Over gnarled miles, through rain falling in sheeted fury. It watched them trudge and it watched them sleep. It watched them feud and bicker. Three times it saw them battle the errant children of the Old Fathers, the Sranc, and it crouched, its eyes wide and wondering as tangles of sorcerous light and shadow fluttered through the forest's mangled depths.
And sometimes it dared crawl close, like a serpent worming toward prey. Grinding its phallus against hoary bark, it would watch her, the girl who had saved them in the ancient-old deeps. And it would know lust, malice. It would gaze with a singularity unknown to Men.
The thing called Soma.
Each night it sought some tree greater than the others, a tower among lesser pillars, and it climbed, leaping and swinging through the canopies, from dead to living, following fork and branch to the wiry limit, until it breached the final leafy weave. There, gently creaking side to side in the breeze, it stared across an ocean of arboreal crowns.
It would bend its neck back until its head pressed its spine, and it would scream.
And scream.
Watch after watch, night after night, shrieking in tones that not even dogs could hear. Only rats.
Screaming. Until its mouth filled with blood.
– | The Hags could not keep up.
They would begin complaining around midday-at least at first. Belmorn, the particularly brutish Galeoth who had become their de facto leader, even went so far as to accuse the Skin Eaters of devilry. With a kind of immovable indifference, Achamian watched the Captain stroll up to the arm-waving giant and plunge a knife in his armpit.
'Your lives are mine!' he screamed at the others. 'Mine to beat! Mine to torture! Mine to murder!'
That night two of the Hags disappeared-Achamian could not remember their names. Nothing was said of them the next day or any of the days following. Scalpers did not speak of the dead, even ones so despicable as the Stone Hags.
The rains began after that, and below dark skies the world beneath the forest canopies was darker still. Lightning strikes were little more than sparks and glows glimpsed through the gauze of a million leaves, but the thunder crashed undulled through the brachiated gloom. Guttered by the trees, the rainwaters fell in the form of countless hanging rivulets, a pissing army of them, soaking the ground to wheezing muck. And if the way became more arduous for the Skin Eaters with their nightly ration of Qirri, it became harder still for the Hags.
One, a ritually scarred Thunyeri named Osilwas, they lost to a river crossing. With a wound festering in his arm, the man had staggered as much as marched for days. One evening Achamian had watched him cut his hair away, lock by lock-to shed weight, he supposed. Despite the man's condition, the old Wizard had thought Osilwas would survive, perhaps mistaking the gleam of fever in his eyes for the light of determination. One stumble in roiling waters was all it took to sweep him away.
Another, a bow-legged Cepaloran the others called Scroll-apparently because of the elaborate blue tattooing across his limbs-simply began wailing like a madman one night and had to be put down as a sobber. The day after, Erydides, who continually claimed to be a Cironji pirate in the chaotic days preceding the New Empire, developed a limp. No matter how hard he laboured, he fell ever farther behind. Achamian's last memory of him was his grimace: a kind of panicked grin stretched across expressions of abject pain. A look that urged wild effort in the utter absence of strength.
Then there was the dispute between Pokwas and Wulgulu, the strutting Thunyeri who for a time had assumed titular command of his brothers. Achamian did not know what caused the altercation, only that it occurred in the course of dividing a joint of wild boar. Pokwas, in particular, was inclined to heap abuse on the Hags, alternately calling them dogs, wretches, and 'mibus'-apparently a mibu was a kind of Zeumi jackal renowned for eating its own kind during the dry season. 'Be a good mibu,' Achamian had overheard him say on more than one occasion, 'and we will feed your dead to you.' One moment everything was gloom and milling exhaustion, the next the two men were grappling, their heels kicking up leaves and dirt as they heaved at each other. Pokwas was easily the stronger: the green-eyed giant twisted Wulgulu around, wrenched him to the ground. Then he began pounding the prostrate Thunyeri about the head and face. Again and again, while everyone gnawed and chewed their dinner, their hands and faces gleaming with grease. Nothing was said, and aside from the black giant's laboured breathing, nothing was heard beyond the slapping thud of his fists. Again and again. The Sword-dancer continued striking the man long after he was dead, while Achamian and the others continued watching and eating. Only Mimara turned away.
Afterward Sarl began cackling in his strange, inward way, muttering, 'I told you, Kiampas! Eh? Yes!'
Something was happening…
Achamian could feel it in his bones-catch glimpses of it in the eyes of the others. Mimara especially. He had watched a human head hammered into a wineskin, and he had felt nothing more than… curiosity?
It was the Qirri. It had to be. The medicine seemed to numb their conscience as much as it quickened their limbs and stretched their wind. Even as Achamian felt himself becoming closer to Mimara, he found himself caring less for the surviving Skin Eaters and not at all for the wretched Hags.
The old Wizard had enough experience with hashish and opium to know the way drugs could alter the small things, stretch and twist the detailed fabric of life. In the fleshpots of Carythusal, he had seen the way the poppy, especially, could conquer the myriad desires of men, until their hunger for the drug eclipsed even lust and love.
He knew enough to be wary, but the fact was they were moving fast, far faster than Achamian had dared hope. Several days into the rains they had found the ruins of a bridge on the banks of a great river, a bridge that Achamian recognized from his dreams as the Archipontus of Wul, a work famed across the Ancient North in Seswatha's day. That meant they had travelled over half the distance from Maimor to Kelmeol, the ancient capital of the Meori Empire, in the space of two weeks-a spectacular distance. If they could maintain this pace, they would easily reach Sauglish and the Coffers before summer's end.
But it was a pace that was killing the newcomers. More and more the remaining Hags took on the vigilant aspect of hostages, a look at once surly, bewildered, and terrified. They ceased speaking, even among themselves, and as much as the Skin Eaters found their gaze inexorably drawn to Cleric, their eyes continually circled about the Captain and the threat of his discipline. Night would fall, the rains would thread the dark with lines of silver, and the Hags would huddle in shivering clutches, while Galian, Conger, and the others would bare their arms and marvel at their steaming skin.
'Where we going?' the youngest of them, a Galeoth adolescent with the strange name of Heresius, began shrieking one evening. 'What madness?' he screamed in broken Sheyic. 'What madness you do?' Staring was the most any of the original company could manage, so sudden and crazed was the young man's outburst. Finally, with the same murderous deliberation Achamian had seen many times, the Captain stood. The youth, who was no fool, bolted like a spooked doe into the murk…
Afterward, Galian insisted he had seen something-arms, he thought-hook out of the dead under-canopy and yank the young wretch into oblivion.
No one mourned him. No one, Stone Hag or Skin Eater, so much as spoke his name. The dead had no place in their history. They were scalpers. As much as they feared their mad Captain, none of them disputed his simple and dread logic. Death to sobbers. Death to loafers. Death to limpers, bellyachers, and bleeders…
Death to weakness, the great enemy of enmity.
So day after day they threw themselves at horizons they could not see, trudged with bottomless vigour into lands obscured and obscure, whether the sky cracked and poured water or the sun shone through sheets of green luminescence. And day after day the Stone Hags dwindled-for they were weak.
As the Skin Eaters were strong.
There was no place for pity, even less for regret, on the slog. And this, as Sarl continually slurred under his breath, was the Slog of Slogs. You could not be wholly human and survive the Long Side, so you became something less and pretended you were more.
In subsequent days Achamian would come to look at this leg of their journey with a peculiar horror, not because he had lived necessary lies, but because he had come to believe them. He was a man who would rather know and enumerate his sins, bear the pain of them, than cocoon himself in numbing ignorance and flattering exculpation.
You can only believe so many lies before becoming one of them.
