Prophet and His General [2]

This was not the time. That mattered no more now than it ever had.

Lyle's knuckles wrenched, ratcheted so vicious and hard around the tent pole he'd braced himself against that he was sure he could only crush it or shatter. There was no question as to which. Whatever he met with, it would break first, because the clenched agony in his nerve and gristle and spine didn't know mercy's tongue, wouldn’t grant him surrender. Not when the hollows of his ears, the back of his eyes and whatever haunted him between burned like this.

Perhaps that was why he took advantage of the gloves cloaking his white knuckles and a jaw that could lock his expression. Perhaps that was why he stared at the woman khacking seed and furrow into the clay soil of his understanding and leaving its pulped flesh to drift in jellied ghasts vivid as memory before his eyes, why he stared just as though he were returning her doubtful scrutiny.

"She has agreed--."

 

Her eyes then seemed even more terrible than they did now, trained on the map where her clan's mountain lay. Her iris' black colour was nothing, nothing to their feverish, atrae motions: swelling as they sweep in to observe the negotiations over a plan of action, retracting to bite down on her impatience, to knife the memory of her people, the Yggdraeli, again.
Grim, gorging and gnashing...

"Never before has one of the Yggdraeli severed had such astonishing intelligence to bring us—."

The screaming silence between the Za'im, the Roth, the Prophet, the Yggdraeli, her translator, and him.
What had she seen, what atri had she witnessed, toiling in that mountain?

"Your plans are come to fruition, lazim. Make preparations. I want that mountain--."

"She’s your ward now--."

   

Now, Lyle strained his pounding head and twisted his tongue. 'I-- little. Little-- have little o--of the tongue. Yours. Your-- the to--ngue.' Their word for Yggdraeli slipped him. The roar in his skull blinded, ripples of blood and the spirits it carried drawing like tides over his raw senses.

"Lyle, are you--?"

 

A hand had still reached for him, at the meeting’s end. He swore he could feel the earthy fingers questing after his smoldering belly, as though to dampen the torments festering therein. Nimh, doldering--! There was no hand big enough to smother it, all was fuel to flame. It burnt and it burnt and it burnt until it was gone, even the air, and when you had nothing but air it collapsed into cold and black. No fate for a Prophet’s wide eyes. The stuff Zekkar bred fro--.

 

Spin.

 

Spin. A distal memory. A flashstick discharge and a scream. The probe end was inside the "lich," shoved up inside by a walkered soldier in khacks. And had the flashstick’s Yggdraeli victim once thrust his poxed hand inside one such as Vacteari, the woman with the death eyes? Inside with a hook? Lyle had heard tell of hooks and yanks, blood on mountain altars--.

 

'You are painful to listen to.' The Yggdraeli woman’s speech was abrupt. Lyle had barely clutched at the straw of the present before it was gone. His arm ached with tension, and he knew the tent pole he gripped to be bent.

Yet he grinned darkly with a snort. It let him exhale the yowl, or perhaps the whimper building in his chest harmlessly through his nose. 'Tongue mus-- should no be very hard like... it is.'

'You look sick. Perhaps you would speak better after the rebirth.' The morning--.

'I-- need... your chance-- say what you want during here. And I-- have duties.' Just the effort of forcing his butchery of the Yggdraeli tongue and cringing at how the hissing syllables broke over his exaggerated pronunciations was pulling him up. Into the now. Now. A language meant for quick hunting cries and worship and whispering through caverns where sound carries. A language of the now, of decision. His vision bunched shred by shred into focus again.

'I want to sleep. And I am not confident of understanding you, even rested.'

'They'll have a-- talk...er in our-- ah the two tongues. In the... morning when possible with secret.' Lyle experimented with easing open his now stiff fingers while he appraised his guest blearily.

Vacteari, her name was. And she appeared other in the honeyed depth of his close tent than she had in High Command’s. Her sister wariness to his own was less taut, though by no means did that soften her black eyes and the pupils dissolved therein. It wasn't as unnerving as folk made it out to be, standing before those eyes; somehow he could feel where her gaze was trained, though he couldn't see. And she was thin as a razor, as the snow-edge of a coinpincher's paper, but she placed her steps firmly enough and moved with such grace he felt that must be natural.

