She has the sense of things bending.
The World is old and miraculous and is filled with a deep despair that none truly know. The Nonman, Mimara has come to understand, is proof of this.
“There was a time,” he says, “when the world shook to the stamping chorus of our march …”
Dusk rolls the plain’s farther reaches into darkness and gloom. The wind buffets, hard enough to prickle with grit. Thunderheads scrawl across the sky, dark and glowing with internal discharges, but rainless save for the odd warm spit.
The Nonman stands before them, naked to the waist, one held in the eyes of ten. His hairless form is perfect in cast and proportion, the very image of manly grace and strength, a statue in a land without sculptors.
“There was such a time…”
Thunder rolls across the mocking skies, and the scalpers crane their gazes this way and that. It alarms the soul, thunder on the plain. The eyes turn to shelter when the heavens crack, and plains are naught but the absence of shelter, exposure drawn on and on across the edge of the horizon. The plains offer no place to hide—only directions to run.
“A time when we,” Cleric says, “when we!—were many, and when these depravities—these skinnies—were few. There was a time when your forefathers wept at the merest rumour of our displeasure, when you offered up your sons and daughters to turn aside our capricious fury!”
She cannot yank her gaze from him—Incariol. He is a mystery, a secret that she must know, if she and Achamian were to be saved. His aspect has become a compulsion for her, like a totem or even an idol: something that rewards the ardour of its observation.
“The most foolish among us,” Cleric continues, “has forgotten more than your wisest will ever know. Even your Wizard is but a child stumbling in his father’s boots. You are but twig-thin candles, burning fast and bright, revealing far more than your span allows you to fathom.”
He bends back his head until the line of his jaw forms a triangle above the banded muscle of his neck. He shouts heavenward, mouthing words that pool blue and brilliant white … Then, miraculously, he steps into the sky, arms out, rising until the clouds become a kind of mantle about his shoulders, a windblown cloak of smoke and warring, interior lights.
“But now look at us,” he booms down to their astonished shadows. “Diminished. Perpetually foundering. Lost without memories. Persecuted as false. Hunted by the very depths we warred to uncover, the very darkness we sought to illuminate.”
He hangs above them. He lowers his radiant gaze. His tears burn silver with refracted light. Thunder crashes, a thousand hammers against a thousand shields.
“This is the paradox—is it not? The longer you live, the smaller you become. The past always dwarfs the present, even for races as fleeting as yours. One morning you awaken to find now … this very moment … little more than a spark in a cavern. One morning you awaken to find yourself so much … less …”
Incariol, she thinks. Ishroi …
“Less than what you wanted. Less than what you once were.”
She is in love, she realizes. Not with him, but with the power and wonder of what he was.
“One day you, who have never been mighty or great, will ask where the glory has gone. Failing strength. Failing nerve. You will find yourself faltering at every turn, and your arrogance will grow brittle, defensive. Perhaps you will turn to your sons and their overshadowed ardour. Perhaps you will seal yourself in your mansion, as we did, proclaiming contempt for the world rather than face its cruel measure …”
She is more in his presence, she decides. She will always be more, whether he flees or dies or utterly loses himself in the disorder that is his soul. For knowing him … Cleric.
“One day you, who have never been mighty or great, will peer through the maze of your depleted life, and see that you are lost …”
He abandons his mantle of clouds, sinking as though on a wire. He sets foot upon powder-dry earth.
Mimara leans forward with the Wizard and the other scalpers. Their mouths hang slack with drool.
“Lost like us,” he murmurs, reaching for the wonder that hides in his pouch.
The thunderheads continue their march into the obscurity of night.
The rain, as always, refuses to fall.
Cil-Aujas, she decides. Something broke in Cil-Aujas. Something between them, something within. And now sanity is abandoning them, drip by lucid drip.
There’s a new Rule of the Slog, and even though it has never been spoken, Mimara knows with utter certainty that violators will be punished as lethally as all the others. A rule that ensuites no mention shall be made of the madness slowly possessing them.
