The Judging eye

Early Spring, 19 New Imperial Year (4132 Year-of-the-Tusk), The River Rohil

The Wizard picked his way through the cool forest deeps, his bones as old as his thoughts were young. He huffed and grimaced, but there was a knowing cadence to his hobble, proof of prior years spent travelling. Four days he had trudged, wending between the pillar trees, squinting at the sun's glare through the spring-thin canopy, using the slow crawl of distant landmarks to guide him to his destination…

Marrow.

All Achamian knew of this place was what his Galeoth slave, Geraus, had told him. It was a Scalpoi entrepфt located at the westward end of the long navigable stretch of the River Rohil, a place where the companies of scalpers who worked the hinterland could collect their bounties and purchase supplies. As the nearest centre of any description to the tower, this was where Geraus would come, three or four times a year, to sell his pelts and, with the gold Achamian gave him, secure those goods they could not improvise for themselves. An even-tempered, slow-speaking man, Geraus had always taken wary delight in telling them the stories of his visits. Perhaps because the journey was both arduous and perilous-Tisthanna rarely forgave Achamian the weeks of Geraus's absence-or perhaps because they simply marked a deviation from the routine of his life, Geraus was given to foot-stomping airs for the days immediately following his return. Only when his tales were completed would he retreat to the borders of his gentle and dependable self. They had always been his time to shine, for the slave of the great Wizard to be "world-shouldered," as the Galeoth say.

For the most part, the visits seemed to be skulking, secretive affairs, transactions made between trusted men and trusted men only. A bag of beans, to hear Geraus speak of it, was as valuable and fraught with complication as a purse of gold or a bale of scalps. He made no secret of his discretion-in fact, he seemed to take great pride in it. Even when his children were infants, Geraus seemed bent on impressing them with the inestimable survival value of humility. The greatest virtue of any slave, he always seemed to be saying, was the ability to pass unnoticed.

No different than a spy, Achamian could not help reflecting.

To think he had believed those days dead and gone, wandering the Three Seas, passing from court to court, holding his head high before sneering kings and potentates-a Schoolman still. Even though he had shed the fat, even though he wore wool and animal skins instead of muslin and myrrh, the simple fact of striking for unseen horizons had brought his past back to prickling life. Sometimes, when he glanced up through greening limbs, he would see the turquoise skies of Kian, or when he knelt to refill his waterskin, the heaving black of the northern Meneanor. Blinks had become glimpses, each with its own history, its own peculiar sense and beauty. Caste-noble courtiers laughing, their faces painted white. Steaming delicacies served by oiled slaves. Fortifications sheathed in enamelled tiles, gleaming beneath arid suns. A black-skinned prostitute drawing high her knees.

Twenty years had slipped away, and not a day had passed.

He already found himself mourning Geraus and his family, far more than he would have imagined. Slaves were funny that way. It was as though the fact of ownership shrouded certain obvious and essential human connections. You assumed it would be the conveniences you would miss, not the slaves who provided them. Now, Achamian could care less about the comforts-they seemed contemptible. And something inner shook whenever he thought of their faces-laughing or crying, it did not matter-something jarred loose by the knowledge he would never sit with them again.

It made him feel like a weepy grandfather.

Perhaps it was good, this suicidal turn his life had taken.

He paused, savoured the gilded granduer of the evening wilderness seen from afar. The escarpment scrawled along the horizon, a long-wandering band of vertical stone mellowing in the dusk, buttressed by scree-and-boulder-choked ramps that descended into the forests below. He could see the Long-Braid Falls, so named because of the way the River Rohil divided about a great head of stone on the scarp's edge, twisting down in two thundering cataracts.

Marrow lay immediately below, soaked in the waterfall's rose-powder haze. The original town, according to Geraus, had been built downriver but had crept like a caterpillar to the escarpment's base as scalp broker after scalp broker vied to be the first to greet the westward-bound Scalpoi. Now, hacked out of the surrounding forest, it looked like a sore scabbed in pitch and wood, huts piled upon shanties, all clapped together using logs and orphaned materials, packed along the riverbank, encrusting the lower terraces of the cliff.

It was fully dark before Achamian reached the town's derelict outskirts. Timber posts were all that remained of the original Marrow. He could see them standing in the surrounding bracken, as silent as the moonlight that illuminated them, some rotted, some leaning, all of them possessing a funereal solitude that he found unnerving. Various characters and random marks scored those nearest the track, the residue of uncounted travellers with their innumerable vanities and frustrations. Shining between gaps in the darkling clouds, the Nail of Heaven allowed him to decipher several.

"I fuck Sranc," one said in fresh-cut Gallish.

"Horjon forgot to sleep with his ass to the wall," another claimed in Ainoni pictograms-beside a blot that could have been sun-cooked blood.

The roar of the falls climbed high into the night, and the first of the mists beaded his skin. A sense of menace ringed the lights of habitation before him. How long had it been since he had last braved a place like this? The carnival of strangers.

His mule in tow, Achamian trudged into what appeared to be the main thoroughfare. He was half-breathless by this time, his body suffused with the falling-forward hum of slogging through distances of mud. His cloak seemed lined with ingots of lead, so pendulous it had become. The town's name was appropriate, he decided. Marrow. He could almost imagine that he tramped through the muck of halved bones.

Shadowy men reeled through the ruts around and beside him, some alone, their eyes hollow and alert, others in cackling groups, their lips and looks relaxed by a consciousness of numbers. Everyone was sodden. Everyone shouted over the thunder of the falls. Most were armed and armoured. Many were caked in blood, either because they were wounded or because they were unwashed.

These were the Scalpoi, sanctioned by the writ of the Aspect-Emperor, drawn from the four corners of the New Empire: wild-haired Galeoth, smooth-cheeked Nansur, great-bearded Tydonni, even lazy-lidded Nilnameshi-they were all here, trading scalps for Imperial kellics and shrial remissions.

Feeling harried by a succession of long looks, Achamian hunched deeper into the hood of his cloak. He knew he was anything but conspicuous, that part of him had simply forgotten how to trust in anonymity. Even still he found himself shrinking from the touch of other eyes, belligerent or curious, it did not matter. There was an unruliness in the air, a whiff of some profound lawlessness, which he initially ascribed to the release of pent urgencies. The Scalpoi spent months far from any hearth, warring and hunting Sranc through the trackless Wilds. He could scarce imagine a more savage calling, or a greater warrant for excess.

But as the mad parade thickened, he realized that the abandon was more than simply a matter of glutting frustrated lusts. There were too many men from too many different castes, creeds, and nations. Caste-nobles from Cingulat. Runaway slaves from Ce Tydonn. Fanim heretics from Girgash. It was as though common origins were all that guaranteed civilization, a shared language of life, and that everything was fury and miscommunication otherwise. Hungers-that was all these men had in common. Instincts. What had made these men wild wasn't the wilderness, or even the mad savagery of the Sranc, it was the inability to trust anything more than the bestial in one another.

Fear, he told himself. Fear and lust and fury… Trust in these, old man. It seemed the only commandment a place such as Marrow could countenance.