Ah, but look at him, the trencher taking in her exotic features first. 'I-- apologies. I am unsettled. Please... hunger before the sleep?’

She appeared relieved that he'd offered food and inclined her head. Thanks or affirmation? Ah-- but she was already moving to open the icebox she'd spotted, and he tried to turn politely and offer her privacy in her deliberations. Again, her mannerisms struck him as odd compared to the customs her compatriots adhered to. Most Yggdraeli women tended to make shadows of themselves—the other soldiers called them shy. But Vacteari, though reserved, was very much present, demanding witness. It struck him as orchestrated deviance. But it was impossible to know if it was for her own benefit or his.

By now he should know. He was acquainted with too many Yggdraeli women for his conscience's sake, through every fault of his own. "You want to know how to get the best intelligence?" He regretted those words-- or might have, if not for the fact that his designs meant women were processed as they were supposed to be rather than simply disappearing after harsh conquests or mouldering in "liberated" mountain caverns. The only problem with his plan was that the Yggdraeli women faced down his superiors or else in the face of a skilled linguimancer's queries they worried their lips and despaired-- they only knew what was useful to one inside their sear-damned society. To one caring for it. But who dwelt among kin with an eye to their demise, even if it were kin one loathed? Lyle possessed an intensely detailed map of the Yggdraelis' multifarious clans, their rivals, and notables; however, there was no way of reaching them without a costly, direct assault on one of their mountain networks. Not now that the Yggdraeli’s high priests were wresting control from the more acquisitive chiefs and closing off interaction in favor of war.

Vacteari had stood at their meeting with High Command that day with her back erect and rattled off a list of wider entries to the Yggdrael's twining caverns, ways of drawing them out, and the numbers they departed with on raids. Rattled it off, her expression froze to chain, long and kinked in a bunch about the tight draw of her lips when she drew forward and spat at the translator further explanadum-- the Yggdraeli priesthood's entanglement with the ruling strongmen, the symbols on which their loyalty hinged, symbols they could not bide out the desecration of, that would force their hands. Her ideas unfolded in well-nursed, sophisticated trains and weaves of intrigue. Her posture bent her over the sun-kissed Southlander's table and tensed her back to all behind it. When the Za'im and the rest dismissed her she burned out slowly in the corner they had consigned her to, and then studied their living arrangements with a blank expression. Guarded, Lyle had presumed. She unsettled him, for none of the natural reasons--.

Who are you, woman?

'For sake-- for your comfort...' Lyle weighed the words. 'How you like living here? No—my meaning-- in what way? Learn... to be-- same as us, here? Or can—as some other area? Like in the-- the mountain?'

The woman twisted and regarded him uncomprehendingly. In fairness, he had never asked before. It was only that she was so strange and self-contained, he couldn't read...

'...we work, we will, as two. For a while. I-- can change how things… which I do… done. Or teach you. To...' He grasped desperately for the word. 'Look same, so not seen as-- not white-- on black? Do you say "outsider"?’

Comprehension dawned on her; the angle of her head and neck formed a bow like the sun creeping over the lichland's conifers. She did not reply; however, turning instead to the icebox. To his surprise she had selected not any prepackaged tins, but some embalmed fat and roots, flour, and powered milk.

'Can I cook inside?' She was not to reveal herself to anyone without High Command, outside the tent, and was treating the flimsy canvas material of her prison to skepticism.

Lyle took the largest of his metal pots and put it astride the top of the brazier. Then returned to a series of long and detailed field journals he was meant to be winnowing into a report.

Neither of them left their eyes to their respective tasks. He studied her and she studied his belongings, and their gazes locked tersely several times as the fat and flour sizzled over his brazier and swelled his nostrils with aromatic whorls of steam. When she noted that one of the manuscripts he had strewn about depicted inscriptions at a Yggdraeli altar her expression positively curdled.
    The Yggdraeli language had no written equivalent, for all its complexity, but their pictographs were clearer than the finest artists from Illum had ever devised. The manuscript revealed a good example. Image after image of long, gaunt beings prostrate in various modes of suffering, but with one of their two heads lifted high, their necks craned that their lacunar faces were turned up away from the mist thronging them. It was only upon further inspection one noted that the figures had two bodies altogether, one red and one black-- the former with its head sinking to its full breast, and the other phallic and bracing itself against this weighted body to strain toward the clear, cold, elaborately patterned snowflakes locked in tessellations above. The mottled sea of claret dusting the painting and cloying to the figures comprised of bloodied handprints then smoothed into ideograms and portraits of spirits.

