The logic of his claim hung like an iron in the air, indifferent to the swell of background voices. Truth was ever the afterlife of words.
Achamian stood dumbstruck.
“I have this leaf,” Sarl said, his eyes bright with just-between-friends mischief. “You place it against your anus—”
The cowled man erupted in faceless laughter. Achamian saw his left eye as he tilted his head back, a glimpse of a pupil set in watery grey. But it was the guttural arrhythmia of his laugh that told him what he was ...
“Just twooo,” Sarl howled, his purple brows nearly pinched to his applered cheeks. “Tw-twooo ensolariis!”
Achamian sneered as much as smiled. The Anus Leaf was an old joke, an expression referring to charlatans who peddled hope in the form of false remedies.
The Captain watched him with imperturbable care.
They were right, he realized. Derision was all he could expect here in Marrow—or even worse. The Skin Eaters were his only hope.
And they had already struck him down.
Achamian took the proffered bowl in both hands just to be sure it didn’t shake. He drained it and gasped. Unwatered wine from some bitter Galeoth soil.
“The Coffers!” Sarl crowed. “Captain! He wants to loot the Coffers!”
Achamian smacked his lips about the burning in his gullet, wiped a rasp-woollen sleeve across his beard and mouth. It was strange, the way a single drink could make you part of someone’s company. “It was him,” Achamian said to the Captain while nodding in the direction of the cowled figure. “Wasn’t it? He told you about the Coffers ...”
Another mistake. Evidently, the Captain refused to recognize even the most innocent conversational impositions. Hint, innuendo, implication; all of it accused with a glare, then condemned with onerous silence.
“We call him Cleric,” Sarl said, tilting his head toward the man—a mock covert gesture.
The black, leather-rimmed oval seemed to stare back at Achamian.
“Cleric,” Achamian repeated.
The cowl remained motionless. The Captain resumed staring into his wine.
“You should hear him in the Wilds,” Sarl exclaimed. “Such sweet sermons! And to think I once thought myself eloquent.”
“And yet,” Achamian said carefully, “Nonmen have no priests.”
“Not as Men understand them,” the black pit replied.
Shock. Its voice had been pleasant, melodious, but marbled with intonations alien to the human vocal range. It was as though the tones of a deformed child had been woven into it.
Achamian sat rigid. “Where are you from?” he asked, his lungs pressed against his backbone. “Ishterebinth?”
The hood bowed to the tabletop. “I can no longer remember. I have known Ishterebinth, I think ... But it was not called such then.”
“I see your Mark. You wear it fierce and deep.”
The hood lifted, as though raising hidden ears to some faraway sound. “As do you.”
“Who was your Quya Master? From which Line do you hail?”
“I ... I cannot remember.”
Achamian licked his lips in hesitation, then asked the question that had to be asked of all Nonmen. “What can you remember?”
An odd hesitation, as though to the syncopation of an inhuman heart.
“Things. Friends. Strangers and lovers. All of them heart-breaking. All of them horrific.”
“And the Coffers? You remember them?”
An almost imperceptible nod. “I was at the Library of Sauglish when it fell—I think. I remember that terror all too well ... But why it should cause me such sorrow, I do not know.”
The words pimpled Achamian’s skin. He had dreamed the horrors of Sauglish far too many times—he need only close his eyes to see the burning towers, the fleeing masses, the Sohonc battling iron-scaled Wracu in skies wreathed in smoke and flame. He had tasted the ash on the wind, heard the wailing of multitudes. He had wept at his own cowardice ...
This made him unique among Men, to have lived the span of two lives—two eye blinks, Seswatha and Achamian, flung across the millennia. But this Nonman before him, his life straddled a hundred human generations. He had lived the entire breadth of those nation-eating ages. From then to now—and even more. From the twilight of the First Apocalypse to the dawn of the Second.
He was in the presence of a living line, Achamian realized, of eyes that had witnessed all the intervening years between his two selves, between Achamian, the Wizard-Exile, and Seswatha, the Grandmaster of the Sohonc. This Nonman had lived the two-thousand-year sleep between ...
