"Don't you see?" Galian said, imploring. Achamian could see the warning in the look he shot his Zeumi friend, as if to say, Too soon! You press too soon! The question was whether the Captain had seen it as well.
Achamian glanced at Mimara and somehow knew that she had sensed it as well. New lines had been drawn, and for the first time they were being tested.
"The Hags are bigger than any company-harder," Galian continued explaining. "That's how they can hunt the likes of us. If those skinnies lopped them, then those skinnies can lop us…" He let his voice trail into the significance of what he had just said.
"If they catch our scent…" Xonghis said, nodding. "Did you say the skinnies were chasing the Hags this way?" he asked the Wizard.
"Almost directly."
The implication was plain. Sooner or later the Sranc would cross their trail. Sooner or later they would start hunting them. According to what Achamian had learned from the others, scent was what made the creatures at once so deadly and so vulnerable. Laying trails to gull the Sranc into ambushes was the primary way scalpers hunted. But if the skinnies caught a company's spoor before they had time to prepare…
"Fatwall," the Captain said after a moment of furious meditation. "Same as before, except we slog it day and night. If we lose them, we lose them. If not, we chop it out there!"
"Fatwall!" Sarl cackled, his gums blood red and glistening. His grins had seemed to eat up his whole face as of late. "Latrine of the Gods!"
They skip-marched-as the scalpers called it-after that, hiked at a trot brisk enough to steal the wind for words. Once again Achamian found himself fearing his age, so exhausting was the pace. For him, the years had accumulated like dry rot: the fabric of his strength seemed healthy enough, but only so long as it wasn't pressed or stretched. By the time evening's shroud climbed across the Mop, the march had become a fog of petty miseries for him: reeling breathlessness, stitches in his side, cramps in his left thigh, needles in the back of his throat.
Dinner provided him with a brief respite. In truth, Cleric and his dispensation of Qirri was the only thing that interested him. Mimara slumped between the crooks fluting the base of the nearest trunk, propped her elbows on her knees, and laid her face in her palms. Xonghis, who seemed as tireless as Cleric or the Captain, set about preparing their measly repast: rank strips from a kill he had made three days ago. Others flopped across the soft humus, using fallen limbs and the like to support their heads.
Achamian leaned against his knees, did his best to spit away the nausea welling through him. He peered through the darkness, searching for Cleric and the Captain. For whatever reason, the two of them always retreated a short distance from the others when they made camp. He would see them, whether high on a promontory or in a depression on the far side of a tree, Cleric sitting, but with his head bowed in such a manner that he seemed to be kneeling, while the Captain-who so rarely spoke otherwise-muttered over him, grinding out words that he could never quite hear.
Just one of many mysteries.
The old Wizard hacked out the last of the fire pooled in his lungs, then shuffled toward the two figures. Cleric crouched on his toes, his cheek pressed against his knees while he listened with eyes both empty and black. The last of the remaining light seemed to linger along the bare-skin contours of his head and arms. Aside from his leggings and the tattered remains of a ceremonial kilt, he wore only his shirt of nimil mail, its intricate links always shining no matter how clotted with filth they became. The Captain stood above him, discoursing in the same scarcely audible mutter. His hair hung listless across the splinted sections of his hauberk, ropes of black shot with grey. His pleated Ainoni tunic, threadbare at the beginning of their expedition, fairly reeked to look at-though Achamian could scarce smell anything above his own rotting garb.
They both looked up, fixed him with twin gazes-one unearthly, the other not quite sane.
A kind anxiousness seized the moment.
"Qirri…" Achamian said, shocked by the croak that was his voice. "I'm… I'm too old for this… this pace."
Without a word, the Nonman turned to rummage through his satchel-one of the few things any of them had managed to carry out of Cil-Aujas. He withdrew the leather pouch, and Achamian found himself hefting the thing in his soul, divvying pinches into the near and distant future. Cleric unknotted the drawstring, reached in with thumb and forefinger.
But Lord Kosoter stayed him with a wave of his hand. Another pang plucked through the old Wizard, this one coloured with intimations of panic.
"We need to speak first," the Captain said. "Holy Veteran to Holy Veteran."
Achamian had the impression of a sneer over and above the contempt that generally ruled the man's expression. Something, a demoralizing wave, crashed through him. What now? Why? Why did this mad fool insist on beating complexity and confusion out of simple things?
He needed his pinch.
"By all means," the old Wizard said stiffly.
What could be more simple than that?
The Captain regarded him with dead eyes. "The others," he finally asked. "What do they say?"
Achamian did his best to match the madman's glare. "They worry," he admitted. "They fear we no longer possess the strength to reach the Coffers."
The Captain said nothing. Thanks to the Chorae beneath his armour, void and menace throbbed where his heart should have been.
"So?" Achamian asked crossly. All he wanted was his pinch! "Does talk violate some Rule of the Slog as well?"
"Talk," the Captain said, spitting to the left of his feet. "I care nothing for your talk…" The man's smile reminded Achamian of the dead he had seen on the battlefields of the First Holy War, the way the sun would sometimes shrink the flesh of the face, drawing cadaverous grins on the fallen.
"So long as you don't weep."
Sranc. The North means Sranc.
She fled them in Cil-Aujas, and now she flees them here, in the Mop. On the Andiamine Heights, where everything turned on the Great Ordeal and the Second Apocalypse, scarce a day passed without hearing something about the Ancient North-so much so that she openly scoffed at its mention. She would actually say things like, "Oh, yes, the North…" or "Sakarpus? You don't say?" There was an absurdity to places far, a sense of insignificant people scratching meaningless earth. Let them die, she would sometimes think, whenever she heard tidings of famine in Ainon or plague in Nilnamesh. What are these people to me? These places?
A fool… that's what she had been. A pathetic little slit.
Their souls and their wind fortified with Qirri, the company fairly sprints across the pitching ground-even Achamian, who had been in obvious straits before Cleric and his medicinal pinch. The Nonman leads, a Surillic Point floating low and brilliant above his right brow. The illumination pulls their scissoring shadows out into the dark, alternately revealing the sinuous arch of limbs and falling into pockets too deep to reach. Where Cil-Aujas had encased them at every turn, sealed them in impenetrable stone, now it seems they race through a void, that nothing exists beyond narrow corridors of earth, trunk, and branching lattices. Nothing. No murdering Stone Hags. No obscene Sranc. No prophecies or armies or panicked nations.
Just the Skin Eaters and rushing shadows.
For no reason she can fathom, images from her old life on the Andiamine Heights plague her soul's eye. Gilded folly. The farther she travels from her mother, it seems, the more a stranger she becomes to herself. She cringes at the thought of her former self: the endless straining to stand aloof, the endless posturing, not to convince others — for how could they not see through her in some measure? — but to assure herself of some false moral superiority…