He trudged onward, more wary than ever. He smelled whisky, vomit, and shallow latrines. He heard songs and laughter and weeping, the ghostly notes of a lute plucked from the bowl of the night. He glimpsed smiles-the glint of gold from yellow-rotted teeth. He saw lantern-limned interiors, raucous, illuminated worlds, filled with hard words and mad, murderous looks. He saw the glimmer of naked steel. He watched a roaring Galeoth man hammer another, over and over, until the man was little more than a blood-soaked worm flexing and squirming in the muck. A drunk harlot, her flabby arms bruised and bare, accosted him. "Fancy a peach?" she drawled, groping between his thighs.

He felt the flare of dwindled memory, the twitch of old, life-preserving habits, no less prudent for becoming vestigial. He gripped the pommel of his knife beneath his cloak.

He passed the lightless Custom House with its threadbare Circumfix hanging slack in the windless gloom. Marrow was an outpost of the New Empire-it wouldn't do to forget that. He passed a lazaret with its aura of astringent, feces, and infection. He passed a low-raftered opium den, as well as several booming taverns and two half-tented brothels, oozing moans and mercantile giggles into the general night. He even happened upon a wooden post-and-lintel temple to Yatwer, filled with chimes and chants-some evening ceremony, Achamian supposed. All the while the cataract whooshed and rumbled, the motionless blast of water against stone. Clear beads dripped from the rim of his cowl.

He tried not to think of the girl. Mimara.

By the time he found the inn Geraus had mentioned, the Cocked Leg, he was almost accustomed to the uproar. Marrow, he decided while leading his mule into the rear courtyard, was not so different from the great polyglot cities of his youth. More vicious, roughed in timber instead of monumental stone, and lacking the size that allowed indifference and mass anonymity to congeal into urban tolerance-there was no unspoken agreement to overlook one another's perversions here. Anyone could be judged at any moment. But even still, it possessed the same sense of possibility, accidental and collective, humming across every public threshold, as though the congregation of strangers was all it took to generate alternatives…

Freedom.

A night in such a place could have a million endings, Achamian realized. That was its wonder and horror both.

A night in Marrow.

The room was small. The woollen bedding reeked of mould and must. The innkeeper had not liked the looks of him, that much was certain. Show the pauper to the pauper's room-that was the ancient rule. Nevertheless, Achamian found himself smiling as he doffed his dripping cloak and squared his supplies and belongings. It seemed he had set out for Marrow a sleeping hermit and had arrived an awakening spy.

This was good, he told himself as he followed the stairs and halls toward the thunder of the Cocked Leg's common room. Most auspicious. Now all he required was some luck.

He grinned in anticipation, did his best to ignore the bloody handprints decorating the wall.

Achamian's adventurous mood evaporated as soon as he pressed his way into the smoky, low-timbered room. The shock nearly struck him breathless, so long had it been since he had last observed other men with his arcane eyes. There was another sorcerer here-an old and accomplished one given the black and blasted depth of his Mark-sitting in the far corner. And there was someone carrying a Chorae as well. A cursed Tear of God, so-called because its merest touch destroyed sorcerers and their desecrations.

Of course, he could see the Mark whenever he looked to his own hands or glimpsed his reflection in sitting water, but it was like his skin, something too near to he truly visible. Seeing its eye-twisting stain on another-especially after so many years immersed in the clarity of the Uncreated, the World as untouched by sorcerers and their blasphemous voices-made him feel… young.

Young with fear.

Turning his back on the presence, Achamian made his way to the barkeep, whom he easily recognized from his slave's description. According to Geraus, his name was Haubrezer, one of the three Tydonni brothers who owned the Cocked Leg. Achamian bowed his head, even though he had yet to see anyone observing jnan since arriving here. "My name is Akka," he said.

"Ya," the tall, stork-skinny man replied. His voice wasn't so much deep as it was dark. "You the old pick. This no land for the slow and crooked, ya know."

Achamian feigned an old man's baffled good humour. It seemed absurd that the venerable Norsirai slur for Ketyai, "pick," could still sting after so many years.

"My slave, Geraus, said you could assist me."

Coming to Marrow had always been the plan-as had hiring a company of Scalpoi. Mimara had simply forced him to abbreviate his timetable, to begin his journey before knowing his destination. Her coming had rattled him in more ways than he cared to admit-the suspicions, the resemblance to her mother, the pointed questions, their sad coupling-but the consequences of her never coming would have been disastrous.

At least now he knew why Fate had sent her to him-as a boot in the rump.

"Yaa," Haubrezer brayed. "Good man, Geraus." A searching look, rendered severe by the angularity of his face. He struck Achamian as one of those men whose souls had adapted to the peculiarities of their body. Stooped and long-fingered, mantislike both in patience and predatoriness. He did not hunt, Achamian decided, so much as he waited.

"Indeed."

Haubrezer stared with an almost bovine relentlessness-bored to tears, yet prepared to die chewing his cud. The man seemed to have compensated for his awkwardness by slowing everything down, including his intellect. Slowness had a way of laying out the grace that dwelt in all things, even the most ungainly. It was the reason why proud drunks took care to walk as though under water.

At last, the large eyes blinked in conclusion. "Ya. The ones you look for…" He lowered his veined forehead toward the back corner, on the far side of the smoking central hearth.

Toward the sorcerer and the Chorae that Achamian had sensed upon entering the common room.

But of course…

"Are you sure?"

Haubrezer kept his head inclined, though it seemed that he stared at his eyebrows rather than the grim-talking shadows beyond the smoke.

"Ho. No mean Scalpoi, those. They the Veteran's Men. The Skin Eaters."

"The Skin Eaters?"

A sour grin, as though the man had been starved of the facial musculature needed to pull his lips from his teeth. "Geraus was right. You hermit, to be sure. Ask anyone here around"-he gestured wide with a scapular hand-"they will tell you, ya, step aside for the Skin Eaters. Famed. The whole River know. They bring down more bales than rutta-anyone. Ho. Step aside for the Skin Eaters, or they strike you down. Hauza kup. Down but good."

Achamian leaned back to appraise what suddenly seemed more a hostile tribe than another alehouse trestle. Though all the other long-tables were packed, the three men Haubrezer referred to sat alone, neither rigid nor at their ease, yet with a posture that suggested an intense inward focus, a violent disregard for matters not their own. The image of them wavered in the sparked air above the hearth: the first-the bearer of the Chorae-with the squared-and-plaited beard of an Ainoni or a Conriyan; the second with long white hair, a goatee, and a weather-pruned face; and the broad-shouldered third-the sorcerer-cowled in black-beaten leather.

Achamian glanced back up at Haubrezer. "Do I require an introduction?"

"Not from the likes of me."

An acute sensitivity to his surroundings beset Achamian while crossing the common room, which for him amounted to a kind of bodily awareness of some imminent undertaking-some reckless leap. He winced at the odour of sweat festering in leather. The outer thunder of the Long-Braid Falls shivered through air and timber alike, so that the room seemed a motionless bubble in a torrent. And the guttural patois everyone spoke-a kind of mongrel marriage of Gallish and Sheyic-struck him with an ancient and impossible taste: the First Holy War, twenty long years gone by.