It almost made Achamian feel whole.
“And your name?”
Sarl whispered some kind of curse.
“Incariol,” the cowled figure said with an air of inward grappling. And then again, “Incariol ...” as though testing its sound on his tongue. “Does that sound familiar?”
Achamian had never heard of it, not that he could remember. Even still, it was plain these Scalpoi had no inkling of who or what rode with them. How could any mortal fathom such a cavernous soul?
As old as the Tusk ...
“So you’re an Erratic.”
“Am I? Is that what I am?”
How did you answer such a question? The creature before him had lived so long his very identity had collapsed beneath him, dropped him into the pit of his own lifetime. His was a running-over soul, where every instance of love or hope or joy drained into the void of forgetfulness, displaced by the more viscous passions of terror, anguish, and hate.
He was an Erratic, addicted to atrocity for memory’s sake.
“He’s calling you mad,” Sarl said, a little too quickly given the gravity of their silence.
The hood turned to him.
“Yes ... I am mad.”
Sarl waved his hands in affectionate contradiction. “Come now, Cleric. No need to—”
“Memories ...” the black pit interrupted. A word struck in wincing tones of woe. “Memories make us sane.”
“See!” Sarl exclaimed, whirling to Achamian. “Sermons!” His face was pinched red about a manic smile, as though he were the kind of man who made claims compulsively and so gloated over every instance of their confirmation.
“This one night in the Wilds, one of our number asks Cleric here what’s the greatest treasure he’s heard tell. Gold, as you might imagine, is quite a popular topic among us Scalpoi, especially when we’re hunting on the dark—without campfires, that is. Warms the bones as sure as any flame, talk of peaches and gold.”
There was something—the turn of his face, maybe, the aura of antagonism in the way he leaned forward, or the twist of insincerity in his tone—that told Achamian that “sermons” were the least of the man’s concerns.
“So Cleric here,” Sarl rasps, “obliges us with another sermon. He mentions several glories, for he’s seen things we mortals can scarce conceive. But for some reason it was the Coffers that stuck. The hoard hidden beneath the Library of Sauglish, ere it was destroyed in the First Apocalypse. The Coffers, we say. The Coffers—any time we’re loath to mention that unluckiest of words, ‘hope.’ Coffers. Coffers. Coffers. We trek out to run down the skinnies, give them a trim, but we always say we’re searching for the Coffers.”
The face-wrinkling amiability suddenly dropped from his face, revealing something cold and hateful and implausibly profound.
“And now, here you are, as sure as Fate.”
There was something, Achamian decided, altogether too mobile about the man’s expressions.
“You’re a learned man,” Sarl added, speaking through strings of phlegm. An uncommon intensity had fixed his rodent features—as if some life-or-death opportunity were on the verge of slipping from his grasp. “Tell me, what do you think of the concept of coincidence? Do you think things happen for reasons?”
A perplexed look. A depleted smile. Achamian could summon no more.
Sarl leaned back, nodding and laughing and petting his white go
atee. Of course you do! his squinty look shouted, as though Achamian had given him the oh-so-predictable book-learned response.
Achamian did his best not to gape. He had forgotten what it was like, the succession of trivial surprises that was part and parcel of joining the company of strangers. In the company of strangers it was so easy to forget the small crablike histories that held others together and set you apart.
But this was no trivial surprise.
From Marrow to the wastes of Kûniüri was a journey of months across Sranc-infested Wilds. Were it not for the Great Ordeal, the trek would be simply impossible: Over the centuries, the School of Mandate had lost more than a few expeditions trying to reach either Sauglish or Golgotterath. But even with the Great Ordeal drawing the Sranc like a lodestone, Achamian knew he could not make his way alone—not so far, not at his age. This was the whole reason why he had come to Marrow: to recruit the assistance he would need. He had simply struck upon the Sohonc Coffers as an inducement, if not an outright ruse ... And now this.
Could it simply be coincidence?
Lord Kosoter watched Sarl with eyes of glassy iron.
