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.
What began as a remedy in the Cil-Aujan deeps had somehow transcended habit and become sacred ritual. "The Holy Dispensation," Mimara once called it in a pique of impatience.
Each night they queued before the Nonman, awaiting their pinch of Qirri. Usually Cleric would sit cross-legged and wordlessly dip his index finger into his pouch, darkening the pad with the merest smear. One by one the Skin Eaters would kneel before him and take the tip of his outstretched finger into their mouths-to better avoid any waste. Achamian would take his place among the others, kneel as they did when his time came. The Qirri would be bitter, the finger cold for the spit of others, sweet for the soil of daily use. A kind of euphoria would flutter through him, one that stirred troubling memories of kneeling before Kellhus during the First Holy War. There would be a moment, a mere heartbeat, where he would buckle beneath the dark gaze of the Nonman. But he would walk away content, like a starving child who had tasted honey.
Thoughtless, he would sit and savour the slow crawl of vitality through his veins.
The first and only Stone Hag to dare ridicule the act was found dead the following morning. Afterward, the renegade scalpers restricted their opinions to sullen looks and expressions-fear and disgust, mostly.
Sometimes the Nonman would climb upon some wild pulpit, the mossed remains of a fallen tree, the humped back of a boulder, and paint wonders with his dark voice. Wonders and horrors both.
Often he spoke of war and tribulation, of loves unravelled and victories undone. But no matter how the scalpers pressed him with questions, he could never recall the frame of his reminiscences. He spoke in episodes and events, never ages or times. The result was a kind of inadvertent verse, moments too packed with enigma and ambiguity to form narrative wholes-at least none they could comprehend. Fragments that never failed to leave his human listeners unsettled and amazed.
Mimara continually pestered the old Wizard with questions afterward. "Who is he?" she would hiss. "His stories must tell you something!"
Time and again Achamian could only profess ignorance. "He remembers the breaking of things, nothing more. The rest of the puzzle is always missing-for him as much as for us! I know only that he's old… exceedingly old…"
"How old?"
"Older than iron. Older even than human writing…"
"You mean older than the Tusk."
All Nonmen living were impossibly ancient. Even the youngest of their number were contemporaries of the Old Prophets. But if his sermons could be believed, Cleric-or Incariol, Lord Wanderer-was far older still, in his prime before the Ark and the coming of the Inchoroi.
An actual contemporary Nin'janjin and Cu'jara Cinmoi…
"Go to sleep," the Wizard grumbled.
What did it matter who Cleric had been, he told himself, when the ages had battered him into something entirely different?
"You look upon me and see something whole… singular…" the Nonman said one night, his head hanging from his shoulders, his face utterly lost to shadow. When he looked up tears had silvered his cheeks. "You are mistaken."