It's the Wizard, she realizes. The damned fool is rubbing off on her.
"The eye that must be plucked."
They breakfast on the last of a juvenile buck. The sky is cloudless, and the morning sun is chill and sharp. An air of renewal surrounds the scalpers; they talk and prepare the way they used to, the animation of men reacquainting themselves with old and arduous tasks.
The Captain sits on a boulder overlooking the forested vista below, sharpening his blade. Cleric stands below him, shirtless beneath his nimil hauberk. He nods as though in prayer, listening as always to the grinding mutter of the Captain. Galian huddles in close conference with Pokwas and Xonghis, while Soma hovers over them. Sutadra has withdrawn up the trail to pray: he is always praying of late. Conger speaks to his countrymen in avid tones, and though Gallish defeats her, she knows that he attempts to rally them. Sarl mutters and cackles to himself as he shaves tiny slices no bigger than a fingernail from his breakfast cut, which he then chews and savours with absurd relish, as if dining on snails or some other delicacy.
Even Achamian seems to sense the difference, though he says nothing. The Skin Eaters have returned. Somehow, they have recovered their old ways and roles. Only the worried glances exchanged between jokes and declarations betray their fright.
The Mop, she realizes, the famed primeval forests of the Long Side. They fear it-apparently enough to forget Cil-Aujas for a time.
"Skinnies," Sarl cackles, his face flushed red. "Chop and bale them, boys… We have skin to eat!"
The cheer raised is so winded, so half-hearted, that the shadow of Lost Mansion seems to leap across them anew… There are so few left.
And Sarl is not one of them.
A tin clank alerts the company, tells them that their Captain has slung his battered shield over his back-what has become the signal for them to resume their march. The slopes are treacherous, and twice she infuriates the old Wizard by offering him a steadying hand. They wend their way down, descending lower and lower, picking and barging their way through massed ranks of scrub. It seems she can feel the mountains climbing into sky-high absurdity behind her.
The Mop grows beneath and before them, becoming larger and larger, until she can make out the vying of individual limbs across the tossed canopy. Despite the descriptions she has heard, she finds herself gawking in wonder. The trees are nothing short of monumental, such is their size. Through screens of leaves she glimpses soaring trunks and spanning limbs and the dark that is the world beneath the canopy.
The air fairly shivers with the sound of birds singing, screeching, hooting, creating a vast and shrill chorus that reaches, she knows, across the horizon to the shores of the Cerish Sea. They find themselves following a shelf that runs parallel to the forest edge about a length or so taller than the canopy. Her glimpses take her deeper now, though still far from the gloom-shrouded floor. She sees limbs reach like sinuous stone, bearing barn-sized shags of greenery and sheets of moss hanging like a mendicant's rags. She sees the piling on of shadows that makes blackness out of the forest depths.
It will swallow us, she thinks, feeling the old panic buzzing through her bones. She has had her fill of lightless bellies. Small wonder the scalpers were anxious.
Tree darkness, Sarl had said.
For the first time, it seems, she understands the sheer enormity of the task the Wizard has set for them. For the first time she understands that Cil-Aujas was but the beginning of their trial-the first in a parade of unguessed horrors.
The shallow cliff dips and collapses into a rugged slope, spilling gigantic stones into the forest verge. The expedition picks its way down and files into the Great Mop…
Into the green darkness.
CHAPTER TWO
We belittle what we cannot bear. We make figments out of fundamentals, all in the name of preserving our own peculiar fancies. The best way to secure one's own deception is to accuse others of deceit.
It is not so much the wisdom of the wise that saves us from the foolishness of the fools as it is the latter's inability to agree.
Spring, 20 New Imperial Year (4132 Year-of-the-Tusk), The High Istyuli
The Sakarpi tell of a man who had two puppies in his belly, the one adoring, the other savage. When the loving one nuzzled his heart, he became joyous, like the father of a newborn boy. But when the other gored it with sharp puppy teeth, he became desperate with sorrow. Those rare times the dogs left him in peace, he would tell people he was doomed. Bliss can be sipped a thousand times, he would say, whereas shame need only cut your throat once.
The Sakarpi called him Kensooras, "Between Dogs," a name that had since come to mean the melancholy suffered by suicides.
Varalt Sorweel was most certainly between dogs.
His ancient city had been conquered, its famed Chorae Hoard plundered. His beloved father had been killed. And now that he found himself in the Aspect-Emperor's fearsome thrall, a Goddess accosted him, the Dread Mother of Birth, Yatwer, in the guise of his lowly slave.
Kensooras indeed.
The cavalry company that was his cage, the Scions, had been called to the hazard of war. The collection of young hostages who composed the Scions had long feared their company was naught but ornamental, that they would be cozened like children while the Men of the Ordeal fought and died around them. They pestered their Kidruhil Captain, Harnilas, endlessly. They even petitioned General Kayutas-to no apparent avail. Even though they marched with their fathers' enemy, they were boys as much as men, and so their hearts were burdened with the violent longing to prove their mettle.
Sorweel was no different. When word of their deployment finally arrived, he grinned and whooped the same as the others-how could he not? The recriminations, as always, came crashing in afterward.
The Sranc had ever been the great foe of his people-that is, before the coming of the Aspect-Emperor. Sorweel had spent the better part of his childhood training and preparing for battle against the creatures. For a Son of Sakarpus, there could be no higher calling. Kill a Sranc, the saying went, birth a man. As a boy he had spent innumerable lazy afternoons mooning over imagined glories, chieftains brained, whole clans annihilated. And he had spent as many taut nights praying for his father whenever he rode out to meet the beasts.
Now, at long last, he was about to answer a lifelong yearning and to embark on a rite sacred to his people…
In the name of the man who had murdered his father and enslaved his nation.
More dogs.
He gathered with the others in Zsoronga's sumptuous pavilion the night before their departure, did his best to keep his counsel while the others crowed in anticipation. "Don't you see?" he finally cried. "We are hostages!"
Zsoronga watched with an air of frowning dismissal. He reclined more than the others so that the crimson silk of his basahlet gleamed across his cheek and jaw. Plaits of his jet medicine-wig curled across his shoulders.
The Zeumi Successor-Prince remained as generous as always, but there could be no denying the chill that had climbed between them since the Aspect-Emperor had declared Sorweel one of the Believer-Kings. The young King desperately wanted to explain things, to tell him about Porsparian and the incident with Yatwer's spit, to assure him that he still hated, but some inner leash always pulled him up short. Some silences, he was learning, were impossible not to keep.