The small man blanched. His face squinted along plaintive lines. “If this is no coincidence, Captain, then it’s the Whore. Anagkë. Fate.” He looked around as if encouraged by imaginary fellows. “And the Whore, begging your pardon, Captain, fucks everyone in the end—everyone. Foe, friend, fuzzy little fucking woodland creatures ...”
But his words were for naught. The Captain’s silence boomed as much.
And Achamian found himself wondering just when the agreement had been struck—and just how the men he had hoped to hire had become his partners. Was he simply one more Skin Eater?
Should he be grateful? Relieved? Horrified?
“I remember ...” the blackness wrapped by the cowl said. “I remember the slaughter of ...”
A peculiar sound, like a sob thumbed into the shape of a cackle.
“Of children.”
“A man,” the Captain grimly noted, “has got to remember.”
That night Achamian dreamed in the old way. He dreamed of Sauglish.
The Wracu came first, as they always did, dropping from the clouds with claws and wings askew. Their roars seemed to fall from all directions, curiously hollow, like children screeching into caverns, only infinitely more savage.
Vertigo. Seswatha hung with his Sohonc brothers above their sacred Library, whose towers and walls yawed out below them, perched on the Troinim, the three hills that commanded the great city’s westward reaches. They awaited the frenzied descent, their figures hazed blue by their Gnostic Wards. Light sparked from their eyes and mouths, so that their heads seemed cauldrons. Their feet braced against the ground’s echo, they sang their blasphemous song.
Psalms of destruction.
Lines of brilliant white mapped the gaping spaces, striking geometries, confining geometries, lights that made smoke of hide and fury. Rearing back to bare claws and spew fire, the dragons plummeted into the arcane glitter, shrieking, screaming. Then they were through, bleeding smoke, some writhing and convulsing, one or two toppling to their deaths. The singing became more frantic. Threads of incandescence boiled against iron scales. Unseen hammers beat against wings and limbs.
Then the Wracu were upon them.
And for an instant, Seswatha became Achamian, an old man born of another age, his eyes rolling like a panicked horse. Somehow forgotten, he jerked his gaze side to side, from the white robed men hanging frail in their glowing spheres to the black-maned beasts that assailed them, burning and rending. Wings bellied like sails in the tempest. Eyes narrowed into sickle-shaped slits. Wounds smoked. The Wracu hammered and clawed the curved planes, and things not of this world sheared. The antique Schoolmen shouted, cried out in horror and frustration. A dragon fell, gutted by blue flame. A sorcerer, young Hûnovis, was stripped to bone by burning exhalations, and twirled like a burning scroll into the vista below. The glare of sorcery and fiery vomit intensified, until all that Achamian could see were ragged silhouettes twisting serpentine over the void.
The city pitched across the distances, a patchwork of labyrinthine streets and packed structures. To the east, he saw the shining ribbon of the River Aumris, the cradle of Norsirai glory. And to the west, beyond the fortifications, he saw the alluvial plains blackened by hordes of whooping Sranc. And beyond them, the whirlwind, howling across the horizon, monstrous and inexhaustible, framed by the rose-gold of more distant skies. Even when obscured by smoke Achamian could feel it … Mog-Pharau, the end of all things.
Roars scored the heights to arch of heaven, reptilian fury wrapped about the inside-out mutter of sorcery—the glory of the Gnosis. The dragons raged. The sorcerers of the Sohonc, the first and greatest School, fought and died.
He did not so much see those below as he remembered them. Refugees packing the rooftops, watching the slow advance of doom. Fathers casting their own babes to the hard cobble of the streets. Mothers cutting their children’s throats—anything to save them from the fury of the Sranc. Slaves and chieftains howling, crying out to heavens shut against them. The broken staring into the dread west, numb to everything save the whirlwind’s roping approach …
Their High-King was dead. The wombs of their wives and their daughters had become graves. The greatest of their thanes and chieftain-knights, the flower of their armed might, had been struck down. Pillars of smoke scored the distance across the earth’s very curve.
The world was ending.
