It would bend its neck back until its head pressed its spine, and it would scream.
And scream.
Watch after watch, night after night, shrieking in tones that not even dogs could hear. Only rats.
Screaming. Until its mouth filled with blood.
—|—
The Hags could not keep up.
They would begin complaining around midday—at least at first. Belmorn, the particularly brutish Galeoth who had become their de facto leader, even went so far as to accuse the Skin Eaters of devilry. With a kind of immovable indifference, Achamian watched the Captain stroll up to the arm-waving giant and plunge a knife in his armpit.
"Your lives are mine!" he screamed at the others. "Mine to beat! Mine to torture! Mine to murder!"
That night two of the Hags disappeared—Achamian could not remember their names. Nothing was said of them the next day or any of the days following. Scalpers did not speak of the dead, even ones so despicable as the Stone Hags.
The rains began after that, and below dark skies the world beneath the forest canopies was darker still. Lightning strikes were little more than sparks and glows glimpsed through the gauze of a million leaves, but the thunder crashed undulled through the brachiated gloom. Guttered by the trees, the rainwaters fell in the form of countless hanging rivulets, a pissing army of them, soaking the ground to wheezing muck. And if the way became more arduous for the Skin Eaters with their nightly ration of Qirri, it became harder still for the Hags.
One, a ritually scarred Thunyeri named Osilwas, they lost to a river crossing. With a wound festering in his arm, the man had staggered as much as marched for days. One evening Achamian had watched him cut his hair away, lock by lock—to shed weight, he supposed. Despite the man's condition, the old Wizard had thought Osilwas would survive, perhaps mistaking the gleam of fever in his eyes for the light of determination. One stumble in roiling waters was all it took to sweep him away.
Another, a bow-legged Cepaloran the others called Scroll—apparently because of the elaborate blue tattooing across his limbs—simply began wailing like a madman one night and had to be put down as a sobber. The day after, Erydides, who continually claimed to be a Cironji pirate in the chaotic days preceding the New Empire, developed a limp. No matter how hard he laboured, he fell ever farther behind. Achamian's last memory of him was his grimace: a kind of panicked grin stretched across expressions of abject pain. A look that urged wild effort in the utter absence of strength.
Then there was the dispute between Pokwas and Wulgulu, the strutting Thunyeri who for a time had assumed titular command of his brothers. Achamian did not know what caused the altercation, only that it occurred in the course of dividing a joint of wild boar. Pokwas, in particular, was inclined to heap abuse on the Hags, alternately calling them dogs, wretches, and "mibus"—apparently a mibu was a kind of Zeümi jackal renowned for eating its own kind during the dry season. "Be a good mibu," Achamian had overheard him say on more than one occasion, "and we will feed your dead to you." One moment everything was gloom and milling exhaustion, the next the two men were grappling, their heels kicking up leaves and dirt as they heaved at each other. Pokwas was easily the stronger: the green-eyed giant twisted Wulgulu around, wrenched him to the ground. Then he began pounding the prostrate Thunyeri about the head and face. Again and again, while everyone gnawed and chewed their dinner, their hands and faces gleaming with grease. Nothing was said, and aside from the black giant's laboured breathing, nothing was heard beyond the slapping thud of his fists. Again and again. The Sword-dancer continued striking the man long after he was dead, while Achamian and the others continued watching and eating. Only Mimara turned away.
Afterward Sarl began cackling in his strange, inward way, muttering, "I told you, Kiampas! Eh? Yes!"
Something was happening...
Achamian could feel it in his bones—catch glimpses of it in the eyes of the others. Mimara especially. He had watched a human head hammered into a wineskin, and he had felt nothing more than... curiosity?
It was the Qirri. It had to be. The medicine seemed to numb their conscience as much as it quickened their limbs and stretched their wind. Even as Achamian felt himself becoming closer to Mimara, he found himself caring less for the surviving Skin Eaters and not at all for the wretched Hags.