He thought of Kellhus and found his resolution rekindled.

The pulse of a fool…

Achamian had no illusions about the men he was about to meet. The New Empire had signalled the end of the once lucrative mercenary trade, but it did not signal the end of those willing to kill for compensation. He had spent the greater part of his life in the proximity of such men-in the company of those who would think him weak. He had long ago learned how to mime the proper postures, how to redress the defects of the heart with the advantages of intellect. He knew how to treat with such men-or so he thought.

His first heartbeat in their presence told him otherwise.

The cowled man, the sorcerer, turned to him, but only far enough to reveal a temple and jawline as white and as smooth as boiled bone. Obdurate black shrouded his eyes. The small, silver-haired man graced him with a nimble, shining look and a smile that seemed to welcome the derision to come. But the square-bearded one, the man Haubrezer had identified as the Captain, continued staring into his wine-bowl as before. Achamian understood instantly he was the kind of man who begrudged others everything.

"Are you the Ainoni they call Kosoter?" he asked. "Ironsoul. The Captain of the Skin Eaters?"

A moment of silence, far too thick to connote shock or surprise.

The Captain took a deliberate drink, then fixed him with his narrow brown eyes. It was a look Achamian recognized from the massacres and privations of the First Holy War. A look that saw only dead things.

"I know you," was all he said in a voice with a hint of a papyrus rasp.

"You will address the Captain as 'Veteran,'" the silver-haired man exclaimed. He was diminutive but with wrists thick enough to promise an iron grip. And he was old, at least as old as Achamian, but it seemed the years had stripped only the fat of weakness from him, leaving spry fire in the leather that remained. He was a man who had been shrivelled strong. "After all," he continued with a slit-eyed laugh, "it's the Law."

Achamian ignored him.

"You know me?" he said to the Captain, who had resumed his study of his inscrutable drink. "From the First Hol-"

"Sir," the small man interrupted. "Please. Allow me to introduce myself. I am Sarl-"

"I need to contract your company," Achamian continued, staring intently at the Captain. Definitely Ainoni. He looked archaic, like something risen from a burial mound.

"Sir," Sarl pressed, this time with a cut-throat gleam in his eye. "Please…"

Achamian turned to him, frowning but attentive.

His grin hooked the ruts of his face into innumerable lines. "I have, shall we say, a certain facility for sums and figures, as well as the finer details of argument. My illustrious Captain, well, let us just say, he has little patience for the perversities of speech."

"So you make the decisions?"

The man burst into a beet-faced cackle, revealing the arc of his gums. "No," he gasped, as though astounded that anyone could ask a question so uproariously thick. "No-no-no! I do the singing. But I assure you, it is the Captain who inks the verse." Sarl bowed to the Ainoni in embellished deference-who now watched Achamian with something poised between curiosity and malice. When Sarl turned back to Achamian, his lips were pursed into a see-I-told-you-so line.

Achamian snorted dismissively. This was one thing he didn't miss about the civilized world: the addiction to all things indirect.

"I need to contract your Captain's company."

"Such a strange request!" Sarl exclaimed, as though waiting to say as much all along. "And daring, very daring. There are no more wars, my friend, save the two that are holy. The one that our Aspect-Emperor wages against wicked Golgotterath, and the more tawdry one we wage against the Sranc. There are no more mercenaries, friend."

Achamian found himself glancing back and forth between the two men. The effect was unnerving, as though the division of attention amounted to a kind of partial blindness.

For all he knew, this was the whole point of this ludicrous exercise.

"It isn't mercenaries I need, it's scalpers. And it isn't war that I intend, it's a journey."

"Ahhh, very interesting," Sarl drawled. His eyes collapsed into fluttering slits every time he smiled, as if blinking at some kind of comical grit. "A journey requiring scalpers is a journey into the wastes, no?"

Achamian paused, disconcerted by the ease of the man's penetration. This Sarl was every bit as nimble as he looked.

"Yes."

"As I thought! Very, very interesting! So tell me, just where in the North do you need to go?"

Achamian had feared this question, as inevitable as it was. Who was he fooling?

"Far…" He swallowed. "To the ruins of Sauglish."

Another spittle-flecked spasm of laughter, this one carving every vein, every web of wrinkles in succinct shades of purple and red. He even yanked his wrists together as though bound, shook up and down, fingers flicking. He looked to the cowled man as though seeking confirmation. "Sauglish!" he howled, rolling his face back. "Oh ho, my friend, my poor, poor lunatic friend!" He reclined back in his chair, sucking air. "May the Gods"-he shook his head in a kind of astonished dismissal-"keep your bowls warm and full and whatever."

Something in his look and tone said, Leave while you still can…

Achamian's fists balled of their own volition. It was all he could do to keep from burning the pissant to cinders. Arrogant monkey-of-a-man! Only the Captain's Chorae and the indigo Mark of his cowled companion stayed his tongue.

A hard moment of fading smiles.

Sarl scratched the pad of his thumb with the nail of his index finger.

Then the Captain said, "What lies in Sauglish?"

The words fairly knocked the blood out of Sarl's ruddy face. Perhaps there were consequences for misreading the Captain's interest. Perhaps the man had simply wandered too far out on a drunken limb. For some reason, Achamian had the impression that Lord Kosoter's voice always had this effect.

"What do you know of it?" Achamian asked. He immediately realized this was a grievous mistake, answering a question with a question when discoursing with the Captain. Nevertheless, he felt the need to match, flint for flint, the man's unearthly look, to communicate his own ability to see the atrocity at the heart of all things.

He stared into Lord Kosoter's shining eyes. He could hear Sarl breath, a shallow-chested sound, like a dog dreaming. He found himself wondering if the cowled man had moved. A ringing sidled into the room, high-pitched and hazy, and with it came a premonition of lethality, a wheedling apprehension. The stakes of this contest, part of him realized, involved far more than dominance or respect or even identity, but the very possibility of being…

I am the end of you, the eyes in his eyes whispered. And they seemed a thousand years old.

Achamian could feel himself wilt. Wild-limbed imaginings flickered through his soul, hot with screams and blood. He could feel tremors knock through his knees.

"Go easy now, friend," Sarl murmured in what seemed genuine conciliation. "The Captain here can piss halfway cross the world, if need be. Just answer his question."

Achamian swallowed, blinked. "The Coffers," some traitor with his voice said. Glancing at Sarl seemed like breaking the surface of a drowning.

"Coffers," Sarl repeated strangely. "Perhaps"-a quick glance at Lord Kosoter-"you should tell the Captain what you meant by the Coffers."

Achamian could see the man's implacable eyes, like Scrutiny incarnate, leaning against his periphery. He found himself glancing at the cowled figure, then looking away, down to the accursed floor.

It wasn't supposed to be like this!

"No," he said, breathing deep, then glaring at all three in turn. The way to deal with the Captain, he realized, was to make him one of a number. "I shall try my luck elsewhere." He made to leave, feeling faint and sweaty and more than a little nauseous.

"You're the Wizard," Lord Kosoter called out in a growl.

The word hooked Achamian like a wire garrote.

