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 follows the escaping riders. She can scarce see them for the dust-some eight or nine men, riding hard for the north.
"Noooooo!"
Gnostic words rumble out from all directions, as if spoken with the sky's own lungs. Bluish light flares from the Wizard's eyes and mouth… Meaning-unholy meaning. He steps out into the open sky, climbing across spectral ground. Wild, hoary, old-he seems a doll of rags flung high against the distance.
She stands dumbstruck, watches as he gains on the fleeing horsemen, then rains brilliant destruction down upon them. Dust steams and plumes, the mark of tumult on the horizon.
The others scarce seem interested. A quick glance reveals that almost all of them are intact, save for Conger, who sits in the dust grimacing, his hands clutched about a crimson welling knee. He watches his Captain's approach with dull horror. The shadow of Lord Kosoter's sword hangs across his face for a breathless heartbeat, then Conger is no more.
"No limpers!" the Captain grates, his eyes at once starved and bright.
And that is the sum of their plunder. It seems sacrilege, for some reason, to don the possessions of others-things so clean they can only be filthy. The old Wizard returns on weary foot, framed by seething curtains of smoke. He has set the plains afire.
"I'm damned already," is all he says in reply to Mimara's look.
He stares at the ground and says nothing for the next three days.
His continuing silence does not trouble her so much as her own indifference to it. She understands well enough: in running down the Tydonni, the old Wizard has murdered in the name of rank speculation. But she knows his guilt and turmoil are as much a matter of going through the motions as is her compassion. His silence is the silence of falsehood, and as such, she sees no reason why she should care.
She has the weight of her own murder to bear.
The morning of the third day passes like any other, save that the tributaries they cross have all dried to dust and their skins have grown flabby enough for the Captain to institute rationing. When the old Wizard finally chooses to speak, he does so without spit.
"Have you ever seen Kellhus with it?"
Kellhus. Hearing the name pricks her for some reason, so much so she resists the urge to make one of the signs of warding she learned in the brothel. Before Achamian, she had never heard anyone refer to her stepfather in the familiar before, not even her mother, who always referred to him as "your father." Not once.
"Seen my stepfather?" she asked. "You mean with my… other eyes?"
She can tell by his hesitation that this is a question he had feared to ask for a long time.
"Yes."
Absolution, she realizes. He killed the Tydonni to prevent any word of their expedition from reaching the Great Ordeal. Now he seeks to absolve himself of their deaths through the righteousness of his cause. Men murder, and men excuse. For most the connection is utterly seamless: those killed simply have to be guilty, otherwise why would they be dead? But Achamian, she knows, is one of those rare men who continually stumble over the seams in their thought. Men for whom nothing is simple.