The white-luck warrior

Spring, 20 New Imperial Year (4132 Year-of-the-Tusk), the "Long Side"

Birds permeate the soaring canopies, but their chorus is distant somehow, muffled, as if they sing from the bottom of a sock. The air is close, thick with the absence of breeze. An earthen reek clings to her every breath: the smell of detritus pounded into mush by the seasons, into earth by the years, and into stone by the ages. When she looks up she sees pinpricks of white shining through pockets of ragged green. Otherwise, there is a quality to the filtered gloom that makes the darkness palpable, viscous, as if they trudge through a fog. The pillared depths are uniformly black. The parallax of intervening trunks slowly scissors a thousand grottoes into invisibility. It almost seems a game, the accumulation of hidden spaces. Enough to conceal nations.

Though heaped about the massive trunks and roots, the ground is soft and easy to tread. They follow a winding line between the monstrous trees, but even still they are continually climbing and descending. Often they are forced to hack their way through hanging veils of moss.

It seems unthinkable that men had once taken hoe and plough to this earth.

The scalpers fear the Mop for good reason, she supposes, but for some reason her fear has left her. It is strange the way trauma deadens curiosity. To suffer cruelty in excess is to be delivered from care. The human heart sets aside its questions when the future is too capricious. This is the irony of tribulation.

To know the world will never be so bad.

She fairly jumps at the sound of her name, so intent and absent is her concentration. The old Wizard is beside her. Somehow he seems of a piece with their new surroundings, no different than when crossing the wild mountain heights or passing through Cil-Aujas before that. He has spent too many years among the wild and the ruined not to resemble them.

"The Judging Eye…" he begins in his curious Ainoni. There is something embarrassed in his apologetic look. "You will be furious when you realize how little I know."

"You tell me this because you are afraid."

"No. I tell you this because I truly know very little. The Judging Eye is a folk legend, like the Kahiht or the White-Luck Warrior, notions that have been traded across too many generations to possess any clear meaning…"

"I can see the fear in your eyes, old man. You think me cursed!"

The Wizard regards her for several unblinking heartbeats. Worry. Pity.

"Aye… I think you are cursed."

Mimara has told herself this from the very beginning. There is something wrong with you. There is something broken. So she assumed hearing the same from Achamian would leave her intact, confirmed more than condemned. But for some reason tears flood her eyes, and her face rebels. She raises a hand against the gaze of the others.

"But I do know," Achamian hastily adds, "that the Judging Eye involves pregnant women."

Mimara gawks at him through tears. A cold hand has reached into her abdomen and scooped away all warring sensation.

"Pregnant…" she hears herself say. "Why?"

"I don't know." He has flecks of dead leaf in his hair, and she squelches the urge to fuss over him. "Perhaps because of the profundity of childbirth. The Outside inhabits us in many ways, none so onerous as when a women brings a new soul into the world."

She sees her mother posing before a mirror, her belly broad and low with the twins, Kel and Sammi.

"So what is the curse?" she fairly cries at Achamian. "Tell me, old fool!" She rebukes herself immediately afterward, knowing that the Wizard's honesty would wither as her desperation waxed. People punish desperation as much out of compassion as petty malice.

Achamian gnaws his bottom lip. "As far as I know," he begins with obvious and infuriating care, "those with the Judging Eye give birth to dead children."

He shrugs as if to say, See? You have nothing to fear…

Cold falls through her in sheets.

"What?"

A scowl knits his brow. "The Judging Eye is the eye of the Unborn… The eye that watches from the God's own vantage."

A cleft has opened about their path: a runoff that delivers them to a shallow ravine. They follow the stream that gurgles along its creases-the water is clear but seems black given the gloom. Monstrous elms pillar the embankments, their roots like great fists clenched about earth. The stream has wedged the trees far enough apart for white to glare through seams in the canopy. Here and there the water's meandering course has gnawed hollows beneath various trees. The company ducks beneath those that had fallen across the ravine, trees like stone whales.

"But I've had… had this… for as long as I can remember."

"Which is my point exactly," Achamian says, sounding far too much like someone taking heart in invented reasons. He frowns, an expression Mimara finds horribly endearing on his shaggy old features. "But things are always tricky where the Outside is concerned. Things do not… happen… as they happen here…"

"Riddles! Why do you constantly torture me with riddles?"

"I'm just saying that in a sense your life has already been lived — for the God or the Gods, that is…"

"Which means?"

"Nothing," he says, scowling.

"Tell me what it means!"

But that cool glint has sparked in his eyes. Once again her words have cut through the fat of the old Wizard's patience and struck the bone of his intolerance. "Nothing, Mimara. Noth-"

A blood-curdling cry. She finds herself against sloped ground, tackled in the Wizard's wiry grasp. She senses the whisper of incipient sorceries-Wards strung out and around them. Cleric is booming something incomprehensible. She glimpses Sutadra staggering, a shaft and fletching jutting from his cheek. He's trying to scream but can only cough.

Again, she realizes. The Skin Eaters are dying again.

"Hold my belt!" Achamian cries to her, jerking himself to a crouch. "Don't let go!"

"In the trees!" someone shouts-Galian.

"Stone Hags! Stone Hags!"

Cleric's laughter booms through the hollows.

In her thirst for all things sorcerous, Mimara has read much about Mandate Schoolmen, and more still regarding the Gnosis and the famed War-Cants of the Ancient North. She knows about the incipient Wards they use to secure their person in event of surprise attacks. Even back at Achamian's collapsed tower, she had sensed them hanging about him, like faint child-scribbling marring the art of the immediate world. Now they crackle with life-preserving ugliness.

Arrows pelt the Wizard's Wards, sparking into nothingness. She throws her gaze to and fro, trying to make sense of the surrounding madness. She hears shouts beyond those of her companions. She glimpses shadowy figures ducking along the heights to either side: bowmen, possessing the rangy gait and mien of scalpers. The ravine has delivered them to a human ambush. Galian and Pokwas squat behind a heaped dead fall nearby. Sutadra is down. Soma she cannot see. Cleric has a sorcerous bulwark of his own. The Captain stands tall at his side.

"To me!" Achamian cries to the others. He's standing now, his feet braced in water and muck, and she has pulled herself beside him. "Close about me!"

Other shouts, other voices, across the heights and through the gloom. Their attackers, crying out in alarm. "Gur-gurwik-wikka!" she hears a broken chorus cry, one of the few Gallish words she understands.

Gurwikka. Sorcerer.

Achamian has already begun his otherworldly mutter. His eyes and mouth flare white, painting the figures crowding about them in shades of blue.

She senses a rush of shadows above, sees men shimming down trees. They drop to the forest floor, scramble for earthen cover. They're running-fleeing.

"Stone Hags!" Pokwas booms, crying out the name like a curse. Only Galian's scarred grip prevents the Sword-dancer from bolting after them.

