages of men. It also ties into the fact that sorcerery requires learning another language that buffers the purity of meaning from the way a spoken language drifts and meanders. Words change so drastically, sometimes in a generation, and can come to mean even their opposites or something wholly alien.

Eskeles has a mule like Achamian. He’s very much a surrogate for that role, teaching Sorweel while during a holy war. Only Sorweel is the opposite of the Young Prince trope that Kellhus was. Neither one of them fulfill the trope but subvert it in different ways. Sorweel never avenges his father. He dies a failure. Though, he did get the princess before the end. I think that decision is one of the reasons Serwa behaves as she does during the climax of the Unholy Consult.

We can see Eskeles’s disregard for wealth and comfort. He breaks a rather expensive looking vase without thought to teach a lesson to his pupil. Eskeles might dress in silks and be fat, but he’s a man that has lived without much and understands how possessions can weigh you down.

Ideas have no boundaries. They spill from person to person. You can’t contain them. Can’t segment them. They spread as new people encounter them and embrace them or discard them. It is honestly why the idea of “Cultural Appropriation” is such a problem. The very act of strangers coming together rubs off some of their cultures on each other. It morphs and mutates and changes into new ideas (or bad ones). The more human cultures mix and exchange, the more advancements we make. Strangers can see what is common to one group in a new light and make a breakthrough in so many different areas. Haven’t you ever been stuck on a problem only for “fresh eyes” to easily spot what you’re missing?

And now we see Baker reinforcing for us, the readers, on his world’s metaphysics. Reminding us that the God is broken into an innumerable amount of pieces, each one inside of a person and peering out through their eyes. This is why his sorcery works. Those who can use sorcery are better able to see with “God’s Eye”. It’s also how Mimara’s Judging Eye works. Destroying this Oversoul is the goal of the Consult and the Inchoroi. With it gone, so are the effects of its existence.

Namely Damnation.

Eskeles speaks with all the conviction of the newly converted. There are none more fervent than those who have abandoned their past belief in favor of a new one. To have so changed their identity takes something powerful on their psyche, so they will really embarrass the new belief. If it’s a dangerous belief, this can be bad. As Dr. James Lindsey describes it, religions can come in two flavors. Those that look up and those that look down. A religion that looks up is one that’s about self-improvement. Being a better person. A religion that looks down is concerned with making sure your neighbors are being virtuous. You could say Jesus’s teachings are an upward-facing religion but many have turned it into a downward-facing one and used it to unleash horrors like the Inquisition or the Witch Hunts. Or the Teutonic Knights’ crusades in Eastern Europe.

The poplar metaphor is fairly obvious. That’s how ideas can work. If they get past your defenses, they can sprout and change you. It can be painful, but once it starts it’s hard to stop.

The Great Ordeal will be recalled until the end of time. But who will recall it? Given how this series ends, will there be anything left? We’ll have to wait and see for the third series.

Zsoronga sees the Dûnyain as performing. That’s very interesting. He comes from a culture that enjoys performing and acting differently in their day to day life. It makes him suspicious of everyone’s actions, I assume. Doubly so of a man claiming such inhuman piety. Sorweel’s answer to that Kellhus mummers (theater acting) is on point.

I do like the added bits of the problem with going through a translator. The words just don’t have the same effect coming from another’s mouth. And why should they? Another person can’t mimic the passions of the person for whom they’re speaking.

Zsoronga’s quote about the lies we tell children in regards to a religious holy war should probably let you know Bakker’s thoughts on religion. We lie to our children to control them, and religion lies to adults for the same reason. Kellhus is just really good at lying.

“How beautiful was his [Harweel’s] damnation.” Sorweel dreams of his father’s damnation was beautiful. His father had never surrendered to Kellhus. Had never succumbed to Kellhus. Sorweel, the perpetual child, has to his new father and that shames him to no end. So he dreams of his father’s defiance and sees it as beautiful. A stubbornness to refuse to bend no matter the cost.

Notice how the mud is like blood on Porsparian’s fingers. We’ve seen in the ritual creating the White Luck Warrior the importance of menstrual blood in Yatwerian rites. And it does hide him. Even Kellhus is fooled. It just doesn’t work. We hear a lot about Narindar, holy assassins, and that is what Sorweel is. He’s being used by Yatwer to kill Kellhus. Another young man being sacrificed.

Sorweel mentions how he’ll forever be a child. That’s how Yatwer is treating him.

Want to keep reading, click here for Chapter 14!

And you have to check out my fantasy novel, Above the Storm!

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

When the Stormriders attack …

…Ary’s people have little chance.

Can he find a way to defeat them?

At 19, Ary has spent ten years mourning his father’s death. The aftermath of the attack still haunts him. Now, on the eve of the draft he faces his greatest fear, being sent to become a marine.

He knows the cost of war.

