“Aye,” Pokwas says. “Sorcerous fruit.”
Hands held out and helpless, she stares down at the dying stranger. Why are you doing this? something cries within her. He’s dying. There’s nothing to be done! Why—
The Judging Eye opens.
“But have we seen the end of them?” the old Wizard asks.
“Depends,” Galian replies. “No one knows what they do over the winter months, where they go. They could be desperate.”
And she learns what it means to stare into the moral sum of a man’s life. Sutadra …
Soot, the others had called him.
You can count the bruises on your heart easily enough, but numbering sins is a far trickier matter. Men are eternally forgetting for their benefit. They leave it to the World to remember, and to the Outside to call them to harsh account. One hundred Heavens, as Protathis famously wrote, for one thousand Hells.
She can see it all, intuitions bundled into the wrinkled architecture of his skin, the squint about his eyes, the cuts across his knuckles. Sin and redemption, written in the language of a flawed life. The oversights, the hypocrisies, the mistakes, the accumulation of petty jealousies and innumerable small selfish acts. A wife struck on a wedding night. A son neglected for contempt of weakness. A mistress abandoned. And beneath these cankers, she sees the black cancer of far greater crimes, the offences that could be neither denied nor forgiven. Villages burned on fraudulent suspicions. Innocents massacred.
But she also sees the clear skin of heroism and sacrifice. The white of devotion. The gold of unconditional love. The gleam of loyalty and long silence. The high blue of indomitable strength.
Sutadra, she realizes, is a good man broken down, a man forced, time and again, to pitch his scruples against the unscalable walls of circumstance—forced. A man who erred for the sake of mad and overwhelming expediencies. A man besieged by history …
Regret. This is what drives him. This is what delivered him to the scalpers. The will to suffer for his sins …
And she loves him—this mute stranger! One cannot see as much as she sees and not feel love. She loves him the way one must love someone with such a tragic past. She knows as a lover knows, or a wife.
She knows he is damned.
He kicks against the mud of the stream, gazes with eyes pinned to sights unseen. He makes fish mouths, and she glimpses the arrow digging into the back of his throat. A small cry escapes him, the kind you would expect from a dying child or dog.
“Shhh …” she murmurs through burning lips. She’s been weeping. “Paradise,” she lies. “Paradise awaits you …”
But a shadow has fallen across them, a darker gloom. The Captain—she knows this without looking. Even as she turns her face up, the Judging Eye closes, but still she glimpses blasted back, coal-orange eyes leering from a charred face …
He raises his boot and kicks the arrow down. Wood popping in meat. Sutadra’s body jerks, flutters like a thread in the wind.
“You rot where you fall,” the Captain says with a queer and menacing determination.
Mimara cannot breathe. There is a softness in the Kianene’s passing, a sense of fire passing into powdery ash. She raises numb fingers to brush the bootprint from the dead man’s nose and beard but cannot bring herself to touch the greying skin.
“Weakness!” the Captain screams at the others. “The Stone Hags struck because they could smell our weakness! No more! No more wallowing! No more womanish regret! This is a slog!”
“The Slog of Slogs!” Sarl screeches out, chortling.
“And I am the Rule of Rules,” the Captain grates.
Xonghis altered their course, leading them away from the Stone Hags and their flight. They left Sutadra behind them, sprawled across the muck, the broken arrow jutting like a thumb from his swelling face. Scalpers lie where they fall—such was the Rule. The cyclopean trunks were not long in obscuring him.
Sutadra had always been a mystery to Achamian—and to the others, from what he could tell. Galian sometimes made a show of asking the Kianene his opinion, then taking his silence as proof of agreement. “See!” he would crow as the others laughed. “Even Soot knows!”
This was the way with some men. They sealed themselves in, bricked their ears and their mouths, and spent their remaining days speaking only with their eyes—until these too became inscrutable. Many, you could wager, held chaos in their hearts, shrill and juvenile. But since ignorance is immovable, they seem immovable, imperturbable. Such is the power of silence. For all Achamian knew, Sutadra was little more than a weak-willed fool, a peevish coward behind the blind of an impassive demeanour.
