The Great Ordeal (Aspect-Emperor #3)(83)

At last she replies. “You mean you dreamed of the First Apocalypse?”

“Aye,” he said, his voice fading to a murmur.

“You were Seswatha once again?”

This yanked his chin upward. “No … No … I was Celmomas! I dreamed his … his Prophecy.”

She stares at him with flat, expectant eyes.

No. Your father isn’t mad. He just sounds that way—even to himself!

“I know …” he begins, pausing to rub his eyes despite the filth of his fingers. “I know. I know what it is we must do …”

“And what is that?”

He purses his lips. “The Eye …”

For some reason this fails to alarm her. “What about it?”

He studies her for a careful moment, far more himself, now.

“We must continue north, intercept the Great Ordeal …” He pauses to gather wind. “You must … You must gaze upon Kellhus with the Eye.”

He speaks with the air of entreaty, as if convincing her to undertake yet another mad gambit. But there is finality in his voice also, a weary sense of coming, despite stubbornness and stupidity, to an obvious conclusion.

“And for what?” she asks, her tone more clipped than she wishes. “To see what I already know?”

He frowns about popping eyes. “Know?”

The perversity is not lost on her. To doubt his words, his mission, for so long, then to suddenly see it with a clarity that he could never hope to attain—only to discover that she does not believe in him.

She sighs. “That the Aspect-Emperor is evil.”

The words hang on idylls of mountain breeze. The old Wizard fairly gapes.

“But how could you … how could you know such a thing?”

She turns to the D?nyain where they sit above them, gazes in a bold manner. The two merely return her regard with a kind of absolute immobility.

“Because he is D?nyain.”

She can see the old Wizard glaring in her margins, baffled and alarmed.

“No, Mimara,” he says after what seems a long moment. “No. He was D?nyain.”

This sparks a surprising fury in her. Why? Why must he always—always!—give away the coin of his doubt? He would make the world rich and himself a pauper, if he could.

She turns back to him with a kind of sly anger.

“There’s no outrunning what they are, Akka.”

“Mimara …” he says, as if she were her tutor. “You’re confusing acts for essences.”

“It’s a sin to use!”

They are truly arguing now. He parses his words with careful condescension.

“Remember Ajencis. ‘Use’ is simply a way to read … Everybody ‘uses’ everybody, Mimara—always. You need only look with certain eyes.”

Certain eyes.

“You cite Ajencis?” she scoffs. “You make arguments? Old fool! You dragged us all the way out here. You! The truth of man lies in his origins, you said. And now, when I have gazed upon those origins—with the very Eye of God, no less!—you argue that they mean nothing?”

Silence.

“You were right about him all along!” she presses, at once upbraiding and beseeching. “You, Akka! You turned to your heart in your pain, in your outrage, and your heart spoke true!”

The Aspect-Emperor is evil.

“But—?”

“Can’t you see? That room—the bones of the Whale Mothers!—that is the truth of what Kellhus has done to my mother—to your wife! He has made a tool of her womb, a bauble of her heart! What greater crime, greater monstrosity, could there be?”

And for the first time she glimpses the deeper tracts of her own outrage, the stab and twinge of her own sins against her mother. Esmenet, undone by her own astrologer mother, ruined by the famine that forced her to sell her daughter, undone by the masculine cruelty of the Imperial Court, and ruined by her false husband most of all …

Her false God.

And Mimara had sought only to punish her—her only blood!

Something—a horror—seized her breath at that moment, a sudden, cavernous accounting of all the harms she had authored. The time her mother had tried to teach her the rudiments of sowing, and Mimara had intentionally pricked her finger. How she used stories of her molestation to batter her mother with heartbreak and shame. The way she called out her mother’s fears and misapprehensions, accused her of being too weak, too polluted, to aspire to the glory of her Imperial station. “Empress? Empress? You can scarce rule your face, let alone an empire!”

The way she had laughed as her mother fled sobbing …

You can scarce rule your face …

She can see her mother weeping in her soul’s eye, curling about silk pillows in lieu of trust and love. Rebuffed, rebuked, shamed time and again. And alone, always alone, no matter whom she clung to …

Only this man, Drusas Achamian, had truly loved her, truly sacrificed for her. Only he had extended the dignity that was her due, and she had been tricked into betraying him …

Turned into another Whale Mother.

Mimara cannot swallow, cannot breathe, so overwhelming is the sense of commission, the weight of things tragic and irrevocable. She has seen it herself with the Eye, the inexplicable vision in the Mop, so she knows that she is saved. But that knowledge has become indistinguishable from skin-scratching, hair-rending shame. She should be damned, cast into everlasting fire …