No questions. No doubters on the slog.
The extraordinary thing about insanity, she has come to realize, is the way it seems so normal. When she thinks of the way the droning days simply drop into their crazed, evening bacchanals, nothing strikes her as strange—nothing visceral, anyway. Things that should make her shudder, like the nip of Cleric’s nail as his finger roams the inside of her cheek, are naught but part of a greater elation, as unremarkable as any other foundation stone.
It is only when she steps back and reflects that the madness stares her plain in the eye.
“He’s killing you …” the thing called Soma had said. “The Nonman.”
She finds herself drifting to the rear of their scattered mob and approaching Sarl, thinking that someone wholly broken might know something about the cracks now riddling their souls. According to the old Wizard, the Sergeant has known Lord Kosoter since the Unification Wars—a long time, as far as life is measured by scalpers. Perhaps he can decipher the skin-spy’s riddle.
“The Slog of Slogs,” she says lamely, not knowing where to begin with a madman. “Eh, Sarl?”
The others have long since abandoned him to his crazed musings. No one dares glance at him, for fear of sparking some kind of rambling tirade. For weeks she has expected, and a couple of times even hoped, that the Captain would silence him. But no matter how long his harsh voice rattles on into the night, nothing is done, nothing is said.
Sarl, it seems, is the lone exception to the Rules.
“She talks to me,” he says, staring off to her right as if she were a phantasm that had plagued his ruminations too long to be directly addressed. “The second most beautiful thing …”
He was easily one of the most wrinkled men she had ever seen when she first saw him. Now his skin is as creased as knotted linen. His tunic has rotted to rags, his hauberk swings unfastened from his knobbed shoulders, and his kilt has somehow lost its backside, baring withered buttocks to open daylight.
“Tell me, Sergeant. How long have you known the Captain?”
“The Captain?” The hoary old man wags a finger, shaking his head in cackling reproach. “The Captain, is it? He-heeee! There’s no explanation for the likes of him. He’s not of this world!”
She flinches at the volume of his voice, reflexively lowers her own tone to compensate.
“How so?”
He shudders with silent laughter. “Sometimes souls get mixed up. Sometimes the dead bounce! Sometimes old men awaken behind the eyes of babes! Sometimes wolves …”
“What are you saying?”
“Don’t cross him,” he rasps with something like conspiratorial glee. “He-he! Oh, no, girl. Never cross him!”
“But he’s such a friendly fellow!” Mimara cries.
He catches her joke but seems to entirely miss the humour. So much of his laughter possesses the dull hollow of reflex. More and more he seems to make the sound of laughter without laughing at all …
And suddenly she can feel it, the lie that has been burrowing through all of them, like a grub that devours meaning and leaves only motions. Laughter without humour. Breath without taste. Words said in certain sequences to silence words unsaid—words that must never be said.
Her whole life she has lived some kind of lie. Her whole life she has charted her course about some con
tradiction, knowing yet not knowing, and erring time and again.
But this lie is different. This lie somehow eludes the pain of those other lies. This lie carves the world along more beautiful joints.
This lie is bliss.
She needs only look to the others to see they know this with the same deathless certainty. Even Sarl, who had long since fled the world’s teeth, content to trade fancy for mad fancy, seems to understand that something … false … is happening.
“And Cleric … How did you fall in with him?”
There’s something about the Sergeant’s presence that winds her. His gait is at once vigorous and wide, his arms swinging out like a skinny man pretending to be fat.
“Found him,” he says.
“Found him? How? Where?”
Mischief twinkles in his gaze.
“Found him like a coin in the dirt!”
“But where? How?”
“After we took Carythusal, when they disbanded the Eastern Zaudunyani … they sent us north to Hûnoreal, he-he!”
“Sent you? Who sent you?”
“The Ministrate. The Holies. Stack skinnies, they said. Haul the bales and keep the gold—they don’t care about gold, the Holies. Just stay on the southeastern marches of Galeoth, they said. Nowhere else? No. No. Just there …”
This confuses her. She has always thought that scalpers were volunteers.