But he would always remember him as strong.
None of this, however, explained Mimara’s reaction. Her tears. Her subsequent silence. After the debacle in the mines of Cil-Aujas, he had assumed she would be immune to terror and violence. He tried to sound her out, but she simply looked away, blinking.
So he paced Galian and Pokwas for a time, asking about the Stone Hags. The bandits had haunted the Mop for some five years now, long enough to become the scourge of the Long Side. Pokwas absolutely despised them: preying upon one’s own was an outrage for the Zeümi, apparently. Galian regarded them with the same wry contempt he took to everything. “It takes figs to do what they do!” he cried at one point, obviously trying to bait his towering friend. “As big and black as your own!” Achamian was inclined to agree. Hunting Sranc was one thing. Hunting Men who hunted Sranc was something else entirely.
They told him the story of the Stone Hag captain, Pafaras, the Mysunsai Schoolman who had assailed Cleric. According to rumour, he was a notorious Breacher, someone who failed to expedite his arcane contracts: a cardinal sin for a School of mercenaries. He had been chased into the wilds more than a decade ago.
“He was the first spitter to chase the Bounty,” Galian explained. “Pompous. One of those fools who turns the world upside down when he finds himself at the end of the line. Arrogant unto comedy. They say he was outlawed for burning down an Imperial Custom House in one of the old camps.”
And so the Stone Hags were born. Scalper companies always vanished in skinny country, swallowed up as if they had never been. “It’s chop-chop-chop with the skinnies,” Pokwas said. “Runners always die.” But the Stone Hags invariably left survivors, and so word of their atrocities spread and multiplied.
“More famous than the Skin Eaters,” Galian said cheerfully. “The one and only.”
Achamian stole several glances at Mimara over the course of their account, still puzzled by her blank face and distracted gait. Had she somehow come to know Sutadra?
“He died the death allotted to him,” he said, resuming his place at her side. “Sutadra …” he added in response to her sharp look.
“Why? What makes you say that?” Her eyes gleamed with defensive tears.
The old Wizard scratched his beard and swallowed, reminded himself to take care, that it was Mimara he was speaking to. “I thought you mourned his loss.”
“The Eye,” she snapped, her voice cracking about a bewildered fury. “It opened. I saw … I saw him … I saw his-his life …”
It seemed he should have known this.
“It’s his damnation I mourn,” she said. The damnation you will share, her look added.
Drusas Achamian had spent the bulk of his life knowing he was damned. Stand impotent before a fact long enough and it will begin to seem a fancy, something to be scorned out of reflex, denied out of habit. But over the years the truth would creep upon him, steal his breath with visions of Schoolmen in their thousands, shades, shrieking in endless agony. And even though he had repudiated the Mandate long ago, he still found himself whispering the first of their catechisms: “Though you lose your soul, you shall gain the World.”
“The damnation you want me to teach you,” he said, referring to the sorcery—the blasphemy—she desperately wanted to learn.
She ignored him after that—so damned mercurial! He fumed until he
realized that days had passed since their last Gnostic lesson. Everything had seemed half-hearted after Cil-Aujas, as if sand had been packed into the joints of all the old motions. He scarce had the stomach to teach, so he simply assumed that she scarce had the stomach to learn. But now he wondered whether there was more to her sudden disinterest.
Life’s harder turns had a way of overwhelming naïve passions. He found himself recalling his earlier advice to Soma. She had been given something, something she had yet to understand.
Time. She would need time to discover who she had become—or was becoming.
The Captain called them to a halt in what seemed a miraculous clearing. An oak had been felled in its hoary prime, leaving a blessed hole in the otherwise unbroken canopy. The company milled about, blinking at the clear blue sky, staring at the remains of the titanic oak. The tree had crashed into the arms of its equally enormous brothers and now hung propped and skeletal above the forest floor. Much of the bark had sloughed away so that it resembled an enormous bone braced by scaffolds of winding branches. Timbers had been set across several forks, creating three platforms at different heights.