The old Wizard had enough experience with hashish and opium to know the way drugs could alter the small things, stretch and twist the detailed fabric of life. In the fleshpots of Carythusal, he had seen the way the poppy, especially, could conquer the myriad desires of men, until their hunger for the drug eclipsed even lust and love.
He knew enough to be wary, but the fact was they were moving fast, far faster than Achamian had dared hope. Several days into the rains they had found the ruins of a bridge on the banks of a great river, a bridge that Achamian recognized from his dreams as the Archipontus of Wûl, a work famed across the Ancient North in Seswatha's day. That meant they had travelled over half the distance from Maimor to Kelmeol, the ancient capital of the Meori Empire, in the space of two weeks—a spectacular distance. If they could maintain this pace, they would easily reach Sauglish and the Coffers before summer's end.
But it was a pace that was killing the newcomers. More and more the remaining Hags took on the vigilant aspect of hostages, a look at once surly, bewildered, and terrified. They ceased speaking, even among themselves, and as much as the Skin Eaters found their gaze inexorably drawn to Cleric, their eyes continually circled about the Captain and the threat of his discipline. Night would fall, the rains would thread the dark with lines of silver, and the Hags would huddle in shivering clutches, while Galian, Conger, and the others would bare their arms and marvel at their steaming skin.
"Where we going?" the youngest of them, a Galeoth adolescent with the strange name of Heresius, began shrieking one evening. "What madness?" he screamed in broken Sheyic. "What madness you do?" Staring was the most any of the original company could manage, so sudden and crazed was the young man's outburst. Finally, with the same murderous deliberation Achamian had seen many times, the Captain stood. The youth, who was no fool, bolted like a spooked doe into the murk...
Afterward, Galian insisted he had seen something—arms, he thought—hook out of the dead under-canopy and yank the young wretch into oblivion.
No one mourned him. No one, Stone Hag or Skin Eater, so much as spoke his name. The dead had no place in their history. They were scalpers. As much as they feared their mad Captain, none of them disputed his simple and dread logic. Death to sobbers. Death to loafers. Death to limpers, bellyachers, and bleeders...
Death to weakness, the great enemy of enmity.
So day after day they threw themselves at horizons they could not see, trudged with bottomless vigour into lands obscured and obscure, whether the sky cracked and poured water or the sun shone through sheets of green luminescence. And day after day the Stone Hags dwindled—for they were weak.
As the Skin Eaters were strong.
There was no place for pity, even less for regret, on the slog. And this, as Sarl continually slurred under his breath, was the Slog of Slogs. You could not be wholly human and survive the Long Side, so you became something less and pretended you were more.
In subsequent days Achamian would come to look at this leg of their journey with a peculiar horror, not because he had lived necessary lies, but because he had come to believe them. He was a man who would rather know and enumerate his sins, bear the pain of them, than cocoon himself in numbing ignorance and flattering exculpation.
You can only believe so many lies before becoming one of them.
—|—
What began as a remedy in the Cil-Aujan deeps had somehow transcended habit and become sacred ritual. "The Holy Dispensation," Mimara once called it in a pique of impatience.
Each night they queued before the Nonman, awaiting their pinch of Qirri. Usually Cleric would sit cross-legged and wordlessly dip his index finger into his pouch, darkening t
he pad with the merest smear. One by one the Skin Eaters would kneel before him and take the tip of his outstretched finger into their mouths—to better avoid any waste. Achamian would take his place among the others, kneel as they did when his time came. The Qirri would be bitter, the finger cold for the spit of others, sweet for the soil of daily use. A kind of euphoria would flutter through him, one that stirred troubling memories of kneeling before Kellhus during the First Holy War. There would be a moment, a mere heartbeat, where he would buckle beneath the dark gaze of the Nonman. But he would walk away content, like a starving child who had tasted honey.
Thoughtless, he would sit and savour the slow crawl of vitality through his veins.
The first and only Stone Hag to dare ridicule the act was found dead the following morning. Afterward, the renegade scalpers restricted their opinions to sullen looks and expressions—fear and disgust, mostly.
