They fought the way Sranc fought.
The Mbimayu sorcerer saw entire streets carpeted in bodies. He saw several rapes, the victims either vacant or shrieking, and more summary executions than he cared to count. He saw a pale-skinned Columnary holding a squalling babe in one arm while trying to battle two laughing Kianene with the other. He saw an old man jumping from a rooftop, his clothing afire.
Perhaps glimpsing something of his dismay, Fanayal was at pains to describe the atrocities suffered by his own people during the First Holy War and the subsequent Wars of Unification. A kind of madness warbled through his outrage as he spoke, condemnation spoken in the tones of divine revelation, as if nothing could be more right and true than the slaughter and rapine about them. The Bloodthirsty Excuse, the sage Memgowa had called it. Retribution.
“But there is more to this than crude vengeance,” Fanayal explained, as if suddenly recalling the learning of the man he addressed. The Padirajah was proud of his own youthful education, Malowebi knew, but found the posture difficult to recover after decades of brutality and fugitive insurrection. “You make an example of the first,” the man continued, “then you show mercy to the second. First, you teach them to fear you, then you earn their trust. Nirsi shal’tatra, we call it. The Honey and the Goad.”
Malowebi could not but reflect on how easily the whip and the honey became confused. Everywhere they rode, the Kianene turned from their sordid labours and called out to their lord in exultation and gratitude—cheered as if famished guests at a sumptuous feast.
Savages, Cousin. You have sent me out among savages.
Something, Malowebi’s silence, perhaps, convinced the Bandit Padirajah to cut their tour short. They reversed direction, rode for what seemed an entire watch plagued by the sound of a babe crying—Malowebi could almost believe someone followed them torturing a cat. Silence haunted the empty windows. Smoke sheeted the west in gauze rags, lending an eerie, watery timbre to the sunlight that slanted across the dying city. Finally they returned to the wrack and ruin of the city’s northwestern walls—the section brought down by Meppa.
Once again, Malowebi found himself gawking.
“It frightens you, no?” Fanayal said, watching his profile. “The spilling of the Water.”
“What do you mean?”
The Padirajah graced him with an upside-down smile. “I’ve been told that Schoolmen find the Cishaurim Psûkhe troubling. You see a violation with your mundane eyes—the glare of sorcery—when your other eye, the one that itches, sees only mundane creation.”
Malowebi shrugged, thinking of the brief dual between Meppa and the lone Saik sorcerer—a decrepit and dishevelled old man—who had defended the hapless city. The rogue Cishaurim floating, impervious to the fire of the Schoolman’s Anagogic dragonhead, disgorging cataracts of blue-twinkling light as pure as it was beautiful. As awesome as Meppa’s power had been—there was no doubting he was a Primary—it had been the beauty that had most astounded, and mortified, the Second Negotiant.
To be a sorcerer was to dwell among deformities.
“It is extraordinary,” Malowebi admitted, “to see the Work without the Mark.” He smiled the wise and slippery smile of an old diplomat. “But we Schoolmen are accustomed to miracles.”
He said this last more in bitter jest than anything. What he witnessed had left many profound impressions. The power of Meppa, certainly. The martial acumen of the Padirajah. The cunning and the bravery of the Fanim, not to mention their barbarity …
But nothing loomed so large as the weakness of the New Empire.
The rumours were absolutely true: the Aspect-Emperor had boned his conquests to pursue his mad invasion of the northern wilds. Disaffected populations. Ill-equipped soldiers, poorly trained and even more poorly led. Infirm and doddering Schoolmen. And perhaps most interestingly, absolutely no Chorae …
Nganka—nay, Zeüm—needed to be informed. This night would be filled with far-calling dreams.
“The people call him Stonebreaker,” Fanayal said. “Meppa … They say he was sent to us by the Solitary God.”
Malowebi turned to him, blinking.
“What do you say?”
“I say he was sent to me!” the hawk-faced Padirajah cried laughing. “I am the Solitary God’s gift to his people.”
“And what does he say?” the Second Negotiant asked, now genuinely curious.
“Meppa? He does not know who he is.”
CHAPTER
SIX
The Meorn Wilderness
Everything is concealed always. Nothing is more trite than a mask.
—AJENCIS, THE THIRD ANALYTIC OF MEN
If you find yourself taken unawares by someone you thought you knew, recall that the character revealed is as much your own as otherwise. When it comes to Men and their myriad, mercenary natures, revelation always comes in twos.
—MANAGORAS, ODE TO THE LONG-LIVED FOOL
Late Spring, 20 New Imperial Year (4132 Year-of-the-Tusk), the “Long Side”
It tracked their blundering flight through the Wilderness. It watched and it hungered and it hated …
How it hated.
It remained in the trees for the most part, running with glee along the dead limbs of the under-canopy. It fed on squirrels, eaten raw, and once upon a wildcat that had tried to feed on it. It supped on the mewling litter afterward, laughed at their miniature hisses and struggles. Their tiny skulls cracked like delicacies.
Days. Weeks.
Over gnarled miles, through rain falling in sheeted fury. It watched them trudge and it watched them sleep. It watched them feud and bicker. Three times it saw them battle the errant children of the Old Fathers, the Sranc, and it crouched, its eyes wide and wondering as tangles of sorcerous light and shadow fluttered through the forest’s mangled depths.
And sometimes it dared crawl close, like a serpent worming toward prey. Grinding its phallus against hoary bark, it would watch her, the girl who had saved them in the ancient-old deeps. And it would know lust, malice. It would gaze with a singularity unknown to Men.
The thing called Soma.
Each night it sought some tree greater than the others, a tower among lesser pillars, and it climbed, leaping and swinging through the canopies, from dead to living, following fork and branch to the wiry limit, until it breached the final leafy weave. There, gently creaking side to side in the breeze, it stared across an ocean of arboreal crowns.
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. Wi
th 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 undercanopy 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 the 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 o
ld 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.”