“Welcome to Stump,” Pokwas said to Achamian with a curious grin.
“This place is known to you?”
“All scalpers know of this place.” With a gesture, the Sword-dancer led him up to the tree’s base. A knoll rose about it, stepped and knotted with roots. The stump itself was as broad as a caste-menial’s hovel but only as high as the Wizard’s knees. The bulk of the severed trunk loomed just beyond, rising into the confusion of the surrounding forest.
“For the longest time,” Pokwas explained, “the legend was that these trees were crypts, that each of them had inhaled the dead from the earth. So several years ago, when it seemed the Fringe would retreat into the Deeper Mop, Galian and I hacked this very tree to the ground. We worked in shifts for three days.”
The old Wizard scowled in camaraderie. “I see.”
A jovial wink. “Look what we found.”
Achamian saw it almost instantly, near the peak of the rough-hewn cone. At first he thought it had been carved—the product of some morbid scalper joke—but a second look told him otherwise. A skull. A human skull embedded in the coiled heartwood. Only a partial eye socket, a cheek, and several teeth—molars to canine—had been chiselled clear, but it was undeniably human.
A shudder passed through the old Wizard, and it seemed he heard a voice whisper, “The heart of a great tree does not burn …”
Memories from a different age, a different trial.
“Some,” Pokwas was saying, “will tell you the skinnies own the Mop.”
“What do you say?”
“That they’re tenants, same as us.” He frowned and smiled, as if catching himself in the commission of some rank Three Seas folly. “The dead own this land.”
The oblong of bare sky quickly darkened. After a sombre repast, the company spread across the three platforms built into the fallen giant, relishing what was likely a false sense of security even as they cursed the unforgiving edges that crooked their backs and poked their shoulders.
That night was a difficult one. The surrounding darkness was every bit as impenetrable as in Cil-Aujas, for one. And the threat of the Stone Hags had them “on the sharp,“ as Sarl might say. But the real problem, Achamian eventually decided, lay with the trees.
In the wild lore of witches—those scraps that Achamian had encountered, anyway—great trees were as much living souls as they were conduits of power. One hundred years to awake, the maxim went. One hundred years for the spark of sentience to catch and burn as a slow and often resentful flame. Trees begrudged the quick, the old witches believed. They hated as only the perpetually confused could hate. And when they rooted across blooded ground, their slow-creaking souls took on the shape of the souls lost. Even after a thousand years, after innumerable punitive burnings, the Thousand Temples had been unable to stamp out the ancient practice of tree-burial. Among the Ainoni, in particular, caste-noble mothers buried rather than burned their children, so they might plant a gold-leaf sycamore upon the grave—and so create a place where they could sit with the presence of their lost child …
Or as the Shrial Priests claimed, the diabolical simulacrum of that presence.
For his part, Achamian did not know what to believe. All he knew was that the Mop was no ordinary forest and that the encircling trees were no ordinary trees.
Crypts, Pokwas had called them.
A legion of sounds washed through the night. Sighs and sudden cracks. The endless creak and groan of innumerable limbs. The hum and whine of nocturnal insects. Eternal sounds. The longer Achamian lay sleepless, the more and more they came to resemble a language, the exchange of tidings both solemn and dire. Listen, they seemed to murmur, and be warned …
Men trod our roots … Men bearing honed iron.
According to Pokwas, nightmares were common in the Mop. “You dream horrors,” the towering man said, his eyes waxy with unwelcome memories. “Wild things that twist and throttle.”
The Plains of Mengedda occurred to the old Wizard, and the Dreams he had suffered marching across them with the Men of the Tusk. Could the Mop be a topos, a place where trauma had worn away the hard rind of the world? Could the trackless leagues before them be soaked in Hell? He had been forced to flee the First Holy War some twenty years previous, so crazed had been his nightmare slumber. What would he suffer here?
