They both looked up, fixed him with twin gazes—one unearthly, the other not quite sane.
A kind anxiousness seized the moment.
“Qirri …” Achamian said, shocked by the croak that was his voice. “I’m … I’m too old for this … this pace.”
Without a word, the Nonman turned to rummage through his satchel—one of the few things any of them had managed to carry out of Cil-Aujas. He withdrew the leather pouch, and Achamian found himself hefting the thing in his soul, divvying pinches into the near and distant future. Cleric unknotted the drawstring, reached in with thumb and forefinger.
But Lord Kosoter stayed him with a wave of his hand. Another pang plucked through the old Wizard, this one coloured with intimations of panic.
“We need to speak first,” the Captain said. “Holy Veteran to Holy Veteran.”
Achamian had the impression of a sneer over and above the contempt that generally ruled the man’s expression. Something, a demoralizing wave, crashed through him. What now? Why? Why did this mad fool insist on beating complexity and confusion out of simple things?
He needed his pinch.
“By all means,” the old Wizard said stiffly.
What could be more simple than that?
The Captain regarded him with dead eyes. “The others,” he finally asked. “What do they say?”
Achamian did his best to match the madman’s glare. “They worry,” he admitted. “They fear we no longer possess the strength to reach the Coffers.”
The Captain said nothing. Thanks to the Chorae beneath his armour, void and menace throbbed where his heart should have been.
“So?” Achamian asked crossly. All he wanted was his pinch! “Does talk violate some Rule of the Slog as well?”
“Talk,” the Captain said, spitting to the left of his feet. “I care nothing for your talk …” The man’s smile reminded Achamian of the dead he had seen on the battlefields of the First Holy War, the way the sun would sometimes shrink the flesh of the face, drawing cadaverous grins on the fallen.
“So long as you don’t weep.”
Sranc. The North means Sranc.
She fled them in Cil-Aujas, and now she flees them here, in the Mop. On the Andiamine Heights, where everything turned on the Great Ordeal and the Second Apocalypse, scarce a day passed without hearing something about the Ancient North—so much so that she openly scoffed at its mention. She would actually say things like, “Oh, yes, the North …” or “Sakarpus? You don’t say?” There was an absurdity to places far, a sense of insignificant people scratching meaningless earth. Let them die, she would sometimes think, whenever she heard tidings of famine in Ainon or plague in Nilnamesh. What are these people to me? These places?
A fool … that’s what she had been. A pathetic little slit.
Their souls and their wind fortified with Qirri, the company fairly sprints across the pitching ground—even Achamian, who had been in obvious straits before Cleric and his medicinal pinch. The Nonman leads, a Surillic Point floating low and brilliant above his right brow. The illumination pulls their scissoring shadows out into the dark, alternately revealing the sinuous arch of limbs and falling into pockets too deep to reach. Where Cil-Aujas had encased them at every turn, sealed them in impenetrable stone, now it seems they race through a void, that nothing exists beyond narrow corridors of earth, trunk, and branching lattices. Nothing. No murdering Stone Hags. No obscene Sranc. No prophecies or armies or panicked nations.
Just the Skin Eaters and rushing shadows.
For no reason she can fathom, images from her old life on the Andiamine Heights plague her soul’s eye. Gilded folly. The farther she travels from her mother, it seems, the more a stranger she becomes to herself. She cringes at the thought of her former self: the endless straining to stand aloof, the endless posturing, not to convince others—for how could they not see through her in some measure?—but to assure herself of some false moral superiority …
Survival, she realizes, is its own kind of wisdom. Scalper wisdom.
She almost snorts aloud at the thought. But running, it seems nothing could be more true. All things perish. All things are weak, execrable. Nothing more so than the conceits of the perpetually wronged.
“A smile?” someone says.
She turns and sees Soma pacing her. Caste-noble tall. Lean and broad-shouldered. With his gowns torn and twisted, he resembles the Disowned Prince that the other girls used to dream about in the brothel—the fabled customer who would rescue rather than abuse.
His dark-lashed eyes seem to laugh. There is a relentlessness to him that she does not quite trust, she realizes. A strength out of proportion to his foppish character.
