The eating paused. The ring of faces turned to the young Nilnameshi, some screwed in mock outrage, others sporting skeptical grins.
With a guileless smile, Soma said, 'His boots fit as fine as my own!'
There was a moment of silence. Soma's jokes, Achamian had learned, generally occasioned a kind of communal trial and conviction, especially when he was trying to be funny. Heads were shaken. Eyes were rolled to heaven. Oxwora, the enormous Thunyeri with shrunken Sranc heads tangled in his shaggy mane, looked up from the glistening rib he had been gnawing, scowling as though his appetite had been ruined. Without a word he tossed the bone at the Nilnameshi. Either by fluke or by dint of grease, the thing slid rather than bounced from his head.
'Ox!' Somandutta cried with real anger, but in the harmless way of the long heckled. The giant grinned, his beard and moustache spackled with flecks of meat.
Suddenly the others were reaching to their feet, and a haphazard wave of bones peppered the hapless Nilnameshi, who held his arms out, cursing. He made as though to throw several back at this or that figure, but ended up joining the general laughter instead.
'Loot thy brother,' the Zeьmi said to Achamian in a there-you-have-it tone. The Sword-Dancer slapped his back. 'Welcome to the slog, Wizard!'
Achamian laughed and nodded, glanced out beyond the circle of illumined faces to the night-hooded world. It was no simple or mean thing, the companionship of killers.
Two days following his introduction to the Bitten, Achamian glimpsed Xonghis jogging along the outside of the trudging line from the rear. The others paid him no attention: He continually roamed while the others marched. Out of boredom more than anything, Achamian asked the man what was wrong, expecting something wry and cutting in reply. Instead, the Jekki slowed his pace to stride beside him. His short-sleeved tunic revealed a grappler's veined arms, brown beneath the reddish hint of sunburn. He was a lean, broad-shouldered man, with the aura of coiled reserve that seemed proper to a former Imperial Tracker.
'We're being followed,' he said in his odd accent.
'Followed?'
'Yes…' He seemed to weigh his own cryptic options. 'By a woman.'
Achamian nearly coughed, such was his alarm. 'Who else knows?'
The Tracker's almond-shaped eyes narrowed. His Xiuhianni blood was always more pronounced in open daylight. 'Moraubon and several of the Herd.'
'Moraubon?'
Suddenly Achamian was huffing and gasping, running back along the tangled verge of the trail. The parade of walking scalpers watched him pass with frowning curiosity. Then he was all alone on the trail, running down a boulder-stumped incline, away from the river and into the mute confines of the forest. Several moments passed before he heard the first hoot, a raw laughing call, filled with malice and the open-mouthed eagerness of men bent on rutting. He heard Moraubon shouting a few moments afterwards: instructions to the others racing across the forest floor. He heard a feminine shriek-no, not a shriek, a shrill cry of defiance and frustration.
The sorcerous words were already rumbling from his lips, through the essence of the encircling world, and he was climbing, not air, but the echoes of ground across the sky, up into the interweaving limbs. Branches lashed him as he broke through the canopy, then walked over the forest crown, each step swallowing a dozen cubits, tipping for the vertigo of looking down through the towering trees. He could see the pitch of the surrounding wilderness to the horizon, ridges like wandering fins, tributaries threading dark clefts with silver, mountains looming in white judgment. He saw men running, Skin Eaters, like the shadows of mice beneath meadow thatch. Then he saw her- Mimara-kicking and thrashing in the clutches of three men.
He stepped into their midst.
They had her pulled like living rope across the forest floor. Moraubon was kneeling between her legs, undoing his girdle and breeches. He seemed to be cooing and growling. He whirled to the sound of Achamian's sorcerous muttering…
Only to be blown tumbling, kicking up tailings of leaves. An Odaini Concussion Cant.
The other Skin Eaters cried out, scrambled back while tugging at their weapons. Through his rage, Achamian could feel something exult at this first violent exercise. Let them see! an inner voice cried. Let them know! His voice cracked out, soaked into the surrounding matter and steamed skyward, sourceless, all-encompassing. The Skin Eaters, including Moraubon, retreated in the safety of the great trunks.
The Compass of Noshainrau, an existential glitter, a line of sun-concentrated white, sweeping out like a flail from the axis of his upraised arm, sketching a perfect circle of destruction. Wood charred and exploded. Flame spilled like water across the ancient oaks, elms, and maples. Mountainous groans and creaks-a chorus-then the roar of mighty trees falling, a ring of them crashing into their stone-heavy cousins, chasing the Skin Eaters into the deeper shadows of the forest.
Achamian stood over her, bright in the sudden sunlight, showered by the twirling green of innumerable spring-early leaves. A Wizard draped in wolf skins. The bulk of once great trees lay heaped about them. Forked trunks and limbs gouged the ground beneath shags of greenery.
Mimara spat blood from her lips, tried to pull her torn leggings to her hips. She made a noise that might have been a sob or a laugh or both. She fell to her knees before him, her left thigh as bare and pale as a barked sapling. A laughing grimace. A glimpse of teeth soaked in blood.
'Teach me,' she said.
No words were spoken as they hastened back, Achamian fuming in the lead, Mimara shambling in her clutched clothing to keep up. They found the Skin Eaters standing in clots across slopes of earth between wain- sized molars of stone. The river arced and sprayed white beyond them, endlessly pounding the hillside. All eyes turned to them as they approached, lingered for a moment on Mimara's slight figure. Instinctively, Achamian held out his arm and drew her close to his chest. Together they pressed to the fore of the crowd.
They saw Moraubon, obviously winded, climb to Lord Kosoter where he stood, thumbs hooked in his war girdle, on the mottled back of a boulder. A confusion of vertical stone faces rose behind the Captain, crested with bracken and the odd suicidal tree. A great rooster tail of water spouted through the heart of the enclosure, kicked into foam by some powerful twist in the current. The cowled Nonman, Cleric, was nowhere to be seen.
The two men shared inaudible words, with Moraubon glancing at Mimara, as though to say, Look at her… The Captain remained absolutely motionless. Sarl glared at the Skin Eaters from immediately below.
'The one with the Chorae,' Mimara whispered, referring to Lord Kosoter. 'Who is he?'
Achamian found himself glancing down the line of warlike faces. 'Shush,' was all he said.
At first it seemed the Captain had simply reached out and seized Moraubon's chin-so casual was his movement. Achamian squinted, trying to understand the wrongness of the image: Lord Kosoter holding the man mere inches from his face, not so much looking into his eyes as watching… Achamian only glimpsed the knife jammed beneath the scalper's mandible when Lord Kosoter withdrew his hand.
Moraubon crumpled as if the Captain had ripped out his bones. Blood sheeted the boulder.
'Can anybody,' Sarl cried out over the river's white thunder, 'tell me what the rule is for peaches on the slog?'
'The Captain always gets the first bite,' Galian called solemnly.
'And what is it that has made us legends of the Wilds? What allows us to eat so much skin?'
'The Rules of the Slog!' a number of them shouted against the roar.
Not in reluctance, Achamian realized, but with dark affirmation. Even the Bitten, even those who had broken bread with the dead man on the boulder.
They're all mad.
Sarl reddened about his mock smile. His eyes became two more wrinkles creasing his face.
Without a glance at his sergeant, the Captain crouched in his ragged Ainoni finery, wiped his blade clean on Moraubon's sleeve. Then he fixed his gaze on Achamian and Mimara. He leapt from the boulder, his balance and bearing shockingly limber. Until that moment, he had seemed carved of living granite.
He strode up to the two of them.
'Who is she?'
'My daughter,' Achamian heard himself say.
