"The Mop," the Nonman said, raking the surrounding gloom with his gaze. "The trees play games with sounds…" A blink belonging to things nocturnal. "With us."
"Then we need to be free of them," Achamian said. With scarce a look at the Captain, he began intoning the inconceivable and dug fingers of spoken meaning into the soft muck of the World.
Heedless of the wondering looks, he trod into the open air.
He climbed through the lower regions of the canopy, using his hands to pull himself around the dead limbs blocking his sorcerous ascent. Vertigo tipped his stomach. Even after so many years, so many Cants, his body still resented the impossibility. He threw his forearms across his face to fend lashing branches as he approached the greenery. He found himself fighting, embroiled in nets of foliage, then the veils fell away…
Pointed wind. Naked sunlight. He blinked against the brightness, savoured the daub of sun across his rutted cheeks.
He could scarce step above the crowns, so immense were the trees. He found himself walking around and between the stacked heights to gain a better view. On and on, as far as his old eyes could see, mighty shags of leaves, heaped and hanging, fluttering pale silver in the breeze, all the way to the horizon. Were it not for the way the leafy surface followed the summits and troughs of the underlying land, he would have likened what he saw to the slow-tossing surface of a sea.
The cries were clearer, but their direction escaped him until he glimpsed the flash of sorcery in the corner of his eye-to the north. A scarp of bald stone rose across the distance, rising and falling so as to resemble a young woman slumbering on her side. He mouthed a quick Cant of Scrying, and the air before him became watery with distorted images. Then he glimpsed them…
Men. Scalpers. Running through the foliage along plummet's edge.
They ran as fleet as children, a scattered file of them, flashing between screens of leaves and mighty trunks, in and out of shadow. A stand of strangler oaks dominated the waist of the escarpment, monsters who clenched the living rock of the edge and sent skeins of roots, interlocking fans of them, roping down the cliff face. This was where the scalpers clustered, throwing panicked glances back the way they had come. Several had already begun their perilous descent…
A second party of scalpers abruptly appeared on the edge, farther back, high on the hip. Achamian had assumed the company was being chased along the ledge, but now he realized they fled the forest deeps behind them-that they were running toward the Skin Eaters. The Men hesitated for a moment, their mouths shouting holes in their beards. Whatever pursued them, Achamian realized, was close, too close for them to join their comrades among the oaks. Numb and blinking, he watched them begin leaping… tiny human figures dropping along sheer stone faces, vanishing into the canopies below. It seemed he could feel the plummet of each tingling through his gut.
Then they appeared, rising from the gloom, engulfing those who had elected to stand and fight.
Sranc. Raving multitudes of them.
Shrieking white faces. A cacophony of miniature cries, human and inhuman, threaded the air. Men hacked at the white-skinned rush, stumbling, falling. One wild-haired scalper, obviously a Thunyeri, stood on a raised thumb of stone, wielding a great axe in each hand. He cut and hammered the first wave to ruin, managed to cow a second before black shafts began jutting from his unarmoured extremities. A stagger, then a misstep sent him skidding and jerking down the cliffside.
A kind of breathless remorse struck the old Wizard. This was how scalpers died, he realized. Lost. Thrown over the edge of civilization. A crazed death-not simply violent. Unwitnessed. Unmourned.
The scalpers down among the strangler oaks seemed to be making good their escape. A dozen of them were now clinging to hanging skirts of roots, daring a breakneck descent. More fugitives crowded the lip, tossing what gear they still carried below. Then one of them simply stepped out over the ledge… and continued walking, though he wobbled and almost fell. The Mysunsai Schoolman, Achamian realized. Pafaras. Too high to use the ground, the fool was trying to negotiate the arcane echo of a promontory that jutted outward about half the height of the cliffs proper. Even from this distance his Mark was clear.
The Stone Hags… He was watching the very Men who had tried to murder them-watching them die.
Achamian could see the Sranc high on the scarp's hip exulting in the flesh of those they had overcome. Others raced toward the remaining scalpers on the waist below, individuals dog-loping along the ledge, masses surging through the parallel deeps. Helpless, Achamian watched more suicidal leaps and another round of desperate, hopeless battles.
Then, with several stalwarts still roaring and battling, the floating Mysunsai set the cliff ledge alight. Even from such a distance his sorcerous cry tickled edges that could not be seen. A great horned head rose before the Mysunsai's slight figure, real enough for sunlight to glint from black scales yet stamped in smoke all the same: the Dragonhead, the dread mainstay of Anagogic sorcery. Golden fire spewed out over the bristling ledge, washed into the avenues between the great trees, making burning shadows of Sranc and Men alike. A chorus of screams climbed across the bowl of the sky.
The scalpers hanging from the roots below raised arms against the shower of burning debris. The Dragonhead dipped again, and more fire washed across the carpets of smoking dead. The Sranc retreated, howling and screaming, vanished into the safety of the deeper forest. There was a blinking pause. The Mysunsai struggled with his arcane footing, seemed to stumble, then simply dropped…
Achamian hung in indecision. Gone were the shouts, the cries. Fires smouldered along the length of the scarp's waist, trailing long plumes of black smoke. Miles of canopy swayed and rebounded in the open wind.
"We should return…"
The old Wizard fairly soiled his wolf-skin robes, such was his shock. He whirled. Cleric hung in the air a mere span behind him, yet the old Wizard had heard nothing, sensed nothing.
"Who?" he cried before his wits returned to him. "Who are you?"
A Mysunsai Schoolman keeping company with scalpers seemed mad enough, but a Nonman?
A Quya Mage?
"The Sranc. They move in force," the ageless Ishroi said, his face white and immaculate in the high sun. The Mop swayed and tossed to the horizon beyond him. "The others must be warned."
– | Back to the gloom, to the reek of moss and earth.
Cleric began describing what they had seen, only to falter as his memories outran him. Achamian finished, doing his best to sound indifferent even though his heart still hammered.
"Fucking Hags!" Pokwas exclaimed, his eyes bright with imagined mayhem. "Serves them. Serves them!"
"You're missing the point," Galian said, staring at Achamian with solemn concentration.
"Pox is right," Soma chimed in. "Good riddance!" He turned, grinning.
"I say we run them," Pokwas cried. "Lop them and bale them." He looked to Soma and laughed. "Repay the favour in their own ski-!"
"Fools!" Lord Kosoter spat. "Nothing will be run. Nothing!"
The black-skinned giant turned to regard his Captain with round-eyed outrage. Lord Kosoter's scrutiny, which was angry at the best of times, narrowed into a murderous squint.