“We’re being followed,” he said in his odd accent.
“Followed?”
“Yes …” He seemed to weigh his own cryptic options. “By a woman.”
Achamian nearly coughed, such was his alarm. “Who else knows?”
The Tracker’s almond-shaped eyes narrowed. His Xiuhianni blood was always more pronounced in open daylight. “Moraubon and several of the Herd.”
“Moraubon?”
Suddenly Achamian was huffing and gasping, running back along the tangled verge of the trail. The parade of walking scalpers watched him pass with frowning curiosity. Then he was all alone on the trail, running down a boulder-stumped incline, away from the river and into the mute confines of the forest. Several moments passed before he heard the first hoot, a raw laughing call, filled with malice and the open-mouthed eagerness of men bent on rutting. He heard Moraubon shouting a few moments afterwards: instructions to the others racing across the forest floor. He heard a feminine shriek—no, not a shriek, a shrill cry of defiance and frustration.
The sorcerous words were already rumbling from his lips, through the essence of the encircling world, and he was climbing, not air, but the echoes of ground across the sky, up into the interweaving limbs. Branches lashed him as he broke through the canopy, then walked over the forest crown, each step swallowing a dozen cubits, tipping for the vertigo of looking down through the towering trees. He could see the pitch of the surrounding wilderness to the horizon, ridges like wandering fins, tributaries threading dark clefts with silver, mountains looming in white judgment. He saw men running, Skin Eaters, like the shadows of mice beneath meadow thatch. Then he saw her—Mimara—kicking and thrashing in the clutches of three men.
He stepped into their midst.
They had her pulled like living rope across the forest floor. Moraubon was kneeling between her legs, undoing his girdle and breeches. He seemed to be cooing and growling. He whirled to the sound of Achamian’s sorcerous muttering …
Only to be blown tumbling, kicking up tailings of leaves. An Odaini Concussion Cant.
The other Skin Eaters cried out, scrambled back while tugging at their weapons. Through his rage, Achamian could feel something exult at this first violent exercise. Let them see! an inner voice cried. Let them know! His voice cracked out, soaked into the surrounding matter and steamed skyward, sourceless, all-encompassing. The Skin Eaters, including Moraubon, retreated in the safety of the great trunks.
The Compass of Noshainrau, an existential glitter, a line of sun-concentrated white, sweeping out like a flail from the axis of his upraised arm, sketching a perfect circle of destruction. Wood charred and exploded. Flame spilled like water across the ancient oaks, elms, and maples. Mountainous groans and creaks—a chorus—then the roar of mighty trees falling, a ring of them crashing into their stone-heavy cousins, chasing the Skin Eaters into the deeper shadows of the forest.
Achamian stood over her, bright in the sudden sunlight, showered by the twirling green of innumerable spring-early leaves. A Wizard draped in wolf skins. The bulk of once great trees lay heaped about them. Forked trunks and limbs gouged the ground beneath shags of greenery.
Mimara spat blood from her lips, tried to pull her torn leggings to her hips. She made a noise that might have been a sob or a laugh or both. She fell to her knees before him, her left thigh as bare and pale as a barked sapling. A laughing grimace. A glimpse of teeth soaked in blood.
“Teach me,” she said.
No words were spoken as they hastened back, Achamian fuming in the lead, Mimara shambling in her clutched clothing to keep up. They found the Skin Eaters standing in clots across slopes of earth between wain-sized molars of stone. The river arced and sprayed white beyond them, endlessly pounding the hillside. All eyes turned to them as they approached, lingered for a moment on Mimara’s slight figure. Instinctively, Achamian held out his arm and drew her close to his chest. Together they pressed to the fore of the crowd.
They saw Moraubon, obviously winded, climb to Lord Kosoter where he stood, thumbs hooked in his war girdle, on the mottled back of a boulder. A confusion of vertical stone faces rose behind the Captain, crested with bracken and the odd suicidal tree. A great rooster tail of water spouted through the heart of the enclosure, kicked into foam by some powerful twist in the current. The cowled Nonman, Cleric, was nowhere to be seen.