Sometimes the Nonman would climb upon some wild pulpit, the mossed remains of a fallen tree, the humped back of a boulder, and paint wonders with his dark voice. Wonders and horrors both.
Often he spoke of war and tribulation, of loves unravelled and victories undone. But no matter how the scalpers pressed him with questions, he could never recall the frame of his reminiscences. He spoke in episodes and events, never ages or times. The result was a kind of inadvertent verse, moments too packed with enigma and ambiguity to form narrative wholes—at least none they could comprehend. Fragments that never failed to leave his human listeners unsettled and amazed.
Mimara continually pestered the old Wizard with questions afterward. "Who is he?" she would hiss. "His stories must tell you something!"
Time and again Achamian could only profess ignorance. "He remembers the breaking of things, nothing more. The rest of the puzzle is always missing—for him as much as for us! I know only that he's old... exceedingly old..."
"How old?"
"Older than iron. Older even than human writing..."
"You mean older than the Tusk."
All Nonmen living were impossibly ancient. Even the youngest of their number were contemporaries of the Old Prophets. But if his sermons could be believed, Cleric—or Incariol, Lord Wanderer—was far older still, in his prime before the Ark and the coming of the Inchoroi.
An actual contemporary Nin'janjin and Cû'jara Cinmoi...
"Go to sleep," the Wizard grumbled.
What did it matter who Cleric had been, he told himself, when the ages had battered him into something entirely different?
"You look upon me and see something whole... singular..." the Nonman said one night, his head hanging from his shoulders, his face utterly lost to shadow. When he looked up tears had silvered his cheeks. "You are mistaken."
"What did he mean?" Mimara asked after she and the Wizard had curled onto their mats. They always slept side by side now. Achamian had even become accustomed to the point of absence that was her Chorae. Ever since that first Sranc attack, when she had been stranded with Soma beyond the protective circuit of his incipient Wards, he had been loathe to let her stray from his side.
"He means that he's not a... a self... in the way you and I are selves. Now go to sleep."
"But how is that possible?"
"Because of memory. Memory is what binds us to what we are. Go to sleep."
"What do you mean? How can somebody not be what they are? That makes no sense."
"Go to sleep."
He would lay there, his eyes closed to the world, while the image of the Nonman—mundane beauty perpetually at war with his arcane disfiguration—plagued his soul. The old Wizard would curse himself for a fool, ask himself how many watches he had wasted worrying about the Erratic. Cleric was one of the Pharroika, the Wayward. Whatever the Nonman once was, he was no longer—and that should be enough.
If he had ceased pondering Incariol altogether in the days following the battle in the ruins of Maimor, it was because of the skin-spy and what its presence implied. But time's passage has a way of blunting our sharper questions, of making things difficult to confront soft with malleable familiarity. Of course, the Consult had been watching him, the man who had taught the Gnosis to the Aspect-Emperor, and so delivered the Three Seas. Of course, they had infiltrated the Skin Eaters.
He was Drusas Achamian.
But the further Soma fell into the past, the more Cleric's presence irked his curiosity, the more the old questions began prickling back to life.
—|—
Even his Dreams had been affected.
He had lost his inkhorn and papyrus in the mad depths of Cil-Aujas, so he could no longer chronicle the particulars of his slumbering experience. Nor did he need to.
It almost seemed as if he had become unmoored when he pondered the transformations. First he had drifted from the central current of Seswatha's life, away from the tragic enormities and into the mundane details, where he had been delivered to knowledge of Ishuäl, the secret fastness of the Dûnyain. Then, as if these things were too small to catch the fabric of his soul, he slipped from Seswatha altogether, seeing things his ancient forebear had never seen, standing where he never stood, as when he saw the Library of Sauglish burn.
And now?
He continued to dream that he and nameless others stood shackled in a shadowy line. Broken men. Brutalized. They filed through a tube of thatched undergrowth, bushes that had grown out and around their passage, forming vaults of a thousand interlocking branches. Over the stooped shoulders of those before him, he could see the tunnel's terminus, the threshold of some sunlit clearing, it seemed—the spaces beyond were so open and bright as to defeat his gloom-pinched eyes. He felt a dread that seemed curiously disconnected from his surroundings, as if his fear had come to him from a far different time and place.
