"Tell me!" Lord Kosoter roared. With his left hand, he held the man up as much by the hair as by the scruff of the neck. With his right, he held his Chorae before the ailing Schoolman's face. The fact that the Stone Hag scarcely glanced at the thing told Achamian he was already dying.
The other Hags, some eleven of them, milled in gasping shock. They looked more like beggars than warriors. Most had shed their armour in their haste to flee, leaving them with only winter-rotted tunics and leggings. Several were thin to the point of bulbous elbows and knees. These were the men he had seen descending the cliff face, Achamian realized.
"Four clans… maybe more," the swaying Hag was saying. "Numerous… Very aggressive."
" More than one clan?" Galian interjected. "Are they mobbing?" The horror was plain in his voice.
A moment of silence. "Maybe…" Pafaras said.
"Mobbing?" Achamian asked aloud.
"A scalper's greatest fear," Pokwas replied in low tones. "The skinnies usually war clan against clan, but sometimes they unite. No one knows why."
"There was a cliff…" Pafaras managed between gasps. "Some climbed down after us… the ones you k-killed… But the rest… backtracked… we think."
"Your sort," the Captain grated in disgust. He bent his face back to show the mayhem in his eyes. "Come to flee the Ordeal, is that it? Come to lord your power?"
"N-no!" the man coughed.
The Captain raised his Chorae as though inspecting a jewel, then, with a kind of casual malice, slammed the thing into the Hag's mouth.
Sparking light. The whoosh of transubstantiation.
Achamian stood blinking, a burning pang where his breath should have been. He watched the salt replica of Pafaras fall backward. It thudded hard against the sponge-soft turf. The Captain crouched, hunched over the petrified sorcerer. He seemed little more than an apish shadow given the war of light and after-image in the Wizard's eyes. He pulled a knife from his boot, wedged the point in the salt cavity that had been the Hag's mouth. He raised his elbow in a prying motion, cracked off the alabaster jaw.
He retrieved his Chorae, then stood, glaring at everyone but Cleric.
"What's he doing?" Mimara whispered with alarm.
"I think he's recruiting," the old Wizard replied, bracing himself against a deep shudder. As much as he despised Mysunsai Schoolmen as mercenaries, he could not help but feel a certain kinship with the man. Nothing instills brotherhood like the sharing of vulnerabilities. "Witho-"
He fell silent, feeling the bite of the Captain's lunatic gaze.
Lord Kosoter prowled about the fugitive scalpers, scrutinizing them with a slaver's indifference. As miserable as the Skin Eaters appeared, the Stone Hags seemed even more wretched. Starved and wounded and absolutely terrified.
"You dogs have a choice," he grated. "You can let the Whore play number-sticks with your pitiful lives…" A rare grin, sinister for the murder in his eyes.
"Or you can let me."
And with that, the Stone Hags ceased to exist, and the Skin Eaters were reborn.
– | Fugitive, they ran, a bubble of light falling through pillared blackness.
The trees seemed to claw at them with stationary malice, slow them with insinuations of frailty and doom. The Hags, who had no Qirri to brace them, cried out from time to time, begging them to stop, or to at least slow their pace. But no one, not even Achamian or Mimara, listened, let alone answered their pleas. This was the Slog of Slogs. The sooner they understood that, the greater their prospects for survival.
The lesson was dear. Two of them fell behind, never to be seen again.
Dawn rose in sheets of brightening green. The impenetrable black yielded to the murk of deep forest hollows. They encountered a surging river the scalpers called the Throat. It fairly raged with spring melt, the water brown with sediment, spouting white plumes where the current crashed against the boulders it had rolled down from the mountains. The sunlight it afforded was welcome, but the glimpse of smoke in the distance apparently was not. "Fatwall," Xonghis explained to Achamian and Mimara. "It burns." They were forced to follow the river's thundering course several miles before finding a crossing. Even still, they lost another of the Hags to the kicking waters.
They plunged back into the Mop and its temple gloom, the mossed ground wheezing beneath their feet. As always they found themselves craning their necks from side to side as if to catch some secret observer. Achamian need only glance at the others to know they suffered the same plaguing sense he did, as if they were the people hated, like the mummer tribes that migrated across the Three Seas.
Some fluke of the terrain delivered them back to the Throat, this time opposite the point they had first encountered it. Cleric bid them pause. "Listen," he called over the white roar. Achamian could hear nothing, but like the others he could see… On the far bank, through the screens of foliage stacked beneath the canopy's verge, he glimpsed shadows running. Hundreds of them, following the path they had taken down-river.
"Skinnies, boys!" Sarl cried with a gurgling laugh. " Mobs of them! Didn't I promise you a chopper? Eh? Eh? "
They continued climbing, the grades at times so steep that thighs burned and sputum flew. If the Qirri failed to whip them forward, then the glimpse of the Sranc who pursued them certainly did. Despite the profundity of their exhaustion, the sight of sunlight through the gallery ahead spurred them to a run.
They found themselves at the Mop's blinking edge, squinting across a slope of felled trees.
Fatwall. The long-dead fortress of Aenku Maimor.
Maimor was a name that Achamian had encountered only a few times in his dreams. The ancient Meori Empire had been little more than a tarp thrown across the fractious tribes of the Eastern White Norsirai, and Maimor had been one of several nails that had held it in place over the generations, a High Royal Fastness, which would house the High-King during his seasonal tour of his more rebellious provinces. Like everything else during the First Apocalypse, it had come crashing down in a hail of fire and Sranc.
The old Wizard wondered whether a Meorishman of yore would recognize what remained. The Maimor lost versus the Maimor cut from the Wilderness some two thousand years later…
Fatwall.
Trees had overgrown the ruined outer defences, strangler oaks mostly. The great stumps yet stood, as tall as towers, clutched like fists about the foundations. The scalpers had incorporated them in their reclamation of the fortress, using them as ad hoc bastions. Elsewhere they had raised palisades across the gaps and timber hoardings along the ruined heights. This was what smoked and burned, the flames all but invisible in direct sunlight.
The Skin Eaters lingered in the shadows, panting and peering. Something had attacked the fortress-and recently.
Achamian heard Galian murmur, "Bad…" to Pokwas, who towered at his side. Catching the old Wizard's look, the former Columnary said, "Skinnies behind us and now skinnies before us? This is more than just a mobbing."
"Then what is it?"
Galian shrugged in the scalper manner, as if to say, We're all dead anyway. Achamian thought of these men, Skin Eater and Stone Hag alike, spending season after season letting blood in these wastes. They feared for their lives, certainly, but not the same as other men feared. How could they? Coin lost to the number-sticks is far different from coin lost to thieves, even if the penury that resulted was the same.
Scalpers knew the gamble.
When nobody could discern any sign of friend or foe, the Captain instructed Cleric to scout ahead. The Nonman strode into the sky, his skin shining, his nimil hauberk gleaming. The mongrel company watched with exhausted wonder. He walked high over the slope of felled trees, receding until he was little more than a thin dash of black hanging over Maimor's ruined precincts.