All he wants is to marry Charlene, who he has loved since they were kids. Building a farm and starting a family sounds perfect. There’s just one problem, his best friend Vel adores her, too. He’d give anything for peace.

But wanting the Stormriders to stop attacking…

…isn’t going to make it happen.

For love, for his people, and especially for the life he wants, Ary makes a decision that will change everything.

The adventure begins.

You’ll love this beautifully creative dark fantasy, because James Reid knows how to create characters and worlds you’ll grow to adore.

Get it now.

You can buy or burrow Above the Storm today!

Reread of The Judging Eye: Chapter Twelve

Reread of The Aspect-Emperor Series

Book 1: The Judging Eye

by R. Scott Bakker

Chapter Twelve

The Andiamine Heights

Welcome to Chapter Twelve of my reread. Click here if you missed Chapter Eleven!

Little snake, what poison in your bite!

Little snake, what fear you should strike!

But they don’t know, little snake—oh no!

They can’t see the tiny places you go…

—ZEÜMI NURSERY SONG

My Thoughts

This seems pretty clearly speaking about Kelmomas. The nursery rhyme is being dismissive of the little snake. What poison is in your bite? What fear should you strike? But this snake can go places you can’t suspect, just like Kelmomas. He moves through the palace with impunity. He slithers around and, though he’s a child and shouldn’t be feared by adults, he is killing those who stand between himself and his mother.

Early Spring, 19 New Imperial Year (4132 Year-of-the-Tusk), Momemn

Kelmomas knows instantly that his father has returned by how people are acting. It’s a lot of subtle clues, from the Guards’ increased alertness to Apparati running around breathless. He didn’t make the connection consciously until he learned the Yatwerian Matriarch had pissed herself.

He’s come to console Mother, the secret voice said.

Kelmomas reacts badly to this. He works on his model of Momemn while wanting to deny this reality that Kellhus was here. He’s always reluctant to think about him. To plot against him. Not fear. But he finally has to face reality and heads to his mother’s apartments. He hears Inrilatas “ranting about the Gods,” his voice broken from years of shouting. He never stopped raving. He has to pass Inrilatas’s door to reach his mother’s rooms. He reaches the door and slows his breath to hear Kellhus telling Esmenet to keep Theliopa at her side. Esmenet asks if he fears skin-spies.

Their voices possessed the weary burnish of a long and impassioned conversation. But the roots of his father’s exhaustion stopped short of the deeper intonations that warbled in and out of his discourse. A heart teasing hum, and a kind of ursine growl, far too low to be consciously heard by Mother. These spoke from something as unwinded as it was inscrutable, an occluded soul, entirely hidden from lesser ears.

He manages her, the voice said. He sees through her face the way you do, only with far more clarity, and he shapes his voice accordingly.

How do you know? Kelmomas asked angrily, stung by the thought that anyone, even Farther, could see further than him. Further into her.

Kellhus says the Consult will grow increasingly desperate as the Great Ordeal marches nearer. They will use everything they have so Theliopa should stay with Esmenet all the time because only she and Maithanet can see the skin-spies. Kelmomas loves stories of skin-spies and their “wicked depredations.” He loved seeing that one getting flayed alive, though he was careful not to let Mother know that. Kelmomas knows he can see skin-spies, too, but he’ll keep it a secret. Hoping to find one and spy on it. “What a game it would make!”

He wondered who was faster…

Mother is horrified that the Consult will attack the Andiamine Heights. Kellhus says it makes sense to distract him. “But nothing distracts you,” complains Esmenet. In this moment, Kelmomas realizes his mother knows what Kellhus is. As Kellhus says he’s leaving, Kelmomas hears the pain in his mother’s voice. He’s about to burst in to comfort her but his secret voice stops him, saying he’ll be recognized by Kellhus. The voice can’t be sure how much Kellhus sees, but Kelmomas needs to be with his mother, wanting to be hugged and kissed by her.

He’s the root, the voice replied, and you’re but the branch. Remember, the Strength burns brightest in him.

For reasons Kelmomas was entirely unable to fathom, that dropped his hand like lead.

The Strength.

Kelmomas runs. But not in flight. He has a plan. He steals a silver skewer while matronly slaves ruffle his hair and give condolences for his dead brother. He plays with them before running off. He can’t get into the Imperial Audience Hall. Luckily, a balcony door is open and he climbs up to it. From here, he can look down at his mother’s seat. This unnerves him. It’s a reminder that no matter how powerful you are, someone can be higher.

He slides down a tapestry and then mounts the Mantle, the seat of his father’s power. He wants the sparrows to come. He waits a while until one gets caught in the net. He doesn’t have a stone, though, but all he has is a skewer.

The world he walked was far different from the world walked by others. He did not need the voice to tell him that. He could hear more, see more, know more—everything more than everybody save his father and maybe his uncle. His sense of smell, in particular.