"I remember you," the grave face continued as he turned. "I remember you from the Holy War." He slid his wine-bowl to one side, leaned forward over the table. "You taught him. The Aspect-Emperor."

"What does it matter?" Achamian said, not caring whether he sounded bitter.

The almost black-on-black eyes blinked for what seemed the first time.

"It matters because it means you were a Mandate Schoolman… once." His Sheyic was impeccable, bent more to some inner dialect of anger than to the lilting cadences of his native Ainoni tongue. "Which means you really do know where to find the Coffers."

"So much the worse for you," Achamian said. But all he could think was how… How could a scalper, any scalper, know about the Sohonc Coffers? He found himself glancing at the leather-cowled man to the Captain's left… The sorcerer. What was his School?

"I think not," Lord Kosoter said, leaning back. "There's scalpers aplenty in Marrow, sure. Any number of companies." He hooked his wine-bowl with two calloused fingers. "But none who know who you are…" His grin was curious, frightening. "Which means none who will even entertain your request."

The logic of his claim hung like an iron in the air, indifferent to the swell of background voices. Truth was ever the afterlife of words.

Achamian stood dumbstruck.

"I have this leaf," Sarl said, his eyes bright with just-between-friends mischief. "You place it against your anus-"

The cowled man erupted in faceless laughter. Achamian saw his left eye as he tilted his head back, a glimpse of a pupil set in watery grey. But it was the guttural arrhythmia of his laugh that told him what he was…

"Just twooo," Sarl howled, his purple brows nearly pinched to his apple-red cheeks. "Tw-twooo ensolariis!"

Achamian sneered as much as smiled. The Anus Leaf was an old joke, an expression referring to charlatans who peddled hope in the form of false remedies.

The Captain watched him with imperturbable care.

They were right, he realized. Derision was all he could expect here in Marrow-or even worse. The Skin Eaters were his only hope.

And they had already struck him down.

Achamian took the proffered bowl in both hands just to be sure it didn't shake. He drained it and gasped. Unwatered wine from some bitter Galeoth soil.

"The Coffers!" Sarl crowed. "Captain! He wants to loot the Coffers!"

Achamian smacked his lips about the burning in his gullet, wiped a rasp-woollen sleeve across his beard and mouth. It was strange, the way a single drink could make you part of someone's company. "It was him," Achamian said to the Captain while nodding in the direction of the cowled figure. "Wasn't it? He told you about the Coffers…"

Another mistake. Evidently, the Captain refused to recognize even the most innocent conversational impositions. Hint, innuendo, implication; all of it accused with a glare, then condemned with onerous silence.

"We call him Cleric," Sarl said, tilting his head toward the man-a mock covert gesture.

The black, leather-rimmed oval seemed to stare back at Achamian.

"Cleric," Achamian repeated.

The cowl remained motionless. The Captain resumed staring into his wine.

"You should hear him in the Wilds," Sarl exclaimed. "Such sweet sermons! And to think I once thought myself eloquent."

"And yet," Achamian said carefully, "Nonmen have no priests."

"Not as Men understand them," the black pit replied.

Shock. Its voice had been pleasant, melodious, but marbled with intonations alien to the human vocal range. It was as though the tones of a deformed child had been woven into it.

Achamian sat rigid. "Where are you from?" he asked, his lungs pressed against his backbone. "Ishterebinth?"

The hood bowed to the tabletop. "I can no longer remember. I have known Ishterebinth, I think… But it was not called such then."

"I see your Mark. You wear it fierce and deep."

The hood lifted, as though raising hidden ears to some faraway sound. "As do you."

"Who was your Quya Master? From which Line do you hail?"

"I… I cannot remember."

Achamian licked his lips in hesitation, then asked the question that had to be asked of all Nonmen. "What can you remember?"

An odd hesitation, as though to the syncopation of an inhuman heart.

"Things. Friends. Strangers and lovers. All of them heart-breaking. All of them horrific."

"And the Coffers? You remember them?"

An almost imperceptible nod. "I was at the Library of Sauglish when it fell-I think. I remember that terror all too well… But why it should cause me such sorrow, I do not know."

The words pimpled Achamian's skin. He had dreamed the horrors of Sauglish far too many times-he need only close his eyes to see the burning towers, the fleeing masses, the Sohonc battling iron-scaled Wracu in skies wreathed in smoke and flame. He had tasted the ash on the wind, heard the wailing of multitudes. He had wept at his own cowardice…

This made him unique among Men, to have lived the span of two lives-two eye blinks, Seswatha and Achamian, flung across the millennia. But this Nonman before him, his life straddled a hundred human generations. He had lived the entire breadth of those nation-eating ages. From then to now-and even more. From the twilight of the First Apocalypse to the dawn of the Second.

He was in the presence of a living line, Achamian realized, of eyes that had witnessed all the intervening years between his two selves, between Achamian, the Wizard-Exile, and Seswatha, the Grandmaster of the Sohonc. This Nonman had lived the two-thousand-year sleep between…

It almost made Achamian feel whole.

"And your name?"

Sarl whispered some kind of curse.

"Incariol," the cowled figure said with an air of inward grappling. And then again, "Incariol…" as though testing its sound on his tongue. "Does that sound familiar?"

Achamian had never heard of it, not that he could remember. Even still, it was plain these Scalpoi had no inkling of who or what rode with them. How could any mortal fathom such a cavernous soul?

As old as the Tusk…

"So you're an Erratic."

"Am I? Is that what I am?"

How did you answer such a question? The creature before him had lived so long his very identity had collapsed beneath him, dropped him into the pit of his own lifetime. His was a running-over soul, where every instance of love or hope or joy drained into the void of forgetfulness, displaced by the more viscous passions of terror, anguish, and hate.

He was an Erratic, addicted to atrocity for memory's sake.

"He's calling you mad," Sarl said, a little too quickly given the gravity of their silence.

The hood turned to him.

"Yes… I am mad."

Sarl waved his hands in affectionate contradiction. "Come now, Cleric. No need to-"

"Memories…" the black pit interrupted. A word struck in wincing tones of woe. "Memories make us sane."

"See!" Sarl exclaimed, whirling to Achamian. "Sermons!" His face was pinched red about a manic smile, as though he were the kind of man who made claims compulsively and so gloated over every instance of their confirmation.

"This one night in the Wilds, one of our number asks Cleric here what's the greatest treasure he's heard tell. Gold, as you might imagine, is quite a popular topic among us Scalpoi, especially when we're hunting on the dark-without campfires, that is. Warms the bones as sure as any flame, talk of peaches and gold."

There was something-the turn of his face, maybe, the aura of antagonism in the way he leaned forward, or the twist of insincerity in his tone-that told Achamian that "sermons" were the least of the man's concerns.

"So Cleric here," Sarl rasps, "obliges us with another sermon. He mentions several glories, for he's seen things we mortals can scarce conceive. But for some reason it was the Coffers that stuck. The hoard hidden beneath the Library of Sauglish, ere it was destroyed in the First Apocalypse. The Coffers, we say. The Coffers-any time we're loath to mention that unluckiest of words, 'hope.' Coffers. Coffers. Coffers. We trek out to run down the skinnies, give them a trim, but we always say we're searching for the Coffers."