The two men shared inaudible words, with Moraubon glancing at Mimara, as though to say, Look at her … The Captain remained absolutely motionless. Sarl glared at the Skin Eaters from immediately below.
“The one with the Chorae,” Mimara whispered, referring to Lord Kosoter. “Who is he?”
Achamian found himself glancing down the line of warlike faces. “Shush,” was all he said.
At first it seemed the Captain had simply reached out and seized Moraubon’s chin—so casual was his movement. Achamian squinted, trying to understand the wrongness of the image: Lord Kosoter holding the man mere inches from his face, not so much looking into his eyes as watching … Achamian only glimpsed the knife jammed beneath the scalper’s mandible when Lord Kosoter withdrew his hand.
Moraubon crumpled as if the Captain had ripped out his bones. Blood sheeted the boulder.
“Can anybody,” Sarl cried out over the river’s white thunder, “tell me what the rule is for peaches on the slog?”
“The Captain always gets the first bite,” Galian called solemnly.
“And what is it that has made us legends of the Wilds? What allows us to eat so much skin?”
“The Rules of the Slog!” a number of them shouted against the roar.
Not in reluctance, Achamian realized, but with dark affirmation. Even the Bitten, even those who had broken bread with the dead man on the boulder.
They’re all mad.
Sarl reddened about his mock smile. His eyes became two more wrinkles creasing his face.
Without a glance at his sergeant, the Captain crouched in his ragged Ainoni finery, wiped his blade clean on Moraubon’s sleeve. Then he fixed his gaze on Achamian and Mimara. He leapt from the boulder, his balance and bearing shockingly limber. Until that moment, he had seemed carved of living granite.
He strode up to the two of them.
“Who is she?”
“My daughter,” Achamian heard himself say.
There was no chance the murderous brown eyes could stare him down—not this time. She felt too much like her mother pressed in the brace of his arm, too much like Esmenet. The Captain glanced to the ground for a meditative moment, seemed to nod, though it could have been a trick of the breeze through his squared beard. After a hooded glance, he turned to make his way back to the head of the trail.
“Either she carries her weight like a man,” he shouted as he walked away. “Or she carries our weight like a woman!”
Catcalls and whistles from the Skin Eaters. Each of them, it seemed, glanced at Achamian and Mimara as they drifted back to resume the march. Their expressions ran the gamut from accusation to jeering lechery. But it was the blank faces that troubled Achamian the most, the eyes that seemed to commit Mimara’s torn leggings to memory.
No one bothered with Moraubon’s body, which continued to drain against a backdrop of booming water and towering debris. A white corpse on a red-painted stone.
“Who is he?” Mimara whispered. While Achamian had eyed the others, she had continued gazing at the Captain’s receding back.
“A Veteran,” he murmured. “The same as me.”
They lagged behind the others, passing from broken sunlight to green shadow, arguing over the rush and hiss of the river.
“You cannot stay! This is impossible!”
“Where would you have me go?”
“Go? Go? Where do you think? Back to your mother! Back to the Andiamine Heights where you belong!”
“Never.”
“I know your mother. I know she loves you!”
“Not so much as she hates what she did to me.”
“T
o save your life!”
“Life … Is that what you call it? Should I tell you the story of my life?
“No.”
“All these men. Trust me, I’ve borne them before. I can bear them again.”
“Not these men.”
“Then I suppose I’m lucky to have you.”
She was nothing like Esmenet, he had come to realize. She tilted her head the same way, as though literally trying to look around your nonsense, and her voice stiffened into the same reedy bundle of disgust, but aside from these echoes …
“Look. You simply cannot stay. This is a journey …” He paused, his breath yanked short by the sheer factuality of what he was about to say. “This is a journey without any return.”
She sneered and laughed. “So is every life.”
There was something snide and infuriating about her, he decided, something that begged to be struck—or dared … He could not tell which.
