Something, Malowebi's silence, perhaps, convinced the Bandit Padirajah to cut their tour short. They reversed direction, rode for what seemed an entire watch plagued by the sound of a babe crying-Malowebi could almost believe someone followed them torturing a cat. Silence haunted the empty windows. Smoke sheeted the west in gauze rags, lending an eerie, watery timbre to the sunlight that slanted across the dying city. Finally they returned to the wrack and ruin of the city's northwestern walls-the section brought down by Meppa.
Once again, Malowebi found himself gawking.
"It frightens you, no?" Fanayal said, watching his profile. "The spilling of the Water."
"What do you mean?"
The Padirajah graced him with an upside-down smile. "I've been told that Schoolmen find the Cishaurim Psukhe troubling. You see a violation with your mundane eyes-the glare of sorcery-when your other eye, the one that itches, sees only mundane creation."
Malowebi shrugged, thinking of the brief dual between Meppa and the lone Saik sorcerer-a decrepit and dishevelled old man-who had defended the hapless city. The rogue Cishaurim floating, impervious to the fire of the Schoolman's Anagogic dragonhead, disgorging cataracts of blue-twinkling light as pure as it was beautiful. As awesome as Meppa's power had been-there was no doubting he was a Primary-it had been the beauty that had most astounded, and mortified, the Second Negotiant.
To be a sorcerer was to dwell among deformities.
"It is extraordinary," Malowebi admitted, "to see the Work without the Mark." He smiled the wise and slippery smile of an old diplomat. "But we Schoolmen are accustomed to miracles."
He said this last more in bitter jest than anything. What he witnessed had left many profound impressions. The power of Meppa, certainly. The martial acumen of the Padirajah. The cunning and the bravery of the Fanim, not to mention their barbarity…
But nothing loomed so large as the weakness of the New Empire.
The rumours were absolutely true: the Aspect-Emperor had boned his conquests to pursue his mad invasion of the northern wilds. Disaffected populations. Ill-equipped soldiers, poorly trained and even more poorly led. Infirm and doddering Schoolmen. And perhaps most interestingly, absolutely no Chorae…
Nganka-nay, Zeum — needed to be informed. This night would be filled with far-calling dreams.
"The people call him Stonebreaker," Fanayal said. "Meppa… They say he was sent to us by the Solitary God."
Malowebi turned to him, blinking.
"What do you say?"
"I say he was sent to me!" the hawk-faced Padirajah cried laughing. " I am the Solitary God's gift to his people."
"And what does he say?" the Second Negotiant asked, now genuinely curious.
"Meppa? He does not know who he is."
CHAPTER SIX
Everything is concealed always. Nothing is more trite than a mask.
If you find yourself taken unawares by someone you thought you knew, recall that the character revealed is as much your own as otherwise. When it comes to Men and their myriad, mercenary natures, revelation always comes in twos.
Late Spring, 20 New Imperial Year (4132 Year-of-the-Tusk), the "Long Side"
It tracked their blundering flight through the Wilderness. It watched and it hungered and it hated…
How it hated.
It remained in the trees for the most part, running with glee along the dead limbs of the under-canopy. It fed on squirrels, eaten raw, and once upon a wildcat that had tried to feed on it. It supped on the mewling litter afterward, laughed at their miniature hisses and struggles. Their tiny skulls cracked like delicacies.
Days. Weeks.
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.