“But what about Cleric?” she presses. “Incariol …”
“Found him!” he explodes with a phlegmatic roar. “Like a coin in the dirt!”
More eyes have turned to them, and she suddenly feels conspicuous—even guilty in a strange way. Aside from other madmen, only thieves trade jokes with madmen—as a way of playing them. Even the old Wizard watches her with a quizzical squint.
Simply talking to the man has compromised her, she realizes. The others now know that she’s seeking something … The Captain knows.
“The Slog of Slogs,” she says lamely. “They’ll sing songs across the Three Seas, Sergeant—think on it! The Psalm of the Skin Eaters.”
The old man begins weeping, as though overwhelmed by the charity of her self-serving words.
“Seju bless you, girl,” he coughs, staring at her with bleary, blinking eyes. For some reason he has started limping, as if his body has broken with his heart.
Suddenly he smiles in his furrow-faced way, his eyes becoming little more than deeper perforations in his red-creased face. “It’s been lonely,” he croaks through rotted teeth.
They see the plume of dust shortly after breaking camp. It rises chalk-white and vertical before being drawn into a mountainous, spectral wing by the wind. The plains pile to the north in desiccated sheets, some crumpled, others bent into stumps and low horns. The plumb line of the horizon has been raised and buckled, meaning some time will pass before the authors of the plume become visible. So they continue travelling with a wary eye to the north. Mimara hears Galian and Pokwas muttering about Sranc. The company has yet to encounter any since crossing into the Istyuli, so it stands to reason.
The plume waxes and wanes according to unseen terrain but grows ever nearer. The Captain barks no instructions, even when the first of the specks appear crawling across the back of a distant knoll.
Hands held against the spiking sun, they peer into the distance.
Riders. Some forty or fifty of them—just enough to defend themselves against a single clan of skinnies. A motley assemblage of caste-menials, wearing crude hauberks of splint over stained tunics of blue and gold. Their beards hang to their waists, sway to the canter of their ponies. They ride beneath a standard she has never seen before, though she recognizes the checkered black shields of Nangaelsa.
“Nangaels,” she says aloud. “They’re Tydonni.”
The Wizard hushes her with an angry glance.
The Great Ordeal, she realizes. At long last they have crawled into its mighty shadow …
A kind of trembling anticipation suffuses her, as if she has stumbled into the gaze of something monstrous with power. And she wonders when she became terrified of her stepfather, when for so long he seemed the only sane voice, the only understanding soul.
“A lost patrol?” Galian asks.
“Supply cohort,” Xonghis says with authority. “They must have abandoned their wains.”
Even though they can see the approaching riders discussing and debating them, the Skin Eaters remain silent. They have outrun civilization, these men, so far and for so long they no longer need fatuous words to bind them.
The Nangael commander is a greybeard with a long, craggy face and a low, prominent brow. His left arm hangs in a sling. The Captain gestures for Galian to accompany him. The two men walk out several paces to greet the nearing man.
The aging officer does them the courtesy of dismounting, as do the two riders nearest him. But his eyes linger on Cleric for several heartbeats. He does not like the looks of him.
“Tur’il halsa brininausch virfel?” the officer calls.
“Tell him we don’t speak gibberish,” the Captain instructs the former Columnary.
Mimara looks to the old Wizard, suddenly afraid. He wags his head almost imperceptibly, as if warning her against anything rash.
“Manua’tir Sheyarni?” Galian calls back.
The Nangaels are sunburned and travel-worn, their kilts frayed, the lines of their faces inked in sweat-blackened dust. But the contrast between them and her companions horrifies Mimara. The scalpers’ clothing has been reduced to black rags, waxy with filth. Conger’s tunic has all but disintegrated into shags of foul string. They look like things that should shamble … like things dead.
The officer comes to a halt before the two men. He is Tydonni tall, but stooped with years, so that he seems of a height with Lord Kosoter. The Captain seems more shade than man in his presence. “Who are you?” he asks in passable Sheyic.
