The ground collapses into broad skirts of rock and gravel below the company’s feet. A smattering of trees cling to the base, hedged by surging nettles and sumac, a tangle of stem and colour that abruptly ends in blue-green swathes of reed, a kind of papyrus, hazy miles cut by black-water channels. Salt marshes. The Cerish Sea forms a featureless plate across the northern horizon, iron dark save where the sun silvers its faraway swells.
They watch ripples of lighter green sweep over the marshes—the apparition of the wind across the rushes. And then they see it, the bones of once-mighty walls, the scapular remains of a gate, and the fields beyond clotted with ruins. She gazes in silent wonder, watches the shadow of a cloud soundlessly soak the distances grey and blue.
“Behold!” the old Wizard calls out from her side. “Ancient Kelmeol. Home to the Sons of Meori. The Far Antique capital of these wastes ere the First Apocalypse.”
She gazes at him, unaware of the palm that has strayed to her belly.
Your father.
She bites her lip, hard, as proof against getting sick.
Achamian could scarce believe his fortune.
Until sighting Kelmeol, he had not realized just how little he had believed in his own mission. Ever since Marrow, some seditious faction within his soul had doubted he would survive even this far. And it seemed a kind of miracle that Men could suffer such trials in the absence of belief, that deeds worthy of wonder and song could be accomplished on the strength of a doubting will.
Unable to find the causeway, the company waded through the mire, beset by clouds of mosquitoes and biting flies. Several actually cried out in relief when they finally clambered onto hard ground and into the wind. After a mere watch Sarl looked poxed, he was covered with so many welts.
Kelmeol lay before them, the terrain humped with tells, the grasses so high it seemed a field in Massentia save for the grand remains of towers and temples breaching the near distance. Achamian had wandered the ruins of antique cities before, but never one so vast or so old. Seswatha had come to Kelmeol in 2150, one more refugee of the fall of the High Norsirai nations. And though those dreamed glimpses were two thousand years old, Achamian could not shake the sense that Kelmeol had fallen in his lifetime, that he was witness to a miraculous obliteration. With every glance a part of him wanted to cry out in disbelief.
There, where the mighty twin statues of Aulyanau had looked down the processional and out across the harbour and over the turquoise sea. Later he would find one of the great heads staring out of the high grasses, more than half-buried and yet still taller than a man. The harbour itself had been swallowed by waving miles of reeds, its very shape lost to the creep of earth and ages.
There, where the Hull, the white-washed curtain walls, had traced the circuit of the city. In some places nothing more than a berm remained of the once-celebrated fortifications, whereas in others sections remained remarkably intact, missing only the polished bronze spikes that had once adorned the crenulations.
There, where the ponderous lines of the Nausk Mausoleum had loomed over the lesser structures of the Pow, the low harbour district—a place of drawn blades and bared breasts. He could still see the rear walls of the Nausk rising like a husk from the ruins of the facade, the stone black save where matted with white and green lichens. The Pow, however, had utterly vanished beneath the waving sheets of green.
And there, the Heilor, the sacred acropolis where the Three Auguries once read the future in the blood of stags, rising like a low-hewn tree stump against the blue band of the Cerish Sea. The citadel had been razed to its foundations. The palace, where Seswatha had taken refuge from the Whirlwind, was little more than a mouth of ruined teeth behind the marble-pillared porticoes.
The decision was made to camp on the ruined acropolis, where they could defend against whatever Sranc clans ranged the marshes. In the Mop, they had slogged in a loose file. Now they spread out across the fields, walked in a ragged rank. They opened and closed about fragments of structure and ornamentation, heaps of spilled masonry, and square columns fallen for so long that the ground had climbed to encompass all but their leaning crowns. In some places, the ruins crowded thick enough to break their formation altogether.