No. She was nothing like Esmenet. Even the vicious dismissiveness of her snorts—all her own.
“Is that what you’ve told these scalpers?”
“What do you mean, ‘told’?”
“That this journey will see them all killed.”
“No.”
“What did you tell them?”
“That I can show them the Coffers.”
“The Coffers?”
“The legendary treasury of the School of Sohonc, lost when the Library of Sauglish was destroyed in the First Apocalypse.”
“So they know nothing of Ishuäl? They have no idea that you hunt the origins of their Holy Aspect-Emperor? The man who pays the bounty on their scalps!”
“No.”
“Murderer. That makes you a murderer.”
“Yes.”
“Teach me, then … Teach me, or I’ll tell them everything!”
“Extortion, is it?”
“Murder is more wicked by far.”
“What makes you certain I wouldn’t kill you, if I’m a murderer as you say?”
“Because I look too much like my mother.”
“There’s a thought. Maybe I should just tell the Captain who you are. A Princess-Imperial. Think of the ransom you would fetch!”
“Yes … But then why bleed all the way to Sauglish looking for the Coffers?”
Impudent. An almost lunatic selfishness! Was she born this way? No. She wore her scars the way hermits wore their stench: as a mark of all the innumerable sins she had overcome.
“This is not a contest you can win, Wizard.”
“How so?”
“I’m no fool. I know you’ve sworn by whatever it is you hold sacred to never teach anoth—”
“I am cursed! Disaster follows my teaching. Death and betra—”
“But you’re mistaken to think that you can use threats or pleas or even reason with me. This Gift I have, this ability to see the world the way you see it, it’s the only Gift I have ever received, the only hope I have ever known. I will be a witch, or I will be dead.”
“Didn’t you hear me? My teaching is cursed!”
“We’re a fine match then.”
Impudent! Impudent! Was there ever such a despicable slit?
That night they cast their camp a short distance from the cluster of others. Neither of them spoke a word. In fact, a quiet had fallen across all the Skin Eaters, enough to make the crackle of their fires the dominant discourse. Only Sarl’s hashed voice continued to saw on as before.
“Kiampas! Kiampas! That was no pretty night, I tell you!”
Achamian need only look up to see several orange faces lifted in their direction—even among the Bitten. Never in his life, it seemed, had he felt so absurdly conspicuous. He heard nothing, but he listened to them mutter about her all the same: assessing her breasts and thighs, spinning expressions of longing into violent boasts, catalogues of what they would do, the vigour of their penetrations, and how she would scream and whimper; speculating on the whys and wherefores of her presence, how she had to be a whore to dare the likes of them, or how she soon would be …
He need only glance at Mimara to know that she listened too. Another woman, a free-wife, or a Princess-Imperial raised in cozened isolation, might be oblivious, simply assume that the white-water souls of men sluiced through the same innocent tributaries as their own, that they shared a common turbulence. But not Mimara. Her ears were pricked—Achamian could tell. But where he felt apprehension, the shrill possessiveness of an overmatched father, she seemed entirely at her ease.
She had been raised in the covetous gaze of men, and though she had suffered beneath brutal hands, she had grown strong. She carried herself, Achamian realized, with a kind of coy arrogance, as though she were the sole human in the presence of resentful apes. Let them grunt. Let them abuse themselves. She cared nothing for all the versions of her that danced or moaned or choked behind their primitive eyes—save that they made her, and all the possibilities that her breath and body offered, invaluable.
She was the thing wanted. So be it. She would find ways to make them pay.
But for Achamian it was too much. Her resemblance to Esmenet was simply too uncanny. And though he had little or no affection for the daughter—the girl was too damaged—he felt himself falling in love with the mother all over again. Esmenet. Esmenet. Sometimes, when his flame-gazing reveries dipped too deep, he found himself startled by the image of her in his periphery, and the very world would reel as he struggled to sort memories of the First Holy War from the chill dark of the now. To go back, he found himself thinking. I would do anything to go back …
So, with the hollow chest of speaking for the sake of forgetting, Achamian began explaining the metaphysics of sorcery to her—if only to kill the prurient silence with the sound of his own voice. She watched him, wide-eyed, the perfect oval of her face perched on her knees—illuminated and beautiful.