The face-wrinkling amiability suddenly dropped from his face, revealing something cold and hateful and implausibly profound.

"And now, here you are, as sure as Fate."

There was something, Achamian decided, altogether too mobile about the man's expressions.

"You're a learned man," Sarl added, speaking through strings of phlegm. An uncommon intensity had fixed his rodent features-as if some life-or-death opportunity were on the verge of slipping from his grasp. "Tell me, what do you think of the concept of coincidence? Do you think things happen for reasons?"

A perplexed look. A depleted smile. Achamian could summon no more.

Sarl leaned back, nodding and laughing and petting his white goatee. Of course you do! his squinty look shouted, as though Achamian had given him the oh-so-predictable book-learned response.

Achamian did his best not to gape. He had forgotten what it was like, the succession of trivial surprises that was part and parcel of joining the company of strangers. In the company of strangers it was so easy to forget the small crablike histories that held others together and set you apart.

But this was no trivial surprise.

From Marrow to the wastes of Kыniьri was a journey of months across Sranc-infested Wilds. Were it not for the Great Ordeal, the trek would be simply impossible: Over the centuries, the School of Mandate had lost more than a few expeditions trying to reach either Sauglish or Golgotterath. But even with the Great Ordeal drawing the Sranc like a lodestone, Achamian knew he could not make his way alone-not so far, not at his age. This was the whole reason why he had come to Marrow: to recruit the assistance he would need. He had simply struck upon the Sohonc Coffers as an inducement, if not an outright ruse… And now this.

Could it simply be coincidence?

Lord Kosoter watched Sarl with eyes of glassy iron.

The small man blanched. His face squinted along plaintive lines. "If this is no coincidence, Captain, then it's the Whore. Anagkл. Fate." He looked around as if encouraged by imaginary fellows. "And the Whore, begging your pardon, Captain, fucks everyone in the end-everyone. Foe, friend, fuzzy little fucking woodland creatures…"

But his words were for naught. The Captain's silence boomed as much.

And Achamian found himself wondering just when the agreement had been struck-and just how the men he had hoped to hire had become his partners. Was he simply one more Skin Eater?

Should he be grateful? Relieved? Horrified?

"I remember…" the blackness wrapped by the cowl said. "I remember the slaughter of…"

A peculiar sound, like a sob thumbed into the shape of a cackle.

"Of children."

"A man," the Captain grimly noted, "has got to remember."

That night Achamian dreamed in the old way. He dreamed of Sauglish.

The Wracu came first, as they always did, dropping from the clouds with claws and wings askew. Their roars seemed to fall from all directions, curiously hollow, like children screeching into caverns, only infinitely more savage.

Vertigo. Seswatha hung with his Sohonc brothers above their sacred Library, whose towers and walls yawed out below them, perched on the Troinim, the three hills that commanded the great city's westward reaches. They awaited the frenzied descent, their figures hazed blue by their Gnostic Wards. Light sparked from their eyes and mouths, so that their heads seemed cauldrons. Their feet braced against the ground's echo, they sang their blasphemous song.

Psalms of destruction.

Lines of brilliant white mapped the gaping spaces, striking geometries, confining geometries, lights that made smoke of hide and fury. Rearing back to bare claws and spew fire, the dragons plummeted into the arcane glitter, shrieking, screaming. Then they were through, bleeding smoke, some writhing and convulsing, one or two toppling to their deaths. The singing became more frantic. Threads of incandescence boiled against iron scales. Unseen hammers beat against wings and limbs.

Then the Wracu were upon them.

And for an instant, Seswatha became Achamian, an old man born of another age, his eyes rolling like a panicked horse. Somehow forgotten, he jerked his gaze side to side, from the white robed men hanging frail in their glowing spheres to the black-maned beasts that assailed them, burning and rending. Wings bellied like sails in the tempest. Eyes narrowed into sickle-shaped slits. Wounds smoked. The Wracu hammered and clawed the curved planes, and things not of this world sheared. The antique Schoolmen shouted, cried out in horror and frustration. A dragon fell, gutted by blue flame. A sorcerer, young Hыnovis, was stripped to bone by burning exhalations, and twirled like a burning scroll into the vista below. The glare of sorcery and fiery vomit intensified, until all that Achamian could see were ragged silhouettes twisting serpentine over the void.

The city pitched across the distances, a patchwork of labyrinthine streets and packed structures. To the east, he saw the shining ribbon of the River Aumris, the cradle of Norsirai glory. And to the west, beyond the fortifications, he saw the alluvial plains blackened by hordes of whooping Sranc. And beyond them, the whirlwind, howling across the horizon, monstrous and inexhaustible, framed by the rose-gold of more distant skies. Even when obscured by smoke Achamian could feel it… Mog-Pharau, the end of all things.

Roars scored the heights to arch of heaven, reptilian fury wrapped about the inside-out mutter of sorcery-the glory of the Gnosis. The dragons raged. The sorcerers of the Sohonc, the first and greatest School, fought and died.

He did not so much see those below as he remembered them. Refugees packing the rooftops, watching the slow advance of doom. Fathers casting their own babes to the hard cobble of the streets. Mothers cutting their children's throats-anything to save them from the fury of the Sranc. Slaves and chieftains howling, crying out to heavens shut against them. The broken staring into the dread west, numb to everything save the whirlwind's roping approach…

Their High-King was dead. The wombs of their wives and their daughters had become graves. The greatest of their thanes and chieftain-knights, the flower of their armed might, had been struck down. Pillars of smoke scored the distance across the earth's very curve.

The world was ending.

Like choking. Like drowning. Like a weight without substance, sinking cold through him, a knife drawn from the snow, even as he fell slack into its bottomless regions. Friends, brothers, shaken apart in grinning jaws. Strangers flailing in fiery blooms. Towers leaning like drunks before crashing. Sranc encrusting distant walls, like ants on slices of apple, loping into the maze of streets. The cries, shrieks, screams-thousands of them rising like steam from burning stones. Sauglish dying.

Hopelessness… Futility.

Never, it seemed, had he dreamed a passion with such vehemence.

Undone, the surviving Sohonc fled the skies, took shelter in the Library with its net of great square towers. Batteries of ballistae covered their retreat, and several of the younger Wracu foundered, harpooned. Achamian stood abandoned in the sky, gazing at mighty Skafra, scars like capstan rope, limbs like sinuous timbers, and leprous wings beating, obscuring the distant No-God with every laborious whump-whump. The ancient Wracu grinned its lipless dragon grin, scanned the near distances with eyes of bloody pearl…

And somehow, miraculously, looked through him.

Skafra, near enough for his bulk to trigger bodily terror. Achamian stared helplessly at the creature, watched the bright crimson of its rage drain from its scales and the rising blooms of black that signified dark contemplation. The conflagration below glittered across its chitinous lines, and Achamian's eyes were drawn downward, to the plummet beneath his feet.