A sadness welled through the old Wizard as he walked and peered, a mourning that possessed the airy clutch of premonition. There was poetry in loss and ruin, a wisdom that even children and idiots understood. For a time he suffered the eerie sense that he walked one of the great capitals of the Three Seas, that these were the ruins of Momemn, Carythusal, or Invishi, and they were the Last Men, thirteen instead of the one hundred and forty-four thousand of legend, and that no matter how far they travelled, how many horizons they outran, all they would find was soot and broken stone.
The world became strange with loneliness. And quiet, very quiet.
Insects whirred to and fro. Fluff scribbled across the back of warring gusts.
Without thinking he reached out for Mimara’s hand. He did not answer her wondering gaze.
By happenstance, he found himself abreast Galian and one of the remaining Stone Hags, the dispossessed Tydonni thane, Tûborsa Hurm.
Hurm was perhaps the strangest of Stone Hags, both in appearance and behaviour. He continued to shave, for one, long after even Galian had abandoned his bare chin. At the close of the day’s march, when his brothers could scarce speak for exhaustion, he would set to sharpening his dagger, which he had worn as narrow as a fish knife, for use on his cheeks at first light. Apparently this was a kind of ritual protest among the ordinarily long-bearded Tydonni, a way to proclaim the theft of one’s honour.
Either way, it spoke to the man’s stamina: even without Qirri he seemed to have little difficulty matching the company’s pace. He had one of those lean physiques, with powerful shoulders perpetually angled forward as if in anticipation of a sprint. His face, which remained ruddy even in the perpetual gloom of the Mop, was shaped like the outward curve of a bow, with close-set eyes and a tiny, even womanish mouth beneath a shark-fin nose.
Galian was pressing the man with questions about the Stone Hags and the scalpers they robbed and murdered—an indelicate topic even given the crude standards of the slog.
“Gali …” Achamian heard Pokwas murmur in warning.
The former Columnary scowled up at the towering Zeümi. “I want to know what moves a man to kill his own kind when skinnies are stacked to the horizon.”
“Scalps,” Hurm said, grinning. “The Custom House counts. It makes no distinction between the likes of you and the likes of me.”
“I don’t understand,” Galian said, his voice lowered in mock caution. Somewhere, somehow, Achamian realized with more than a little dismay, the man had lost his fear of their Captain. “The Bounty is the Holy Bounty, is it not?”
“Holy, is it?”
“What else would it be?”
A phlegmatic snort. “Gold,” Hurm said after spitting a string of phlegm. “Gold for mead. Gold for pork-and-onion stew …” His porcine gaze clicked from place to place, then settled on Mimara, appraised her with a kind of milky viciousness. His lips parsed about rotted teeth. “Gold for pretty, pretty peaches.”
Perhaps this was when Achamian first sensed the madness about to happen.
“You would wager damnation for these things?” Galian asked.
“Damnation?”
A sly grin. “The Holy Bounty is Holy because it has been decreed by the Aspect-Emperor.”
“The Aspect-Emperor, is it? Would you like to know what I think of our glorious tyrant?”
Achamian recognized the triumph in the Columnary’s look. Galian used the same baiting manner with Soma, only with more mischief than malice in his eyes.
“Very much.”
What was happening here?
The Tydonni thane grinned with alehouse cruelty. “I think his gold was born to burden my purse. I think he overlooks the likes of me … and of you! I think all those prayers, all those little wire circumfixes, are naught but wa
sted effort! Because in the end,” he continued with a conspiratorial lean, “I think he’s no different than you or me. A sinner. A dog. A demon when too deep in his cups! A fool. A fraud. A scalper of sou—!”
Lord Kosoter materialized at the man’s side, his knife out … Achamian blinked in confusion. A stabbing motion. Hurm crushed his cheek against his shoulder, as if plagued by a mosquito in his ear.
Mimara cried out for shock. Achamian stood dumbfounded.
Gripping a nest of black hair, the Captain—impossibly—held the man upright while he hacked at the man’s neck with his free hand. For an instant there was no blood. Then it seemed to gush from the jerking form.
“Blasphemer!” Sarl chortled, his teeth and gums shining, his eyes squeezed into creases. “No blasphemers on the slog!”