Lyle covered it self-consciously, but frowned. His fingers flexed and it took all his self-possession to pry them from forming new fists at the disgust he'd glimpsed in her curled lip.

'I will not have answers to your questions until you've eaten and slept.' She asserted, suddenly. Lyle blinked.

Vacteari did not grace him with a glance up this time, her colorless face tracing spells and musings into to the clumps of dumpling forming in her makeshift gravy. Yet in her words there was a curious sort of power. As though she saw through him-- his weariness and his fear and the constant turns of his stomach keeping him from tending to his own nutrition and most of all his apprehensions toward her. He hesitated. What did she mean by-- was this a--?

Shaking his head, he forced himself up to sit beside her, though he couldn't force himself to feel comfortable. She didn't look any less guarded, either. Still, he felt envious when she offered the gravy to him. Of what he didn’t know. Perhaps it was the certainty, the utter conviction with which she’d prepared it.

They ate in deeper silence even than they slept in. Lyle did not much sleep, having given her the schracke he'd broken in and having known from the beginning the result would have been the same if he hadn't. The pattern they established that first night held over the course of the next weeks as together they prepared to carry out High Command's bidding, save that Vacteari began to demand words in Common Tongue. "Wrong" was her precious, toddling stubbin-- complete with a rolled 'r' Lyle couldn't master in the Yggdraeli tongue. They achieved much even during the intervals the translator was away by pouring over Lyle's sketches, maps, and the like and awaiting the moment her lips would form the ultimatum and she could begin to explain how his ink mischaracterized the Yggdraelis' mountain. In the end the translator, a linguimancer (and a man inflated with the hitherto unforeseen significance of his specialty) only had to translate when Lyle needed to unfurl an elaborate scheme for Vacteari's criticism. Neither conversed of themselves; this was an unspoken rule. But they circled.

Lyle was compelled by his task to make several rounds throughout camp-- to High Command, the dispatcher, provisions, and the medic's tent for a commission of particularly delicate nature. To his chagrin he was also forced to deliver orders to his contemporaries, fellow lazims, requesting that they rouse and prep their labarams’ squads for a task-they-knew-not-what (ever a source of backbiting and dry, desert-variety grousing; Southlanders' languages never had accommodated insults more targeted than a metaphor, and the development of anything so pointed as the slur 'trencher' in such a culture was nothing short of a miracle).

While away, Lyle sensed that Vacteari chafed. Wouldn't anyone in that tent? So he took her discreetly to visit the resettlement division. There were very few Yggdraeli there because no operations of particular success or devastation had taken place for some time. Yet he felt that Vacteari may, in the future, meet with such a division and that this would qualify not only as a diversion but a preparatory exercise-- knowing, all the while, that were he honest he would have told her that he wanted to see her interact with others of her relinquished society.

There he was relieved to note that there were one or two young Yggdraeli men perched sullenly on the cots where they, one and all, waited for the Utterian army to deign to appoint their fates. Soldiers tended to respect the men more, to expect more resentment and distance of them rather than the gratitude they were wont to extort from the women they "liberated." Vacteari ignored them, and Lyle knew it was a purposeful snub from the way the men scowled at her and fiddled with the hem of the drabs under their skin jackets-- drabs prized, like the flashsticks Yggdraeli used, from raids on outlying Croixation villages to the North. Stiff-backed, Vacteari approached the women, instead, and began stiltedly requesting details about the procedures Utterian soldiers subjected them to. He watched curiously. Afterward she was satisfactorily irritated.

'You expect that I will feel close to them because we're the same "kind"?'

'Perhaps if-- but you not same. I want to see what... is it you hate-- from past? Your past?' His Yggdraeli was only growing marginally smoother, and listening to Vacteari converse with the soon to be refugees he'd received a dour reminder that she spoke quite slowly for his benefit.

To his surprise, Vacteari answered. 'I hate their simpleminded adherence to the worship of Death, of all things. They would cut out their own hearts before they considered--.' Considered...

Lyle frowned. 'Arrogant.'

