'Found him!' he explodes with a phlegmatic roar. 'Like a coin in the dirt!'
More eyes have turned to them, and she suddenly feels conspicuous-even guilty in a strange way. Aside from other madmen, only thieves trade jokes with madmen-as a way of playing them. Even the old Wizard watches her with a quizzical squint.
Simply talking to the man has compromised her, she realizes. The others now know that she's seeking something… The Captain knows.
'The Slog of Slogs,' she says lamely. 'They'll sing songs across the Three Seas, Sergeant-think on it! The Psalm of the Skin Eaters.'
The old man begins weeping, as though overwhelmed by the charity of her self-serving words.
'Seju bless you, girl,' he coughs, staring at her with bleary, blinking eyes. For some reason he has started limping, as if his body has broken with his heart.
Suddenly he smiles in his furrow-faced way, his eyes becoming little more than deeper perforations in his red-creased face. 'It's been lonely,' he croaks through rotted teeth.
They see the plume of dust shortly after breaking camp. It rises chalk-white and vertical before being drawn into a mountainous, spectral wing by the wind. The plains pile to the north in desiccated sheets, some crumpled, others bent into stumps and low horns. The plumb line of the horizon has been raised and buckled, meaning some time will pass before the authors of the plume become visible. So they continue travelling with a wary eye to the north. Mimara hears Galian and Pokwas muttering about Sranc. The company has yet to encounter any since crossing into the Istyuli, so it stands to reason.
The plume waxes and wanes according to unseen terrain but grows ever nearer. The Captain barks no instructions, even when the first of the specks appear crawling across the back of a distant knoll.
Hands held against the spiking sun, they peer into the distance.
Riders. Some forty or fifty of them-just enough to defend themselves against a single clan of skinnies. A motley assemblage of caste-menials, wearing crude hauberks of splint over stained tunics of blue and gold. Their beards hang to their waists, sway to the canter of their ponies. They ride beneath a standard she has never seen before, though she recognizes the checkered black shields of Nangaelsa.
'Nangaels,' she says aloud. 'They're Tydonni.'
The Wizard hushes her with an angry glance.
The Great Ordeal, she realizes. At long last they have crawled into its mighty shadow…
A kind of trembling anticipation suffuses her, as if she has stumbled into the gaze of something monstrous with power. And she wonders when she became terrified of her stepfather, when for so long he seemed the only sane voice, the only understanding soul.
'A lost patrol?' Galian asks.
'Supply cohort,' Xonghis says with authority. 'They must have abandoned their wains.'
Even though they can see the approaching riders discussing and debating them, the Skin Eaters remain silent. They have outrun civilization, these men, so far and for so long they no longer need fatuous words to bind them.
The Nangael commander is a greybeard with a long, craggy face and a low, prominent brow. His left arm hangs in a sling. The Captain gestures for Galian to accompany him. The two men walk out several paces to greet the nearing man.
The aging officer does them the courtesy of dismounting, as do the two riders nearest him. But his eyes linger on Cleric for several heartbeats. He does not like the looks of him.
'Tur'il halsa brininausch virfel?' the officer calls.
'Tell him we don't speak gibberish,' the Captain instructs the former Columnary.
Mimara looks to the old Wizard, suddenly afraid. He wags his head almost imperceptibly, as if warning her against anything rash.
'Manua'tir Sheyarni?' Galian calls back.
The Nangaels are sunburned and travel-worn, their kilts frayed, the lines of their faces inked in sweat- blackened dust. But the contrast between them and her companions horrifies Mimara. The scalpers' clothing has been reduced to black rags, waxy with filth. Conger's tunic has all but disintegrated into shags of foul string. They look like things that should shamble… like things dead.
The officer comes to a halt before the two men. He is Tydonni tall, but stooped with years, so that he seems of a height with Lord Kosoter. The Captain seems more shade than man in his presence. 'Who are you?' he asks in passable Sheyic.
'Skin Eaters,' Galian says simply.
' Scalpers? This far? How is that possible?'
'The skinnies were mobbing. We had no choice but to flee northwest.'
A moment of canny blankness dulls the officer's eyes.
'Unlikely.'
'Yes,' the Captain says.
He pulls his knife, thrusts it into the man's eye socket. 'Unlikely.'
The body slumps forward. Cries rifle the arid sky, and somehow Mimara knows the commander was beloved. The men to either side of the officer stumble back in horror. Lord Kosoter glares and grins, his knife braced against his right thigh. His eyes shine above the tangled fury of his teeth and beard. Weapons are drawn in the clamour. Beneath shouts of alarm and outrage, a different voice strums the strings of a different world…
Cleric is singing.
He stands pale and bare-chested. Brilliance glares through the apertures of his face. He reaches out, his hands crooked into empty claws. Lariats of white light scribble across the rear of the ragtag column…
The Seventh Quyan Theorem-or something resembling it.
Shrieks, both equine and human. The glimpse of shadows in high sunlight. Men are thrown. Horses roll and thrash, kicking up clouds of dust. Mimara sees a man on his knees screaming. At first he's little more than a shadow in the dust, but by some miracle a tunnel of clarity opens through the sheets. He howls, his beard aflame beneath scalded cheeks.
Then the battle crashes over her.
Nangael war-cries wrack the air. The nearest Tydonni kick their ponies forward, shields braced, broadswords swinging high. The scalpers meet their charge with eerie calm. They step around the hurtling forms, hacking riders, stringing horses. Pokwas leaps, pivoting to the weight of his great tulwar. A pony blunders into exploding dust. A rider's head spins high, then falls, trailing its beard like a comet. Xonghis ducks between charging Tydonni, gores a thigh. The Captain draws another in an elusive half-circle before lunging high to pierce the man's throat. The wretch falls backward, is dragged choking from his right stirrup.
Chaos and obscurity. Figures emerge then vanish into the tan fog. Sorcerous light flickers and glows, like lightning in clouds. An injured Nangael lurches out of the curtained madness, a cudgel raised in a bloody fist. Mimara is astonished to find Squirrel in her hand, bright and sharp. His face is blank with mortal determination. He swings at her, but she easily ducks to one side, scores the inside of his forearm to the bone. He roars and wheels, his beard pendulous for blood. But the cudgel slips from his hand-she has cut him to the tendon. He leaps to tackle, but again she is too nimble. She steps aside, brings Squirrel flashing down, chops the back of his neck. He drops like a nerveless sack.
The clamour fades. The dust is drawn up and out like milk spilled into a stream. The scalpers stand in what should have been gasping disbelief but more resembles blinking curiosity. The fog clears, revealing chalked figures crawling or writhing across the parched grasses. They have tar for blood.
Mimara gazes at the man she has killed. He lies motionless on his stomach, blinking as he suffocates. The tattoo of a small Circumfix graces his left temple. She cannot bring herself to end his suffering the way the others do. She turns away, blinking at the dust, looking for Achamian…
She finds him several paces from Koll, who stands exactly as he had before the battle began, his sword still hanging from the string that creases his forehead. She tries to secure the Wizard's gaze, but he's peering somewhere beyond her, squinting into the distance.
'No,' Achamian croaks, as though jarred from a profound stupor. 'No!'
At first Mimara thinks he refers to the murder of innocents before them, but then she realizes that his gaze
