Did this not instantly make her an instrument of some kind? A witting or unwitting spy? Achamian had watched an entire army—a holy war—succumb to his dread influence. Slaves, princes, sorcerers, fanatics—it did not matter. Achamian himself had surrendered his love—his wife! What chance could this mere girl have?

How much of her soul was hers, and how much had been replaced?

He gazed at her, tried to scowl away the slack from his expression.

“He sent you, didn’t he?”

She looked genuinely confused, dismayed even. “What? Kellhus?” She stared at him, her mouth open and wordless. “If his people find me, they would drag me home in chains! Throw me at the feet of my fucking mother—you have to believe that!”

“He sent you.”

Something, some mad note in his voice perhaps, rocked her backward. “I’m not ly-lying …” Tears clotted her eyes. A strange half-crook bent her face to the side, as though angling it away from unseen blows. “I’m not lying,” she repeated with a snarling intensity. A twitch marred her features. “No. Look. Everything was going so well … Everything was going so well!”

“This is the way it works,” Achamian heard himself rasp in an utterly ruthless voice. “This is the way he sends you. This is the way he rules—from the darkness in our own souls! If you were to feel it, know it, that would simply mean there was some deeper deception.”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about! He-he’s always been kind—”

“Did he ever tell you to forgive your mother?”

“What? What do you mean?”

“Did he ever tell you the shape of your own heart? Did he ever speak salving words, healing words, words that helped you see yourself more clearly than you had ever seen yourself before?”

“Yes—I mean, no! And yes … Please … Things were going so—!”

There was a grinding to his aspect, an anger that had become reptilian with age. “Did you ever find yourself in awe of him? Did something whisper to you, This man is more than a man? And did you feel gratified, gratified beyond measure, at his merest tenderness, at the bare fact of his attention?”

He was shaking as he spoke now, shaking at the memories, shaking at the nakedness of twenty years stripped away. It seemed to hang about the edges of his vision, the lies and the hopes and the betrayals, the succession of glaring suns and uproarious battles.

“Akka …” she was saying. So like her whore-mother. “What are you talki—?”

“When you stood before him!” he roared. “When you knelt in his presence , did you feel it? Hollow and immovable, as if you were at once smoke and yet possessed the bones of the world? Truth? Did you feel Truth?”

“Yes!” she cried. “Everyone does! Everyone! He’s the Aspect-Emperor! He’s the Saviour. He’s come to save us! Come to save the Sons of Men!”