The sight of the Holy Library burning stuck pins into his eyes. Beloved stone! The great walls sheathed in obsidian along their sloped foundations, rising high and white above. The copper roofs, stacked like massive skirts. And the deep courtyards, so that from the sky the structure resembled the halved heart of some vast and intricate beast. Sunbright sputum washed across ensorcelled stone, knifed through seams and cracks. Dragonfire rained across the circuit, a spray of thunderous eruptions.

But where? Where was Seswatha? How could he dream without-

The old Wizard awoke crying out thoughts from the end of a different world. Sauglish! We have lost Sauglish!

But as his eyes sorted the darkness of his room from the afterimages, and his ears dredged the roar of the falls from the death-throe thunder, it seemed he could hear the madwoman… Mimara.

"You have become a prophet…" Was that not what she had said?

"A prophet of the past."

The next day Sarl collected Achamian and brought him to what must have been one of the Cocked Leg's largest rooms. Though he moved with the same spry impatience, the old cutthroat seemed surprisingly quiet. Whether this was due to the previous night's drink or discussion, Achamian could not readily tell.

Another man awaited them in addition to Kosoter and Cleric: a middle-aged Nansur named Kiampas. If Sarl was the Captain's mouth, then Kiampas, Achamian realized, was his hand. Clean-shaven and elegantly featured, he looked somewhat younger than the fifty or so years Achamian eventually credited to him. He was definitely more soldier than warrior. He had a wry, methodical air that suggested melancholy as much as competence. Because of this, Achamian found himself almost instantly trusting both his instincts and his acumen. As a former Imperial Officer, Kiampas was a devotee of plans and the resources required to bring them to fruition. Such men usually left the issue of overarching goals to their superiors, but after listening to Achamian explain the mission to come, his manner betrayed obvious doubt if not out-and-out dismay.

"So just when did you hope to reach these ruins?" His speech had a well-practised insistence-a first-things-first air-that spoke of many long campaigns.

"The Wards protecting the Coffers are peculiar," Achamian lied, "geared to the heavenly spheres. We must reach Sauglish before the autumn solstice."

All eyes raked him, searching, it seemed, for the telltale glow of deceit in the blank coals of his face.

"Sweet Sejenus!" Kiampas cried in disbelief. "The end of summer?"

"It's imperative."

"Impossible. It can't be done!"

"Yes," the Captain grated, "it can."

Kiampas paled, seemed to glance down in unconscious apology. Though he was cut of different cloth entirely, Achamian wasn't surprised to see him sharing Sarl's reaction to the chest-tightening rarity of their Captain's voice.

"Well then," the Nansur continued, apparently searching for his equilibrium in the matter at hand. "The choice of routes is straightforward then. We should travel through Galeoth, up through-"

"That cannot be done," Achamian interrupted.

The studied lack of expression on Kiampas's face would be Achamian's first glimpse of the man's escalating disdain.

"And what route do you suggest?"

"Along the back of the Osthwai."

"The back of the…" The man possessed a sneering side, but then, so did most ironic souls. "Are you fucking mad? Do you realize-"

"I cannot travel anywhere in the New Empire," Achamian said, genuinely penitent. Of all the Skin Eaters he had met thus far, Kiampas was the only one he was prepared to trust, if only at a procedural level. "Ask Lord Kosoter. He knows who I am."

Apparently the lack of contradiction in the Captain's glare was confirmation enough.

"So you wish to avoid the Aspect-Emperor," Kiampas continued. Achamian did not like the way his eyes drifted to the Captain as he said this.

"What of it?"

His impertinent smile was rendered all the more injurious by the dignity of his features. "Rumour has it Sakarpus has fallen, that the Great Ordeal even now marches northward."

He was saying they would have to cross the New Empire no matter what. Achamian bowed his face to the jnanic degree that acknowledged a point taken. He knew how absurd he must look, an old, wild-haired hermit dressed in a beggar's tunic, aping the etiquette of a faraway caste-nobility. Even still, this was a courtesy he had yet to extend to any of the others; he wanted Kiampas to know that he respected both him and his misgivings.

Something told him he would need allies in the weeks and months to come.

"Look," Achamian replied. "Were it not for the Great Ordeal, an expedition such as this would be madness. This is perhaps the one time, the only time, that something like this can be attempted! But just because the Aspect-Emperor clears our way, doesn't mean we must cross his path. He shall be far ahead of us, mark me."

Kiampas was having none of it. "The Captain tells me you're a fellow Veteran, that you belonged to the First Holy War. That means you know full well the sluggish and capricious ways of great hosts on the march."

"Sauglish lies out of their way," Achamian said evenly. "The chances of encountering any Men of the Circumfix are exceedingly slim."

Kiampas nodded with slow skepticism, then leaned back, as if retreating from some disagreeable scent.

The smell of futility, perhaps.

After that second meeting, the watches of the day and the days of the week passed quickly. Lord Kosoter commanded a muster of the full company the following morning. The Skin Eaters assembled among the posts of old Marrow, far enough from the mists for their jerkins to harden in the sun. They were a motley group, some sixty or so strong, sporting all manner of armour and weaponry. Some were fastidious, obviously intent on reclaiming as much civilization as they could during their brief tenure in Marrow. One was even decked in the crisp white gowns of a Nilnameshi caste-noble and seemed almost comically concerned with the mud staining his crimson-threaded hems. Others were savage-slovenly, bearing the stamp of their inhuman quarry, to the point of almost resembling Sranc in the case of some. A great many seemed to have adopted the Thunyeri custom of wearing shrunken heads as adornment, either about their girdles or sewn into the lacquered faces of their shields. Otherwise, the only thing they seemed to share in common was a kind of deep spiritual fatigue and, of course, an abiding, almost reverential fear of their Captain.

When they had settled into ranks, Sarl described, in terms grandiloquent enough to flirt with mockery, the nature of the expedition their Captain was in the course of planning. Lord Kosoter stood off to the side, his eyes scavenging the horizon. Cleric accompanied him, somewhat taller and just as broad, his face hidden in his cowl. The cataracts boomed in the distance, a great murky hiss that reminded Achamian of the way the Inrithi hosts had roared in response to Kellhus some twenty years previous. Birdsong braided the nearby forest verge.

Sarl explained the extraordinary perils that would face them, how they would be travelling ten times the distance of a standard "slog," as he called it, and how they could expect to live in the "pit" for more than a year. He paused after mentioning this last as though to let its significance resonate. Achamian reminded himself that the wilderness was not so much a place to these men, as an art with its own well of customs and lore. He imagined that scalpers traded stories of companies gone missing returning after so many months in the "pit." Those words, "more than a year," he realized, likely carried dismaying implications.

But again and again, the old, wire-limbed man came back to the Coffers. "Coffers," spoken like the title of some great king. "Coffers," murmured like the name of some collective aspiration. "Coffers," spat as though to say, "How long shall we be denied our due?" "Coffers," hollered over and over like the name of some lost child. "Coffers," invoked as though it were something lost and holy, another Shimeh crying out for reconquest…

But more real than any of these things in that it could be divided into equal shares.

A lie carved at the joints.