And he did not know who he was.
A titanic horn would blare, and the line would be pulled stumbling forward, and peering, he would see a starved wretch at the fore, at least a hundred souls distant, stepping into the golden light... vanishing.
And the screaming would begin, only to be yanked short.
Again and again, he dreamed this senseless dream. Sometimes it was identical. Sometimes he seemed one soul closer to the procession's end. He could never be sure.
Was it the Qirri? Was it the deathless rancour of the Mop, or a cruel whim of Fate?
Or had the trauma of his life at last unhinged him and cast his slumber to the wolves of grim fancy?
For his whole life, ever since grasping the withered pouch of Seswatha's heart deep in the bowel of Atyersus, his dreams had possessed meaning... logic, horrifying to be sure, but comprehensible all the same. For his whole life he had awakened with purpose.
And now?
—|—
"So what was it like?" Achamian asked her as the company filed through the arboreal maze.
"What was what like?"
They always addressed each other in Ainoni now. The fact that only the Captain could comprehend them made it seem daring somehow—and curiously proper, as if madmen should oversee the exchange of secrets. Even still, they took care that he did not overhear.
"Life on the Andiamine Heights," he said, "as an Anasûrimbor."
"You mean the family you're trying to destroy."
The old Wizard snorted. "Just think, no more running."
At last she smiled. Anger and sarcasm, Achamian had learned, were a kind of reflex for Mimara—as well as a fortress and a refuge. If he could outlast her initial hostility, which proved difficult no matter how much good humour he mustered, he could usually coax a degree of openness from her.
"It was complicated," she began pensively.
"Well then, start at the beginning."
"You mean when they came for me in Carythusal?"
The old Wizard shrugged and nodded.
They had slackened their pace enough to fall behind the others, even the dour file of Stone Hags, who stole longing glances as Mimara drifted past. Despite the chorus of birdsong, a kind of silence re
ared about them, the hush of slow growth and decay. It felt like shelter.
"You have to understand," she said hesitantly. "I didn't know that I had been wronged. The brutalities I endured... But I was a child... and then I was a brothel-slave—that's what I was... Something made to be violated, abused, over and over, until I grew too old or too ugly, and they sold me to the fullery. That was just the... the way... So when the Eothic Guardsmen came and began beating Yappi... Yapotis... the brothel master, I didn't understand. I couldn't understand..."
Achamian watched her carefully, saw a rare strand of sunlight flash across her face. "You thought you were being attacked instead of saved."
A numb nod. "They took me away before the killing began, but I knew... I could tell from the soldiers' manner, cold, as merciless as any of these scalpers. I knew they would kill anyone who had a hand in my... my fouling..."
She had the habit of slipping into Tutseme when she became upset, the rough dialect peculiar to menials and slaves from Carythusal. The clipped vowels. The singsong intonations. Achamian would have teased her for sounding like an Ainoni harlot, had the subject matter been less serious.
"They brought me to a ship—you should have seen them! Stammering, bowing and kneeling, not the soldiers, but the Imperial Apparati who commanded them. They asked me—begged me!—for some kind of request, for something they could do, for my health and my ease, they said. For my glory. I'll never forget that! My whole life my only prize had been the lust my form incited in men—the face of an Empress, the hips and slit of a young girl—and there I stood, the proud possessor of what? Glory? So I said, 'Stop. Stop the killing!' And they looked at me with long faces and said, 'Alas, Princess, that is the one thing we cannot do.' 'Why?' I asked them...
"'Because the Blessed Empress has commanded it,' they said...
"So I stood on the prow and watched... They had moored on the high river, on the quays typically reserved for the Scarlet Spires—you know those?—so I could see the slums rise to the north, all the Worm laid out for inspection. I could see it burn... I could even see souls trapped on their roofs... Men, women, children... jumping..."
The White-Luck Warrior Page 18
