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

She has seen the Wizard with the Judging Eye-seen his damnation. At the time she simply assumed that sorcery was the cause, that contrary to her stepfather's claims, sorcery remained the unpardonable sin. And this seemed to lend credence to Achamian and his desperate case against the man who had stolen his wife. But what if this wasn't the case? What if this very quest was the ground of his damnation? There is poetry in the notion, as perverse as it is, and this more than anything else is what hones her fear to a cutting edge. To strike out in the name of love, only to inadvertently unleash the greatest terror the world has ever seen. When she mulls the possibility, it seems to smell of the Whore through and through... at least from what she has seen of Her.

This is what makes telling the Wizard all but impossible. What was she supposed to say? That his life and the lives of all those his deceptions have killed have been in vain? That he is a tool of the very apocalypse he hopes to prevent?

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...

- - Kill the Captain...

She knows this creature. She can number the bones in its false face. She even knows the questions that will confuse it, hint at the absence that is its soul. It stands upon a different field of battle, vast and spectral and devious with a thousand years of patient calculation. And for some reason, it needs Lord Kosoter to be a casualty of that cryptic battle.

Kill the Captain. Understand this command, she realizes, and she will understand Soma's design.

She has watched the slow transformation of loyalties and rivalries within the company. She has seen the glint of sedition in Galian's eyes. She has noticed the way Achamian has come to accept, even prize, the Captain and his ruthless methods. Lord Kosoter will deliver them to the Library of Sauglish-despite all the perils and uncertainties. He is simply one of those men, possessed of a will so cruel, so domineering, that the world could not but yield.

He was the Captain. The harsh shadow, bloodthirsty and pitiless, forever standing in her periphery.

She has always watched, and her eyes are nothing if not critical, but she has never probed, never tested. According to Soma something was happening, something that would eventually imperil their lives. According to Soma things transpired that neither she nor the old Wizard could see.

So she will squint against the glare of the obvious, peer into the gloom of implication. She will pretend to sleep while pondering possibilities and assembling questions. She will solve this one mystery...

She will become a spy.

So far the Mop has climbed and conquered every terrain they have encountered, scaffolding the sides of hills, braiding the heights above rivers, pillaring broad plains. She has peered through the green murk and trod across root-heaved earth for so long that sometimes she forgets the arid smell of open places, the flash of sunlight, and the kiss of unobstructed wind. All is humid and enclosed. She feels like a mole, forever racing beneath the thatch, always wary of flying shadows. When she thinks of the Stone Hags who have fallen in exhaustion, they are already buried in her soul's eye.

Finally they come to a stone formation jutting like a great fractured bone from the earth. Scrub clings to its scarped shelves, but nothing else, and peering up they actually catch ragged glimpses of sky where its bulk breaches the canopy. Standing aloof from their curious peering, the Captain bids them to find a way to the summit. Though hours of daylight remain, they will camp.

The sun glares. The air chills. The Mop tosses on and on, an endless ocean of swaying crowns. Whatever relief they hope to find in wind and sunlight is snuffed when they look to one another. Squinting. Eyes glittering from blackened faces. Ragged like beggars. In the gloom below, they seemed as true to their surroundings as the moss or the humus. Here on the heights, there is no overlooking either their straits or their desperation.

They look like the damned. Achamian, in particular, given the Mark.

They make camp on the formation's rump, where enough soil has accumulated to sustain a thin wig of foliage. They sit in scattered clots, watching the setting sun fall crimson into distant canopies. The Mop seems to mock and to beckon in turn, a susurrus unlike any she has heard, a horde of a million million leaves rattling in the dying breeze.

Opposite their camp, the formation rears into a promontory, stone horned like a bent-back thumb. The Captain stands in the dying light, beckons Cleric to follow him. Mimara pretends not to watch them vanish about the treacherous ledges. She counts fifty heartbeats, then strikes out along the opposite face, where they have designated their latrine. She continues past the putrid smell, literally risks life and limb scaling a serrated pitch. Then she creeps forward in a crouch, moving toward the sound of muttered voices.