He smells his mother’s scent and his uncle. It’s the Matriarch’s piss that attracts his attention. He breathes it in. It excites him in a primal way. He then darts to the balcony behind the thrones. The moon’s out over the Meneanor Sea. The dark sea is ominous. It’s too vast and trackless to be known, even for Kellhus.

Ever did Men drown in blackness, even in sun-spliced waters.

He jumps off and avoids the sorcerous Wards with ease since he’s one of the few. He dodges the Pillarian Guard without any effort. The problem is the Eothic Guard. They have a lot of bowmen and they’re very good at hitting things. Saubon sponsors archery contests to find new recruits for the guard. Only the Agmundrmen from Galeoth are better. So Kelmomas is risking getting feathered. Though the risk sounds fun, he doesn’t actually want to hit.

It was no easy task, culling risks from possibilities.

He skulks across the roofs, using every trick he can to keep from being seen. He fights against a savage grin. He revels in the fun of creeping past Guardsmen without making a sound. He eluded them, enjoying being behind them in the dark and unseen. One nearly spotted him, but he keeps his body motionless. Once he was past, the thrill of almost getting caught rushes through him. He wants to cry out in glee. The rest of the guards “stared out in utter ignorance of their ignorance.” It felt like he existed in a different world from them. He could do anything. Then he feels like he’s testing them. “What if he were a skin-spy?” They fail to spot him, and that angers him and decides on what they should learn. “The darkness, he wanted to tell them, was not empty.”

He soon reaches the guest apartment. He feels like that crossing without being seen was both impossible and inevitable. He feels like he broke the world with his actions. That amuses him to no end.

He leaps into a hay pile and wiggles through it. He watches slaves from within it while a group of drunk Kidruhil harasses the workers. A horse is pulling a wagon. Kelmomas times his movement with the horse’s hooves hitting the cobblestones. He jumps beneath one of the horses and clings to its belly, becoming an extension of the horse and enters the Batrial Campus, the guest compound, unseen. He soon drops to the ground and lets the wagon roll over him. He darts to his destination, smelling the Matriarch’s scent.

He follows the trail, thinking it’s like what a worm would make. He hears a guard’s heartbeat around the corner. He takes a single heartbeat to peek around the corner and memorize the hallway and the guard before the Matriarch’s door. He’s not one of the palace guards. Kelmomas starts “crying” and runs around the corner to the guard. The Yatwerian sentry goes to comfort the boy, revealing himself to be a father and used to soothing children. He bends down.

Kelmomas stepped into the fan of his [the guard’s] multiple shadows.

“Come, now, little man—”

The motion was singular, abrupt with elegance. The skewer tip entered the sentry’s right tear duct and slipped into the centre of his head. The ease of penetration was almost alarming, like poking a nail into soft garden soil. Using the bone along the inner eye socket for leverage, Kelmomas wrenched the buried point in a precise circle. There was no need, he thought, to mutilate geometry as well.

The man falls to the ground, Kelmomas using the man’s dead weight to pull the skewer free. He lives for a moment or two longer. Then Kelmomas takes the man’s knife and goes through the unlocked door. A body slave, sleeping on the floor, rouses, waking up three more. He steps between them, slashing with precise strikes to kill them without being splashed by any of their spurting blood. “To walk the cracks between heartbeats.”

The Matriarch was quite awake by the time the little boy slipped into her bedroom. “Tweet!” he trilled. “Tweet-tweet!” His giggling was uncontrollable…

Almost as much as her shrieking.

Esmenet is outside the Matriarch’s quarters. She doesn’t want to see the woman’s corpse. She’s seen enough death in her life. She says they’ll wait here to Phinersa and Captain Imhailas. She sometimes thinks he’s too decisive while Phinersa is too fretting. She feels like Imhailas is always controlling urges he doesn’t even realize he has. He’s always standing close to her, wanting her even though he knows it’s wrong. A sin. As a prostitute, she knows that a man who feels guilty about his actions is more dangerous than the one who doesn’t. “What had the strength to seize also had the strength to choke.”

Maithanet arrives, stepping with care to avoid blood. He’s dressed plainly, the clothing revealing the strength he has, a reminder that he can “break necks with ease.” He has come from the Cmiral temple-complex. To maintain separation of the political and the spiritual, he never stays in the palace. He asks after Kellhus and his opinion. Esmenet snaps at Maithanet, revealing Kellhus left right before the murders were discovered. She then asks how a cult could do this, even Yatwer’s cult.

Maithanet suggests a Narindar, the legendary Cultic assassin. Esmenet presses Maithanet, saying he doesn’t believe that. He doesn’t know what happened other than this was a shrewd move. Sharacinth was the only way they had to seize control of Yatwer’s cult from within or creating a civil war. Phinersa notes Sharacinth is now Yatwer’s weapon.