'The men are the arrogant ones. Calling their power holy.'

The lazim's steps slowed, briefly, before he shook his head and hurried on. With nothing more than: 'Don't mistake-- what... the thing used for. Anything used-- for. It's not... the thing's... its self? Its... the whole thing. It's not.' Then he flushed.

On his halting tongue the words seemed a banality. But then, so did her accusations. Neither could speak fluently, indirectly, and what they danced about so chargedly did not condescend to be approached from the front. They could make it no place. Virtually everyone Lyle had ever met agreed on what their condition was, the problem with their world, Uegyre-- the blunt facts prime for ultimatums. But not a one had settled on the same causes or solutions.

Once more he and Vacteari were consigned to watching one another warily, hoping and suspecting that enmity might rear up between them. Lyle had the sneaking suspicion that dealing with her personally was an assignment that had been given him to draw him out of reclusion. He was frustrated to note that it was working, and that he wasn't as angry as he might have anticipated.

Then there was Maura.

For the first week and a half Lyle had been relieved to find that the Prophet must have pressing duties of his own—that is, the Prophet did not appear. Alone, he and Vacteari fell into as comfortable a routine as was like to be expected, and owing to her knack for acerbically making him feel a mug for neglecting his self-care he was in a great deal better a mood than was usual for him, what with a full stomach and marginally more sleep.

The Prophet reappeared at another hearing with High Command to size up the color in Lyle's face with a broad grin and elbow him whenever he launched into Calce explicatives with their superiors (even curses as benign as scratted). They were seated at a campaign table adorned with a profusion of files Lyle didn't bother to flip through because he'd penned the majority. They were congratulating him again and he was swearing at the fact that the most sensitive part of the operations had yet to so much as begin, and then they were remarking on his tidy preparations and grilling him on the finer details.

Fiza’ims, haza’ims, deza’ims, laza’ims, geza’ims, za’ims, and finally roths and the higher Prophets—second only to the Grand Prophet and a mysterious shadow council of Reshti and Illumni.

This Roth, in particular (and he was black as night, so black and lithesome that soldiers, want to fashion periapts for themselves, wagered his beauty were a blessing and an inner light that kissed even the back of his skin and darkened the sun's work), he bridged his fingers and watched the lazim over them with interest. Grooming me. Lyle bit his tongue hard and hoped against hope he'd not taste blood. Those hopes were disappointed when, once more, they dismissed him without divulging who, precisely, he was going to send in to infiltrate the khacked mountain. Even as Maura interrupted his exit to request a conversation in private he was acidly deriding his own failure to devise a better administrative plan for if his plan succeeded that might undermine the Yggdraeli's fears they'd be made as godless as trenchers once the static from the Utterians’ flashsticks settled, and--.

But Maura. Yes.

His stroll back with to the lazim’s tent was infuriating. Maura let his smiling, serene silence stand as reprimand enough. The lazim was not often afflicted by the desire to keep anyone's counsel but his own for his actions; so afflicted, he was confronted within by naked ambivalence. And even once they reached the tent the scrat-hack of a Prophet ignored him in favor of a kind of silent company with Vacteari-- he moved immediately to help her prepare a meal, making himself at home to his own portion. No matter how determinedly Lyle worked he could not rid himself of a pregnant, almost aching consciousness of his superior.

It wasn't until Vacteari's baleful and despotic eye had him seated at the brazier with the Prophet that Maura asked: 'How are you feeling about this operation?'

The woman didn't smile but Lyle felt like she wanted to. Maura couldn't have spoken a question she was likelier to comprehend.

'Like I can't possibly prepare well enough for it and the lot of you should keep off my shadow if I'm going to do all I can, for Rue's sakes.'

'What do you say?' Vacteari asked for the Prophet's benefit.

'I want him out.'

'I am only here to assess,' Maura offered conciliatorily. 'How you are coping with the responsibility, in addition to your other duties. The dezims for a few hundred men all have reports that reach you, do they not? And you insisted on camping out here in the thick of them, your labaram.'

And, glancing at Vacteari Maura smiled on another topic. 'I'd say he is better because of this.' Gesturing toward the food and eliciting a satisfied twitch of her lip.