“We all … start laughing … at some point …” he says between breaths.
She turns away, concentrates on what shreds of ground she can glimpse between shadows. On the long and hard trail, she knows, a twisted ankle means death …
“Knowing how to stop …” the man persists. “That is … the real trick … of the slog.”
Unlike her sisters in the brothel, Mimara had despised men like Soma, men who continually apologized with grand gestures and false concerns. Men who had to smother their crimes beneath pillows of silken guilt.
She much preferred those who sinned with sincerity.
“Mimara …” the man begins.
She keeps her eyes averted. Soma is nothing to her, she tells herself. Just another fool who would grope her in the dark, if he could. Sticky his fingers with her peach.
The world rises into the sphere of Cleric’s light, then pours into oblivion. She peers at the oncoming ground as it vanishes into the shadows of those before her. Running. There is peace in flight, she realizes, a kind of certainty she has never understood, though she has known it her entire life. Running from the brothel, running from the mother who abandoned her there: these are fraught with doubt and worry and regret, the heart-cracking recriminations of those who run to punish as much to flee.
But running from Sranc …
Her lungs are bottomless. The Qirri tingles through her thought, her limbs. She is little more than a feather, a mote, before the forces that inhabit her. And there is a thickness to it, an eroticism, being the plaything of enormities.
I have the Judging Eye!
Anasûrimbor Mimara marvels and laughs. Galian joins her, then Pokwas, then the rest of the company, and for some reason it seems right and true, laughing while fleeing Sranc through a cursed forest …
Then Cleric stops, his head bent as though listening. He turns to them. His face burns so bright beneath the Surillic Point that he seems an angel—an inhuman angel.
“Something comes …”
Then they all hear it … to their right, the dull scuff and drum of someone running. The air whisks to the sound of drawn weapons. Squirrel is in her hand.
A stranger staggers as much as leaps into existence. His hair is tied into a Galeoth war-knot. Blood slicks his right arm. Exhaustion has beaten his panic into resignation—you can see it on his face. And Mimara realizes that her flight has yet to begin. To flee, to truly run, is to throw yourself as this man has thrown himself, past effort and determination to the convulsive limit of endurance.
To run as they ran in Cil-Aujas.
The man crashes into Galian’s arms, bawling out something inarticulate.
“What’s he saying?” the Captain barks at Sarl.
“Skinnies!” the withered Sergeant cackles. “The skinnies are on them!”
“Sweet Seju!” someone cries.
“Look!” Pokwas cries, peering into the blackness that had delivered the man. “Look! Another light!”
Everyone, the newcomer included, turns in the direction the Sword-dancer indicates. At first they see nothing. Then it materializes, a floating point of white, appearing and disappearing to the rhythm of intervening obstructions. Sorcerous light. They glimpse figures as it nears, at least a dozen.
More men—surviving Stone Hags …
Even from this distance you can see their fear and haste, but something slows them … A litter, she realizes. They carry someone on a litter. The small mob passes behind the grand silhouette of a tree and she glimpses the man they carry—the sorcerer …
Galian and Pokwas are shouting. They’ve thrust the sobbing Stone Hag to his knees as if preparing to execute him. “No!” Achamian is crying. “I for—”
“He’s a Hag!” Galian cries as if mystified, as if summary execution is a courtesy compared with what the man deserves—a scalper who hunts scalpers.
The Captain pays no attention whatsoever, instead mutters to Cleric, who peers into the blackness behind the approaching party. She watches the bald head turn, the white face smile. She sees the glint of fused teeth.
“Haaaaags!” Sarl gurgles. His eyes are squeezed into crescents above his cheeks.
The fugitives begin calling out as they approach, a cracked chorus of relief and desperate warning. Within heartbeats they blunder into the greater light of Cleric’s Surillic Point, terrified and bleeding. The litter is dropped. Some skid to their knees. Others raise abject hands before the weapons brandished by the Skin Eaters.
Mimara feels someone clutch her sword arm, turns to see Soma standing grim beside her. He means to give reassurance, she knows, yet she finds herself offended all the same. With a jerk she pulls her arm free.