Esmenet had concluded as much almost the instant she had stepped into the blood-splattered antechamber earlier that night. She was going to be blamed for this. First the rumors of the White-Luck Warrior, then the Yatwerian Matriarch herself assassinated while a guest of the Empress. The bumbling preposterous of it mattered not at all. For the masses, the outrageousness of the act would simply indicate her fear, and her fear would suggest that she believed the rumours, which in turn would mean the Aspect-Emperor had to be a demon…

This had all the making of a disaster.

She orders this to be covered up, but from the nervousness of her subordinates, they know it’s too late. She sighs, resigned. Imhailas declares they should take go on the attack. Up until now, he hadn’t made himself noticed, certain he would be blamed for the assassin getting through. Maithanet agrees but says there might be another possibility about what happened. As they speak, she stares at the dead. It feels surreal that they are holding their “council of war” before the corpses whose lives had been extinguished.

But then, she realized, the living had to forever look past the dead—on the pain of joining them.

She wants the crime investigated by someone with interrogatory. Maithanet suggests a Patriarch of another cult like Yagthrûta, who is “as rabid as his Patron God when it comes to matters of ritual legality.” He’s the leader of Momian’s cult and greatly respected for his piety and honesty. He’d even crossed the Meneanor in a skiff to show his faith. And as a barbarian, no one thought he was a Shrial or Imperial agent. Esmenet likes it and wants them to find Nannaferi. Imhailas agrees, wanting her dead to defang the cult. Esmenet is annoyed by the “inane adages” he always says. Usually, she likes them, not minding because he does it to impress her, but it doesn’t feel appropriate right now.

Phinersa doesn’t have anything new to add other than they think Nannaferi is in Shigek. Hard to say with Fanim raiding across the River Sempis. Esmenet grimaces, and he flinches. Fanayal ab Kascamandri sudden aggression is both annoying and effective. He’s severed the overland routs to Nilnamesh and so attacking fortified towns with a Cishaurim. It was “precisely the kind of confusion the Mother-Supreme needed.”

Weakness, she realized. They smelled weakness, all the enemies of the New Empire, be they heathen or Orthodox.

Phinersa says they’ll need to issue arrest warrants to capture her. Then she’ll be tortured. She isn’t sure and turns to Maithanet wondering if Sharacinth’s murder can be blamed on internal Cult feuds to give the pretext to order Nannaferi’s arrest. Maithanet advises caution and suggests consulting Kellhus.

Esmenet felt her look harden into a glare.

Why? she sound herself thinking. Why doesn’t Kellhus trust you?”

She says they need to prepare for riots and infiltrate the cult. She wants the Imperial Precincts secured to keep any more assassinations from happening. She wants to have the palace prepared for a siege and then orders the Acrong Columns recalled. Everyone is stunned by her sudden burst of orders. She shouts at them which startles them into action. She thinks Phinersa glanced at Maithanet to get confirmation before obeying.

So many looks. So many qualms. It was always the complexities that overwhelmed us. It was always the maze of others that robbed us of our way.

My little boy is dead.

She presses down her misgivings and asked Maithanet if he thinks skin-spies killed Sharacinth. He answers, “I find this turn… incalculable.” Esmenet is reminded of the “septic reaches of Caraskand” and the First Holy War. She is convinced this is the work of the skin-spies as Kellhus has warned her.

My Thoughts

We see Kelmomas’s jealousy on full display as he spies on his mother and Kellhus. He’s that little snake that is creeping around. Not even Kellhus appears aware that he’s there. Probably because he’s exhausted by traveling so far. There are limits even for Kellhus in what he can handle.

His childishness is still on full display with his fascination of skin-spies, not caring about the danger the pose for him and his family. He wants to play with one. Find out who’s the best little snake at crawling around the palace. It’s a game we’ll see him play with the White Luck Warrior in the next two books.

Kelmomas’s childishness is warring with his Dûnyain half. The secret voice claims to be Samarmas, but really it is his Dûnyain logic battling against the human half of him. That part that just wants his mother all to himself.

“When he reached the final pillar, it unnerved him to see that he look down on the Mantle and his mother’s seat.” Kelmomas has his first brush with the concept he’s better than his mother. He’s afraid of this. If he ever crosses that line, he’ll lose his mother as something he can love. He’ll lose what little humanity he has, and he’s not ready for that. If he had grown up, I can imagine him killing Esmenet when he reached maturity.

There’s something I don’t think I ever noticed or paid attention to that Kelmomas is one of the few.

I like that Bakker keeps Kelmomas playing children’s games. Just fucked-up and deadly ones.

The darkness is never empty. That goes into the central thesis of the entire series: our actions are defined by the Darkness that Comes Before. All those things we are unaware of in our past. In those around us. All the thousands and thousands of stimuli that we experience every day that shape our perception and actions. Men like to think they can ignore what they can’t see.

Always a mistake.