'Why you? Why not a psychomancer?' Lyle demanded cynically. He was not unduly concerned about his other responsibilities. He made it a point to ensure that those he commanded could work without him and, given that he was a trencher, they were all too glad of the pride he left to them.

The Prophet only returned to his meal with a small shake of his head.

'Explain?' Vacteari requested.

'I do not-- understand him. For me-- myself. Holy man-- we call "Prophet" is... not worth of trust most of the time.'

'I have never seen you lie before.' Vacteari glanced up, and Lyle's mouth fell shut with faint astonishment before he set down his bowl and began to rise, but she interrupted him. 'Will you translate for me?'

She continued before he could finish lowering himself back down. 'Tell him that this, accepting things as they are and acting as they demand, is the way of women. Our temples call this, satisfying hunger and other needs,' she was gesturing to the food and the cot she ever forced him to use. 'Or treating yourself as natural, they call it "sin." The men speak of Death as judgment, and reject this and because they can control us they think they can control everything else too. And it’s only if its controlled by an idea in the head from Death's dreaming realm that they call it holy. It can't come from here.' It was a careful set of words. She had rehearsed them many times-- before she so much as approached the Utterian army, Lyle suspected. 'Tell him they would kill it. The weaker they feel the more they will kill. Ask him what his faith says.'

Lyle's pupils darted erratically up and down her face, trying to find some source for this sudden outpouring. Yet she seemed utterly unruffled, her chin tilted proudly up at him. Maura was already leaning forward with a mixture of concern and curiosity at his expression. He did not translate, but: 'Why?'

'Because your soldiers are the same. I can't decide on you. But he has helped me and I see other in him. Is it his religion?'

'His faith,' Lyle corrected quickly, unthinkingly. He wanted to argue back. Too simple. She put it too simply. But again he didn't have the words. And he had to preempt Maura: 'She wants to hear you describe your faith. She hates the Yggdraeli's. She... says you have helped her and that is why she would know?' His eyes narrowed.

Maura fell back with a low whistle, a calloused hand scraping at the wiry stubble overflowing down his jowls and chin. 'You two must get along. Heady words... and such questions...’

'You helped her when?’

'She put a question to me first, didn't she?'

Lyle gripped his knees impatiently, or perhaps to brace himself. Something in the solemnity with which Maura granted priority to Vacteari's query roused him to his senses. The singed umber features that the brazier summoned into existence by casting tufts of its gaseous inner flame through the scene coalesced into an image, so vivid clarity was no longer a matter of concern.

Vacteari sat erect with her shoulder blades thrust back as though her spine were of aetherthings, and her attention plied Lyle's insides until they stung worse than blood's throbbing flood to a dead limb. Gooseflesh burned up his arms with cold. But he couldn't fall toward Maura. Because Maura was loosely sprawled at the side of the brazier, and his opened limbs and spirit had veritably merged with the tent's light until it seemed almost as though his dark locks and burnished skin would fade into the air he searched for a true answer-- fade and then embrace them all. Lyle hung suspended, at the mercy of the answer to follow, and all over he was freezing wondering when he'd given himself over to that mercy.

That said, how dare the Prophet offer that mundane, sheepish smile like he didn't know his own powers. 'Please tell her that I fear lying to her and I'm... not quite sure what I believe in is. I-- think perhaps that's why I believe in it.'

The lazim's mouth was forming some stilted rendition of this in Yggdraeli, but despite Vacteari's penetrating stare he could not tear his eyes from the Prophet or, indeed, feel past the numb shock that had doused his head. When he finished Maura added: '...and perhaps its because I haven't faced what either of you have.'

Vacteari was as unreadable as ever. Rightly, Lyle suspected, she felt the Prophet's words completed themselves. As Lyle cleaned the wooden dishes and tried to shove Maura away from lending his arm to help, the tent was pervaded by the muted roar of his own, churning thoughts like a distal ocean-- though oceans were a distant memory on the Yggdraeli taiga. He glanced at Vacteari and wondered if it was naive to hope the leagues and the years would someday ease her...