“No time!” someone is screeching—one of the Hags. “No time!”
All is argument and confusion. In the gaggle of shouts and voices they fail to hear the loping approach. Now they stand rigid and peering, their ears pricked to the invisible rush. Twigs snapping. Throats grunting. Feet kicking.
Mimara is dead. She knows this absolutely. She and Soma are standing on the periphery, several paces from the commotion of the latest arrivals—from Achamian and his life-preserving Wards.
“To meee!” she hears the old Wizard cry. She hears the inside-out mutter of sorcery, sees shadows tossed, lights plumbing the barked blackness.
They come howling out of the black. Crude weapons held high and wide. Faces twisted into ravenous sneers. Streaming between trunks. Unshod feet kicking up humus.
The first flies at her like a thrown dog. She parries its crazed swing, ducks and strings the thing as it sails past her. Others follow a mere heartbeat behind. Too many blades. Too many teeth!
Then something impossible happens. Soma …
Somehow before her, when he had stood behind. Somehow catching each raving creature in its instant. He does not fight as scalpers fight, matching skill against ferocity, hammering strength against wild velocity. Nor does he dance as Pokwas dances, trusting ancient patterns to parse the surrounding air. No. What he does is utterly unique, a performance written for each singular moment. He throws and snaps his body. He moves in rings and lines, so fast that only inhuman screams and slumping bodies allow her to follow the thread of his attack.
Then it’s over.
“Mimara!” Achamian is crying. She sees him fighting his way toward her.
He clutches her tight against his rank robes, but she is as numb to the smell as she is to everything else. She returns his hug out of reflex, all the while watching Soma standing above the twitching dead, watching her.
She survived. He had glimpsed her stranded, had expected the worst, yet there she stood, utterly untouched. Holding her, the old Wizard did his best not to sob in relief. He blinked at the panicked burning in his eyes …
Exhaustion. It had to be.
They turned to the roar of the Captain, who held the prostrate Hag sorcerer upright. The infamous Pafaras. The man was at least as old as Kosoter, but he possessed nowhere near the stature and strength. He was Ketyai, though his unkempt beard lent him a barbaric, Norsirai countenance. His accent suggested Cengemis or northern Conriya. He swayed in the Captain’s grip, capable of standing on his left foot only. His right was bootless—bare and purpling. His foul leggings had been sawed open to the thigh, revealing blood-sopped bandages about his shin. When Achamian had first glimpsed him on the litter, he had assumed the man was simply wounded. But now he could see the leg was broken—severely broken. The length of his right shin was only two thirds that of his left.
“Tell me!” Lord Kosoter roared. With his left hand, he held the man up as much by the hair as by the scruff of the neck. With his right, he held his Chorae before the ailing Schoolman’s face. The fact that the Stone Hag scarcely glanced at the thing told Achamian he was already dying.
The other Hags, some eleven of them, milled in gasping shock. They looked more like beggars than warriors. Most had shed their armour in their haste to flee, leaving them with only winter-rotted tunics and leggings. Several were thin to the point of bulbous elbows and knees. These were the men he had seen descending the cliff face, Achamian realized.
“Four clans … maybe more,” the swaying Hag was saying. “Numerous … Very aggressive.”
“More than one clan?” Galian interjected. “Are they mobbing?” The horror was plain in his voice.
A moment of silence. “Maybe …” Pafaras said.
“Mobbing?” Achamian asked aloud.
“A scalper’s greatest fear,” Pokwas replied in low tones. “The skinnies usually war clan against clan, but sometimes they unite. No one knows why.”
“There was a cliff …” Pafaras managed between gasps. “Some climbed down after us … the ones you k-killed … But the rest … backtracked … we think.”
“Your sort,” the Captain grated in disgust. He bent his face back to show the mayhem in his eyes. “Come to flee the Ordeal, is that it? Come to lord your power?”
“N-no!” the man coughed.
The Captain raised his Chorae as though inspecting a jewel, then, with a kind of casual malice, slammed the thing into the Hag’s mouth.
Sparking light. The whoosh of transubstantiation.