A thunderous crack-somewhere to the fore of their small column. She sees Cleric's silhouette against the glare of roiling fire. A sorcerer assails him. A man hangs between vaulting branches, dressed in black, his limbs like rag-bound sticks. An ethereal dragon head rears from his hands, vomits fire…

She squints against sunset brilliance.

A whooshing hiss returns her gaze to things more immediate. Achamian stands rigid, his hands raised, his face a mask of grizzled skin across sunlight. He sweeps a line of blinding white across the heights of the ravine. She throws a forearm across her eyes, glimpses her shadow as it chases a circle across the ground… The Compass of Noshainrau.

Fire laves barked surfaces. Wood explodes into char.

But where the trees on the Galeoth side of the mountains toppled, the leviathans of the Mop merely groan and crack. Leaves shower across the ravine. A burning clutch of branches crashes into the creek, bursts into steam. Flutters of deeper movement catch her eye: more men fleeing…

Stone Hags.

She looks again to the Nonman. He stands unharmed before flashing breakers of fire, crying out in his mundane voice but in a tongue she does not understand. "Houk'hir!" he shouts in a booming laugh. "Gimu hitiloi pir milisis!" The sorcerous mutter of his opponent continues to rise up out of space and substance. The figure still hangs above the ravine, black against swatches of sky and levels of brightening green…

Achamian is gripping her arm, as if holding her back from some ill-advised rush.

Smoke blooms from nothingness, piles outward from the heart of every hollow. Within heartbeats a pall has obscured the overmatched sorcerer.

Cleric simply stands as before, both feet planted in the shining course of the stream. His laughter is strange, like a murder of crows crying across thunder.

For several moments no one does anything more than stare and breathe.

The Captain climbs alone to the crest of the ravine, lifts himself onto the back of a long-fallen tree, one that reaches across the gully like a collapsed temple column. A lone shaft of sunlight illuminates him and the tattered remnants of his dress. Light hooks about the dents in his shield and armour.

"Knife our bales?" he roars into the crotched depths. " Our bales?"

Sarl starts cackling, hard enough to begin hacking phlegm.

Lord Kosoter turns, rakes the surrounding dark with a look of preternatural fury. "I will stab out your eyes!" he bellows. "Gut your peach! I will kick vomit from your teeth! "

Mimara finds herself kneeling beside Sutadra-she is not sure why. The Kianene has curled onto his side, hissing breaths that end in grunts, holding riven hands to either side of the arrow embedded in his cheek.

They have shared no words, she and this man. They have lived shoulder to elbow on the trail for weeks, and yet they have scarcely exchanged glances. How could such a thing be? How could this life dwindling beneath her be little more than scenery one moment and… and…

"Please-please," she mumbles. "Tell me what to do…"

The heathen scalper fixes her in his gaze-a look of absurd urgency. He sputters something but can only speak blood. His goatee, which has become a full beard since Cil-Aujas, is clotted with it.

"Stone Hags," she hears Galian say in explanation to Achamian. "Bandits. A scalper company that preys on its own. They saw our numbers, I'm guessing, thought we were low-hanging fruit." A wry laugh.

"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 Zeumi, 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 naive 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 Ishual-the birthplace of Anasurimbor 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 stumbling 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.

The platform above formed a ragged rectangle shot with strings of luminance between the timbers. The figure who climbed down from its edge looked a wraith, his clothing was so shredded about the edges. Starlight rippled across the unrusted splints of his hauberk.

The Captain, Achamian realized with dim horror.

The figure shimmed along the trunk, black sheets of hair swaying. He had scarcely set foot on the corner of Achamian's platform before swinging down to the next as nimble as a monkey. The two men regarded each other-for scarce a heartbeat, but it was enough. Ravenous, was all Achamian could think. There was something starved about the eyes that glared from the disgusted squint, something famished about the grin that cut the plaited beard.

The man dropped out of sight. Still staring at the point where their eyes had connected, Achamian heard him land on the platform below, heard the knife whisk from the sheath…

"Sobber!" a voice hissed.

There were three thuds in quick succession, each carrying the dread timbre of flesh.

Gasping. The choking rattle of pierced lungs. The sound of a heel scraping across barked wood-a feeble kicking.

Then nothing.

A poisonous fog seemed to fill the Wizard, steaming out from his gut into his extremities, something that at once burned and chilled. Without thinking he lay back beside Mimara, closed his eyes in the pretense of sleep. The noise of Lord Kosoter climbing back to his platform seemed scabrous thunder in his ears. It was all Achamian could do not to raise warding hands against the sound.

For several moments he simply breathed against the fact of what had happened-against the absence of the life that had been weeping below him only moments before. He had sat immobile and listened to it happen. Then he had pretended to sleep. He had sat there and watched a boy murdered in the name of his lie… The lie of a Wizard who had made benjuka pieces out of men.

The obsession.

Strength, Achamian told himself. This! This is what Fate demands of you… If his heart had not yet hardened to flint, he knew it would before this journey was done. You could not kill so many and still care.

Fail or succeed, he would become something less than a man. Something dangerous.

Like the Captain.

Nothing was said about the dead man in the morning. Not even Mimara dared speak, either because the atrocity was too obvious or too near. They simply gnawed and stared off in random directions while Hameron's blood dried to a rind along the bottom of his platform's timbers. Even Sarl seemed loathe to breach the silence. If any looks were exchanged, Achamian found Lord Kosoter's presence too oppressive to watch for them.

The fact that nothing was said about anything — including the Stone Hags and their attack-said everything: the Captain's new-found faith in the Rules did not sit well with his men. The company resumed its march through the deep forest gloom, somehow more desolate, more lost and exposed, for the absence of just two souls.

Once again they struck at a tangent to the mountains, down, so that walking at once seemed easier and harder on the knees. They skirted the banks of a swift-flowing tributary for a time, eventually crossing where it panned across boulder-chocked shallows. The elms and oaks, if anything, were even more gigantic. They threaded a makeshift path between the trunks, some of them so immense and hoary they seemed more natural formations than trees. All of their lowermost limbs were dead, shorn of bark, radial tiers stacked upon radial tiers, creating a false, skeletal canopy beneath the canopy proper. Whenever Achamian glanced up at them, they resembled black veins, networks of them, wending and forking across higher screens of sun-glowing green.

As the day wore on, the gaps between the walkers seemed to expand. This was when Pokwas and Galian, doing their best to shun Somandutta, happened to find themselves abreast Achamian and Mimara. They walked in guarded silence for a time. Pokwas softly hummed some tune-from his native Zeum, Achamian decided, given its strange intonations.

"At this rate," Galian finally ventured, "it'll just be him sitting on a pile of bones by time the skinnies get to us." The Nansur spoke without looking at anyone.

"Aye," Pokwas agreed. " Our bones."

They were not so much searching for an understanding, it seemed, as they were acknowledging one that already existed. If anything proves that Men are bred for intrigue, it is the way conspiracies require no words.

"He's gone mad," Achamian said.

Mimara laughed-a sound the old Wizard found shocking. Ever since the Stone Hags and their abortive ambush, she had seemed bent on silent brooding. " Gone mad, you say?"