No, we don’t want to mutilate geometry, do we, Kelmomas? That line as he’s scrambling the guard’s brain to make sure he’s dead made me chuckle.

So we started his journey with him wanting to kill a sparrow trapped in the netting above the throne room. He can’t get to it since he only has a silver skewer. Then he finds another “sparrow” to kill, the Matriarch. He tracks her and then “tweets” like a bird in mockery as he kills her.

Bakker uses Kelmomas to show us just how much security is at the Andiamine Heights to show that even a child Dûnyain struggles to sneaks around. No wonder Esmenet is so disturbed by the assassination. If they could reach the Matriarch, they could get to anyone. This is the start of Esmenet’s paranoia that Kelmomas will use to turn her against Maithanet.

Reality means that we can’t let grief keep us from living. From acting. Especially in disaster, you have to keep moving. Keep surviving. The dead are gone. You’re still going.

Is this the first mention of the god Momian? He wasn’t in my custom dictionary for the series. Apparently, he’s the god of law. And, interestingly, this is the first cult to have a Thunyeri reach the highest level of authority. Most must be dominated by Nansur and other Ketyai races. It shows the cult respects law more than politics.

So, it has been six months since I have worked on this. I’ve had a crazy time. I’ve been doing a podcast, promoting my new fantasy series Secret of the Jewels, and then I had to move in August. So, I’m trying to get back into the habit of working on this every day! Back to the commentary!

We see more of Esmenet’s doubts with Maithanet already falling into place. The foundation of their conflict is growing especially when she thinks (and I believe it’s her imagination) that Phinersa glances at Maithanet. Kelmomas’s schemes starting to bear fruit.

Maithanet has no clue who killed Sharacinth. It’s an irrational act. He doesn’t have the data to know that Kelmomas is acting in such ways so he can’t see why this happened. He can’t see any motivation to kill her. Not with the capability of getting into the palace and out so cleanly.

Boy, I finished my reread in less than 10 minutes. I was so close to the end of the chapter.

We see the seeds of doubt getting planted in Esmenet’s mind about Maithanet. She sees this as skin-spies so clearly, yet he has no idea what happened. He can’t calculate this event. These are the hooks Kelmomas will use to drive the wedge between his mother and all those taking away her attention. Killing Sharacinth is just one step in that.

Besides the fun he had doing it, of course. He has too much emotion. That’s what makes him so much dangerous. Kellhus’s intellect with Esmenet’s emotions. Well, the emotions of a child, which are always feral and wild things that need to be nurtured and guided so they become well-adjusted adults.

If you want to read more, click here for Chapter Thirteen!

And you have to check out my fantasy novel, Above the Storm!

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

When the Stormriders attack …

…Ary’s people have little chance.

Can he find a way to defeat them?

At 19, Ary has spent ten years mourning his father’s death. The aftermath of the attack still haunts him. Now, on the eve of the draft he faces his greatest fear, being sent to become a marine.

He knows the cost of war.

All he wants is to marry Charlene, who he has loved since they were kids. Building a farm and starting a family sounds perfect. There’s just one problem, his best friend Vel adores her, too. He’d give anything for peace.

But wanting the Stormriders to stop attacking…

…isn’t going to make it happen.

For love, for his people, and especially for the life he wants, Ary makes a decision that will change everything.

The adventure begins.

You’ll love this beautifully creative dark fantasy, because James Reid knows how to create characters and worlds you’ll grow to adore.

Get it now.

You can buy or burrow Above the Storm today!

Reread of The Judging Eye: Chapter Eleven

Reread of The Aspect-Emperor Series

Book 1: The Judging Eye

by R. Scott Bakker

Chapter Eleven

The Osthwai Mountains

Welcome to Chapter Eleven of my reread. Click here if you missed Chapter Ten!

Since all men count themselves righteous, and since no righteous man raises his hand against the innocent, a man need only strike another to make him evil.

—NULL VOGNEAS, THE CYNICATA

Where two reasons may deliver truth, a thousand lead to certain delusion. The more steps you take, the more likely you will wander astray.

—AJENCIS, THEOPHYSICS

My Thoughts

So Cynicata makes me think of cynic. And that is certainly a cynical view of people. And it’s so true. We are all the heroes of our own story, and we are all too quick to look at someone else and “strike” them. Make them evil. We’ll use bigot, or racist, or homophobic. Quick labels to let us feel comfortable in our moral superiority so we can maintain the fiction that we’re not just as evil as the man we labeled.

This leads us into the second quote which is about following delusional ideas. Going too far down the path of an idea can lead to so many problems. Look at any philosophy embraced by a nation-state or a tribe or a religion and see where it can go.

If you believe what we do, you’ll be saved. It’s moral for us to save unbelievers. So it’s moral for us to force them to believe so we can save them.

