She can see it all, intuitions bundled into the wrinkled architecture of his skin, the squint about his eyes, the cuts across his knuckles. Sin and redemption, written in the language of a flawed life. The oversights, the hypocrisies, the mistakes, the accumulation of petty jealousies and innumerable small selfish acts. A wife struck on a wedding night. A son neglected for contempt of weakness. A mistress abandoned. And beneath these cankers, she sees the black cancer of far greater crimes, the offences that could be neither denied nor forgiven. Villages burned on fraudulent suspicions. Innocents massacred.
But she also sees the clear skin of heroism and sacrifice. The white of devotion. The gold of unconditional love. The gleam of loyalty and long silence. The high blue of indomitable strength.
Sutadra, she realizes, is a good man broken down, a man forced, time and again, to pitch his scruples against the unscalable walls of circumstance- forced. A man who erred for the sake of mad and overwhelming expediencies. A man besieged by history…
Regret. This is what drives him. This is what delivered him to the scalpers. The will to suffer for his sins…
And she loves him-this mute stranger! One cannot see as much as she sees and not feel love. She loves him the way one must love someone with such a tragic past. She knows as a lover knows, or a wife.
She knows he is damned.
He kicks against the mud of the stream, gazes with eyes pinned to sights unseen. He makes fish mouths, and she glimpses the arrow digging into the back of his throat. A small cry escapes him, the kind you would expect from a dying child or dog.
"Shhh…" she murmurs through burning lips. She's been weeping. " Paradise," she lies. "Paradise awaits you…"
But a shadow has fallen across them, a darker gloom. The Captain-she knows this without looking. Even as she turns her face up, the Judging Eye closes, but still she glimpses blasted back, coal-orange eyes leering from a charred face…
He raises his boot and kicks the arrow down. Wood popping in meat. Sutadra's body jerks, flutters like a thread in the wind.
"You rot where you fall," the Captain says with a queer and menacing determination.
Mimara cannot breathe. There is a softness in the Kianene's passing, a sense of fire passing into powdery ash. She raises numb fingers to brush the bootprint from the dead man's nose and beard but cannot bring herself to touch the greying skin.
"Weakness!" the Captain screams at the others. "The Stone Hags struck because they could smell our weakness! No more! No more wallowing! No more womanish regret! This is a slog! "
"The Slog of Slogs!" Sarl screeches out, chortling.
"And I am the Rule of Rules," the Captain grates.
Xonghis altered their course, leading them away from the Stone Hags and their flight. They left Sutadra behind them, sprawled across the muck, the broken arrow jutting like a thumb from his swelling face. Scalpers lie where they fall-such was the Rule. The cyclopean trunks were not long in obscuring him.
Sutadra had always been a mystery to Achamian-and to the others, from what he could tell. Galian sometimes made a show of asking the Kianene his opinion, then taking his silence as proof of agreement. "See!" he would crow as the others laughed. "Even Soot knows!"
This was the way with some men. They sealed themselves in, bricked their ears and their mouths, and spent their remaining days speaking only with their eyes-until these too became inscrutable. Many, you could wager, held chaos in their hearts, shrill and juvenile. But since ignorance is immovable, they seem immovable, imperturbable. Such is the power of silence. For all Achamian knew, Sutadra was little more than a weak-willed fool, a peevish coward behind the blind of an impassive demeanour.
But he would always remember him as strong.
None of this, however, explained Mimara's reaction. Her tears. Her subsequent silence. After the debacle in the mines of Cil-Aujas, he had assumed she would be immune to terror and violence. He tried to sound her out, but she simply looked away, blinking.
So he paced Galian and Pokwas for a time, asking about the Stone Hags. The bandits had haunted the Mop for some five years now, long enough to become the scourge of the Long Side. Pokwas absolutely despised them: preying upon one's own was an outrage for the Zeumi, apparently. Galian regarded them with the same wry contempt he took to everything. "It takes figs to do what they do!" he cried at one point, obviously trying to bait his towering friend. "As big and black as your own!" Achamian was inclined to agree. Hunting Sranc was one thing. Hunting Men who hunted Sranc was something else entirely.
They told him the story of the Stone Hag captain, Pafaras, the Mysunsai Schoolman who had assailed Cleric. According to rumour, he was a notorious Breacher, someone who failed to expedite his arcane contracts: a cardinal sin for a School of mercenaries. He had been chased into the wilds more than a decade ago.
"He was the first spitter to chase the Bounty," Galian explained. "Pompous. One of those fools who turns the world upside down when he finds himself at the end of the line. Arrogant unto comedy. They say he was outlawed for burning down an Imperial Custom House in one of the old camps."
And so the Stone Hags were born. Scalper companies always vanished in skinny country, swallowed up as if they had never been. "It's chop-chop-chop with the skinnies," Pokwas said. "Runners always die." But the Stone Hags invariably left survivors, and so word of their atrocities spread and multiplied.
"More famous than the Skin Eaters," Galian said cheerfully. "The one and only."
Achamian stole several glances at Mimara over the course of their account, still puzzled by her blank face and distracted gait. Had she somehow come to know Sutadra?
"He died the death allotted to him," he said, resuming his place at her side. "Sutadra…" he added in response to her sharp look.
"Why? What makes you say that?" Her eyes gleamed with defensive tears.
The old Wizard scratched his beard and swallowed, reminded himself to take care, that it was Mimara he was speaking to. "I thought you mourned his loss."
"The Eye," she snapped, her voice cracking about a bewildered fury. "It opened. I saw… I saw him… I saw his-his life…"
It seemed he should have known this.
"It's his damnation I mourn," she said. The damnation you will share, her look added.
Drusas Achamian had spent the bulk of his life knowing he was damned. Stand impotent before a fact long enough and it will begin to seem a fancy, something to be scorned out of reflex, denied out of habit. But over the years the truth would creep upon him, steal his breath with visions of Schoolmen in their thousands, shades, shrieking in endless agony. And even though he had repudiated the Mandate long ago, he still found himself whispering the first of their catechisms: "Though you lose your soul, you shall gain the World."
"The damnation you want me to teach you," he said, referring to the sorcery-the blasphemy — she desperately wanted to learn.
She ignored him after that-so damned mercurial! He fumed until he realized that days had passed since their last Gnostic lesson. Everything had seemed half-hearted after Cil-Aujas, as if sand had been packed into the joints of all the old motions. He scarce had the stomach to teach, so he simply assumed that she scarce had the stomach to learn. But now he wondered whether there was more to her sudden disinterest.
Life's harder turns had a way of overwhelming naive passions. He found himself recalling his earlier advice to Soma. She had been given something, something she had yet to understand.
Time. She would need time to discover who she had become-or was becoming.
The Captain called them to a halt in what seemed a miraculous clearing. An oak had been felled in its hoary prime, leaving a blessed hole in the otherwise unbroken canopy. The company milled about, blinking at the clear blue sky, staring at the remains of the titanic oak. The tree had crashed into the arms of its equally enormous brothers and now hung propped and skeletal above the forest floor. Much of the bark had sloughed away so that it resembled an enormous bone braced by scaffolds of winding branches. Timbers had been set across several forks, creating three platforms at different heights.