No questions. No doubters on the slog.
The extraordinary thing about insanity, she has come to realize, is the way it seems so normal. When she thinks of the way the droning days simply drop into their crazed, evening bacchanals, nothing strikes her as strange-nothing visceral, anyway. Things that should make her shudder, like the nip of Cleric's nail as his finger roams the inside of her cheek, are naught but part of a greater elation, as unremarkable as any other foundation stone.
It is only when she steps back and reflects that the madness stares her plain in the eye.
"He's killing you…" the thing called Soma had said. "The Nonman."
She finds herself drifting to the rear of their scattered mob and approaching Sarl, thinking that someone wholly broken might know something about the cracks now riddling their souls. According to the old Wizard, the Sergeant has known Lord Kosoter since the Unification Wars-a long time, as far as life is measured by scalpers. Perhaps he can decipher the skin-spy's riddle.
"The Slog of Slogs," she says lamely, not knowing where to begin with a madman. "Eh, Sarl?"
The others have long since abandoned him to his crazed musings. No one dares glance at him, for fear of sparking some kind of rambling tirade. For weeks she has expected, and a couple of times even hoped, that the Captain would silence him. But no matter how long his harsh voice rattles on into the night, nothing is done, nothing is said.
Sarl, it seems, is the lone exception to the Rules.
"She talks to me," he says, staring off to her right as if she were a phantasm that had plagued his ruminations too long to be directly addressed. "The second most beautiful thing…"
He was easily one of the most wrinkled men she had ever seen when she first saw him. Now his skin is as creased as knotted linen. His tunic has rotted to rags, his hauberk swings unfastened from his knobbed shoulders, and his kilt has somehow lost its backside, baring withered buttocks to open daylight.
"Tell me, Sergeant. How long have you known the Captain?"
"The Captain?" The hoary old man wags a finger, shaking his head in cackling reproach. "The Captain, is it? He-heeee! There's no explanation for the likes of him. He's not of this world!"
She flinches at the volume of his voice, reflexively lowers her own tone to compensate.
"How so?"
He shudders with silent laughter. "Sometimes souls get mixed up. Sometimes the dead bounce! Sometimes old men awaken behind the eyes of babes! Sometimes wolves…"
"What are you saying?"
"Don't cross him," he rasps with something like conspiratorial glee. "He-he! Oh, no, girl. Never cross him!"
"But he's such a friendly fellow!" Mimara cries.
He catches her joke but seems to entirely miss the humour. So much of his laughter possesses the dull hollow of reflex. More and more he seems to make the sound of laughter without laughing at all…
And suddenly she can feel it, the lie that has been burrowing through all of them, like a grub that devours meaning and leaves only motions. Laughter without humour. Breath without taste. Words said in certain sequences to silence words unsaid-words that must never be said.
Her whole life she has lived some kind of lie. Her whole life she has charted her course about some contradiction, knowing yet not knowing, and erring time and again.
But this lie is different. This lie somehow eludes the pain of those other lies. This lie carves the world along more beautiful joints.
This lie is bliss.
She needs only look to the others to see they know this with the same deathless certainty. Even Sarl, who had long since fled the world's teeth, content to trade fancy for mad fancy, seems to understand that something… false… is happening.
"And Cleric… How did you fall in with him?"
There's something about the Sergeant's presence that winds her. His gait is at once vigorous and wide, his arms swinging out like a skinny man pretending to be fat.
"Found him," he says.
"Found him? How? Where?"
Mischief twinkles in his gaze.
"Found him like a coin in the dirt!"
"But where? How?"
"After we took Carythusal, when they disbanded the Eastern Zaudunyani… they sent us north to Hunoreal, he-he!"
"Sent you? Who sent you?"
"The Ministrate. The Holies. Stack skinnies, they said. Haul the bales and keep the gold-they don't care about gold, the Holies. Just stay on the southeastern marches of Galeoth, they said. Nowhere else? No. No. Just there…"
This confuses her. She has always thought that scalpers were volunteers.
"But what about Cleric?" she presses. "Incariol…"
"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.