'Now picture you and the Point walking together. Hold fast that image. It'll be trying at first, but with practice it'll become thoughtless, like any other reflex.'
Her gaze fell blank to his wool-covered chest. Without prompting, she took two steps, her eyes climbing in upward astonishment to watch the glaring light track her move for move. She looked back about to laugh, only to stub her toe against some dust-furred detritus. She grinned as she snatched back her balance. Her shadow bloomed and compressed beneath her.
'Hurry,' he said. 'Catch the others.'
She made no secret of her disgust as she strode past the sergeant, walking like a slave with an amphora poised atop her head. Then she began trotting down the path the others had sloughed through the dust.
And she glowed, the old Wizard thought, not only against the stalking black, but against so many memories of harm.
Achamian followed her as far as Sarl. The man stood slightly humped beneath the weight of his pack, the straps of which had bunched folds of mail across the front of his hauberk. Standing so close to him reminded Achamian of the dead Pick, the heart, and the knowledge that they were not alone in these black-bowel deeps. Mimara's light was fast receding, and he saw Sarl's eyes flit toward the encroaching darkness. Without a word, they both began following the woman.
'What do you want, Sergeant?' The company's passage had left an aura of dust in the air, and Achamian could feel it fur the insides of his mouth. His chest wanted to cough the words.
'The Captain asked me to speak to you.' Sarl looked even more wrinkled in the gloom. His face was grey and grimace-marked, like a corpse exhumed from black peat. The Wizard breathed against the bristle of bodily alarm, fought the urge to ball his hands into fists. He almost always felt this whenever Sarl strayed too near, ever since the man had smashed his wine-bowl in the Cocked Leg.
'Did he now.'
'Yes,' Sarl said in a breathy rasp, smiling like an uncle fishing for a nephew's love. That was the thing about the man's ceaseless posturing: Even when the passions were appropriate, the underlying intensities were all wrong. 'You see, he thinks you're… too honest, let us say.'
'Honest.'
'And arrogant.'
'Arrogant,' Achamian repeated. There was something deadening about the discourse of fools. It was as if his patience were a pool that was only so deep, and Sarl's every word were a rock…
'Look,' Sarl said. 'We are learned men, you and I-'
'I assure you, Sergeant, there's very little that you and I share.'
'Oho! The grief old Sarl gets for his diplomacy!'
'Diplomacy.'
'Yes, diplomacy!' he cried in sudden savagery. 'Fine fucking words spoken to fine fucking fools!'
Mimara had drawn far ahead of them by now, so that they walked in the least glimmer of light, more the rims of men than possessing human substance, stepping by memory of grounds glimpsed ahead. Sarl was a threat, both to him and his quest-if Achamian had suspected as much before, he knew now. All he need do was speak to the madman in his true voice, right here, right now, and that threat would vanish, become more ash to powder this dead Mansion's floor.
'What?' the fool continued. 'Did you not think the Captain knew we walked through a vast tomb? Did you not think he would have commanded Cleric to illuminate it? And what do you do? You decide to show the bones to all! To let simple men know they walked beneath inhuman tombs. Darkness shields as much as it threatens, Schoolman! And you must remember the first rule!'
There was reason in what he was saying. But then that was the problem with reason: It was as much a whore as Fate. Like rope, you could use it to truss or snare any atrocity…
Another lesson learned at Kellhus's knee.
'Another Rule of the Slog, is it?'
'Oh yes… The rules that have made this company a legend in the Wilds. Do you hear me? A legend!'
'So what is the first rule, Sergeant?'
'The Captain always knows. Do you hear me? The Captain always knows!'
All at once, the hand-waving, wire-grinning complexity of the sergeant seemed to focus into one simple truth: Sarl did not just revere his Captain, he worshipped him. Achamian nearly spit, so sour was the disgust that welled through him. To think that after all these years, he marched in the company of fanatics once again!
'You think you can cow me?' he heard himself shout. 'A Holy Veteran, like your Captain? What my eyes have seen, Sergeant. I have spat at the feet of the Aspect-Emperor himself! I possess a strength, a might, that can scar mountains, rout entire hosts, turn your bones into boiling oil! And you presume-presume! — to threaten me?'
Sarl laughed, but with a breath clipped by wariness. 'You've stepped outside the circle of your skill, Schoolman. This is the slog, not the Holy War, and certainly not some infernal School. Here, our lives depend upon the resolve of our brothers. The knee that cracks pulls ten men down. Recall that. There will be no second warning.'
Achamian knew he should be politic, conciliatory, but he was too weary, and too much had happened. Wrath had flooded all the blind chambers of his heart.
'I am not one of you! I am not a Schoolman, and I am certainly not a Skin Eater! And this, my friend, is not your-'
His anger sputtered, blew away and outward like smoke. Horror plunged in.
Sarl actually continued several more steps before realizing he was alone. 'What?' he called uneasily from the almost total dark. The lights ahead of them seemed to hang in absolute blackness, a vision of little men toiling into the void.
Over the course of his long life, Achamian had been asked many times what it was like to see the world with the arcane senses of the Few. He would usually answer that it was just as manifold and multifarious as the world revealed by mundane senses-and every bit as difficult to describe. Sometimes he would say it was like a different kind of hearing.
Sarl forgotten, he found himself looking down, even though he could see neither the ground nor his feet. It seemed he could hear calling: the Skin Eaters shouting out their names.
There were galleries immediately below them, stretching many miles into the entombed fundament. Before, he had known this as an abstraction, as something drawn from the uncertain palette of memory. But now he could feel those wending spaces, not directly, but through the constellation of absences, the pits in the stitch of existence, that moved through them.
Chorae…
Tears of God, at least a dozen of them, borne by something that prowled the halls beneath their feet.
The riot of thought and passion that so often heralded disaster. The apprehension of meaning to be had where no sense could be found, not because he was too simple, but because he was too small and the conspiracies were too great.
Sarl was little more than a direction in the viscous black. 'Run!' the Wizard cried. 'Run!'
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
If the immutable appears recast, then you yourself have been transformed.
