ruthless so much as they were vicious. They were not hard so much as they were numb. And they were not driven so much as they were hungry.
They were, in the end, mercenaries… albeit ones touched by the gibbering ferocity of the Sranc.
Lord Kosoter seemed to acknowledge as much over the course of the rate glances Achamian exchanged with him. It was a bond between them, Achamian realized, their shared experiences of the First Holy War. They alone possessed the measuring stick, they alone knew the rule. And it had made them kinsmen of a sort a thought that at once awed and troubled Achamian.
During that night's obligatory revels, Sarl approached him. 'The Captain has asked me,' he said, 'to remind you these men are Scalpoi. Nothing more. Nothing less. The legend of the Skin Eaters resides in him.'
Achamian thought it strange, a man who despised speaking confiding in a man who could do nothing else. 'And you? You believe this?'
The same eye-pinching grin. 'I've been with the Captain since the beginning,' he cackled. 'From before the Imperial Bounty, in the wars against the Orthodox. I've seen him stand untouched in a hail of arrows, while I cringed behind my shield. I was at his side on the walls of Meigeiri, when the fucking Longbeards fell over themselves trying to flee from his blood-maddened gaze. I was there, after the battle of Em'famir. With these two ears I heard the Aspect-Emperor-the Aspect-Emperor! — name him Ironsoul!' Sarl laughed with purpling mania. 'Oh, yes, he's mortal, to be sure. He's a man like other men, as many an unfortunate peach has discovered, believe you me. But something watches him, and more important, something watches through him…'
Sarl seized Achamian's elbow, smashed his wine-bowl into Achamian's hard enough to shatter both. 'You would do well…' he said, a mad blankness on his face. He eased backward step by unreal step, nodding as though to a tune or a truth that only rats could hear, 'to respect the Captain.'
Achamian looked down to his soaked hand. The wine had run from his fingers as thick as blood.
To think he had worried about the Nonman's madness.
The presence of the Erratic concerned Achamian, to be sure, but on so many levels that the resulting anxieties seemed to cancel one another out. And he had to admit, aside from the bardic romance of a Nonman companion, there was a tremendous practical advantage to his presence. Achamian had few illusions about the odyssey that confronted them. It was a long and bitter war they were about to undertake as much as it was an expedition, a protracted battle across the breadth of Eдrwa. He had much to learn regarding this Incariol, true, but there were few powers in the world that could rank a Nonman Magi.
Lord Kosoter kept him close for good reason.
At the ensuing muster the following morning, only some thirty or so Skin Eaters reported-half the number of those assembled the previous day. Lord Kosoter remained as inscrutable as ever, but Sarl seemed overjoyed, though it was unclear whether it was because so many or so few had 'cleaved to the slog,' as he put it. The defections may have halved his chances of survival, but they also had doubled the value of his shares.
With the composition of the company decided, the following days were dedicated to outfitting and supplying the expedition. Achamian quite willingly surrendered what remained of his gold, a gesture that seemed to impress the Skin Eaters mightily. The fortune spent seemed to speak of the far greater fortune to be made-even Sarl joined in the general enthusiasm. It was ever the same: Convince a man to take a single step-after all, what earthly difference could one step make? — and he would walk the next mile to prove himself right.
How could they know Achamian had no expectation of return? In a sense, leaving the Three Seas was the real return. He might no longer be a Mandate Schoolman, but his heart belonged to the Ancient North all the same. To the coiling insinuations of the Dreams…
To Seswatha.
'It is always like this,' Kiampas told him one evening at the Cocked Leg. The two of them had been sitting side by side wordlessly eating while the trestle before them boomed and cackled with revelling Skin Eaters-Sarl in the celebratory thick of them.
'Before going on a slog?' Achamian asked.
Kiampas paused to suck at the tip of a rabbit bone. He shrugged.
'Before anything,' he said, glancing up from the carcass scattered across his plate. There seemed to be genuine sorrow in his look, the regret of kings forced to condemn innocents in the name of appeasing the masses. 'Anything involving blood.'
Weariness broke across the Wizard, as if a consciousness of years were an integral part of understanding the man's meaning. He turned to the illuminated tableau of scalpers before them: nodding, leaning, shaking with laughter, and, with the exception of Sarl and a few others, brash with rude youth. For the first time, Achamian felt the cumulative weight of all the lies he had told, as though the prick of each had been tallied in lead. How many would die? How many would he use up in his quest to learn the truth of the man-god whose profile graced all the coins they so coveted?
How many pulses had he sacrificed?
Are you doing this for the sake of vengeance? Is that it?
Guilt palmed his gaze toward the incidental background, toward those untouched by his machinations. Across the haze of the room's central hearth, he saw Haubrezer watching the Skin Eaters as well. When he realized that Achamian had seen him, the thin man jerked to his feet, then lurched through the door, his wrists paddling the air with every loping step.
Achamian thought of the innkeep's warning. 'Stand aside for the Skin Eaters,' he had said.
They strike you down but good.
'I have built a place,' the High-King said.
It was strange, the way Achamian knew he dreamed, and the way he knew it not at all, so that he lived this moment as a true now, as something unthought, unguessed, unbreathed, as Seswatha, speaking with another man's selfsame spontaneity, every heartbeat counting out a unique existence, veined and clothed and clotted with urgent and indolent passion. It was strange, the way he paused at the forks of the moment and made ancient decisions…
How could it be? How could he feel all the ferment of a free soul? How could he live a life for the first time over and over?
Seswatha leaned over a small table set between glowering tripods. Snake-entwined wolves danced in a bronze rim around the lip of each, so that the light cast by their flames was fretted by struggling shadows. It made staring at the benjuka plate and its occult patterns of stone pieces difficult. Achamian suspected his old friend had done this deliberately. Benjuka, after all, with its infinite relationships and rule-changing rules, was a game of prolonged concentration.
And no man loathed losing more than Anasыrimbor Celmomas.
'A place,' Achamian repeated.
'A refuge.'
Seswatha frowned, bent his gaze up from the plate.
'What do you mean?'
'In case the war… goes wrong.'
This was uncharacteristic. Not the worry, for indecision riddled Celmomas to the core, but the worry's expression. Back then, no one save the Nonmen of Ishterebinth understood the stakes of the war that embroiled them. Back then, 'apocalypse' was a word with a different meaning.
Achamian nodded in Seswatha's slow and deliberate way. 'You mean the No-God,' he said with a small laugh-a laugh! Even for Seswatha, that name had been naught but a misgiving, more abstraction than catastrophe.
How did one relive such ancient ignorance?
Celmomas's long and leonine face lay blank, indifferent to the geography of pieces arranged between them. The totem braided into his beard-a palm-sized countenance of a wolf cast in gold-seemed to pant and loll in the uncertain light.
'What if this… this thing… is as mighty as the Quya say? What if we are too late?'
'We are not too late.'
Silence fell upon them as in a tomb. There was something subterranean about all the ancillary chambers of the Annexes, but none more so, it seemed, than the Royal Suites. No matter how thick the decorative plaster, no
