"But I've had… had this… for as long as I can remember."
"Which is my point exactly," Achamian says, sounding far too much like someone taking heart in invented reasons. He frowns, an expression Mimara finds horribly endearing on his shaggy old features. "But things are always tricky where the Outside is concerned. Things do not… happen… as they happen here…"
"Riddles! Why do you constantly torture me with riddles?"
"I'm just saying that in a sense your life has already been lived — for the God or the Gods, that is…"
"Which means?"
"Nothing," he says, scowling.
"Tell me what it means!"
But that cool glint has sparked in his eyes. Once again her words have cut through the fat of the old Wizard's patience and struck the bone of his intolerance. "Nothing, Mimara. Noth-"
A blood-curdling cry. She finds herself against sloped ground, tackled in the Wizard's wiry grasp. She senses the whisper of incipient sorceries-Wards strung out and around them. Cleric is booming something incomprehensible. She glimpses Sutadra staggering, a shaft and fletching jutting from his cheek. He's trying to scream but can only cough.
Again, she realizes. The Skin Eaters are dying again.
"Hold my belt!" Achamian cries to her, jerking himself to a crouch. "Don't let go!"
"In the trees!" someone shouts-Galian.
"Stone Hags! Stone Hags!"
Cleric's laughter booms through the hollows.
In her thirst for all things sorcerous, Mimara has read much about Mandate Schoolmen, and more still regarding the Gnosis and the famed War-Cants of the Ancient North. She knows about the incipient Wards they use to secure their person in event of surprise attacks. Even back at Achamian's collapsed tower, she had sensed them hanging about him, like faint child-scribbling marring the art of the immediate world. Now they crackle with life-preserving ugliness.
Arrows pelt the Wizard's Wards, sparking into nothingness. She throws her gaze to and fro, trying to make sense of the surrounding madness. She hears shouts beyond those of her companions. She glimpses shadowy figures ducking along the heights to either side: bowmen, possessing the rangy gait and mien of scalpers. The ravine has delivered them to a human ambush. Galian and Pokwas squat behind a heaped dead fall nearby. Sutadra is down. Soma she cannot see. Cleric has a sorcerous bulwark of his own. The Captain stands tall at his side.
"To me!" Achamian cries to the others. He's standing now, his feet braced in water and muck, and she has pulled herself beside him. "Close about me!"
Other shouts, other voices, across the heights and through the gloom. Their attackers, crying out in alarm. "Gur-gurwik-wikka!" she hears a broken chorus cry, one of the few Gallish words she understands.
Gurwikka. Sorcerer.
Achamian has already begun his otherworldly mutter. His eyes and mouth flare white, painting the figures crowding about them in shades of blue.
She senses a rush of shadows above, sees men shimming down trees. They drop to the forest floor, scramble for earthen cover. They're running-fleeing.
"Stone Hags!" Pokwas booms, crying out the name like a curse. Only Galian's scarred grip prevents the Sword-dancer from bolting after them.
A thunderous crack-somewhere to the fore of their small column. She sees Cleric's silhouette against the glare of roiling fire. A sorcerer assails him. A man hangs between vaulting branches, dressed in black, his limbs like rag-bound sticks. An ethereal dragon head rears from his hands, vomits fire…
She squints against sunset brilliance.
A whooshing hiss returns her gaze to things more immediate. Achamian stands rigid, his hands raised, his face a mask of grizzled skin across sunlight. He sweeps a line of blinding white across the heights of the ravine. She throws a forearm across her eyes, glimpses her shadow as it chases a circle across the ground… The Compass of Noshainrau.
Fire laves barked surfaces. Wood explodes into char.
But where the trees on the Galeoth side of the mountains toppled, the leviathans of the Mop merely groan and crack. Leaves shower across the ravine. A burning clutch of branches crashes into the creek, bursts into steam. Flutters of deeper movement catch her eye: more men fleeing…
Stone Hags.
She looks again to the Nonman. He stands unharmed before flashing breakers of fire, crying out in his mundane voice but in a tongue she does not understand. "Houk'hir!" he shouts in a booming laugh. "Gimu hitiloi pir milisis!" The sorcerous mutter of his opponent continues to rise up out of space and substance. The figure still hangs above the ravine, black against swatches of sky and levels of brightening green…
Achamian is gripping her arm, as if holding her back from some ill-advised rush.
Smoke blooms from nothingness, piles outward from the heart of every hollow. Within heartbeats a pall has obscured the overmatched sorcerer.
Cleric simply stands as before, both feet planted in the shining course of the stream. His laughter is strange, like a murder of crows crying across thunder.
For several moments no one does anything more than stare and breathe.
The Captain climbs alone to the crest of the ravine, lifts himself onto the back of a long-fallen tree, one that reaches across the gully like a collapsed temple column. A lone shaft of sunlight illuminates him and the tattered remnants of his dress. Light hooks about the dents in his shield and armour.
"Knife our bales?" he roars into the crotched depths. " Our bales?"
Sarl starts cackling, hard enough to begin hacking phlegm.
Lord Kosoter turns, rakes the surrounding dark with a look of preternatural fury. "I will stab out your eyes!" he bellows. "Gut your peach! I will kick vomit from your teeth! "
Mimara finds herself kneeling beside Sutadra-she is not sure why. The Kianene has curled onto his side, hissing breaths that end in grunts, holding riven hands to either side of the arrow embedded in his cheek.
They have shared no words, she and this man. They have lived shoulder to elbow on the trail for weeks, and yet they have scarcely exchanged glances. How could such a thing be? How could this life dwindling beneath her be little more than scenery one moment and… and…
"Please-please," she mumbles. "Tell me what to do…"
The heathen scalper fixes her in his gaze-a look of absurd urgency. He sputters something but can only speak blood. His goatee, which has become a full beard since Cil-Aujas, is clotted with it.
"Stone Hags," she hears Galian say in explanation to Achamian. "Bandits. A scalper company that preys on its own. They saw our numbers, I'm guessing, thought we were low-hanging fruit." A wry laugh.
"Aye," Pokwas says. " Sorcerous fruit."
Hands held out and helpless, she stares down at the dying stranger. Why are you doing this? something cries within her. He's dying. There's nothing to be done! Why The Judging Eye opens.
"But have we seen the end of them?" the old Wizard asks.
"Depends," Galian replies. "No one knows what they do over the winter months, where they go. They could be desperate."
And she learns what it means to stare into the moral sum of a man's life. Sutadra…
Soot, the others had called him.
You can count the bruises on your heart easily enough, but numbering sins is a far trickier matter. Men are eternally forgetting for their benefit. They leave it to the World to remember, and to the Outside to call them to harsh account. One hundred Heavens, as Protathis famously wrote, for one thousand Hells.