“Skin Eaters,” Galian says simply.
“Scalpers? This far? How is that possible?”
“The skinnies were mobbing. We had no choice but to flee northwest.”
A moment of canny blankness dulls the officer’s eyes.
“Unlikely.”
“Yes,” the Captain says.
He pulls his knife, thrusts it into the man’s eye socket. “Unlikely.”
The body slumps forward. Cries rifle the arid sky, and somehow Mimara knows the commander was beloved. The men to either side of the officer stumble back in horror. Lord Kosoter glares and grins, his knife braced against his right thigh. His eyes shine above the tangled fury of his teeth and beard. Weapons are drawn in the clamour. Beneath shouts of alarm and outrage, a different voice strums the strings of a different world …
Cleric is singing.
He stands pale and bare-chested. Brilliance glares through the apertures of his face. He reaches out, his hands crooked into empty claws. Lariats of white light scribble across the rear of the ragtag column …
The Seventh Quyan Theorem—or something resembling it.
Shrieks, both equine and human. The glimpse of shadows in high sunlight. Men are thrown. Horses roll and thrash, kicking up clouds of dust. Mimara sees a man on his knees screaming. At first he’s little more than a shadow in the dust, but by some miracle a tunnel of clarity opens through the sheets. He howls, his beard aflame beneath scalded cheeks.
Then the battle crashes over her.
Nangael war-cries wrack the air. The nearest Tydonni kick their ponies forward, shields braced, broadswords swinging high. The scalpers meet their charge with eerie calm. They step around the hurtling forms, hacking riders, stringing horses. Pokwas leaps, pivoting to the weight of his great tulwar. A pony blunders into exploding dust. A rider’s head spins high, then falls, trailing its beard like a comet. Xonghis ducks between charging Tydonni, gores a thigh. The Captain draws another in an elusive half-circle before lunging high to pierce the man’s throat. The wretch falls backward, is dragged choking from his right stirrup.
Chaos and o
bscurity. Figures emerge then vanish into the tan fog. Sorcerous light flickers and glows, like lightning in clouds. An injured Nangael lurches out of the curtained madness, a cudgel raised in a bloody fist. Mimara is astonished to find Squirrel in her hand, bright and sharp. His face is blank with mortal determination. He swings at her, but she easily ducks to one side, scores the inside of his forearm to the bone. He roars and wheels, his beard pendulous for blood. But the cudgel slips from his hand—she has cut him to the tendon. He leaps to tackle, but again she is too nimble. She steps aside, brings Squirrel flashing down, chops the back of his neck. He drops like a nerveless sack.
The clamour fades. The dust is drawn up and out like milk spilled into a stream. The scalpers stand in what should have been gasping disbelief but more resembles blinking curiosity. The fog clears, revealing chalked figures crawling or writhing across the parched grasses. They have tar for blood.
Mimara gazes at the man she has killed. He lies motionless on his stomach, blinking as he suffocates. The tattoo of a small Circumfix graces his left temple. She cannot bring herself to end his suffering the way the others do. She turns away, blinking at the dust, looking for Achamian ….
She finds him several paces from Koll, who stands exactly as he had before the battle began, his sword still hanging from the string that creases his forehead. She tries to secure the Wizard’s gaze, but he’s peering somewhere beyond her, squinting into the distance.
“No,” Achamian croaks, as though jarred from a profound stupor. “No!”
At first Mimara thinks he refers to the murder of innocents before them, but then she realizes that his gaze follows the escaping riders. She can scarce see them for the dust—some eight or nine men, riding hard for the north.
“Noooooo!”
Gnostic words rumble out from all directions, as if spoken with the sky’s own lungs. Bluish light flares from the Wizard’s eyes and mouth … Meaning—unholy meaning. He steps out into the open sky, climbing across spectral ground. Wild, hoary, old—he seems a doll of rags flung high against the distance.