The breeze or the play of echoes across chaotic stone fools her, for she almost blunders upon them. Only some instinct to freeze saves her from discovery. She breathlessly shrinks behind the cover of a tortoise-humped outcropping.

"They remind you..."

The Captain's voice. It shocks her as surely as a knife point 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."

She steps from behind the rising shell of rock, finds herself standing almost entirely exposed. Only the direction of their gazes prevents them from seeing her. Cleric sits in a pose of dejected glory, at once beautiful and grotesque for the blasted depths of his Mark. The Captain stands over him, a vision of archaic savagery, his Chorae so close to the Nonman that she can see a faint husk of salt rising across his scalp.

"Tell me!" Incariol cries in hushed tones. "Tell me why I am here!"

A moment of glaring impatience. "Because they remind you."

"But who? They remind me of who?" Even as Cleric says this his glittering black eyes wander toward her.

"Someone you once knew," the Captain grates. "They remind you of someone you once-"

He whirls toward her. His hair swings in broken sheets of black and grey.

"What are you doing?" he barks.

"I-I..." she stammers. "I think I need more... more Qirri."

A moment of murderous deliberation, then something like a grin hooks his eyes. He turns wordlessly to the Nonman, who remains seated as before.

"No," Cleric says with a strange solemnity. "Not yet. I apologize... Mimara."

This is the first time he has spoken her name. She retreats, flinching from the Captain's manic glare, her skin buzzing with the shame of her exposure. Afterward she remembers the Nonman's lips more than his voice, their fulsome curves, white tinged with too-long-in-the-water blue. She sees them moving to the rhythm of consonant and vowel.

Mim... araa...

Like a kiss, she thinks, her arms bundled against a curious sense of chill.

Like a kiss.

- - She keeps to herself the following day. The Wizard seems only too happy to oblige her. The trail has its rhythms, its own ebb and flow. Sometimes everyone seems to be engaged in low conversation, while other times everyone appears sullen and wary or simply lost in their own labouring breaths, and naught can be heard above the whistling chorus of birdsong. Their descent back into the Mop has replaced their anxiousness with melancholy.

She is quite lost in thought when Cleric comes alongside her, senseless ruminations, more a collage of recriminations and pained memories than anything meaningful.

She smiles at her shock. The unearthly beauty of his face and form unsettles her, almost as much as the horrid depth of his Mark. Something wrenches at the inner corners of her eyes whenever she allows her gaze to linger. He is contradiction incarnate.

"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 walks in silence for a time, eyes tracking the ground before his booted feet. There is something... overwhelming about his stature. The other men, with the possible exception of Sarl, exude the same aura of physical strength and martial brutality as had so many warlike men on the Andiamine Heights. But Cleric possesses a density beyond intimations of force and threat, one that reminds her of her stepfather and the way the world always seemed to bow about his passage.

She thinks of all the skinnies he has killed, the legions incinerated in the existential thunder of his voice. And he seems hardened for the multitudes that flicker shrieking before her soul's eye-in Cil-Aujas, on Maimor, across the Mop-as if murder draws flesh to stone. She wonders what it would be like, dying beneath his black-glittering eyes.

Beautiful, she decides.

"I think I once knew this," he finally says. At first she cannot identify the passion twining through his voice. Achamian has told her much about the Nonmen, how their souls often move in ways counter to the tracks of human passion. She wants to say sorrow, but it seems more somehow...

She wonders if tragedy could be a passion.

"Now you know it again," she says, smiling at the frigid gaze.

"No," he replies. "Never again."

"Then why ask?"

"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.

- - Afterward, her thoughts racing, she ponders the absurdity of memory, the fact that so simple a faculty can make a being so powerful so pathetic in its faltering. But the Wizard has been watching, of course. He's always watching, it seems. Always worried. Always... trying.