Maura left soon after that. Yet Lyle began to suspect that an alliance had formed between his two principal nuisances. He began to suspect that Vacteari's soliloquy on the Yggdraeli faith had been not for Maura's benefit but his own, and that she anticipated either acknowledgement or a rebuttal. Yet how was he acquiesce or to fight it as he desired if he knew only Temple notables and sociomancers' accounts of the Yggdraeli faith (these were unreliable, treated the faith like a collection of wishful fancies), when he had never so much as witnessed a service or, more importantly, a day given to the routines of a devotee? And in any case, his preparations waxed ever more frenetic and demanding as they approached the deadline he had given High Command. Most days he spent weaving between more tents than he cared to number. His escape was not perfect, however.

'The Prophet,' Vacteari caught him with one such day before he slipped out. She was barring his way to the exit, arms crossed. 'He said you also judged your people. That's why they thought we might work well together. Because you betrayed yours, also.'

‘Did he?’ Lyle shouldered through the query and out their shared dwelling without giving answer, smoothing back his long bangs into a snug, fur-lined cap with a grimace the moment he was sure she wouldn’t see it.

No. It's not the same at all. You, at least, knew what in Zekkar's blacks you were trying to accomplish. The thought chased him whilst he crept through the encampment; during the day it was restive, as sharp-nosed soldiers had long ago devised that things were moving again and were anxious to see that things weren't going to khack them up the ass. Everywhere tempers were short with impatience. It made the alleys between tarp feel swollen, and constricted. Fortunately, it was very early morning. Unfortunately the Prophet was milling outside the dispatcher's headquarters the lazim needed to visit with obvious intent; there was a particular set to his expression when official rather than imagined duties compelled him. He wore it now.

When he gestured for the lazim to follow him there was little choice.

Lyle padded after him whilst rubbing his hands together in the brisk and chill, all too aware of how the air colored his nose and cheeks. He wondered whether it was this that inspired Maura to lead him to a nearby clergy's outpost rather than a more distal locale. The Utterian army had erected something like a Temple at the base of a tremendous conifer. Its roots supported a raised platform, and the trunk was circled by a fan-like shelf supporting the Revelations (Tomes) to Rue and all the prophets before him; as well as a copy of the Treatises, the Temple's best interpretations of the volume. Some inspired soul had used ash to etch into the conifer a burning man caged in his pyre, but with open arms that seemed to reach beyond that agonizing grave. The burning man, Rue, had no features, as was common. Southlanders found images that progressed beyond symbols arcane and suspicious.

It was the capacity for a simple merchant or soldier to raise an atri's furor and force small details, small amenities like this, into existence that sometimes kindled Lyle's grudging respect for the Southlander's aegis. He knew many a soldier like Jarry that was the better for this small piece of home. He knew others for whom it stood for something, truly-- and though he mightn't fully understand these last he felt their souls were like as not most in consonance with the appearance of orderliness and accountability the military strove to display. Quite the contrast to the sycophants prowling about with sermons and the shallow culture of pity-fueled handouts and self-aggrandizement he remembered finding among the mechtrensche's congregations.

People like Maura got the best of a rather scholastic Miralist tradition, religion to help them understand the world they lived in. And what bastardized religion did the mechtrensche know but exhortations to yield to kin, community, and so-called tradition? Their foggy, misremembered folk traditions had more substance than…

He was surprised to find his attention pilfered by, then lingering on Rue’s image. A martyr who set up his followers for schism by refusing to declare whether he were divine or earthly, a martyr who claimed his immolation stood for a rebirth of man's spirit to fend off Zekkar's legion atraen and the forces of entropy-- to keep their natures for their return to the great God in death. A martyr who also declared there were two deaths and two lives... "All that is, is it not good? But we live and die not as we are." Lyle had read more than he would ever confess to Maura. Yet this—a headache. Incomprehensible.

He turned, and jumped when he realized Maura was studying his reaction to the hackneyed Temple with interest. Then Lyle coughed. 'Mindful of Vacteari's question when you brought me here?'

Maura drew his jacket off and tossed it down on one of the elaborate rugs circling the Temple's belly. The dun of his robe was even duller by contrast to his radiant dark skin, drawn out again by the braziers' heat. 'I was mindful of warmth and privacy, Lyle. A Prophet perplexed does better to leave signs and sermons to the Fate that his God has etched in events.' He was so tall it seemed to take an age for him to lower himself to the floor.