Currently, the Skin Eaters think they’re going to find riches at the Coffers. They need to reach the Coffers by midsummer. To do that, they have to get over the mountains now. But the passes are snowed in. So let’s go through the haunted and cursed Nonman mansion that scalpers disappear in all the time. We’re the Skin Eaters. We’re better than other Scalpers. We’ll be fine.

A bad idea leading to disaster combined with their moral superiority that they are better Scalpers than others. We see this at the end of the chapter with Sarl asking why the Skin Eaters hadn’t come to Cil-Aujas.

Early Spring, 19 New Imperial Year (4132 Year-of-the-Tusk), the Osthwai Mountains

The Scalpers have named the mountain ahead Ziggurat. They don’t know its real name. Cleric might have even forgotten that it is called Aenaratiol (Smokehorn), but Achamian remembers. Beneath it lies Cil-Aujas, the Black Halls. At the time, Achamian was willing to do this out his desperation to reach Sauglish by midsummer. But now he’s remembering that it’s a dangerous place. Only Golgotterath is worse.

The Skin Eaters have their own theories about the Black Halls, making up their own tales to explain Cil-Aujas had fallen. Achamian knows the truth and begins telling him that it was refugees who caused its downfall. He has the Bitten listening with the intensity of children, especially Xonghis. More than the Bitten join them. Even Sarl and Kiampas gather. Mimara sits beside him while the fire burns bright before them.

He talks about the Nonmen and how great they were back when Men were savages. Before the Tusk had been written. Back then, Cû’jara-Cinmoi had been their greatest king. But the wars with the Inchoroi left him broken, unable to resist the Five Tribes of Men who entered the world. Then he speaks of the First Apocalypse.

“If you want to look at the true ruin,” he said, nodding to the barren knoll where the Captain sat alone with his inhuman lieutenant, “look no further than your Cleric. Reduced. Dwindled. They were once to us as we are to Sranc. Indeed, for many among the Nonmen, we were little more.”

He talks about the Meöri Empire, the White Norsirai kingdom that ruled the wilderness on the other side of the mountains. What the Scalpers called the Long Side. Crushed by the No-God, their hero Nostol led his people to Cil-Aujas ruled over by its king, Gin’yursis. They join together and the two made a stand at Kathol Pass and stopped the Consult form crossing the mountains for a year. Despite their alliance, Nostol and his Meöri people came to hate the immortal and angelic Nonman. They coveted the Nonmen’s glory and used scriptures from the Tusk to justify their greed.

There are three versions of the tale. In one, Nostol and his thanes seduced the Emwama concubines, human slaves used by the Nonman as substitutes for their dead wives. He hoped this would spur the Nonmen to retribution. A pretext he could use to attack them back. Nostol was said to have personally impregnated sixty-three of them.

“Talk about farting in the queen’s bedchamber!” Pokwas exclaimed.

“Indeed,” Achamian said, adding to the chorus of laughter with the mock gravity of his tone. And there are no windows in the deeps of Cil-Aujas…”

In the second version, Nostol merely seduces Weyukat, the Nonman King’s favored concubine. She had twice gotten pregnant with Gin’yursis’s child but miscarried. Still, that was better than most. So when she comes up pregnant, he thinks it’s his. If she has a daughter, it could mean the salvation of the Nonman race. Instead, she gives birth to a child named Swanostol. The king killed the babe and Nostol had his outrage.

In the final version, Nostol ordered his men to seduce the Nonmen nobility and create friction and passion. Achamian thinks this one is the correct version since all this happened in a year, and that’s not feasible for all these pregnancies and births to occur. He also has seen scraps from Seswatha’s dream that bears it out. However, they all end in the same way.

War.

In the darkness of the underground mansion, the Nonmen sorcerers unleashed their Gnosis on men bearing Chorae. It was a bloody fight. At the end, drenched in gore, Nostol and slain Gin’yursis and sat on the dead king’s throne. He wept and laughed at his deed.

“With courage and fell cunning,” Achamian said, his face hot in the firelight, “Men made themselves masters of Cil-Aujas. Some Nonmen hid, only to be found in the course of time, but hunger or iron, it mattered not. Others escaped through chutes no mortal man has ever known. Perhaps even now they wander like Cleric, derelict, cursed with the only memories that will not fade, doomed to relive the Fall of Cil-Aujas until the end of days.”

Galian says he’s heard this story. It’s why Galeoth are “cursed with fractiousness” since they’re descendants of Nostol’s people. However, Achamian says that Gin’yursis cursed all men, blaming them all for what happened.

“We are all Sons of Nostol. We all bear the stamp of his frailty.”