Like Mother.

"What did he want?" he rasps in heated Ainoni.

"Why do you fear him?" she snaps in return. She is never sure where this instinct comes from, knowing how to throw men on their heels.

The old Wizard walks and scowls, frail against a murky background of colossal trunks and mossed deadfalls. Trees growing in a graveyard of trees.

"Because I'm not sure that I could kill him when the time comes," he finally says. He speaks as much to the matted ground as to her, his beard crowded against his breastbone, his eyes unfocused in the manner of men making too-honest admissions.

"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."

The words she overheard the previous night seem to clutch with their own fingers, to scratch with nails like quills...

"But who? They remind me of who?"

"Someone," the Captain replies in his grinding voice, "you once knew..."

She composes her face into the semblance of boredom. "How can you be so sure?" she asks the Wizard.

"Because that is what Erratics do. Kill those they love."

She holds his gaze for an instant, then looks down to her trudging feet. She glimpses the skull of some animal-a fox, perhaps-jutting from the humus.

"To remember."

She doesn't mean this as a question, and apparently understanding, the old Wizard says nothing in reply. He always seems preternaturally wise when he does this.

"But his memory..." she says. "How could he be more powerful than you when he can barely follow the passage of days?"

Achamian scratches his chin through the wiry mat of his beard. "There's more than one kind of memory... It's events and individuals he forgets, mostly. Skills are different. They don't pile on the same way across the ages. But like I told you, sorcery depends on the purity of the meanings. What makes magic so difficult for you to learn turns on the same principle that makes him so powerful-even if he has forgotten the bulk of what he once knew. Ten thousand years, Mimara! The purity that escapes you, the purity that I find such toil, is simply a reflex for the likes of him."

He stares at her the way he always does when trying to press home some crucial point: his lips slightly parted, his eyes beseeching beneath a furrowed brow.

"A Quya Mage," she says.

"A Quya Mage," he repeats, nodding in relief. "Few things in this world are more formidable."

She tries to smile at him but looks away because of the sudden threat of tears. Worry and fear assail her. Over Cleric and the Captain, over the skin-spy and what it has insinuated. She draws a deep breath, risks looking at the old man. He grins in melancholy reassurance, and suddenly it all seems manageable, standing here 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.

"What?" he asks, his voice querulous, his eyes twinkling.

An unaccountable shyness climbs into her face. He is, she realizes, the first man to have ever made her feel safe.

"May our dooms be one," she says with curt nod.

The old Wizard smiles. "May our dooms be one, Mimara."

- - The pebble it throws is round and chipped, drawn down from the high mountains, its surface cracked and polished by ages of blasting water and migrating gravel. It threads the sieve of dead branches, climbing its low-thrown arc, before sailing into the midst of supine company, over the slumbering form of Pokwas, into the tangle of hair about her head.

She awakens instantly, knows instantly.

Soma.

She recoils from the thought, knowing that Soma, the real Soma, lies dead somewhere near Marrow-that what awaits her in the black has no name because it has no soul.

She wanders from the camp, following a rare lane of low light, beyond the first ring of towering sentinels, beyond the reach of any incipient Wards. She feels more than sees the shadow atop the blunt limb above her. Breathless, she looks up...

The shadow leans down and forward, and she sees it, staring at her with wide, expectant eyes...

Her own face.

"I can smell the fetus within you..." she hears her voice say.

"Kill the Captain, and it will be saved."

- - No. No. No.

Deceit! Devilry and deceit!

All her life she has thought in whispers. A habit of slaves, who must practise within what will save them without.

But her heart shouts as she tries to find her way back to sleep.

Lie. This is what they do, skin-spies. Uncertainty is their contagion; fear and confusion are their disease. "They seduce," her mother once told her. "They play on your fears, your vulnerabilities, use them to craft you into their tool."

But what if...