"No one's survived more slogs," Galian said.

"Yes," Pokwas snorted. "But then no one has a pet Nonman either."

"Things are topsy out here," Galian replied. "You know that. Crazy is sane. Sane is crazy." The former Nansur Columnary fixed his canny gaze on Achamian.

"So what do we do?" Achamian asked.

Galian's eyes roamed the surrounding gloom, then clicked back. "You tell me, Wizard…" There was anger in his tone, a resolution to voice hard questions. Achamian found his gaze as piercing as it was troubling-a fellow soldier's demand for honesty. "What are the chances a company this small will make your precious Coffers? Eh?"

This was when Achamian realized that he stood against these men. Mad or not, Lord Kosoter showed no signs of wavering. If anything his most recent acts of madness displayed a renewed resolve. As much as Achamian hated to admit it, Hameron had been a liability…

The old Wizard found himself warding away thoughts of Kellhus and his ability to sacrifice innocents.

"We've scarce reached the Fringe," Pokwas exclaimed, "and we're three-quarters dead!"

The Fringe, the Wizard recalled, was what scalpers called the boundary of Sranc country.

"As I said," Galian replied. "At this rate."

"Once we clear the Meorn Wilderness," Achamian declared with as much certitude as he could muster, "we'll be marching in the wake of the Great Ordeal. Our way will be cleared for us."

"And the Coffers?" Galian asked with a kind of sly intensity-one that the old Wizard did not like. "They are as you say?"

Achamian could feel Mimara watching his profile. He could only pray her look was not too revealing.

"You will return princes."

Cleric was the first to hear the cries. The sound was distant, small, like the wheeze at the bottom of an old man's breath. They had to look to one another to be sure others had heard it. The land was rutted with wandering slopes and gullies, yet no matter how steep the grade, the canopy remained unbroken above them, and nothing save a dim shower of gold and green filtered to the forest floor. This made determining the distance, let alone the direction, of the cries all but impossible. Then they heard a crack of thunder, too unnatural to be anything other than sorcerous. The scalpers all looked to Cleric-a reflex borne of previous slogs, Achamian imagined.

"The Mop," the Nonman said, raking the surrounding gloom with his gaze. "The trees play games with sounds…" A blink belonging to things nocturnal. "With us."

"Then we need to be free of them," Achamian said. With scarce a look at the Captain, he began intoning the inconceivable and dug fingers of spoken meaning into the soft muck of the World.

Heedless of the wondering looks, he trod into the open air.

He climbed through the lower regions of the canopy, using his hands to pull himself around the dead limbs blocking his sorcerous ascent. Vertigo tipped his stomach. Even after so many years, so many Cants, his body still resented the impossibility. He threw his forearms across his face to fend lashing branches as he approached the greenery. He found himself fighting, embroiled in nets of foliage, then the veils fell away…

Pointed wind. Naked sunlight. He blinked against the brightness, savoured the daub of sun across his rutted cheeks.

He could scarce step above the crowns, so immense were the trees. He found himself walking around and between the stacked heights to gain a better view. On and on, as far as his old eyes could see, mighty shags of leaves, heaped and hanging, fluttering pale silver in the breeze, all the way to the horizon. Were it not for the way the leafy surface followed the summits and troughs of the underlying land, he would have likened what he saw to the slow-tossing surface of a sea.

The cries were clearer, but their direction escaped him until he glimpsed the flash of sorcery in the corner of his eye-to the north. A scarp of bald stone rose across the distance, rising and falling so as to resemble a young woman slumbering on her side. He mouthed a quick Cant of Scrying, and the air before him became watery with distorted images. Then he glimpsed them…

Men. Scalpers. Running through the foliage along plummet's edge.

They ran as fleet as children, a scattered file of them, flashing between screens of leaves and mighty trunks, in and out of shadow. A stand of strangler oaks dominated the waist of the escarpment, monsters who clenched the living rock of the edge and sent skeins of roots, interlocking fans of them, roping down the cliff face. This was where the scalpers clustered, throwing panicked glances back the way they had come. Several had already begun their perilous descent…

A second party of scalpers abruptly appeared on the edge, farther back, high on the hip. Achamian had assumed the company was being chased along the ledge, but now he realized they fled the forest deeps behind them-that they were running toward the Skin Eaters. The Men hesitated for a moment, their mouths shouting holes in their beards. Whatever pursued them, Achamian realized, was close, too close for them to join their comrades among the oaks. Numb and blinking, he watched them begin leaping… tiny human figures dropping along sheer stone faces, vanishing into the canopies below. It seemed he could feel the plummet of each tingling through his gut.

Then they appeared, rising from the gloom, engulfing those who had elected to stand and fight.

Sranc. Raving multitudes of them.

Shrieking white faces. A cacophony of miniature cries, human and inhuman, threaded the air. Men hacked at the white-skinned rush, stumbling, falling. One wild-haired scalper, obviously a Thunyeri, stood on a raised thumb of stone, wielding a great axe in each hand. He cut and hammered the first wave to ruin, managed to cow a second before black shafts began jutting from his unarmoured extremities. A stagger, then a misstep sent him skidding and jerking down the cliffside.

A kind of breathless remorse struck the old Wizard. This was how scalpers died, he realized. Lost. Thrown over the edge of civilization. A crazed death-not simply violent. Unwitnessed. Unmourned.

The scalpers down among the strangler oaks seemed to be making good their escape. A dozen of them were now clinging to hanging skirts of roots, daring a breakneck descent. More fugitives crowded the lip, tossing what gear they still carried below. Then one of them simply stepped out over the ledge… and continued walking, though he wobbled and almost fell. The Mysunsai Schoolman, Achamian realized. Pafaras. Too high to use the ground, the fool was trying to negotiate the arcane echo of a promontory that jutted outward about half the height of the cliffs proper. Even from this distance his Mark was clear.

The Stone Hags… He was watching the very Men who had tried to murder them-watching them die.

Achamian could see the Sranc high on the scarp's hip exulting in the flesh of those they had overcome. Others raced toward the remaining scalpers on the waist below, individuals dog-loping along the ledge, masses surging through the parallel deeps. Helpless, Achamian watched more suicidal leaps and another round of desperate, hopeless battles.

Then, with several stalwarts still roaring and battling, the floating Mysunsai set the cliff ledge alight. Even from such a distance his sorcerous cry tickled edges that could not be seen. A great horned head rose before the Mysunsai's slight figure, real enough for sunlight to glint from black scales yet stamped in smoke all the same: the Dragonhead, the dread mainstay of Anagogic sorcery. Golden fire spewed out over the bristling ledge, washed into the avenues between the great trees, making burning shadows of Sranc and Men alike. A chorus of screams climbed across the bowl of the sky.