The lazim managed a profoundly skeptical roll of his eyes for form's sake but he sat, also, and tried not to look phased when he misgauged his distance and his knee threatened to graze his companions'. 'There are a number of demands on my time these days, so if you would see fit not to go circumnavigatory...'

To his surprise and regret, Maura obliged:

'Why did you initially ask to be the one who would infiltrate the mountain with Vacteari? They said no and even though Shiga and Vacteari and I leverage our best efforts you're still... wound tight as a wristdial.'

As the Prophet spoke his stare moved gradually from the lazim's knee to his face and Lyle was very aware, very suddenly, of his own red and heavy eyes, the smallness of his frame and the burgeoning fractures marring every crag of a mask that was shedding its youth too quick. He swallowed.

'If we conquer this mountain there are others. It doesn't mean anything. A tactician working inside, seeing how the society works, rather than a spy—such a tactician as I could find a way to rebuild after, a way to deal with the prisoners of war and form alliances that would seduce the other Yggdraeli away from their resistance.'

'...that's the official story, in any case,' Maura mumbled, not unkindly. ‘A solid one.’ Many of the Yggdraeli clan leaders to the South had been seduced by the rather more absolute power they could exercise over their kin (though kin was really more metaphorical than literal) by rooting it in goods and titled land. In the rather larger northern territory; however, religious leaders held more sway and had been savvy enough to foresee that such a system would spell the end for their authority. They had introduced rather more fluid, merit-based authority structures that shored up their positions. Considering the exploited and often wretched lot of the southern group of Yggdraeli, priests’ adherents were only too devoted to the cause. It would be a rather more tricky system of fellow-feeling and resistance to dismantle, and particularly to dismantle without--.

'It's the story entire, damnation.' The lazim thrust his face roughly away from both the altar and the Prophet and wished the gloaming of the morning did not cling so luridly to the sheer fabric of the tarp surrounding them, as though reaching for him.

But then the Prophet's hand landed heavily on his shoulder, and his stomach positively knotted in his gut even before the dread revelation boxed his ears and set them ringing: 'Lyle, Vacteari took up on your behalf and you will be the one going into the mountain, now.'

Lyle's eyes widened, and he smacked Maura's palm away as though it burnt, his eyes darting over the Prophet in a desperate, wild scrabble to search out the lie. His breath caught-- he had to swallow again. And then he felt his knee knocking against Maura's as he shivered, and he could only cover his face in a hand. 'Kh--khacking pox. What-- did she tell them?'

'The truth. Even our best linguimancers don't have native proficiency in the local dialects. Much less our trained spies. The Yggdraeli natives working for us haven’t yielded information of the sort everybody in High Command wants. Vacteari says you naturally carry yourself like a Yggdraeli and that she might be able to pretend to be… ahm… of your flesh. Claim that you have taken an oath of silence. Among devotees of their temples it is not uncommon. And she said she trusts you.'

'Khacking pox...' Lyle's voice trebled.

Maura was leaning like he desired to try and support the lazim again. 'You don't look a man who got his appeal. What he wanted.'

'What I want is always the worst of my problem--.' Lyle stopped and rose swiftly, shaking his head. 'Thank you for reporting to me, Prophe--.'

'I think you want to go into the mountain to search for justification.'

The words gripped Lyle tighter than a flash to the spine, tighter than natures Miralists ascribed to everything, tighter than his future tomb. Maura would not have believed the sickly man could shade whiter but he did, stricken, and against the Temple’s rich trunk and the burnished antiquities it supported he seemed ghostly enough to vanish, pulled between the altar and the black without the tent and liable to shatter against either.

'I--.'

Suddenly, the impression winked away. The lazim straightened in a paroxysm, and both his fists clenched as he marched forward, growling through locked teeth as though he had never quavered at all: 'There will never be justification for what I do, Prophet.'

'You say that without so much as knowing what you're doing yet, Lyle--.' Maura had to restrain himself from reaching out again. Lyle did not so much as pause.

'It's politics, isn't it? A Prophet should know what sacrificial rituals look like.' With that, the lazim was gone. Gone, and snared again in his own—but no. It wasn’t that. If it were only self-torment Lyle endured, then surely it wouldn’t be so infectious. Surely--.

Maura rubbed the fading warmth in his knee, then offered a second prayer to complement this first.

Despite the precaution, he wasn't at all certain it was enough.