Except that Castor had not approved of her posting...
He shut his eyes, weary and worried again about Emmy. Her official position was a thin shield, he knew. Somehow he must accomplish what Calandria demanded of him, and return to her. Tonight, or tomorrow; soon.
Suddenly dizzy, he opened his eyes. To sunlight.
Jordan blinked, and again saw the tables and the guests, under lamplight. He craned his neck back. Shafts of evening light still shone through the oculi high overhead, but it hadn't been those he'd seen. For a mere instant, he'd seen forest light, leaves and sky.
He shook his head and sat up a little straighter. Must be the wine , he thought hopefully. With an effort, he returned his attention to the banquet.
Linden and Sheia still ate stone-faced, though their wives seemed animated enough. At the head table, Yuri seemed most relaxed, his slack-jawed pale face shining in the gas light. But, Jordan noticed, his hair was plastered to his forehead with sweat, and it wasn't hot in here. Of course, Yuri was right next to the fire.
In more ways than one, Jordan thought, and smiled. "You wouldn't wish to have the troubles of the highborn," Jordan's father had told him more than once. Just
now he agreed.
Jordan leaned back and closed his eyes.
His ruined hand brushed aside twigs, revealing a forest path. With a sigh he stepped down to it. For a moment he swayed, and put one hand out to steady himself against a tree. Then he sat down.
Armiger looked up at the sky. Night was coming. He had been walking for two days now without pause; night merely slowed him down. At first it had been mechanical, aimless activity. Gradually as he walked, though, the bright air and thrum of life all around him awakened something in hima kind of recognition, an identification with the things that grew and struggled all around. If he squinted at the sky, his healing eyes could perceive the faint threads of the Diadem swans wavering in their high seats. The Winds still did not know he was here. But while the sight of them filled him with a deep pang of lossfor they were his own kind, if distantly relatedit was the buzzing insects and the gaudy flowers that he drew strength from. The swans, like his greater Self, were inaccessible.
As he walked, Armiger for the first time contemplated what it meant to be mortal.
Now as he paused on this tenuous path, he forced himself to take stock of his body. Hitherto the body had been just a vessel, rugged but ultimately disposable. Today as he walked he had begun to come to grips with the idea that this was his only body nowthat his resources were finite and concentrated in this ruined husk.
His wounds were healing. If he tried he could articulate words with his split tongue, and his fingers could grip again. The terrible wound in his chest had closed, and great sloughs of skin had fallen away to reveal flesh new and pink. As he walked he had stuffed leaves into his mouth to make up the mass he'd lost, dimly aware as he did so that the human biology of his body protested. He overrode it to command digestion and assimilation. After all he was not human; he was Armiger, agent of a god.
Or he had been. What he examined now in the failing daylight was a badly wounded man, dehydrated and staggering on blistered feet. In his experience in the field, he had seen men like this weeping as they collapsed by the side of his marching columns. They tended not to rise again.
When he closed his eyes and listened to this human body, Armiger knew why. Yesterday as he walked he had wondered how the small lives around him experienced existence, unaware that he need only pay attention to his own body to know.
As long as he thought of himself as Armiger the demigod, this body's problems seemed trivial, as he had treated those dying men's tears as trivial. After all, they were so stupidly unaware of themselves as parts of the systems of army, ecology and planetary action which Armiger felt in his deepest being. What was a body, or even a mind? Get rid of it, there were more, the important thing was the system. Armiger had been the systems' awareness; they had been it also, but never knew.
While he had his tie to the omniscient power that had created him, Armiger had rarely used the brain of this human body he was in, except when he needed to understand the irrational actions of his soldiers. This body thought, and felt, like any human, but he didn't need to use that mind, for he had access to the far greater mind of his master, whose own thoughts could themselves be conscious entities.
Previously Armiger had existed as god and mind, with the body merely a tool. Now he was only mind and body. He ran his hands over this body, finding the strains and infections. He stank, he realized. The human instincts he had ignored so long quailed at the damage, the humiliation of his state. For the first time, Armiger opened himself to those instincts.
This was what his men had felt, fighting and dying. This was the essential experience of the deer and foxes he had sighted as he walked: pain and loneliness.