The scalpers hanging from the roots below raised arms against the shower of burning debris. The Dragonhead dipped again, and more fire washed across the carpets of smoking dead. The Sranc retreated, howling and screaming, vanished into the safety of the deeper forest. There was a blinking pause. The Mysunsai struggled with his arcane footing, seemed to stumble, then simply dropped…

Achamian hung in indecision. Gone were the shouts, the cries. Fires smouldered along the length of the scarp's waist, trailing long plumes of black smoke. Miles of canopy swayed and rebounded in the open wind.

"We should return…"

The old Wizard fairly soiled his wolf-skin robes, such was his shock. He whirled. Cleric hung in the air a mere span behind him, yet the old Wizard had heard nothing, sensed nothing.

"Who?" he cried before his wits returned to him. "Who are you?"

A Mysunsai Schoolman keeping company with scalpers seemed mad enough, but a Nonman?

A Quya Mage?

"The Sranc. They move in force," the ageless Ishroi said, his face white and immaculate in the high sun. The Mop swayed and tossed to the horizon beyond him. "The others must be warned."

– | Back to the gloom, to the reek of moss and earth.

Cleric began describing what they had seen, only to falter as his memories outran him. Achamian finished, doing his best to sound indifferent even though his heart still hammered.

"Fucking Hags!" Pokwas exclaimed, his eyes bright with imagined mayhem. "Serves them. Serves them!"

"You're missing the point," Galian said, staring at Achamian with solemn concentration.

"Pox is right," Soma chimed in. "Good riddance!" He turned, grinning.

"I say we run them," Pokwas cried. "Lop them and bale them." He looked to Soma and laughed. "Repay the favour in their own ski-!"

"Fools!" Lord Kosoter spat. "Nothing will be run. Nothing!"

The black-skinned giant turned to regard his Captain with round-eyed outrage. Lord Kosoter's scrutiny, which was angry at the best of times, narrowed into a murderous squint.

"Don't you see?" Galian said, imploring. Achamian could see the warning in the look he shot his Zeumi friend, as if to say, Too soon! You press too soon! The question was whether the Captain had seen it as well.

Achamian glanced at Mimara and somehow knew that she had sensed it as well. New lines had been drawn, and for the first time they were being tested.

"The Hags are bigger than any company-harder," Galian continued explaining. "That's how they can hunt the likes of us. If those skinnies lopped them, then those skinnies can lop us…" He let his voice trail into the significance of what he had just said.

"If they catch our scent…" Xonghis said, nodding. "Did you say the skinnies were chasing the Hags this way?" he asked the Wizard.

"Almost directly."

The implication was plain. Sooner or later the Sranc would cross their trail. Sooner or later they would start hunting them. According to what Achamian had learned from the others, scent was what made the creatures at once so deadly and so vulnerable. Laying trails to gull the Sranc into ambushes was the primary way scalpers hunted. But if the skinnies caught a company's spoor before they had time to prepare…

"Fatwall," the Captain said after a moment of furious meditation. "Same as before, except we slog it day and night. If we lose them, we lose them. If not, we chop it out there!"

"Fatwall!" Sarl cackled, his gums blood red and glistening. His grins had seemed to eat up his whole face as of late. "Latrine of the Gods!"

They skip-marched-as the scalpers called it-after that, hiked at a trot brisk enough to steal the wind for words. Once again Achamian found himself fearing his age, so exhausting was the pace. For him, the years had accumulated like dry rot: the fabric of his strength seemed healthy enough, but only so long as it wasn't pressed or stretched. By the time evening's shroud climbed across the Mop, the march had become a fog of petty miseries for him: reeling breathlessness, stitches in his side, cramps in his left thigh, needles in the back of his throat.

Dinner provided him with a brief respite. In truth, Cleric and his dispensation of Qirri was the only thing that interested him. Mimara slumped between the crooks fluting the base of the nearest trunk, propped her elbows on her knees, and laid her face in her palms. Xonghis, who seemed as tireless as Cleric or the Captain, set about preparing their measly repast: rank strips from a kill he had made three days ago. Others flopped across the soft humus, using fallen limbs and the like to support their heads.

Achamian leaned against his knees, did his best to spit away the nausea welling through him. He peered through the darkness, searching for Cleric and the Captain. For whatever reason, the two of them always retreated a short distance from the others when they made camp. He would see them, whether high on a promontory or in a depression on the far side of a tree, Cleric sitting, but with his head bowed in such a manner that he seemed to be kneeling, while the Captain-who so rarely spoke otherwise-muttered over him, grinding out words that he could never quite hear.

Just one of many mysteries.

The old Wizard hacked out the last of the fire pooled in his lungs, then shuffled toward the two figures. Cleric crouched on his toes, his cheek pressed against his knees while he listened with eyes both empty and black. The last of the remaining light seemed to linger along the bare-skin contours of his head and arms. Aside from his leggings and the tattered remains of a ceremonial kilt, he wore only his shirt of nimil mail, its intricate links always shining no matter how clotted with filth they became. The Captain stood above him, discoursing in the same scarcely audible mutter. His hair hung listless across the splinted sections of his hauberk, ropes of black shot with grey. His pleated Ainoni tunic, threadbare at the beginning of their expedition, fairly reeked to look at-though Achamian could scarce smell anything above his own rotting garb.

They both looked up, fixed him with twin gazes-one unearthly, the other not quite sane.

A kind anxiousness seized the moment.

"Qirri…" Achamian said, shocked by the croak that was his voice. "I'm… I'm too old for this… this pace."

Without a word, the Nonman turned to rummage through his satchel-one of the few things any of them had managed to carry out of Cil-Aujas. He withdrew the leather pouch, and Achamian found himself hefting the thing in his soul, divvying pinches into the near and distant future. Cleric unknotted the drawstring, reached in with thumb and forefinger.

But Lord Kosoter stayed him with a wave of his hand. Another pang plucked through the old Wizard, this one coloured with intimations of panic.

"We need to speak first," the Captain said. "Holy Veteran to Holy Veteran."

Achamian had the impression of a sneer over and above the contempt that generally ruled the man's expression. Something, a demoralizing wave, crashed through him. What now? Why? Why did this mad fool insist on beating complexity and confusion out of simple things?

He needed his pinch.

"By all means," the old Wizard said stiffly.

What could be more simple than that?

The Captain regarded him with dead eyes. "The others," he finally asked. "What do they say?"

Achamian did his best to match the madman's glare. "They worry," he admitted. "They fear we no longer possess the strength to reach the Coffers."

The Captain said nothing. Thanks to the Chorae beneath his armour, void and menace throbbed where his heart should have been.

"So?" Achamian asked crossly. All he wanted was his pinch! "Does talk violate some Rule of the Slog as well?"

"Talk," the Captain said, spitting to the left of his feet. "I care nothing for your talk…" The man's smile reminded Achamian of the dead he had seen on the battlefields of the First Holy War, the way the sun would sometimes shrink the flesh of the face, drawing cadaverous grins on the fallen.

"So long as you don't weep."

Sranc. The North means Sranc.

