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 goose-pimples 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 Cûnuroi 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.
CHAPTER
FOUR
The Istyuli Plains
All ropes come up short if pulled long enough. All futures end in tragedy.
—CENEIAN PROVERB
And they forged counterfeits from our frame, creatures vile and obs
cene, who hungered only for violent congress. These beasts they loosed upon the land, where they multiplied, no matter how fierce the Ishroi who hunted them. And soon Men clamoured at our gates, begging sanctuary, for they could not contend with the creatures. “They wear your face,” the penitents cried. “This calamity is your issue.” But we were wroth, and turned them away, saying, “These are not our Sons. And you are not our Brothers.”
—ISÛPHIRYAS
Spring, 20 New Imperial Year (4132 Year-of-the-Tusk), The High Istyuli
The Company of Scions picked its way across the broad back of Eärwa. The days passed without any visible sign of having travelled whatsoever. They had been charged with trolling the grasslands to the southwest with the hope of finding game they could drive back to the Army of the Middle-North. They did not see so much as a hoofprint. They could scarce feed themselves as the days passed, let alone an army.
The Parching Wind continued to blow, kneading scalps and hair with warm fingers, hissing through the dead scrub that bristled the endless plate of the Istyuli. Even though they rode with purpose, it seemed they drifted, such was the expanse surrounding them. The land was devoid of track or direction and so vast that Sorweel often found himself hunching in his saddle—cringing in the dim way of bodily fears. He was bred to the plains, to open endless skies, and even still he felt shrunken, soft, and exposed. Men tend to forget the World’s true proportion, to think the paltry measure of their ambition can plumb the horizon. It is a genius of theirs. But some lands, by dint of monumental heights or sheer, stark emptiness, contradict this conceit, remind them that they are never so big as the obstacles the World might raise against them.