He slumped into himself, his head bowed like a galley slave chained about the neck. The fire of bones gleamed across the white of his bare scalp.
Achamian battled the scowl from his face. To embrace mystery was one thing, to render it divine was quite another. What the Nonman said sounded too like Kellhus, and too little like what Achamian knew of Nonmen mystery cults. Again he found himself contemplating the blasted complexion of the Erratic's Mark: Whomever he was, he was as powerful as he was old… With scarce thousands of Nonmen remaining, how could have Achamian not heard of him?
Incariol.
'If the dark truly is the God,' Sarl muttered through gravel. He squinted out at the black spaces with the leather of his face. 'I'd say we're in His almighty belly right about now…'
Throughout the entirety of Cleric's sermon, Lord Kosoter had continued sharpening his sword, as though he were the reaper who would harvest the Nonman's final meaning. At long last, he paused, stood to sheath his fish- silver blade. The fire lent him an infernal aspect, soaking his tattered battledress in crimson, gleaming across the plaits of his square beard and filling his eyes as surely as it filled the skulls at his feet.
A sparking air of expectancy-the Captain spoke so rarely it always seemed you heard his voice for the first vicious time.
But another sound spoke in his stead. Thin, as if carried on a thread, exhausted by echoes…
The shell of a human sound. A man wailing, where no man should be.
Blinking in the bright light of another Bar of Heaven, the company fanned out over the vast expanse of the Repositorium, their shadows stretched as long as walking trees across the ashen floor before them.
The cry had trailed into nothingness almost as soon as it had appeared, leaving the company scrambling for their weapons and their feet. Everyone instinctively turned to Cleric seated upon his high stone dolmen. The Nonman had simply pointed into the blackness, perpendicular to the way they had originally come.
The seven youngest of the Skin Eaters remained with the mules, while the twenty-odd others struck out in the direction indicated by Cleric, swords drawn, shields raised. As unnerved as any of them, Achamian and Mimara took their place in the wide-walking line, their backs bathed in light, their faces in shadow. Galian and Pokwas moved to the right of them, while Sarl and the Captain advanced to their left. No one uttered a word, but walked, like Achamian, with ears so keen the silence seemed to roar. Drawn like tendons before them, their shadows were so black that their boots vanished into them with every step.
For almost an entire watch, they traversed an either-or world of light and dark, with a crevassed landscape for a ceiling and black-mouthed tombs for walls. The ancient lantern chains, though evenly spaced and sparely positioned, flayed the open spaces, forming curtains across the grim distances. And Achamian could not but think that here was an image of the Apocalypse that threatened them all.
Despite the brilliance of the light behind them, the darkness grew ever more bold. Soon they seemed a peculiar line of half-men, backs without bodies, moving as thin as branches waving in the wind. The dust that fogged their strides formed ethereal shadows across the lanes of light between them, like steam in low morning sun. Still no one spoke. Everyone held shield and sword at the ready.
And the mighty Repositorium gaped on and on.
When they found the man, he was kneeling in a desert plain of dust, his face raised to the glittering vision that was the now distant Bar of Heaven. The Skin Eaters formed a thin and wary circle about him, peering against the tricks of the gloom. Though his eyes were clearly open, he did not seem to see any of them. He was another scalper-the necklaces of teeth he wore atop his hauberk made that much plain. His skin was Ketyai dark, and his beard had been crudely plaited in the Conriyan fashion, though none of his gear seemed to hail from that nation. At first he seemed greased in pitch, so pale was the distant light. None of the Skin Eaters saw the crimson sheen until they were but several paces away.
'Blood.' Xonghis was the first to mutter. 'This man has battled…'
'Perimeter positions!' Sarl yelled to the astonished company. 'Move-move!'