She fled them in Cil-Aujas, and now she flees them here, in the Mop. On the Andiamine Heights, where everything turned on the Great Ordeal and the Second Apocalypse, scarce a day passed without hearing something about the Ancient North-so much so that she openly scoffed at its mention. She would actually say things like, "Oh, yes, the North…" or "Sakarpus? You don't say?" There was an absurdity to places far, a sense of insignificant people scratching meaningless earth. Let them die, she would sometimes think, whenever she heard tidings of famine in Ainon or plague in Nilnamesh. What are these people to me? These places?

A fool… that's what she had been. A pathetic little slit.

Their souls and their wind fortified with Qirri, the company fairly sprints across the pitching ground-even Achamian, who had been in obvious straits before Cleric and his medicinal pinch. The Nonman leads, a Surillic Point floating low and brilliant above his right brow. The illumination pulls their scissoring shadows out into the dark, alternately revealing the sinuous arch of limbs and falling into pockets too deep to reach. Where Cil-Aujas had encased them at every turn, sealed them in impenetrable stone, now it seems they race through a void, that nothing exists beyond narrow corridors of earth, trunk, and branching lattices. Nothing. No murdering Stone Hags. No obscene Sranc. No prophecies or armies or panicked nations.

Just the Skin Eaters and rushing shadows.

For no reason she can fathom, images from her old life on the Andiamine Heights plague her soul's eye. Gilded folly. The farther she travels from her mother, it seems, the more a stranger she becomes to herself. She cringes at the thought of her former self: the endless straining to stand aloof, the endless posturing, not to convince others — for how could they not see through her in some measure? — but to assure herself of some false moral superiority…

Survival, she realizes, is its own kind of wisdom. Scalper wisdom.

She almost snorts aloud at the thought. But running, it seems nothing could be more true. All things perish. All things are weak, execrable. Nothing more so than the conceits of the perpetually wronged.

"A smile?" someone says.

She turns and sees Soma pacing her. Caste-noble tall. Lean and broad-shouldered. With his gowns torn and twisted, he resembles the Disowned Prince that the other girls used to dream about in the brothel-the fabled customer who would rescue rather than abuse.

His dark-lashed eyes seem to laugh. There is a relentlessness to him that she does not quite trust, she realizes. A strength out of proportion to his foppish character.

"We all… start laughing… at some point…" he says between breaths.

She turns away, concentrates on what shreds of ground she can glimpse between shadows. On the long and hard trail, she knows, a twisted ankle means death…

"Knowing how to stop…" the man persists. "That is… the real trick… of the slog."

Unlike her sisters in the brothel, Mimara had despised men like Soma, men who continually apologized with grand gestures and false concerns. Men who had to smother their crimes beneath pillows of silken guilt.

She much preferred those who sinned with sincerity.

"Mimara…" the man begins.

She keeps her eyes averted. Soma is nothing to her, she tells herself. Just another fool who would grope her in the dark, if he could. Sticky his fingers with her peach.

The world rises into the sphere of Cleric's light, then pours into oblivion. She peers at the oncoming ground as it vanishes into the shadows of those before her. Running. There is peace in flight, she realizes, a kind of certainty she has never understood, though she has known it her entire life. Running from the brothel, running from the mother who abandoned her there: these are fraught with doubt and worry and regret, the heart-cracking recriminations of those who run to punish as much to flee.

But running from Sranc…

Her lungs are bottomless. The Qirri tingles through her thought, her limbs. She is little more than a feather, a mote, before the forces that inhabit her. And there is a thickness to it, an eroticism, being the plaything of enormities.

I have the Judging Eye!

Anasurimbor Mimara marvels and laughs. Galian joins her, then Pokwas, then the rest of the company, and for some reason it seems right and true, laughing while fleeing Sranc through a cursed forest…

Then Cleric stops, his head bent as though listening. He turns to them. His face burns so bright beneath the Surillic Point that he seems an angel-an inhuman angel.

"Something comes…"

Then they all hear it… to their right, the dull scuff and drum of someone running. The air whisks to the sound of drawn weapons. Squirrel is in her hand.

A stranger staggers as much as leaps into existence. His hair is tied into a Galeoth war-knot. Blood slicks his right arm. Exhaustion has beaten his panic into resignation-you can see it on his face. And Mimara realizes that her flight has yet to begin. To flee, to truly run, is to throw yourself as this man has thrown himself, past effort and determination to the convulsive limit of endurance.

To run as they ran in Cil-Aujas.

The man crashes into Galian's arms, bawling out something inarticulate.

"What's he saying?" the Captain barks at Sarl.

"Skinnies!" the withered Sergeant cackles. "The skinnies are on them!"

"Sweet Seju!" someone cries.

"Look!" Pokwas cries, peering into the blackness that had delivered the man. "Look! Another light!"

Everyone, the newcomer included, turns in the direction the Sword-dancer indicates. At first they see nothing. Then it materializes, a floating point of white, appearing and disappearing to the rhythm of intervening obstructions. Sorcerous light. They glimpse figures as it nears, at least a dozen.

More men-surviving Stone Hags…

Even from this distance you can see their fear and haste, but something slows them… A litter, she realizes. They carry someone on a litter. The small mob passes behind the grand silhouette of a tree and she glimpses the man they carry-the sorcerer…

Galian and Pokwas are shouting. They've thrust the sobbing Stone Hag to his knees as if preparing to execute him. "No!" Achamian is crying. "I for-"

"He's a Hag!" Galian cries as if mystified, as if summary execution is a courtesy compared with what the man deserves-a scalper who hunts scalpers.

The Captain pays no attention whatsoever, instead mutters to Cleric, who peers into the blackness behind the approaching party. She watches the bald head turn, the white face smile. She sees the glint of fused teeth.

"Haaaaags!" Sarl gurgles. His eyes are squeezed into crescents above his cheeks.

The fugitives begin calling out as they approach, a cracked chorus of relief and desperate warning. Within heartbeats they blunder into the greater light of Cleric's Surillic Point, terrified and bleeding. The litter is dropped. Some skid to their knees. Others raise abject hands before the weapons brandished by the Skin Eaters.

Mimara feels someone clutch her sword arm, turns to see Soma standing grim beside her. He means to give reassurance, she knows, yet she finds herself offended all the same. With a jerk she pulls her arm free.

"No time!" someone is screeching-one of the Hags. "No time!"

All is argument and confusion. In the gaggle of shouts and voices they fail to hear the loping approach. Now they stand rigid and peering, their ears pricked to the invisible rush. Twigs snapping. Throats grunting. Feet kicking.

Mimara is dead. She knows this absolutely. She and Soma are standing on the periphery, several paces from the commotion of the latest arrivals-from Achamian and his life-preserving Wards.

"To meee!" she hears the old Wizard cry. She hears the inside-out mutter of sorcery, sees shadows tossed, lights plumbing the barked blackness.

They come howling out of the black. Crude weapons held high and wide. Faces twisted into ravenous sneers. Streaming between trunks. Unshod feet kicking up humus.

The first flies at her like a thrown dog. She parries its crazed swing, ducks and strings the thing as it sails past her. Others follow a mere heartbeat behind. Too many blades. Too many teeth!

