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!
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…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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