The next morning, they continue on with little conversation. They are approaching the Ziggurat with trepidation. They follow the hilly Low Road around the mountain’s base, the trees growing more and more scraggly. By noon, the Ziggurat dominates the sky. “They tramped onward in a kind of stupor.” Not even Mimara is drawing eyes as the weight of that height presses on them. The mountain is impossible to ignore. “The Skin Eaters, each in their own way, seemed to understand that this was the prototype, what tyrants aped with their God-mocking works, mountains into monument, migration into pageant and parade.” The mountain is too old and vast for any word to capture it.

The mountains proclaim that they are small. They keep advancing and soon, as noticed by Sutadra, they are walking an ancient road. Instead of being good news, it only troubles them more. The weight of history rises around them. “There was comfort in a simple track, Achamian supposed, an assurance that the world they walked did not laugh at them.”

After a few hours, they round a bend and see the entrance. A tall wall gouged into the mountain. They have reached the Obsidian Gate. They gather beneath it, dwarfed by its size. They are not prepared for the stories. They stare at it “like emissaries of a backward yet imperious people trying to see past their awe.”

Nothing bars the way into the abandon mansion. Every bit of the walls is carved with images of the Nonmen. From warriors fighting beasts to captives. Even in ruins, the scale of the carvings, its grandeur and detail, beggars them. This is something beyond human skill.

For the first time, Achamian thought he understood the crude bronze of Nostol’s betrayal.

Mimara asks what they are doing. Achamian thinks they are reflecting on mankind. Then Xonghis points to one pillar carved with the markings of other scalper companies. They gather around and see which companies have braved it. The most recent one belongs to the Bloody Picks who left a fortnight ago. They remember the member of that company they passed on the way here.

The following silence persisted longer than it should. There was a heartbreak in this furtive marks, a childishness that made the ancient works rising about them seem iron heavy, nigh invincible. Scratches. Caricatures with buffoonish themes. They were so obviously the residue of a lesser race, one whose triumph lay not in the nobility of arms and intellect, but in treachery and the perversities of fortune.

Kiampas spots the High Shields sign and says he’s right, they did die in there. Sarl disagrees, saying they died on the Long Side. Then Sarl scratches the Skin Eaters’ sign on it. Sarl then asks why they waited so long to come here. The Skin Eaters were legends as was this place. It was fate they should meet. “Such was the logic.”

His [Sarl’s] face pinched into a cackle. “This is the slog of slogs, boys!”

Cleric just enters the gate and starts turning before yelling, “Where are you.” He is disgusted no one guards the gate. He seems old and frail, confused. Only the strength of his Mark reminds Achamian of his power. Ironsoul claps a hand on Cleric’s shoulder.

“They’re dead, you fool. Ancient dead.”

The cowled darkness that was his face turned to the Captain, held him in eyeless scrutiny, then lifted skyward, as though studying the lay of illumination across the hanging slopes. As the gathered company watched, he raised two hands and drew back, for the first time, his leather hood. The gesture seemed obscene, venal, a flouting of some aboriginal modesty.

He turned to regard his fellow scalpers, smiling as if taking heart in their astonishment. His fused teeth gleamed with spit. His skin was with and utterly hairless, so much so that he looked fungal, like something pulled from forest compost. His features were youthful, drawn with the same fine lines and flawless proportions as all his race.

The face of a Sranc.

Cleric acknowledges reality. He’s crying and laughing.

Night falls. There’s not much fuel for a fire here, so the entire company shares one. It’s a miserable night with only Sarl’s mad declarations rising above muttered conversations. Fear is palpable, especially when some claim that the carved images are changing in the flickering camp light. Sarl mocks them by claiming he saw one turn into something sexual. This makes them all laugh as Sarl ensures dread is kept at bay.

Achamian keeps glancing at Cleric, realizing that the ruined mansion and the Nonmen are the same. Both as “old as languages and peoples.” Mimara leans against him unlike her mother who liked to hold his hand. She speaks with Soma. Achamian starts listening to their conversation. Soma says she acts like a lady of noble birth, but she replies that her mother was a whore. Soma shrugs, not caring. He’d burned his ancestor list. She asks, mockingly, if that frightens him. He asks how. She points to the others and says they’re vicious men who have some record of their fathers, an unbroken line of fathers. He asks why that should be frightening.

“Because,” Mimara said, “it means they’re bound to the unbroken line of their fathers, back into the mists of yore. It means when they die, entire hosts will cast nets for their souls.” Achamian felt her shoulders hitch in a pity-for-the-doomed shrug. “But you… you merely wander between oblivions, from the nothingness of your birth to the nothingness of your death.”

“Between oblivions?”

“Like flotsam.”

“Like flotsam?”

“Yes. Doesn’t that frighten you?”

Achamian starts scowling at the Nonmen friezes. The hundreds watching them. It’s like proof of souls. That sends him to stare at Cleric again. Nonman returns the stare. It’s sparked by an exhausted kinship and is broken without “rancour or acknowledgment.” Then he hears Soma admit it does frighten him. Mimara says of course it does. Soon, all taking dies down. Men find their bedrolls.