Then something impossible happens. Soma…

Somehow before her, when he had stood behind. Somehow catching each raving creature in its instant. He does not fight as scalpers fight, matching skill against ferocity, hammering strength against wild velocity. Nor does he dance as Pokwas dances, trusting ancient patterns to parse the surrounding air. No. What he does is utterly unique, a performance written for each singular moment. He throws and snaps his body. He moves in rings and lines, so fast that only inhuman screams and slumping bodies allow her to follow the thread of his attack.

Then it's over.

"Mimara!" Achamian is crying. She sees him fighting his way toward her.

He clutches her tight against his rank robes, but she is as numb to the smell as she is to everything else. She returns his hug out of reflex, all the while watching Soma standing above the twitching dead, watching her.

She survived. He had glimpsed her stranded, had expected the worst, yet there she stood, utterly untouched. Holding her, the old Wizard did his best not to sob in relief. He blinked at the panicked burning in his eyes…

Exhaustion. It had to be.

They turned to the roar of the Captain, who held the prostrate Hag sorcerer upright. The infamous Pafaras. The man was at least as old as Kosoter, but he possessed nowhere near the stature and strength. He was Ketyai, though his unkempt beard lent him a barbaric, Norsirai countenance. His accent suggested Cengemis or northern Conriya. He swayed in the Captain's grip, capable of standing on his left foot only. His right was bootless-bare and purpling. His foul leggings had been sawed open to the thigh, revealing blood-sopped bandages about his shin. When Achamian had first glimpsed him on the litter, he had assumed the man was simply wounded. But now he could see the leg was broken-severely broken. The length of his right shin was only two thirds that of his left.

"Tell me!" Lord Kosoter roared. With his left hand, he held the man up as much by the hair as by the scruff of the neck. With his right, he held his Chorae before the ailing Schoolman's face. The fact that the Stone Hag scarcely glanced at the thing told Achamian he was already dying.

The other Hags, some eleven of them, milled in gasping shock. They looked more like beggars than warriors. Most had shed their armour in their haste to flee, leaving them with only winter-rotted tunics and leggings. Several were thin to the point of bulbous elbows and knees. These were the men he had seen descending the cliff face, Achamian realized.

"Four clans… maybe more," the swaying Hag was saying. "Numerous… Very aggressive."

" More than one clan?" Galian interjected. "Are they mobbing?" The horror was plain in his voice.

A moment of silence. "Maybe…" Pafaras said.

"Mobbing?" Achamian asked aloud.

"A scalper's greatest fear," Pokwas replied in low tones. "The skinnies usually war clan against clan, but sometimes they unite. No one knows why."

"There was a cliff…" Pafaras managed between gasps. "Some climbed down after us… the ones you k-killed… But the rest… backtracked… we think."

"Your sort," the Captain grated in disgust. He bent his face back to show the mayhem in his eyes. "Come to flee the Ordeal, is that it? Come to lord your power?"

"N-no!" the man coughed.

The Captain raised his Chorae as though inspecting a jewel, then, with a kind of casual malice, slammed the thing into the Hag's mouth.

Sparking light. The whoosh of transubstantiation.

Achamian stood blinking, a burning pang where his breath should have been. He watched the salt replica of Pafaras fall backward. It thudded hard against the sponge-soft turf. The Captain crouched, hunched over the petrified sorcerer. He seemed little more than an apish shadow given the war of light and after-image in the Wizard's eyes. He pulled a knife from his boot, wedged the point in the salt cavity that had been the Hag's mouth. He raised his elbow in a prying motion, cracked off the alabaster jaw.

He retrieved his Chorae, then stood, glaring at everyone but Cleric.

"What's he doing?" Mimara whispered with alarm.

"I think he's recruiting," the old Wizard replied, bracing himself against a deep shudder. As much as he despised Mysunsai Schoolmen as mercenaries, he could not help but feel a certain kinship with the man. Nothing instills brotherhood like the sharing of vulnerabilities. "Witho-"

He fell silent, feeling the bite of the Captain's lunatic gaze.

Lord Kosoter prowled about the fugitive scalpers, scrutinizing them with a slaver's indifference. As miserable as the Skin Eaters appeared, the Stone Hags seemed even more wretched. Starved and wounded and absolutely terrified.

"You dogs have a choice," he grated. "You can let the Whore play number-sticks with your pitiful lives…" A rare grin, sinister for the murder in his eyes.

"Or you can let me."

And with that, the Stone Hags ceased to exist, and the Skin Eaters were reborn.

– | Fugitive, they ran, a bubble of light falling through pillared blackness.

The trees seemed to claw at them with stationary malice, slow them with insinuations of frailty and doom. The Hags, who had no Qirri to brace them, cried out from time to time, begging them to stop, or to at least slow their pace. But no one, not even Achamian or Mimara, listened, let alone answered their pleas. This was the Slog of Slogs. The sooner they understood that, the greater their prospects for survival.

The lesson was dear. Two of them fell behind, never to be seen again.

Dawn rose in sheets of brightening green. The impenetrable black yielded to the murk of deep forest hollows. They encountered a surging river the scalpers called the Throat. It fairly raged with spring melt, the water brown with sediment, spouting white plumes where the current crashed against the boulders it had rolled down from the mountains. The sunlight it afforded was welcome, but the glimpse of smoke in the distance apparently was not. "Fatwall," Xonghis explained to Achamian and Mimara. "It burns." They were forced to follow the river's thundering course several miles before finding a crossing. Even still, they lost another of the Hags to the kicking waters.

They plunged back into the Mop and its temple gloom, the mossed ground wheezing beneath their feet. As always they found themselves craning their necks from side to side as if to catch some secret observer. Achamian need only glance at the others to know they suffered the same plaguing sense he did, as if they were the people hated, like the mummer tribes that migrated across the Three Seas.

Some fluke of the terrain delivered them back to the Throat, this time opposite the point they had first encountered it. Cleric bid them pause. "Listen," he called over the white roar. Achamian could hear nothing, but like the others he could see… On the far bank, through the screens of foliage stacked beneath the canopy's verge, he glimpsed shadows running. Hundreds of them, following the path they had taken down-river.

"Skinnies, boys!" Sarl cried with a gurgling laugh. " Mobs of them! Didn't I promise you a chopper? Eh? Eh? "

They continued climbing, the grades at times so steep that thighs burned and sputum flew. If the Qirri failed to whip them forward, then the glimpse of the Sranc who pursued them certainly did. Despite the profundity of their exhaustion, the sight of sunlight through the gallery ahead spurred them to a run.

They found themselves at the Mop's blinking edge, squinting across a slope of felled trees.

Fatwall. The long-dead fortress of Aenku Maimor.

Maimor was a name that Achamian had encountered only a few times in his dreams. The ancient Meori Empire had been little more than a tarp thrown across the fractious tribes of the Eastern White Norsirai, and Maimor had been one of several nails that had held it in place over the generations, a High Royal Fastness, which would house the High-King during his seasonal tour of his more rebellious provinces. Like everything else during the First Apocalypse, it had come crashing down in a hail of fire and Sranc.

