thighs.
He felt the flare of dwindled memory, the twitch of old, life-preserving habits, no less prudent for becoming vestigial. He gripped the pommel of his knife beneath his cloak.
He passed the lightless Custom House with its threadbare Circumfix hanging slack in the windless gloom. Marrow was an outpost of the New Empire-it wouldn't do to forget that. He passed a lazaret with its aura of astringent, feces, and infection. He passed a low-raftered opium den, as well as several booming taverns and two half-tented brothels, oozing moans and mercantile giggles into the general night. He even happened upon a wooden post-and-lintel temple to Yatwer, filled with chimes and chants-some evening ceremony, Achamian supposed. All the while the cataract whooshed and rumbled, the motionless blast of water against stone. Clear beads dripped from the rim of his cowl.
He tried not to think of the girl. Mimara.
By the time he found the inn Geraus had mentioned, the Cocked Leg, he was almost accustomed to the uproar. Marrow, he decided while leading his mule into the rear courtyard, was not so different from the great polyglot cities of his youth. More vicious, roughed in timber instead of monumental stone, and lacking the size that allowed indifference and mass anonymity to congeal into urban tolerance-there was no unspoken agreement to overlook one another's perversions here. Anyone could be judged at any moment. But even still, it possessed the same sense of possibility, accidental and collective, humming across every public threshold, as though the congregation of strangers was all it took to generate alternatives…
Freedom.
A night in such a place could have a million endings, Achamian realized. That was its wonder and horror both.
A night in Marrow.
The room was small. The woollen bedding reeked of mould and must. The innkeeper had not liked the looks of him, that much was certain. Show the pauper to the pauper's room-that was the ancient rule. Nevertheless, Achamian found himself smiling as he doffed his dripping cloak and squared his supplies and belongings. It seemed he had set out for Marrow a sleeping hermit and had arrived an awakening spy.
This was good, he told himself as he followed the stairs and halls toward the thunder of the Cocked Leg's common room. Most auspicious. Now all he required was some luck.
He grinned in anticipation, did his best to ignore the bloody handprints decorating the wall.
Achamian's adventurous mood evaporated as soon as he pressed his way into the smoky, low-timbered room. The shock nearly struck him breathless, so long had it been since he had last observed other men with his arcane eyes. There was another sorcerer here-an old and accomplished one given the black and blasted depth of his Mark-sitting in the far corner. And there was someone carrying a Chorae as well. A cursed Tear of God, so-called because its merest touch destroyed sorcerers and their desecrations.
Of course, he could see the Mark whenever he looked to his own hands or glimpsed his reflection in sitting water, but it was like his skin, something too near to he truly visible. Seeing its eye-twisting stain on another- especially after so many years immersed in the clarity of the Uncreated, the World as untouched by sorcerers and their blasphemous voices-made him feel… young.
Young with fear.
Turning his back on the presence, Achamian made his way to the barkeep, whom he easily recognized from his slave's description. According to Geraus, his name was Haubrezer, one of the three Tydonni brothers who owned the Cocked Leg. Achamian bowed his head, even though he had yet to see anyone observing jnan since arriving here. 'My name is Akka,' he said.
'Ya,' the tall, stork-skinny man replied. His voice wasn't so much deep as it was dark. 'You the old pick. This no land for the slow and crooked, ya know.'
Achamian feigned an old man's baffled good humour. It seemed absurd that the venerable Norsirai slur for Ketyai, 'pick,' could still sting after so many years.
'My slave, Geraus, said you could assist me.'
Coming to Marrow had always been the plan-as had hiring a company of Scalpoi. Mimara had simply forced him to abbreviate his timetable, to begin his journey before knowing his destination. Her coming had rattled him in more ways than he cared to admit-the suspicions, the resemblance to her mother, the pointed questions, their sad coupling-but the consequences of her never coming would have been disastrous.
At least now he knew why Fate had sent her to him-as a boot in the rump.
'Yaa,' Haubrezer brayed. 'Good man, Geraus.' A searching look, rendered severe by the angularity of his face. He struck Achamian as one of those men whose souls had adapted to the peculiarities of their body. Stooped and long-fingered, mantislike both in patience and predatoriness. He did not hunt, Achamian decided, so much as he waited.
'Indeed.'
Haubrezer stared with an almost bovine relentlessness-bored to tears, yet prepared to die chewing his cud. The man seemed to have compensated for his awkwardness by slowing everything down, including his intellect. Slowness had a way of laying out the grace that dwelt in all things, even the most ungainly. It was the reason why proud drunks took care to walk as though under water.
At last, the large eyes blinked in conclusion. 'Ya. The ones you look for…' He lowered his veined forehead toward the back corner, on the far side of the smoking central hearth.
Toward the sorcerer and the Chorae that Achamian had sensed upon entering the common room.
But of course…
'Are you sure?'
Haubrezer kept his head inclined, though it seemed that he stared at his eyebrows rather than the grim- talking shadows beyond the smoke.
'Ho. No mean Scalpoi, those. They the Veteran's Men. The Skin Eaters.'
'The Skin Eaters?'
A sour grin, as though the man had been starved of the facial musculature needed to pull his lips from his teeth. 'Geraus was right. You hermit, to be sure. Ask anyone here around'-he gestured wide with a scapular hand-'they will tell you, ya, step aside for the Skin Eaters. Famed. The whole River know. They bring down more bales than rutta-anyone. Ho. Step aside for the Skin Eaters, or they strike you down. Hauza kup. Down but good.'
Achamian leaned back to appraise what suddenly seemed more a hostile tribe than another alehouse trestle. Though all the other long-tables were packed, the three men Haubrezer referred to sat alone, neither rigid nor at their ease, yet with a posture that suggested an intense inward focus, a violent disregard for matters not their own. The image of them wavered in the sparked air above the hearth: the first-the bearer of the Chorae-with the squared-and-plaited beard of an Ainoni or a Conriyan; the second with long white hair, a goatee, and a weather- pruned face; and the broad-shouldered third-the sorcerer-cowled in black-beaten leather.
Achamian glanced back up at Haubrezer. 'Do I require an introduction?'
'Not from the likes of me.'
An acute sensitivity to his surroundings beset Achamian while crossing the common room, which for him amounted to a kind of bodily awareness of some imminent undertaking-some reckless leap. He winced at the odour of sweat festering in leather. The outer thunder of the Long-Braid Falls shivered through air and timber alike, so that the room seemed a motionless bubble in a torrent. And the guttural patois everyone spoke-a kind of mongrel marriage of Gallish and Sheyic-struck him with an ancient and impossible taste: the First Holy War, twenty long years gone by.
He thought of Kellhus and found his resolution rekindled.
The pulse of a fool…
Achamian had no illusions about the men he was about to meet. The New Empire had signalled the end of the once lucrative mercenary trade, but it did not signal the end of those willing to kill for compensation. He had spent the greater part of his life in the proximity of such men-in the company of those who would think him weak. He had long ago learned how to mime the proper postures, how to redress the defects of the heart with the advantages of intellect. He knew how to treat with such men-or so he thought.