Aside from his one nightmarish dream of the finding the No-God, he had dreamed of naught but the same episode since climbing free of Cil-Aujas: the High-King Celmomas giving Seswatha the map detailing the location of Ishuäl—the birthplace of Anasûrimbor Kellhus—telling him to secure it beneath the Library of Sauglish … In the Coffers, no less.
“Keep it, old friend. Make it your deepest secret …”
He lay on the crude platform, his back turned to Mimara. A warmth seeped through the exhausted weight of his body. Pondering rose out of pondering, thought out of thought. He drifted ever further from the mighty trees and their conspiracies, ever further from the ways of the wakeful. And as so often happened when he stood on the threshold of slumber, it seemed he could see, actually see, things that were no more than wisps, shreds of memory and imagination. The golden curve of the map-case. The twin Umeri inscriptions—token curses common to ancient Norsirai reliquaries—saying, “Doom, should you find me broken.”
And he thought, Strange …
Finding knowledge in sleep.
He stood shackled, one among the gloom of many …
A line of captives, wrist chained to wrist, ankle to ankle, wretched for abuse …
Standing encased in horror and ignorance, a file running the length of a shadowy tunnel …
His eyes rolled in equine panic. What now? What-what now?
He saw walls, which for an instant seemed golden but formed of mangled thatch, scrub and undergrowth, surging and twining to weave a black corridor about their miserable passage. He could even discern the terminus, over shoulders slouched in woe and capitulation, an opening of some kind, a clearing …
Bright with things he did not want to see.
His teeth were missing … Beaten?
Yes … Beaten from his skull.
“N-no,” Achamian sputtered, awareness rising like a fog within him. The trees, he realized.
Trees! Crypts, the scalpers called them …
“Cease!” Achamian cried. But not one of the chained shadows raised their heads in acknowledgment. “Cease!” he raged. “Cease, or I shall burn you and your kin! I will make candles of your crowns! Cut trails of ash and black through your heart!”
And somehow he knew that he screamed with the wrong lips in the wrong world.
Gagging shrieks filtered down the hall, ringing as though across iron shields.
Something blared, a sound too engulfing, too guttural to be a mere horn. Without warning the chains yanked him and the shadowy procession forward, one stumblin
g step toward the light … the clearing.
And though all the world’s terror loomed before him, the brutalized stranger thought, Please …
Let this be the end.
Achamian found himself sitting, gripping his boney shoulders with boney fingers. His ears roared, and the blackness spun. He panted, gathering his wits and wind. Only then did the other sounds of the night creep into his hearing. The distant howl of wolves. The creak of sentience through vaulting limbs. The sound of Pokwas and his gentle snore. Sarl’s mumbling growl …
And someone wailing without breath … on the platform below him. “N-no …” he heard a hitching, glutinous voice murmur in Gallish. “Please …” Then again, hissed through teeth clenched against returning waves of terror, “Please!”
Hameron, he realized. The one most broken by Cil-Aujas.
There was a time when Achamian had thought himself weak, when he had looked on men such as these scalpers with a kind of complicated envy. But life had continued to heap adversity upon him, and he had continued to survive, to overcome. He was every bit the man he had been, too inclined to obsess, too ready to shoulder the burden of trivial sins. But he no longer saw these ingrown habits as weaknesses. To think, he now knew, was not a failure to act.
Some souls wax in the face of horror. Others shrink, cringe, bolt for an easy life and its many cages. And some, like young Hameron, find themselves trapped between inability and the inevitable. All men cry in the dark. Those who did not were something less than men. Something dangerous. Pity welled through the old Wizard, pity for a boy who had found himself stranded on scarps too steep to climb.
Pity and guilt.
Achamian heard the whine and scuff of someone on the platform above him. He blinked against the dark. The limbs of the fallen tree forked black across the stars. The Nail of Heaven glittered above, higher on the horizon than he had ever seen it before—with his waking eyes at least. The clearing lay bare and silent about them, a swatch of wool soaked in the absolute ink of shadows at night. Mimara lay curled at his side, as beautiful as porcelain in the bluing light.