The old Wizard wondered whether a Meorishman of yore would recognize what remained. The Maimor lost versus the Maimor cut from the Wilderness some two thousand years later…

Fatwall.

Trees had overgrown the ruined outer defences, strangler oaks mostly. The great stumps yet stood, as tall as towers, clutched like fists about the foundations. The scalpers had incorporated them in their reclamation of the fortress, using them as ad hoc bastions. Elsewhere they had raised palisades across the gaps and timber hoardings along the ruined heights. This was what smoked and burned, the flames all but invisible in direct sunlight.

The Skin Eaters lingered in the shadows, panting and peering. Something had attacked the fortress-and recently.

Achamian heard Galian murmur, "Bad…" to Pokwas, who towered at his side. Catching the old Wizard's look, the former Columnary said, "Skinnies behind us and now skinnies before us? This is more than just a mobbing."

"Then what is it?"

Galian shrugged in the scalper manner, as if to say, We're all dead anyway. Achamian thought of these men, Skin Eater and Stone Hag alike, spending season after season letting blood in these wastes. They feared for their lives, certainly, but not the same as other men feared. How could they? Coin lost to the number-sticks is far different from coin lost to thieves, even if the penury that resulted was the same.

Scalpers knew the gamble.

When nobody could discern any sign of friend or foe, the Captain instructed Cleric to scout ahead. The Nonman strode into the sky, his skin shining, his nimil hauberk gleaming. The mongrel company watched with exhausted wonder. He walked high over the slope of felled trees, receding until he was little more than a thin dash of black hanging over Maimor's ruined precincts.

Veils of smoke wafted about him, drawn to the lazy west. The Osthwai Mountains loomed in the distance beyond, clouds massing about their summits. After several moments of peering, Cleric waved them forward.

The company set across the bone-yard of trees, following the zigzag of trunks like beached whales, picking their way through wickets of skeletal branches. At times it seemed a labyrinth. Open daylight offered Achamian another opportunity to appraise the newcomers, the Hags, who seemed even more mangy and forlorn. They had the watchful look of captives and the voices of slaves living in fear of a violent and mercurial master. Like the Skin Eaters, they hailed from across the Three Seas. But who they were did not seem to matter, at least not to Achamian. They were Stone Hags, bandit scalpers who killed Men to profit from Sranc. In a real sense they were no better than cannibals and perhaps even more deserving of death. But they were human, and in a land of mobbing Sranc, that kinship trumped all other considerations.

Any reckoning of their crimes would have to come after.

Maimor's gate had collapsed into utter ruin long, long ago. A makeshift replacement had been raised across its uneven remains, a timber palisade untouched by the fires that smouldered elsewhere. The doors stood open and unmarked. The company filed beneath the crude fortifications, gazing about in different directions. Achamian had braced himself for the sight of slaughter within-few things were more disturbing than the aftermath of a Sranc massacre. But there was nothing. No dead. No blood. No seed.

"They've fled," Xonghis said, referring to the Ministerial contingent that was supposed to be stationed here. "The Imperials… This is their work. They've evacuated."

In some places the ruins spilled into gravel, while elsewhere they seemed remarkably intact. Hanging sections of wall. Alleyways through waist-high remnants. Blocks breached the interior turf, scattered and heaped, creating innumerable slots and crevices for rats. Several more massive stumps hunched over and across the stonework, their roots splayed out in veinlike skirts-two storeys high in some places. The fundamental layout of the fortress followed the ancient sensibility, where recreating some original model trumped more practical considerations. Even though the heights formed a distended oval, the walls were rectilinear. The citadel, in contrast, was round, forming the circle-in-square pattern that Achamian immediately recognized from his dreams of ancient Kelmeol, the lost capital of the Meori Empire, when Seswatha had stayed at the fortress of Aenku Aumor.

The stone was pitted and multicoloured, here black with moulds, there frosted with white and turquoise lichens. What ornamentation that survived, though plain in comparison to Cil-Aujas, seemed exceedingly elaborate by human standards. Every surface had been worked in patterns, animal totems for the most part, beasts standing, their arms articulated in humanlike poses. As numerous as the reliefs were, Achamian found only one intact representation of Meori's ancient crest: seven wolves arrayed like daisy petals about a shield.

His whole body hummed, at once scraped of all strength and steeped in giddy vigour. Qirri. Despite everything, Achamian found himself gazing and wandering as he had so many years ago, lost in thoughts of times long dead. He had always found sanctuary in ruins, freedom from the demands of his calling as well as connection with the ancient days that so tyrannized his nights. He had always felt whole in the presence of fragments.

"Akka…" Mimara called, her voice so like her mother's that goosepimples climbed the old Wizard's spine. A plaintive echo.

He turned, surprised by his smile. This was her first time, he realized, her first glimpse of the ancient Norsirai and their works.

"Remarkable, isn't it? To think ruins like this are all that remain of…"

He trailed, realizing that she looked at the others, not the ruined pockets climbing about them.

She turned to him, her eyes pinned with indecision. "Skin-spy…" she said in Ainoni.

"What?"

She blinked in momentary indecision. "Skin-spy… Somandutta… He's a… a skin-spy."

"What? What are you saying?" Achamian asked, struggling to collect his thoughts. She was a Princess-Imperial, which meant she had doubtless received extensive training regarding Consult skin-spies: who they were inclined to replace, how they were apt to reveal themselves.

She probably knew more about the creatures than he did.

"When the Sranc attacked," she continued under her breath, watching the Nilnameshi caste-noble where he stood with the others. "Earlier… The way he moved…" She turned to the Wizard, fixed him with a look of utter feminine certainty, as serious as famine or disease. "What he did was impossible, Akka."

Achamian stood dumbstruck. A skin-spy?

Half-remembered passions galloped through him. The heat and misery of the First Holy War. Images of old enemies. Old terrors…

He turned to where the Nilnameshi stood. "Soma…" he called, his voice rising thin.

"He saved my life," she murmured beside him, obviously every bit as bewildered as he was. "He revealed himself to save me…"

"Soma!" Achamian called again.

The man spared him a sideways glance before turning back to the mutter of those about him. Conger. Pokwas. Achamian blinked, suddenly feeling very feeble and very old. The Consult? Here?

The entire time.

"He revealed himself to save me…"

The confusion did not so much lift as part about necessity, leaving only naked alarm and the focus that came with it.

" Somandutta! I am speaking to you!"

The affable brown face turned to him, smiling with…

An Odaini Concussion Cant was the first thing to the old Wizard's lips.

Without warning, Soma leapt over the milling scalpers, boggling eyes and snuffing voices. He twisted mid-air with an acrobat's grace, landed with the scuttling fury of a crab. He was two-thirds across the courtyard before Achamian had finished. He leapt, sailing over the ruined wall as the Cant smashed stone and scabbed mortar.