Sarl explained all, his face reddening, then reddening again, his head bobbing to the more strident turns of speech, his body given to illustrative antics, standing at attention, trotting in place, pacing while the voice pondered. And all was disciplined silence throughout, something which, given the crazed composition of the Skin Eaters, Achamian would have thought a miracle had he not shared bowls with their Captain.

"You have until tomorrow morning to decide," Sarl announced in wide-armed conclusion. "Tomorrow to decide whether to risk all to become a prince! or cradle your pulse and die a slave. Afterwards, departures will be considered desertion-desertion! — and Cleric, here, will be set to the hunt. You know the rule of the slog, boys. The knee that buckles pulls ten men down. The knee that buckles pulls ten men down!"

Watching them break ranks and fall to talking among themselves, Achamian found himself comparing them to the hard-bitten men of the First Holy War, the warriors whose zeal and cruelty had allowed Kellhus to conquer all the Three Seas. The Skin Eaters, he decided, were a far different breed than the Men of the Tusk. They were not ruthless so much as they were vicious. They were not hard so much as they were numb. And they were not driven so much as they were hungry.

They were, in the end, mercenaries… albeit ones touched by the gibbering ferocity of the Sranc.

Lord Kosoter seemed to acknowledge as much over the course of the rate glances Achamian exchanged with him. It was a bond between them, Achamian realized, their shared experiences of the First Holy War. They alone possessed the measuring stick, they alone knew the rule. And it had made them kinsmen of a sort a thought that at once awed and troubled Achamian.

During that night's obligatory revels, Sarl approached him. "The Captain has asked me," he said, "to remind you these men are Scalpoi. Nothing more. Nothing less. The legend of the Skin Eaters resides in him."

Achamian thought it strange, a man who despised speaking confiding in a man who could do nothing else. "And you? You believe this?"

The same eye-pinching grin. "I've been with the Captain since the beginning," he cackled. "From before the Imperial Bounty, in the wars against the Orthodox. I've seen him stand untouched in a hail of arrows, while I cringed behind my shield. I was at his side on the walls of Meigeiri, when the fucking Longbeards fell over themselves trying to flee from his blood-maddened gaze. I was there, after the battle of Em'famir. With these two ears I heard the Aspect-Emperor-the Aspect-Emperor! — name him Ironsoul!" Sarl laughed with purpling mania. "Oh, yes, he's mortal, to be sure. He's a man like other men, as many an unfortunate peach has discovered, believe you me. But something watches him, and more important, something watches through him…"

Sarl seized Achamian's elbow, smashed his wine-bowl into Achamian's hard enough to shatter both. "You would do well…" he said, a mad blankness on his face. He eased backward step by unreal step, nodding as though to a tune or a truth that only rats could hear, "to respect the Captain."

Achamian looked down to his soaked hand. The wine had run from his fingers as thick as blood.

To think he had worried about the Nonman's madness.

The presence of the Erratic concerned Achamian, to be sure, but on so many levels that the resulting anxieties seemed to cancel one another out. And he had to admit, aside from the bardic romance of a Nonman companion, there was a tremendous practical advantage to his presence. Achamian had few illusions about the odyssey that confronted them. It was a long and bitter war they were about to undertake as much as it was an expedition, a protracted battle across the breadth of Eдrwa. He had much to learn regarding this Incariol, true, but there were few powers in the world that could rank a Nonman Magi.

Lord Kosoter kept him close for good reason.

At the ensuing muster the following morning, only some thirty or so Skin Eaters reported-half the number of those assembled the previous day. Lord Kosoter remained as inscrutable as ever, but Sarl seemed overjoyed, though it was unclear whether it was because so many or so few had "cleaved to the slog," as he put it. The defections may have halved his chances of survival, but they also had doubled the value of his shares.

With the composition of the company decided, the following days were dedicated to outfitting and supplying the expedition. Achamian quite willingly surrendered what remained of his gold, a gesture that seemed to impress the Skin Eaters mightily. The fortune spent seemed to speak of the far greater fortune to be made-even Sarl joined in the general enthusiasm. It was ever the same: Convince a man to take a single step-after all, what earthly difference could one step make? — and he would walk the next mile to prove himself right.

How could they know Achamian had no expectation of return? In a sense, leaving the Three Seas was the real return. He might no longer be a Mandate Schoolman, but his heart belonged to the Ancient North all the same. To the coiling insinuations of the Dreams…

To Seswatha.

"It is always like this," Kiampas told him one evening at the Cocked Leg. The two of them had been sitting side by side wordlessly eating while the trestle before them boomed and cackled with revelling Skin Eaters-Sarl in the celebratory thick of them.

"Before going on a slog?" Achamian asked.

Kiampas paused to suck at the tip of a rabbit bone. He shrugged.

"Before anything," he said, glancing up from the carcass scattered across his plate. There seemed to be genuine sorrow in his look, the regret of kings forced to condemn innocents in the name of appeasing the masses. "Anything involving blood."

Weariness broke across the Wizard, as if a consciousness of years were an integral part of understanding the man's meaning. He turned to the illuminated tableau of scalpers before them: nodding, leaning, shaking with laughter, and, with the exception of Sarl and a few others, brash with rude youth. For the first time, Achamian felt the cumulative weight of all the lies he had told, as though the prick of each had been tallied in lead. How many would die? How many would he use up in his quest to learn the truth of the man-god whose profile graced all the coins they so coveted?

How many pulses had he sacrificed?

Are you doing this for the sake of vengeance? Is that it?

Guilt palmed his gaze toward the incidental background, toward those untouched by his machinations. Across the haze of the room's central hearth, he saw Haubrezer watching the Skin Eaters as well. When he realized that Achamian had seen him, the thin man jerked to his feet, then lurched through the door, his wrists paddling the air with every loping step.

Achamian thought of the innkeep's warning. "Stand aside for the Skin Eaters," he had said.

They strike you down but good.

"I have built a place," the High-King said.

It was strange, the way Achamian knew he dreamed, and the way he knew it not at all, so that he lived this moment as a true now, as something unthought, unguessed, unbreathed, as Seswatha, speaking with another man's selfsame spontaneity, every heartbeat counting out a unique existence, veined and clothed and clotted with urgent and indolent passion. It was strange, the way he paused at the forks of the moment and made ancient decisions…

How could it be? How could he feel all the ferment of a free soul? How could he live a life for the first time over and over?

Seswatha leaned over a small table set between glowering tripods. Snake-entwined wolves danced in a bronze rim around the lip of each, so that the light cast by their flames was fretted by struggling shadows. It made staring at the benjuka plate and its occult patterns of stone pieces difficult. Achamian suspected his old friend had done this deliberately. Benjuka, after all, with its infinite relationships and rule-changing rules, was a game of prolonged concentration.

And no man loathed losing more than Anasыrimbor Celmomas.

"A place," Achamian repeated.

"A refuge."

Seswatha frowned, bent his gaze up from the plate.

"What do you mean?"

"In case the war… goes wrong."

This was uncharacteristic. Not the worry, for indecision riddled Celmomas to the core, but the worry's expression. Back then, no one save the Nonmen of Ishterebinth understood the stakes of the war that embroiled them. Back then, "apocalypse" was a word with a different meaning.