Galian had known this would happen, the old Wizard realized.
The Captain continued his savage work, grimacing in yellow-toothed disgust. He did not so much cut the head from the body as hack the body from under the head. The Hag’s black-stained limbs flumped senseless between the grasses. His head yanked high like a freed kite.
“Anasûrimbor Kellhus!” the Captain raved at the survivors. “He is the God! And this”—he swung Hurm’s head so that blood flew from the crimson lobes of its mouth—“is His work!”
Achamian could only watch with detached wonder, the kind that afflicts the survivors of sudden catastrophes. He saw well enough. He knew well enough. And yet none of it made the slightest sense.
He found himself wondering how long before Cleric called on them to dispense the Qirri. He needed it. To the point of wringing hands and clenched teeth, he needed it.
The Captain, it seemed, was a Believer.
Zaudunyani.
The pretense of thought twined through the fraud that was its soul …
It ran like a dog, bent, so that the grasses whipped in wet shags about its face and shoulders. The morning sun hung low, a pale orb in the mists that always greeted the dawn on the shore of a great sea. Gold limned any stonework bared to the sky. The acropolis rose from the ink of its own shadow, a silhouette without depth in the haze. There was beauty in the destruction, as well as thunderous proof of the Old Fathers and their power. Here, the will and might of Men had perished before the rapacious hunger of the Derived. Here, the glorious multitudes had coupled with the screaming, the broken and the dead.
These were holy facts—sacred. But the thing called Soma did not raise its head to contemplate or to consider. It did not dare. There was the tracker, Xonghis, whose almond eyes missed little. And there was the Nonman, whose senses almost rivalled its own in some respects.
There was the mission.
It paused over the headless corpse of the Stone Hag, listened to the music of carrion flies. It lingered for a moment, long enough to savour the thickness between its thighs, the arching bloat. Then it continued racing along the company’s blundering trail.
On the heights of what had once been called the Heilor, it dashed through concentric shells of ruin, crept along debris-choked foundations. It ignored the vista: the city scattered like bones, the steaming marshes, the plate of the Cerish Sea. Instead it rooted through the remains of the scalper camp, sniffing the sweet where their anuses had pressed against the grasses. It found the spot where the female had made water, only to flee from the reek of her fetus.
It paused over the sour musk of the Nonman.
Something was happening … Something unanticipated by the Old Fathers.
It cringed, swatted its face in slouching fear. Had anyone happened upon it at that moment, they would have seen a crazed creature, limbed like a man but possessing a woman’s beautiful face, greased with blood and filth, rocking from foot to foot like a bereaved ape.
It bent back its head until the base of its skull pressed against the crown of its spine, unsheathed its second voice …
And screamed.
“There’s no need …” a small voice piped from above. “I have followed you since sunrise.”
It whirled in feral alarm.
A series of ruined walls fenced the ground behind, each rising and falling like miniature mountain ranges. A bird perched on the summit of the nearest, its body glossy black, shot with strains of violet, its head white with marmoreal translucence—and human.
A Synthese … vessel of the Old Fathers. Flowering weeds trembled in the wind beside its clicking feet. A daylight moon, pale as a blind cat’s eye, rose above its obsidian back.
The thing called Soma fell to its false face.
“You were to watch him,” the bird said, a miniature scowl creasing its expression.
“Things have changed.”
Eyes like blue beads closed then opened. “How so?”
The thing called Soma dared raise Mimara’s face. “A sorcerer, a Gnostic sorcerer, hired the company several weeks ago … He hopes to find the Coffers.”
A moment of palm-sized confusion.
“The Mandate? The Mandate has hired the Skin Eaters?”
“No … I’m not sure … He claims to be a Wizard, a sorcerer without a School. Even still, Chigra burns strong in him. Very strong.”
The Synthese bent its tiny head down in momentary meditation. “So the old fool has found his way back to the benjuka plate … And he discovered you? Drusas Achamian?”