Few slept well. The black mouth of the Obsidian Gate seemed to inhale endlessly.

In the morning light, the ruins are more sad than scary. Still, they ate in silence. They force a semblance of normalcy to calm their nerves. The fire burns out, forcing Achamian to boil water for his tea with sorcerery. Xonghis speaks with Kosoter than they enter the “Black Halls of Cil-Aujas with nary a commemorating word.”

Achamian, with Mimara at his side, gives a final glance at the sky before he follows the others in. He spots the Nail of Heaven which “twinkled alone in the endless blue, a beacon of all things high and open…”

A final call to those who would dare the nethers of the earth.

My Thoughts

Smokehorn does not fit with a mountain that’s a flat top like a Ziggurat. Horns are pointy. It makes me wonder why the Nonman would choose that. Is it a shield volcano that blew its top off and the nonman saw that? A smoking horn and now it has crumbled to a flat top? Maybe the story will explain it and I’m speculating needlessly.

Wonder if we’ll ever find that missing tribe. Norsirai, Ketyai, Satyothi, and Scylvendi. One, I believe, is missing. Some think they stayed over on the other side of those mountains in Eänna and didn’t enter Eärwa.

We get a very classic tale, two races coming together to stand up against the darkness. They prevail, but instead of ending in a great and enduring friendship like in many fantasies, Bakker turns it to the dark. To the twisted ambitions and frailty of the human soul. Men are ever jealous of those greater than them and scheme to pull them down into the muck. We see it all the time in our world under the guise of “progress.”

The story also reminds me of the Fall of Gondolin in the Silmarillion. An underground city betrayed and destroyed out of jealousy. Though it was an elf jealous of a human. Still, we see that same sort of tragedy that was common in the ancient tales and has fallen out of favor in modern times.

I think it’s clear why the last story survived. What warrior wants to be remembered as a seducer of other men when they could boast of cuckolding their enemy and stealing their future as well as their lives.

Some great description to the lead up to the Obsidian Gate and then its carving. Bakker really captures the epicness. As someone who lives in the sight of Mount Rainier, which looms the way the Zigurrat does, I understand what he’s describing.

It always does feel like what the people did before us is more impressive than today. More grand. More profound like each generation of man has grown more buffoonish. And now you have these men faced with the works of a long-lived race. Even before the Womb Plague, the nonman had long, long lives. They had the time and patience to build such monuments.

And all the scalpers can do is shitty graffiti.

Hubris is something you have to watch out for. Sarl is full of it. The Skin Eaters are the best, so they’ll do what all these other companies failed to do.

Erratics are Nonmen with Alzheimer. In that moment, Cleric was in the past. He can’t tell the difference. It’s sad. He’s losing himself. The only problem, he has a young body and powerful sorcery. That’s what makes the Erratics so dangerous.

The description of Cleric is haunting. Especially that last part: the face of a Sranc. It’s one of those parallels with Lord of the Rings. The orcs were elves twisted into monstrous beasts. The Sranc were based on the Nonmen. We also get hints that the nonmen are some sort of fungal-based life. Not mammalian at all. Not sure if that’s true. They can reproduce with humans. In the real world, that would mean they were very close genetically. Even if the breeding is rare, it can happen. But this is fantasy where you get cross-species reproduction all the time.

Interesting that Soma, our skin-spy, talks about destroying his ancestor list. Mimara explains to us that it means for their culture. That your ancestors look out for you in the afterlife and make sure you’re not lost. But the Consult wants oblivion. That is what they want there to be when they die. They don’t want to suffer for eternity. In fact, it’s the same goal that Kellhus will be working for. But he just doesn’t want to destroy the world to do it. My theory, anyway.

It’s so anticlimactic as they finally enter the ruins. After a night of stress, the reality of their worries is underwhelming. Almost a disappointment. Little do they know…

Okay, the Nail of Heaven is bright enough to be seen in daylight. I really, really want to know what this is.

Click here for the next part!

And you have to check out my fantasy novel, Above the Storm!

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

When the Stormriders attack …

…Ary’s people have little chance.

Can he find a way to defeat them?

At 19, Ary has spent ten years mourning his father’s death. The aftermath of the attack still haunts him. Now, on the eve of the draft he faces his greatest fear, being sent to become a marine.

He knows the cost of war.

All he wants is to marry Charlene, who he has loved since they were kids. Building a farm and starting a family sounds perfect. There’s just one problem, his best friend Vel adores her, too. He’d give anything for peace.

But wanting the Stormriders to stop attacking…

…isn’t going to make it happen.

For love, for his people, and especially for the life he wants, Ary makes a decision that will change everything.

The adventure begins.

You’ll love this beautifully creative dark fantasy, because James Reid knows how to create characters and worlds you’ll grow to adore.

Get it now.

You can buy or burrow Above the Storm today!