Instead, he rubbed his face, muttering curses. What kind of rank foolishness was this? Pining over harsh words to a cracked and warped woman!

“I watched you,” Mimara abruptly said, staring at the procession of chains through the upper reaches of his light. For a moment he assumed this was just more hounding, then she said, “You don’t trust the Nonman. I could see it in your eyes.”

Achamian scanned the distance to be sure Cleric was far enough away not to hear, then looked at her with the mixture of annoyance and mystification that was fast becoming his “Mimara-face,” even as part of him recognized that this was her peace offering.

“Now is not the time, girl,” he said brusquely. That she could worry about such a thing given what they had just heard—not to mention what they might find—was beyond Achamian. If anything made her seem crazed, he told himself, it wasn’t so much her intellect as the disorder of her cares.

“Is it his Mark?” she persisted, again speaking in Ainoni. “Is that why you fear him?”

As though to match her absurdity with his own, Achamian began mumbling the song his slave’s children had sung and sung until he had cried aloud for them to stop. It seemed he could even hear them, piping about the edges of his husky baritone, voices that had floated with innocence and chanting delight. Voices he dearly missed.

“Stinky feet, hide my sweet, walk the river cool …”

“Sometimes,” Mimara persisted, “when I glimpse him in the corner of my eye …”

“Stinky bum, sniff your thumb, swim the water pool …”

“… he seems like something monstrous, a shambling wreck, black and rotted and … and …”

Suddenly the song and the peevishness that had provoked it were forgotten. Achamian found himself listening with arched attentiveness—a horror-spurred concentration.

She worked her mouth for a moment, lips pert about some lozenge of inexplicability, then looked to him helplessly.

“And it’s like you can taste his evil,” he heard himself say. “Not so much on your tongue as in your gums. Your teeth ache for it.”

A peculiar vulnerability afflicted her look, as though she had admitted something beyond her courage. “Not always,” she said.

“And it’s more than just the Nonman, isn’t it?” Something peculiar fizzed through his voice, something like a pang, but too fraught with fear. “Sometimes … Sometimes I look this way as well, don’t I?”

“So you see the same?” she blurted.

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.”