Her slavery moves through her, not so much a crowd of flinching years as an overlapping of inner shadows. It is always there—always here. The whips and fists and violation, a clamour shot through with memories of love for her sisters, some weaker, some stronger, pity for the torment in the eyes of some, those who would weep, “Just a child …” They used her, all of them used her, but somehow the bottom of the jar never dried. Somehow a last sip remained, enough to moisten her lips, to dry her eyes.

This was how her mother’s agents found her years ago, dressed like their Holy Empress, emptied save for a single sip. Apparently thousands had died, such was Anasûrimbor Esmenet’s outrage. A whole swath of the Worm in Carythusal had been razed, the male population indiscriminately slaughtered.

But it was never clear just whom Mother was avenging.

Mimara knows what will happen. So rather than follow Achamian into the town, she circles around and climbs the escarpments instead. This time, she really does leave her mule, Foolhardy, to the wolves. She takes up a position well away from the eastward tracks—not a day passes, it seems, without some company trudging in from the horizon—and she watches the town the way an idle boy might study a termite-infested stump. It looks like a toy woven of rotted grass. The trees and bracken opening about a great lesion of open mud. The rows of swollen-wood structures ribbing the interior. The great white veils floating like some ghostly afterimage from the falls, encompassing the strings of fuzzing smoke …

From high above she watches the town and waits. Sometimes, when the wind blows just so, she can even smell the place’s fetid halo. She watches the coming and going, the ebb and flow of miniature men and their miniature affairs, and she understands that the infinite variety of Men and their transactions is simply a trick of an earthbound vantage, that from afar, they simply are the mites they appear to be, doing the same things over and over. Same pains, same grievances, same joys, made novel by crippled memory and stunted perspective.

Finitude and forgetfulness, these are what grace Men with the illusion of the new. It seems something she has always known, but could never see; a truth obscured by the succession of close leaning faces.

She dares no fire. She hugs herself warm. From lips of high-hanging stone, she watches and waits for him. She has no other place to go. She is, she decides, every bit as rootless as he. Every bit as mad.

Every bit as driven.

CHAPTER SEVEN - Sakarpus

CHAPTER SEVEN

Sakarpus

… conquered peoples live and die with the knowledge that survival does not suffer honour. They have chosen shame over the pyre, the slow flame for the quick.

—TRIAMIS I, JOURNALS AND DIALOGUES

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

It was a thing of wonder.