Achamian nodded in Seswatha's slow and deliberate way. "You mean the No-God," he said with a small laugh-a laugh! Even for Seswatha, that name had been naught but a misgiving, more abstraction than catastrophe.

How did one relive such ancient ignorance?

Celmomas's long and leonine face lay blank, indifferent to the geography of pieces arranged between them. The totem braided into his beard-a palm-sized countenance of a wolf cast in gold-seemed to pant and loll in the uncertain light.

"What if this… this thing… is as mighty as the Quya say? What if we are too late?"

"We are not too late."

Silence fell upon them as in a tomb. There was something subterranean about all the ancillary chambers of the Annexes, but none more so, it seemed, than the Royal Suites. No matter how thick the decorative plaster, no matter how bright the paint or gorgeous the tapestries, the lintelled ceilings hung just as low, humming with the weight of oppressive stone.

"You, Seswatha," the High-King said, returning his gaze to the plate. "You are the only one. The only one I trust."

Achamian thought of his Queen, her buttocks against his hips, her calves hooked hot and hungry about his waist.

The High-King moved a stone, a move that Seswatha had not foreseen, and the rules changed in the most disastrous way possible. What had been opportunity found itself twisted inside out, stamped into something as closed and as occluded as the future.

Achamian was almost relieved…

"I have built a place… a refuge…" Anasыrimbor Celmomas said. "A place where my line can outlive me."

Ishuдl…

Sucking musty air, Achamian shot upright in bed. He grabbed his white maul, pressed his head to his knees. The Long-Braid Falls thundered beyond the timbered walls, a white background roar that seemed to give the blackness mass and momentum. "Ishuдl," he murmured. "A place…" He looked up to the heavens, as though peering through the obscurity of his room's low ceiling. "But where is it?"

Whining ears, sorting through the fibres of sound: laughter from the floor, breaking like a bubble in boiling pitch; shouts calling out the streets, daring and proclaiming.

"Where?"

The truth of men lay in their origins. He knew this as only a Mandate Schoolman could. Anasыrimbor Kellhus had not come to the Three Seas by accident. He had not found his half-brother waiting for him as Shriah of the Thousand Temples by accident. He had not conquered the known world by accident!

Achamian swung his feet from his blankets, sat on the edge of his straw-mattressed bed. The words from some ribald song floated up through the joists in the floor.

Her skin was rough as brick,

Her legs were made of rope.

Her gut was plenty thick,

And her teeth were soft as soap.

But her peach was cast in gold.

Aye! No! Aye!

T'were her peach that had me sold!

Waves of gagging laughter. A muffled voice raised to the Coffers. A ragged, ululating cheer, soaking through wood.

The Skin Eaters, singing before they shed blood.

For the longest time, Achamian sat motionless save for the slow saw of his breathing. It seemed he could see the spaces beneath, that he hung upon glass over close limb-jostled air. The Captain was absent, of course, as remote as his godlike authority required. But he could see Sarl, his ink-line eyes, age-scorched skin, and gum-glistening smile, see him using his rank to enforce the pretence that he was one of them. That was his problem, Sarl, his refusal to acknowledge his old man crooks, the flabby reservoirs of regret and bitterness that chambered every elderly heart.

And then there were the men, the Skin Eaters proper as opposed to their mad handlers, spared the convolutions of long life, lost in the thoughtless fellowship of lust and brute desire that made the young young, flaunting the willingness to fuck or to kill under the guise of whim, when in truth it all came down to the paring eyes of the others. Recognition.

He could see all of it through night and floors.

And the Wizard realized, with the curious fate-affirming euphoria of those who discover themselves guiltless. He would burn a hundred. He would burn a thousand.

However many fools it took to find Ishuдl.

The company stomped to the foot of the escarpments, in the chill of the following morning, a long bleary-eyed train bent beneath packs and leading mules, and began climbing out of the squalid precincts of Marrow. The switchback trail was nothing short of treacherous, smeared as it was in donkey shit. But it seemed appropriate, somehow, that spit and toil were required to leave the wretched town. It made palpable the limits they were scaling, the fact that they had turned their backs on the New Empire's outermost station, the very fringe of civilization, both wicked and illumined.

To leave Marrow was to pass out of history, out of memory… to enter a world as disordered as Incariol's soul. Yes, Achamian thought, willing his old and bandy limbs step by puffing step. It was proper that he should climb.

All passages into dread should exact some chastising toll.

Mimara has learned much about the nature of patience and watching.

And even more about the nature of Men.

She realizes quite quickly that Marrow is no place for the likes of her. She understands her fine-boned beauty, knows in intimate detail the way it hooks, burrlike, the woollen gaze of men. She would, she knows, be endlessly accosted, until some clever pimp realized she had no protection. She would be drugged, or set upon by numbers greater than she could handle. She would be raped and beaten. Someone would comment on her uncanny resemblance to the Holy Empress on an uncut silver kellic, and she would be trussed in cheap-dyed linens, foil, and candy jewels. For miles around, every scalper with a copper would walk away with some piece of her.

She knows this would happen… In her marrow, you might say.

Her slavery moves through her, not so much a crowd of flinching years as an overlapping of inner shadows. It is always there-always here. The whips and fists and violation, a clamour shot through with memories of love for her sisters, some weaker, some stronger, pity for the torment in the eyes of some, those who would weep, "Just a child…" They used her, all of them used her, but somehow the bottom of the jar never dried. Somehow a last sip remained, enough to moisten her lips, to dry her eyes.

This was how her mother's agents found her years ago, dressed like their Holy Empress, emptied save for a single sip. Apparently thousands had died, such was Anasыrimbor Esmenet's outrage. A whole swath of the Worm in Carythusal had been razed, the male population indiscriminately slaughtered.

But it was never clear just whom Mother was avenging.

Mimara knows what will happen. So rather than follow Achamian into the town, she circles around and climbs the escarpments instead. This time, she really does leave her mule, Foolhardy, to the wolves. She takes up a position well away from the eastward tracks-not a day passes, it seems, without some company trudging in from the horizon-and she watches the town the way an idle boy might study a termite-infested stump. It looks like a toy woven of rotted grass. The trees and bracken opening about a great lesion of open mud. The rows of swollen-wood structures ribbing the interior. The great white veils floating like some ghostly afterimage from the falls, encompassing the strings of fuzzing smoke…

From high above she watches the town and waits. Sometimes, when the wind blows just so, she can even smell the place's fetid halo. She watches the coming and going, the ebb and flow of miniature men and their miniature affairs, and she understands that the infinite variety of Men and their transactions is simply a trick of an earthbound vantage, that from afar, they simply are the mites they appear to be, doing the same things over and over. Same pains, same grievances, same joys, made novel by crippled memory and stunted perspective.

Finitude and forgetfulness, these are what grace Men with the illusion of the new. It seems something she has always known, but could never see; a truth obscured by the succession of close leaning faces.

She dares no fire. She hugs herself warm. From lips of high-hanging stone, she watches and waits for him. She has no other place to go. She is, she decides, every bit as rootless as he. Every bit as mad.

Every bit as driven.