Achamian stood blinking, a burning pang where his breath should have been. He watched the salt replica of Pafaras fall backward. It thudded hard against the sponge-soft turf. The Captain crouched, hunched over the petrified sorcerer. He seemed little more than an apish shadow given the war of light and after-image in the Wizard’s eyes. He pulled a knife from his boot, wedged the point in the salt cavity that had been the Hag’s mouth. He raised his elbow in a prying motion, cracked off the alabaster jaw.
He retrieved his Chorae, then stood, glaring at everyone but Cleric.
“What’s he doing?” Mimara whispered with alarm.
“I think he’s recruiting,” the old Wizard replied, bracing himself against a deep shudder. As much as he despised Mysunsai Schoolmen as mercenaries, he could not help but feel a certain kinship with the man. Nothing instills brotherhood like the sharing of vulnerabilities. “Witho—”
He fell silent, feeling the bite of the Captain’s lunatic gaze.
Lord Kosoter prowled about the fugitive scalpers, scrutinizing them with a slaver’s indifference. As miserable as the Skin Eaters appeared, the Stone Hags seemed even more wretched. Starved and wounded and absolutely terrified.
“You dogs have a choice,” he grated. “You can let the Whore play number-sticks with your pitiful lives …” A rare grin, sinister for the murder in his eyes.
“Or you can let me.”
And with that, the Stone Hags ceased to exist, and the Skin Eaters were reborn.
Fugitive, they ran, a bubble of light falling through pillared blackness.
The trees seemed to claw at them with stationary malice, slow them with insinuations of frailty and doom. The Hags, who had no Qirri to brace them, cried out from time to time, begging them to stop, or to at least slow their pace. But no one, not even Achamian or Mimara, listened, let alone answered their pleas. This was the Slog of Slogs. The sooner they understood that, the greater their prospects for survival.
The lesson was dear. Two of them fell behind, never to be seen again.
Dawn rose in sheets of brightening green. The impenetrable black yielded to the murk of
deep forest hollows. They encountered a surging river the scalpers called the Throat. It fairly raged with spring melt, the water brown with sediment, spouting white plumes where the current crashed against the boulders it had rolled down from the mountains. The sunlight it afforded was welcome, but the glimpse of smoke in the distance apparently was not. “Fatwall,” Xonghis explained to Achamian and Mimara. “It burns.” They were forced to follow the river’s thundering course several miles before finding a crossing. Even still, they lost another of the Hags to the kicking waters.
They plunged back into the Mop and its temple gloom, the mossed ground wheezing beneath their feet. As always they found themselves craning their necks from side to side as if to catch some secret observer. Achamian need only glance at the others to know they suffered the same plaguing sense he did, as if they were the people hated, like the mummer tribes that migrated across the Three Seas.
Some fluke of the terrain delivered them back to the Throat, this time opposite the point they had first encountered it. Cleric bid them pause. “Listen,” he called over the white roar. Achamian could hear nothing, but like the others he could see … On the far bank, through the screens of foliage stacked beneath the canopy’s verge, he glimpsed shadows running. Hundreds of them, following the path they had taken down-river.
“Skinnies, boys!” Sarl cried with a gurgling laugh. “Mobs of them! Didn’t I promise you a chopper? Eh? Eh?”
They continued climbing, the grades at times so steep that thighs burned and sputum flew. If the Qirri failed to whip them forward, then the glimpse of the Sranc who pursued them certainly did. Despite the profundity of their exhaustion, the sight of sunlight through the gallery ahead spurred them to a run.
They found themselves at the Mop’s blinking edge, squinting across a slope of felled trees.
Fatwall. The long-dead fortress of Aenku Maimor.
Maimor was a name that Achamian had encountered only a few times in his dreams. The ancient Meori Empire had been little more than a tarp thrown across the fractious tribes of the Eastern White Norsirai, and Maimor had been one of several nails that had held it in place over the generations, a High Royal Fastness, which would house the High-King during his seasonal tour of his more rebellious provinces. Like everything else during the First Apocalypse, it had come crashing down in a hail of fire and Sranc.