Quite against his intentions, he began teaching her the Gnosis.
The hike into the mountains proved arduous. The trail heaved and plummeted as it strayed farther and farther from the river gorges. The mules clicked across tracts of sheeted gravel and bare stone. The mighty broadleaves of the plateau became ever more spindly. “It’s like we’re climbing back into winter,” Mimara breathlessly noted after picking a purple bud from the twigs hanging above her head.
Perhaps because of the accusatorial aura hanging between them, or perhaps just to steer his thoughts away from the burning in his thighs or the stitches in his flank, Achamian began teaching her Gilcûnya, the ancient tongue of all Gnostic Magi. As a student at Atyersus, he had been dismayed to discover that he would have to learn an entire language—not to mention one whose grammar and intonation were scarcely human—before he would be able to sing his first primitive Cant. Mimara, however, took to the task with out-and-out zealotry.
He hadn’t the heart to tell her the truth: that the reason the sorcerous Schools were loath to take adults as students had to do with the way age seemed to diminish the ability to learn languages. What had taken him a single year as a child could very well take her several. It could be the case that she would never learn to manipulate the meanings with the precision and purity required …
Why this should seem a crime was beyond him.
The Skin Eaters watched them whenever opportunity afforded, some more boldly than others. Where the width of the trail allowed, a dozen or so always seemed to gather in loose and fortuitous packs about them. Achamian found himself bristling each time, and not simply because of the endless succession of gazes sliding across her form. They were friendly, courteous to a fault, but there was no mistaking their bullying nearness, or the predatory lag whenever their look crossed his own, that moment too long, pregnant with threat and prowess. He understood the game well enough, the false gallantry of helping her across the more treacherous twists in the trail, the implicit significance of offering him the exact same assistance. Leave her to us, old man …
Mimara, of course, affected not to notice.
That afternoon a stop was called at the base of an incline. No one at their end of the line knew the cause of the delay, and everyone was worn out enough to remain incurious. Achamian was doing vocabulary drills with Mimara when Sarl surprised them. “The Captain wants you,” the man said, smiling as usual, though more than a little chagrin seemed written into the wrinkles netting his eyes. He grimaced at Mimara as he paused to catch his breath, then looked to the other Skin Eaters milling in the gloom. He lowered his voice to a mutter. “Troubling news.”
Achamian did his best to pace the old cutthroat up the incline. By the time he gained the crest of the ridge line, he was breathing hard, pressing his knees with his hands at every step. A cold breeze greeted him, soaking through his beard and clothing. The Osthwai Mountains piled across the horizon in all their glory, titanic flanges of earth and stone rearing into cloud-smothered peaks. The woollen ceiling seemed close enough to touch, and so black that his hackles raised in the expectation of thunder. But the distances remained crisp with silence.
He saw Lord Kosoter standing with Cleric looming at his side. Both were watching Kiampas haggle with a Thunyeri almost as tall as Oxwora, though far older and nowhere as thick-limbed. The two seemed to be speaking some mongrel tongue that combined elements of Sheyic and Thunyeri. At least several dozen of the man’s wild countrymen stood watching in the near distance.
The tall one, Sarl explained in a low murmur, was called Feather, though Achamian could see nothing avian about his ornament. Several shrunken Sranc heads adorned his crazed red-and-grey hair. His war girdle used knuckle-bones in the place of beads. Aside from his hauberk, the gold-wire Circumfix hanging about his neck seemed his only concession to civilization. Even paces back, Achamian could smell his furs, the carnivore reek of blood and piss. He was, Sarl continued in a low mutter, the chieftain of one of the so-called tribal companies, most of which were made up of Thunyeri, a people who had warred so long and so hard against the Sranc it had become a missionary calling.