The Skin Eaters scattered, their gear clanking as they raced to form a thin rank in the murk beyond the stranger. Achamian approached with the Captain and the others, holding Mimara a pace behind him with an outstretched arm. They gathered to either side of the man, standing so as not to obscure the light. Answering to some look or gesture from Lord Kosoter, Xonghis tossed his shield to the floor and knelt before the unknown scalper. Achamian stepped over the shield, glimpsing the three shrunken Sranc heads, joined at the chins, that adorned its centre. Where before he had pressed Mimara back, now he could feel her tugging on the back of his hide cloak, silently urging him to keep his distance. When he glanced back at her, she nodded toward the stranger, directing his gaze to the man's lap.
The scalper held on to a hand, its fingers cupped like dearly won gold between his palms…
A woman's severed hand.
'I've seen him before,' Kiampas said. 'He's one of the Picks. The Bloody Picks.'
The smeared face flinched at those words. For the first time, the dark eyes wandered from the Bar of Heaven, which rose incandescent on the ingrown horizon. He seemed to search the gaps between their leaning faces.
'Light…' the Pick whispered. He brought the severed hand to his cheek, closed his eyes, and swayed like a child. 'Didn't I promise you light?'
He shrunk from the fingers Xonghis placed on his shoulder. 'What happened?' the Imperial Tracker asked, the sternness of his tone somehow softened by the cadences of his Jekki accent. 'Where's your company?'
The man looked at him as though he were some kind of tragic intrusion. 'My company…' he repeated.
'Yes,' the Tracker said. 'The Bloody Picks. What happened to them? What happened to…'
Xonghis looked up to Kiampas, but it was Lord Kosoter who said, 'Captain Mittades.'
'Captain Mittades,' the Tracker repeated. 'What happened to him?'
The man began shaking. 'M-my-my-my…' he began, blinking his eyes with each stutter. 'M-m-m-my c-c- company?' The severed hand had sunk back to his lap.
'Yes. What happened?'
A look of incredulity stretched about rigid terror.
'My c-company? It was too-too-too-too dark-too dark to see the blood… You could only hear it!' His expression clenched at this, his lips pulled inward, as though he were suddenly toothless. 'He-he-hear it sucking at their feet as they ran, slapping the walls like little boy hands. Draining like piss… It was too daaaark!'
'Whose feet?' Sarl's saw-toothed voice broke in. 'Whose hands?'
'There's no light inside,' the man sobbed. 'Our skin. Our skin is too thick. It wraps-like a shroud-it keeps the blackness in. And my heart-my heart! — it looks and looks and it can't see!' A shower of spittle. 'There's nothing to see!'
Something wild and violent jerked through the man, as if he were a sack filled with rabid vermin. And in the light, it all seemed too stark, too obvious to the naked eye, the twitch and fracture of a man's breaking. His eyes rolling beneath a stationary film of reflected white. His face caped in black, the lines of his anguish bleeding ink this way and that. Even Xonghis leaned backward.
The stranger began rocking side to side. A kind of pained tooth-to-tooth grin broke his beard. 'In the dark there is always touch… you see?' He waved the severed hand in a bawling, loose-wristed manner. A thread of blood pattered across Mimara's tunic. 'I held on. I–I didn't l-l-let go! I held on. I held on. I held on. I h-he-held on!' His eyes ceased seeing anything illuminated, became so crazed as to seem painted. 'Gamarrah! Gamarrah! I got you! Don't let go. No-no, don't! Don't! Don't let go!'
Lord Kosoter stepped forward, stood so that his shadow blotted the Pick entirely. He pressed Xonghis to the side with his left hand.
'I held on!' the Pick shrieked.
As though breaking hard ground with a spade, the Captain plunged his sword down through the man's corselet, snapping one of the Sranc-teeth necklaces. He drove the point deep, from the man's clavicle to his belly. The Pick jerked and spasmed, shook like sodden cloth on a slave's drying-stick. The Captain wrenched his sword clear; the body fell backward, arms unrolling, its feet pinned beneath it. The severed hand rolled soundlessly through the dust. Of its own volition, the man's hand seemed to twitch and grope. Senseless fingertip touched senseless fingertip.
