Let this be the end.
Achamian found himself sitting, gripping his boney shoulders with boney fingers. His ears roared, and the blackness spun. He panted, gathering his wits and wind. Only then did the other sounds of the night creep into his hearing. The distant howl of wolves. The creak of sentience through vaulting limbs. The sound of Pokwas and his gentle snore. Sarl's mumbling growl…
And someone wailing without breath… on the platform below him. 'N-no…' he heard a hitching, glutinous voice murmur in Gallish. 'Please…' Then again, hissed through teeth clenched against returning waves of terror, 'Please!'
Hameron, he realized. The one most broken by Cil-Aujas.
There was a time when Achamian had thought himself weak, when he had looked on men such as these scalpers with a kind of complicated envy. But life had continued to heap adversity upon him, and he had continued to survive, to overcome. He was every bit the man he had been, too inclined to obsess, too ready to shoulder the burden of trivial sins. But he no longer saw these ingrown habits as weaknesses. To think, he now knew, was not a failure to act.
Some souls wax in the face of horror. Others shrink, cringe, bolt for an easy life and its many cages. And some, like young Hameron, find themselves trapped between inability and the inevitable. All men cry in the dark. Those who did not were something less than men. Something dangerous. Pity welled through the old Wizard, pity for a boy who had found himself stranded on scarps too steep to climb.
Pity and guilt.
Achamian heard the whine and scuff of someone on the platform above him. He blinked against the dark. The limbs of the fallen tree forked black across the stars. The Nail of Heaven glittered above, higher on the horizon than he had ever seen it before-with his waking eyes at least. The clearing lay bare and silent about them, a swatch of wool soaked in the absolute ink of shadows at night. Mimara lay curled at his side, as beautiful as porcelain in the bluing light.
The platform above formed a ragged rectangle shot with strings of luminance between the timbers. The figure who climbed down from its edge looked a wraith, his clothing was so shredded about the edges. Starlight rippled across the unrusted splints of his hauberk.
The Captain, Achamian realized with dim horror.
The figure shimmed along the trunk, black sheets of hair swaying. He had scarcely set foot on the corner of Achamian's platform before swinging down to the next as nimble as a monkey. The two men regarded each other- for scarce a heartbeat, but it was enough. Ravenous, was all Achamian could think. There was something starved about the eyes that glared from the disgusted squint, something famished about the grin that cut the plaited beard.
The man dropped out of sight. Still staring at the point where their eyes had connected, Achamian heard him land on the platform below, heard the knife whisk from the sheath…
'Sobber!' a voice hissed.
There were three thuds in quick succession, each carrying the dread timbre of flesh.
Gasping. The choking rattle of pierced lungs. The sound of a heel scraping across barked wood-a feeble kicking.
Then nothing.
A poisonous fog seemed to fill the Wizard, steaming out from his gut into his extremities, something that at once burned and chilled. Without thinking he lay back beside Mimara, closed his eyes in the pretense of sleep. The noise of Lord Kosoter climbing back to his platform seemed scabrous thunder in his ears. It was all Achamian could do not to raise warding hands against the sound.
For several moments he simply breathed against the fact of what had happened-against the absence of the life that had been weeping below him only moments before. He had sat immobile and listened to it happen. Then he had pretended to sleep. He had sat there and watched a boy murdered in the name of his lie… The lie of a Wizard who had made benjuka pieces out of men.
The obsession.
Strength, Achamian told himself. This! This is what Fate demands of you… If his heart had not yet hardened to flint, he knew it would before this journey was done. You could not kill so many and still care.
Fail or succeed, he would become something less than a man. Something dangerous.
Like the Captain.
Nothing was said about the dead man in the morning. Not even Mimara dared speak, either because the atrocity was too obvious or too near. They simply gnawed and stared off in random directions while Hameron's blood dried to a rind along the bottom of his platform's timbers. Even Sarl seemed loathe to breach the silence. If any looks were exchanged, Achamian found Lord Kosoter's presence too oppressive to watch for them.
The fact that nothing was said about anything — including the Stone Hags and their attack-said everything: the Captain's new-found faith in the Rules did not sit well with his men. The company resumed its march through the deep forest gloom, somehow more desolate, more lost and exposed, for the absence of just two souls.
Once again they struck at a tangent to the mountains, down, so that walking at once seemed easier and harder on the knees. They skirted the banks of a swift-flowing tributary for a time, eventually crossing where it panned across boulder-chocked shallows. The elms and oaks, if anything, were even more gigantic. They threaded a makeshift path between the trunks, some of them so immense and hoary they seemed more natural formations than trees. All of their lowermost limbs were dead, shorn of bark, radial tiers stacked upon radial tiers, creating a false, skeletal canopy beneath the canopy proper. Whenever Achamian glanced up at them, they resembled black veins, networks of them, wending and forking across higher screens of sun-glowing green.
As the day wore on, the gaps between the walkers seemed to expand. This was when Pokwas and Galian, doing their best to shun Somandutta, happened to find themselves abreast Achamian and Mimara. They walked in guarded silence for a time. Pokwas softly hummed some tune-from his native Zeum, Achamian decided, given its strange intonations.
'At this rate,' Galian finally ventured, 'it'll just be him sitting on a pile of bones by time the skinnies get to us.' The Nansur spoke without looking at anyone.
'Aye,' Pokwas agreed. ' Our bones.'
They were not so much searching for an understanding, it seemed, as they were acknowledging one that already existed. If anything proves that Men are bred for intrigue, it is the way conspiracies require no words.
'He's gone mad,' Achamian said.
Mimara laughed-a sound the old Wizard found shocking. Ever since the Stone Hags and their abortive ambush, she had seemed bent on silent brooding. ' Gone mad, you say?'
'No one's survived more slogs,' Galian said.
'Yes,' Pokwas snorted. 'But then no one has a pet Nonman either.'
'Things are topsy out here,' Galian replied. 'You know that. Crazy is sane. Sane is crazy.' The former Nansur Columnary fixed his canny gaze on Achamian.
'So what do we do?' Achamian asked.
Galian's eyes roamed the surrounding gloom, then clicked back. 'You tell me, Wizard…' There was anger in his tone, a resolution to voice hard questions. Achamian found his gaze as piercing as it was troubling-a fellow soldier's demand for honesty. 'What are the chances a company this small will make your precious Coffers? Eh?'
This was when Achamian realized that he stood against these men. Mad or not, Lord Kosoter showed no signs of wavering. If anything his most recent acts of madness displayed a renewed resolve. As much as Achamian hated to admit it, Hameron had been a liability…
The old Wizard found himself warding away thoughts of Kellhus and his ability to sacrifice innocents.
'We've scarce reached the Fringe,' Pokwas exclaimed, 'and we're three-quarters dead!'
The Fringe, the Wizard recalled, was what scalpers called the boundary of Sranc country.
'As I said,' Galian replied. 'At this rate.'
'Once we clear the Meorn Wilderness,' Achamian declared with as much certitude as he could muster, 'we'll be marching in the wake of the Great Ordeal. Our way will be cleared for us.'
