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 peeri
ng, 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.
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