Yes, she decides. Drusas Achamian is her brother.

“So all this time,” she says, daring to speak into one of the few silences he affords her, “you’ve been dreaming his life, cataloguing it, searching for clues as to my stepfather’s origin …

“Yes.”

“What have you found?”

The question shocks him; that much is plain. He draws clawed fingers through his great and grizzled beard. “A name,” he finally says with the sullen resentment of those forced to admit the disproportion between their boasts and their purse.

“A name?” She nearly laughs.

A long sour glare.

She reminds herself to take care. Her instinct, given all that she has endured, is to be impatient with the conceits of others. But she needs this man.

An inward look of concentration, then he says, “Ishuäl.”

He almost whispers it, as though it were a jar containing furies, something that could be cracked open by a careless tongue.

“Ishuäl,” she repeats, simply because his tone seems to demand it.

“It’s derived from a Nonman dialect,” he continues. “It means ‘Exalted Grotto,’ or ‘High Hidden Place,’ depending on how literal the translation.”

“Ishuäl? Kellhus is from Ishuäl?”

It troubles him, she can tell, to hear her refer to her stepfather as such—as someone familiar.

“I’m certain of it.”

“But if it’s a hidden place …”

Another sour glare. “It won’t be long,” he mutters with old man dismissiveness. “Not now. Not any more. Seswatha … His life is opening … Not just the small things, but the secrets as well.”

A life spent mining the life of another, pondering glimpses of tedium through the lense of holy and apocalyptic portent. Twenty years! How can he hope to balance the proportions? Grub through dirt long enough and you will prize stones.

“Like he’s yielding,” she forces herself to say.

“Exactly! I know I sound mad for saying it, but it’s almost as if he knows.” She finds nodding difficult, as though pity has seized the hinge of her neck and skull. What reservoirs of determination would it take? To spend so long immersed in a task not only bereft of any tangible profit, but without any appreciable measure of progress—how much would it require? Year after year, wrestling with the imperceptible, wringing hope out of smoke and halfmemory. What depths of conviction? What kind of perseverance?

Certainly not any the sane possess.

Faces. All conduct is a matter of wearing the appropriate faces. The brothel taught her that, and the Andiamine Heights simply confirmed the lesson. It’s as though expressions occupy various positions, a warning here, a greeting there, with the distance between measured by the difficulty of forcing one face from the other. At this moment nothing seems so difficult as squeezing pity into the semblance of avid interest.

“No other Mandate Schoolman has ever experienced anything like this?” She has asked this already, but it bears repeating.