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 had watched her carefully as he spoke, hoping to see the glint of thrill in her eyes. But there was naught but concern. This had been gnawing at her for quite some time, he realized.

“The Judging Eye,” she repeated in flawless Ainoni. “And what is that?”

His heart crawled into his throat. He coughed it loose, then swallowed it back into his chest. “It means that you don’t simply apprehend the Mark of sorcery, you see the sin as well …” He trailed, then laughed, despite the horror that flexed through him.

“And that’s funny?” she asked, her voice warbling with indignation.

“No, girl … It’s just that …”

“That what?”

“Your stepfather … Kellhus.”

He had improvised this, not willing to stray too far into the truth. But once spoken it seemed every bit as true and far more terrible with significance. Such was the perversity of things that Men often recognized their own arguments only after they had spoken them. “Kellhus …” he repeated numbly.

“What about him?”

“He says the Old Law has been revoked, that Men are at long last ready for the New …” The words the Mandate Catechism came back to him unbidden, and with the heat of truths drawn intact from the crucible of deception. Though you lose your soul, you shall gain the world …

“Think,” he continued. “If sorcery 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?”

He was surprised to discover he had stopped walking, that he stood riven, staring at the woman whose parentage had stirred so many echoes of heartbreak and whose unscrupulous obstinacy threatened everything. The last of the Skin Eaters had passed them, casting dubious backward glances as they marched with the mule-train beyond the limits of his light. Within heartbeats it was just the two of them, flanked by knolls of heaped basalt, plains of dust, and bones bleached as light as charcoal by the ages. Cleric’s light had tapered to a point, and the company had dwindled to a floating procession of shining helms and trudging shadows.

Silence sealed them as utterly as the blackness.