Like choking. Like drowning. Like a weight without substance, sinking cold through him, a knife drawn from the snow, even as he fell slack into its bottomless regions. Friends, brothers, shaken apart in grinning jaws. Strangers flailing in fiery blooms. Towers leaning like drunks before crashing. Sranc encrusting distant walls, like ants on slices of apple, loping into the maze of streets. The cries, shrieks, screams—thousands of them—rising like steam from burning stones. Sauglish dying.
Hopelessness … Futility.
Never, it seemed, had he dreamed a passion with such vehemence.
Undone, the surviving Sohonc fled the skies, took shelter in the Library with its net of great square towers. Batteries of ballistae covered their retreat, and several of the younger Wracu foundered, harpooned. Achamian stood abandoned in the sky, gazing at mighty Skafra, scars like capstan rope, limbs like sinuous timbers, and leprous wings beating, obscuring the distant No-God with every laborious whump-whump. The ancient Wracu grinned its lipless dragon grin, scanned the near distances with eyes of bloody pearl …
And somehow, miraculously, looked through him.
Skafra, near enough for his bulk to trigger bodily terror. Achamian stared helplessly at the creature, watched the bright crimson of its rage drain from its scales and the rising blooms of black that signified dark contemplation. The conflagration below glittered across its chitinous lines, and Achamian’s eyes were drawn downward, to the plummet beneath his feet.
The sight of the Holy Library burning stuck pins into his eyes. Beloved stone! The great walls sheathed in obsidian along their sloped foundations, rising high and white above. The copper roofs, stacked like massive skirts. And the deep courtyards, so that from the sky the structure resembled the halved heart of some vast and intricate beast. Sunbright sputum washed across ensorcelled stone, knifed through seams and cracks. Dragonfire rained across the circuit, a spray of thunderous eruptions.
But where? Where was Seswatha? How could he dream without—
The old Wizard awoke crying out thoughts from the end of a different world. Sauglish! We have lost Sauglish!
But as his eyes sorted the darkness of his room from the afterimages, and his ears dredged the roar of the falls from the death-throe thunder, it seemed he could hear the madwoman … Mimara.
“You have become a prophet …” Was that not what she had said?
“A prophet of the past.”
The next day Sarl collected Achamian and brought him to what must have
been one of the Cocked Leg’s largest rooms. Though he moved with the same spry impatience, the old cutthroat seemed surprisingly quiet. Whether this was due to the previous night’s drink or discussion, Achamian could not readily tell.
Another man awaited them in addition to Kosoter and Cleric: a middle-aged Nansur named Kiampas. If Sarl was the Captain’s mouth, then Kiampas, Achamian realized, was his hand. Clean-shaven and elegantly featured, he looked somewhat younger than the fifty or so years Achamian eventually credited to him. He was definitely more soldier than warrior. He had a wry, methodical air that suggested melancholy as much as competence. Because of this, Achamian found himself almost instantly trusting both his instincts and his acumen. As a former Imperial Officer, Kiampas was a devotee of plans and the resources required to bring them to fruition. Such men usually left the issue of overarching goals to their superiors, but after listening to Achamian explain the mission to come, his manner betrayed obvious doubt if not out-and-out dismay.
“So just when did you hope to reach these ruins?” His speech had a well-practised insistence—a first-things-first air—that spoke of many long campaigns.
“The Wards protecting the Coffers are peculiar,” Achamian lied, “geared to the heavenly spheres. We must reach Sauglish before the autumn solstice.”
All eyes raked him, searching, it seemed, for the telltale glow of deceit in the blank coals of his face.
“Sweet Sejenus!” Kiampas cried in disbelief. “The end of summer?”
“It’s imperative.”
“Impossible. It can’t be done!”
“Yes,” the Captain grated, “it can.”
Kiampas paled, seemed to glance down in unconscious apology. Though he was cut of different cloth entirely, Achamian wasn’t surprised to see him sharing Sarl’s reaction to the chest-tightening rarity of their Captain’s voice.
“Well then,” the Nansur continued, apparently searching for his equilibrium in the matter at hand. “The choice of routes is straightforward then. We should travel through Galeoth, up through—”