R. Bakker - The Judging eye

No one bothered with Moraubon's body, which continued to drain against a backdrop of booming water and towering debris. A white corpse on a red-painted stone.

"Who is he?" Mimara whispered. While Achamian had eyed the others, she had continued gazing at the Captain's receding back.

"A Veteran," he murmured. "The same as me."

They lagged behind the others, passing from broken sunlight to green shadow, arguing over the rush and hiss of the river.

"You cannot stay! This is impossible!"

"Where would you have me go?"

"Go? Go? Where do you think? Back to your mother! Back to the Andiamine Heights where you belong!"

"Never."

"I know your mother. I know she loves you!"

"Not so much as she hates what she did to me."

"To save your life!"

"Life… Is that what you call it? Should I tell you the story of my life?"

"No."

"All these men. Trust me, I've borne them before. I can bear them again."

"Not these men."

"Then I suppose I'm lucky to have you."

She was nothing like Esmenet, he had come to realize. She tilted her head the same way, as though literally trying to look around your nonsense, and her voice stiffened into the same reedy bundle of disgust, but aside from these echoes…

"Look. You simply cannot stay. This is a journey…" He paused, his breath yanked short by the sheer factuality of what he was about to say. "This is a journey without any return."

She sneered and laughed. "So is every life."

There was something snide and infuriating about her, he decided, something that begged to be struck-or dared… He could not tell which.

No. She was nothing like Esmenet. Even the vicious dismissiveness of her snorts-all her own.

"Is that what you've told these scalpers?"

"What do you mean, 'told'?"

"That this journey will see them all killed."

"No."

"What did you tell them?"

"That I can show them the Coffers."

"The Coffers?"

"The legendary treasury of the School of Sohonc, lost when the Library of Sauglish was destroyed in the First Apocalypse."

"So they know nothing of Ishuдl? They have no idea that you hunt the origins of their Holy Aspect-Emperor? The man who pays the bounty on their scalps!"

"No."

"Murderer. That makes you a murderer."

"Yes."

"Teach me, then… Teach me, or I'll tell them everything!"

"Extortion, is it?"

"Murder is more wicked by far."

"What makes you certain I wouldn't kill you, if I'm a murderer as you say?"

"Because I look too much like my mother."

"There's a thought. Maybe I should just tell the Captain who you are. A Princess-Imperial. Think of the ransom you would fetch!"

"Yes… But then why bleed all the way to Sauglish looking for the Coffers?"

Impudent. An almost lunatic selfishness! Was she born this way? No. She wore her scars the way hermits wore their stench: as a mark of all the innumerable sins she had overcome.

"This is not a contest you can win, Wizard."

"How so?"

"I'm no fool. I know you've sworn by whatever it is you hold sacred to never teach anoth-"

"I am cursed! Disaster follows my teaching. Death and betra-"

"But you're mistaken to think that you can use threats or pleas or even reason with me. This Gift I have, this ability to see the world the way you see it, it's the only Gift I have ever received, the only hope I have ever known. I will be a witch, or I will be dead."

"Didn't you hear me? My teaching is cursed!"

"We're a fine match then."

Impudent! Impudent! Was there ever such a despicable slit?

That night they cast their camp a short distance from the cluster of others. Neither of them spoke a word. In fact, a quiet had fallen across all the Skin Eaters, enough to make the crackle of their fires the dominant discourse. Only Sarl's hashed voice continued to saw on as before.

"Kiampas! Kiampas! That was no pretty night, I tell you!"

Achamian need only look up to see several orange faces lifted in their direction-even among the Bitten. Never in his life, it seemed, had he felt so absurdly conspicuous. He heard nothing, but he listened to them mutter about her all the same: assessing her breasts and thighs, spinning expressions of longing into violent boasts, catalogues of what they would do, the vigour of their penetrations, and how she would scream and whimper; speculating on the whys and wherefores of her presence, how she had to be a whore to dare the likes of them, or how she soon would be…

He need only glance at Mimara to know that she listened too. Another woman, a free-wife, or a Princess-Imperial raised in cozened isolation, might be oblivious, simply assume that the white-water souls of men sluiced through the same innocent tributaries as their own, that they shared a common turbulence. But not Mimara. Her ears were pricked-Achamian could tell. But where he felt apprehension, the shrill possessiveness of an overmatched father, she seemed entirely at her ease.

She had been raised in the covetous gaze of men, and though she had suffered beneath brutal hands, she had grown strong. She carried herself, Achamian realized, with a kind of coy arrogance, as though she were the sole human in the presence of resentful apes. Let them grunt. Let them abuse themselves. She cared nothing for all the versions of her that danced or moaned or choked behind their primitive eyes-save that they made her, and all the possibilities that her breath and body offered, invaluable.

She was the thing wanted. So be it. She would find ways to make them pay.

But for Achamian it was too much. Her resemblance to Esmenet was simply too uncanny. And though he had little or no affection for the daughter-the girl was too damaged-he felt himself falling in love with the mother all over again. Esmenet. Esmenet. Sometimes, when his flame-gazing reveries dipped too deep, he found himself startled by the image of her in his periphery, and the very world would reel as he struggled to sort memories of the First Holy War from the chill dark of the now. To go back, he found himself thinking. I would do anything to go back…

So, with the hollow chest of speaking for the sake of forgetting, Achamian began explaining the metaphysics of sorcery to her-if only to kill the prurient silence with the sound of his own voice. She watched him, wide-eyed, the perfect oval of her face perched on her knees-illuminated and beautiful.

Quite against his intentions, he began teaching her the Gnosis.

The hike into the mountains proved arduous. The trail heaved and plummeted as it strayed farther and farther from the river gorges. The mules clicked across tracts of sheeted gravel and bare stone. The mighty broadleaves of the plateau became ever more spindly. "It's like we're climbing back into winter," Mimara breathlessly noted after picking a purple bud from the twigs hanging above her head.

Perhaps because of the accusatorial aura hanging between them, or perhaps just to steer his thoughts away from the burning in his thighs or the stitches in his flank, Achamian began teaching her Gilcыnya, the ancient tongue of all Gnostic Magi. As a student at Atyersus, he had been dismayed to discover that he would have to learn an entire language-not to mention one whose grammar and intonation were scarcely human-before he would be able to sing his first primitive Cant. Mimara, however, took to the task with out-and-out zealotry.

He hadn't the heart to tell her the truth: that the reason the sorcerous Schools were loath to take adults as students had to do with the way age seemed to diminish the ability to learn languages. What had taken him a single year as a child could very well take her several. It could be the case that she would never learn to manipulate the meanings with the precision and purity required…