“No … There is a woman with him—one who has been taught how to recognize us. A pregnant woman …”
A sharp puppet nod. “The face you wear … I see.” Shadows fluttered around the bird form, as if some greater eye blinked about the world. An intimation of rage and power. “Mimara.”
The thing called Soma cringed and retreated. “Yes.”
“She’s pregnant. You are certain of this?”
“The stench is unmistakable.”
Another moment of bird-hesitation, as if each thought had to be untangled … It was no small matter planting a soul so mighty into a skull the size of an eggshell.
“Then she cannot be harmed. All the prophecies must be respected, the false as much as the true.”
“Yes, Old Father. I anticipated this, which is why I … refrained.”
A sideways twitch of the head. “She leaves the safety of the others?”
“To piss and shit. I have spoken with her twice now. She will yield their secret in time.”
“And the Schoolman has not intervened?”
“He does not know.”
The small head flicked back. Laughter tinkled like glass. The Consult Synthese looked from the Heilor, its gaze ticking between points across the fields of papyrus out to the featureless reaches of the Cerish Sea. The wind combed its feathered tailings, blowing wide with the inaudible roar of absence and ruin.
The thing called Soma breathed deep the scent of ash become earth.
“Brave girl …” the Old Father cooed, still considering the crumbs of the age-long feast that was the Meorn Empire. “Continue tracking them, Tsuör. At the very least, they will take you home.”
CHAPTER
SEVEN
The Istyuli Plains
… and they scoff at heroes, saying that Fate serves disaster to many, and feasts to few. They claim that willing is but a form of blindness, the conceit of beggars who think they wrest alms from the jaws of lions. The Whore alone, they say, decides who is brave and who is rash, who will be hero and who will be fool. And so they dwell in a world of victims.
—QUALLAS, ON THE INVITIC SAGES
Ever do Men use secrets to sort and measure those they love, which is why they are less honest with their brothers and more guarded with their friends.
—CASIDAS, ANNALS OF CENEI
Late Spring, 20 New Imperial Year (4132 Year-of-the-Tusk), The High Istyuli
They had fled and they had gathered, like sawdust before the sweep of the carpenter’s hand.
Sranc.
The clans that infested the Sakarpi Pale had fled long before the Great Ordeal trod their nourishing earth. They, unlike their
wilder cousins to the north, had long, hard experience with the cunning ways of Men. They knew the folly of closing for battle absent overwhelming numbers, so they fled where other clans would have raced gibbering to their doom. They fled, bearing word of the dread Israzi’horul, the Shining Men, who marched with world-cracking strength behind them.
Their cousins to the north heeded them, as did their cousins in turn. Hundreds became thousands became tens of thousands. So the clans fell back, ever back, wincing from chance encounters with Mannish pickets, forming a rind that grew ever more raucous with numbers as it retreated across the empty leagues. And growing ever more hungry.
What began as the flight of a few scattered clans soon became a shrieking migration. The Parching Wind whipped high the dust of their discord, raised veils of arid filth to the arch of Heaven. The sun was blotted. The Sranc teemed as insects across the obscured flats and shallows, so many the land became desert waste in their wake, stamped and scratched into lifelessness.
And as their numbers swelled so did their fear of the Shining Men dwindle.
Shortly after the Breaking of the Ordeal, General Sibawul te Nurwul, intent to demonstrate the skill and daring of his Cepalorans, disobeyed the orders of Prince Kayûtas and rode far ahead of his fellow Kidruhil pickets. He would be the first among Men to lay eyes on the storm brewing in the Istyuli wastes. There was no question of giving battle, for the inhuman multitudes blackened the circuit of all that could be seen. A full third of his riders fell that day, for the fleetest among the Sranc were quicker than the slowest among the Cepaloran riders. Sibawul and his Cepalorans raced fleeing toward their fellow pickets, drawing thousands in pursuit, and a running battle, the first since the Fall of Sakarpus, was fought as the Kidruhil companies scrambled to fend them. Several hundred cavalrymen were lost before the day’s end—a needless waste.