The company stood pale and uncomprehending.

"Let that be a warning!" Sarl cackled in abject glee. He turned to the Hags as if they were unkempt cousins requiring lessons in jnanic etiquette. "Steer clear the peach, lads!" He glanced at Achamian, his eyes possessing enough of the old canniness to unnerve the old Wizard.

"What the Captain doesn't gut, the Schoolman blasts!"

They slept in bare sunlight.

As was proper, since nothing was as it should be. Battling men instead of Sranc. Taking refuge in a fallen fortress. Finding a skin-spy in their midst, then saying nothing of it.

The Qirri had faded and, despite the longing looks, the Nonman kept his pouch hidden in his satchel. Of exhaustion's many modalities, perhaps none is so onerous as apathy, the loss of sense and desire, where you wish only to cease wishing, where mere breathing becomes a kind of thoughtless toil.

Achamian's sleep was fitful, plagued by flies-the biting kind-and worries, too numerous and inchoate to resolve into anything comprehensible. Soma. The Sranc pursuing them. The Captain. Cleric. Mimara. The dead in Cil-Aujas. His lies. Her curse…

And of course Kellhus… and Esmenet.

Fire and their lack of numbers had convinced Lord Kosoter that the outer walls were indefensible, so they had retreated to the shattered citadel. At some point the structure had collapsed inward, leaving only the great blocks of the foundation intact. Centuries of vegetation had choked the inner ruin with uneven earth so that the remaining walls, which towered the height of three men along their outer faces, climbed only chest high for those standing within. The scalpers salvaged what they could find, those few trifles left behind by the retreating "Imperials," as they called them. Then they climbed into the citadel's earthen gut to await the inevitable.

The subsequent vigil was as surreal as it was forlorn. While the rest dozed in what shade they could find, Cleric took a position on one of the great blocks, sitting cross-legged, gazing over the ruins below, across the field of felled trees, to the Mop's black verge. Achamian actually found comfort in the sight of him, a being who had survived who knew how many sieges and battles, back into the mists of history.

The Nonman waited until late afternoon to begin his sermon, when the air had cooled enough and the shade had grown enough to provide the possibility of real sleep. He stood on the lip and turned to regard them below, his slim and powerful figure bathed in light. The sky reached blue and infinite beyond him. Achamian found himself watching and listening the way the others watched and listened.

"Again, my brothers," he said in impossibly deep tones. "Again we find ourselves stranded, trapped in another of the World's hard places…"

Stranded. A word like a breath across a dying coal.

Stranded. Lost with none to grieve them. Trapped.

"Me," the Nonman continued, letting his head sag. "I know only that I have stood here a thousand times over a thousand years-more! This… this is my place! My home…"

When he looked up, his eyes glittered black for fury. A snarl hooked his colourless lips.

"Wreaking destruction on these perversions… Atoning… Atoning!

"

This last word rang metallic across the stone, sent ever-dwindling echoes across the heights. Roused, several of the Skin Eaters mouthed their approval. The Stone Hags simply gaped.

"And this is your place as well, even if you loathe numbering your sins."

"Yes!" Sarl coughed out over the rising clamour. His eyes were slits for his grin. "Yes!"

That was when the inhuman baying began, a few throats cascading into a hundred, a thousand, rising from the Mop below…

Sranc.

Achamian and the others leapt to their feet. They crowded the wall beneath Cleric, and to a man peered at the forest verge a half-mile or so to the south.

And saw nothing save lengthening shadows and boundaries of scrub bathed in sunlight. The inhuman chorus dissolved into a cacophony of individual shrieks and cries. Birds bolted from the canopy.

"A thousand times over a thousand years!" Cleric cried. He had turned to face the Mop, but otherwise stood as exposed as before. Achamian glimpsed his shadow falling long and slender across the ruins below.

"You live your life squatting, shitting, sweating against your women. You live your life fearing, praying, begging your gods for mercy! Begging! " He was ranting now, swaying and gesticulating with a kind of arrhythmic precision. The setting sun painted him with lines of crimson.

Unseen throats howled and barked across the distance-a second congregation.

"You think secrets dwell in these mean things, that truth lies in the toes you stub, the scabs you pick! Because you are small, you cry, 'Revelation! Revelation hides in the small! '"

The black gaze fixed Achamian-lingered for a heartbeat or two.

"It does not."

The words pinched the old Wizard deep in the gut.

"Revelation rides the back of history…" Cleric said, sweeping his eyes to the arc of the horizon, to the innumerable miles of wilderness. "The enormities! Race… War… Faith… The truths that move the future!"

Incariol looked down across his fellow scalpers, his awestruck supplicants. Even Achamian, who had lived among the Cunuroi as Seswatha, found himself staring in dread and apprehension. Only the Captain, who simply watched the Mop with grim deliberation, seemed unmoved.

"Revelation rides the back of history," the Nonman cried, bowing his head to the failing sun. The light etched the links and panels of his nimil so that he appeared garbed in trickles of glowering fire.

"And it does not hide…"

Incariol. He seemed something wondrous and precarious, Ishroi and refugee both. Ages had been poured into him, and poured, overflowing his edges, diluting what he had lived, who he had been, until only the sediment of pain and crazed profundity remained.

The sun waxed against the distant peaks, hanging in reluctance-or so it seemed-sinking only when the watchers blinked. It rode the white-iron curve of a mountain for a moment, then slipped like a gold coin into high-stone pockets.

The shadow of the world rose and descended across them. Dusk.

All eyes turned to the ragged crescent of the tree-line, to the grunting hush that had fallen across the distance. They saw the first Sranc creep pale and white from the bowers, like insects feeling the air… A savage crescendo rifled the air, punctuated by the moan of urgent horns.

Then the rush.

– | They came as they always came, Sranc, no different from the first naked hordes that had surged across the fields of Pir-Pahal in an age that made Far Antiquity young. They came, over the slope of felled trees, sluicing between the trunks, racing across barked backs. They came, through the palisade gate, thronging across the ancient courtyards, braiding the wall's ruined circuit with gnashing teeth and crude weapons. They came and they came, until they seemed a liquid, streaming and breaking, spitting an endless spray of arrows.

The blue and violet of the evening sky faded into oblivion, leaving only the starry dome of night. The Nail of Heaven glittered from raving eyes, gleamed from notched iron. The scalpers huddled behind what few shields they possessed, shouted curses, while Cleric and the Wizard stood upon the wall's disordered summit.

All was screaming destruction below. Monochrome madness. The Men gagged on the porcine smoke. And they watched, knowing that they witnessed something older than nations or languages, a Gnostic sorcerer and a Quya Mage, singing in impossible voices, wielding looms of incandescence in wide-swinging arms. They saw hands glow about impossible dispensations. They saw light issue from empty air. They saw bodies pitched and prised, and burned, burned most of all, until the ground became croaking charcoal.

Incariol had spoken true… It was a mighty thing, a sight worthy of the pyre.

A revelation.