The slave glanced up at him, his wrinkled look as resentful as alarmed. Sorweel had never addressed him as a servant, let alone as a slave.

He grabbed the old man’s arm, yanked him to his feet with an ease that he found shocking. “What?” he cried. He paused, screwed his face in an expression of frustration and regret, tried to remember the Sheyic words Eskeles had taught him. Surely he could ask this—something as simple as this!

“What you do?” he cried.

A wild look of incomprehension.

Sorweel thrust him back, then maintaining his glare, made a pantomime of taking soil and rubbing it across his cheeks. “What? What you do?”

Like a flutter of wings, Porsparian’s confusion flickered into a kind or perverse glee. He grinned, began nodding like a madman confirmed in his delusions. “Yemarte … Yemarte’sus!”

And Sorweel understood. For the first time, it seemed, he actually heard his slave’s voice.

“Blessed … Blessed you.”

CHAPTER SIXTEEN - Cil-Aujas

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

Cil-Aujas

A soul too far wandered from the sun,
walking deeper ways,
into regions beneath map and nation,
breathing air drawn for the dead,
talking of lamentation.

—PROTATHIS, THE GOAT’S HEART

Spring, 20 New Imperial Year (4132 Year-of-the-Tusk), Mount Aenaratiol

She is terrified and alive.

Mimara runs over mouldered bones, a pinch of sun-brilliance carried high in the air above her. In her soul she thinks circles, while with her eyes she sees the light swing and seesaw, and she ponders the impossibility of it, how the light shed is the same light as any other, baring the surfaces of things, and yet at the same time not quite whole, as though strained through a filter—robbed of some essential sediment.

Sorcerous light, stretched over the ruin like moulted skin. Her light!

Fear crowds the moment, to be sure. She knows why the Wizard has given her this Gift, perhaps better than he. Part of her, she realizes, will not survive this underworld labyrinth …

Great Cil-Aujas.