Veils of smoke wafted about him, drawn to the lazy west. The Osthwai Mountains loomed in the distance beyond, clouds massing about their summits. After several moments of peering, Cleric waved them forward.
The company set across the bone-yard of trees, following the zigzag of trunks like beached whales, picking their way through wickets of skeletal branches. At times it seemed a labyrinth. Open daylight offered Achamian another opportunity to appraise the newcomers, the Hags, who seemed even more mangy and forlorn. They had the watchful look of captives and the voices of slaves living in fear of a violent and mercurial master. Like the Skin Eaters, they hailed from across the Three Seas. But who they were did not seem to matter, at least not to Achamian. They were Stone Hags, bandit scalpers who killed Men to profit from Sranc. In a real sense they were no better than cannibals and perhaps even more deserving of death. But they were human, and in a land of mobbing Sranc, that kinship trumped all other considerations.
Any reckoning of their crimes would have to come after.
Maimor's gate had collapsed into utter ruin long, long ago. A makeshift replacement had been raised across its uneven remains, a timber palisade untouched by the fires that smouldered elsewhere. The doors stood open and unmarked. The company filed beneath the crude fortifications, gazing about in different directions. Achamian had braced himself for the sight of slaughter within-few things were more disturbing than the aftermath of a Sranc massacre. But there was nothing. No dead. No blood. No seed.
"They've fled," Xonghis said, referring to the Ministerial contingent that was supposed to be stationed here. "The Imperials… This is their work. They've evacuated."
In some places the ruins spilled into gravel, while elsewhere they seemed remarkably intact. Hanging sections of wall. Alleyways through waist-high remnants. Blocks breached the interior turf, scattered and heaped, creating innumerable slots and crevices for rats. Several more massive stumps hunched over and across the stonework, their roots splayed out in veinlike skirts-two storeys high in some places. The fundamental layout of the fortress followed the ancient sensibility, where recreating some original model trumped more practical considerations. Even though the heights formed a distended oval, the walls were rectilinear. The citadel, in contrast, was round, forming the circle-in-square pattern that Achamian immediately recognized from his dreams of ancient Kelmeol, the lost capital of the Meori Empire, when Seswatha had stayed at the fortress of Aenku Aumor.
The stone was pitted and multicoloured, here black with moulds, there frosted with white and turquoise lichens. What ornamentation that survived, though plain in comparison to Cil-Aujas, seemed exceedingly elaborate by human standards. Every surface had been worked in patterns, animal totems for the most part, beasts standing, their arms articulated in humanlike poses. As numerous as the reliefs were, Achamian found only one intact representation of Meori's ancient crest: seven wolves arrayed like daisy petals about a shield.
His whole body hummed, at once scraped of all strength and steeped in giddy vigour. Qirri. Despite everything, Achamian found himself gazing and wandering as he had so many years ago, lost in thoughts of times long dead. He had always found sanctuary in ruins, freedom from the demands of his calling as well as connection with the ancient days that so tyrannized his nights. He had always felt whole in the presence of fragments.
"Akka…" Mimara called, her voice so like her mother's that goosepimples climbed the old Wizard's spine. A plaintive echo.
He turned, surprised by his smile. This was her first time, he realized, her first glimpse of the ancient Norsirai and their works.
"Remarkable, isn't it? To think ruins like this are all that remain of…"
He trailed, realizing that she looked at the others, not the ruined pockets climbing about them.
She turned to him, her eyes pinned with indecision. "Skin-spy…" she said in Ainoni.
"What?"
She blinked in momentary indecision. "Skin-spy… Somandutta… He's a… a skin-spy."
"What? What are you saying?" Achamian asked, struggling to collect his thoughts. She was a Princess-Imperial, which meant she had doubtless received extensive training regarding Consult skin-spies: who they were inclined to replace, how they were apt to reveal themselves.
She probably knew more about the creatures than he did.
"When the Sranc attacked," she continued under her breath, watching the Nilnameshi caste-noble where he stood with the others. "Earlier… The way he moved…" She turned to the Wizard, fixed him with a look of utter feminine certainty, as serious as famine or disease. "What he did was impossible, Akka."
Achamian stood dumbstruck. A skin-spy?
Half-remembered passions galloped through him. The heat and misery of the First Holy War. Images of old enemies. Old terrors…
He turned to where the Nilnameshi stood. "Soma…" he called, his voice rising thin.
"He saved my life," she murmured beside him, obviously every bit as bewildered as he was. "He revealed himself to save me…"
"Soma!" Achamian called again.
The man spared him a sideways glance before turning back to the mutter of those about him. Conger. Pokwas. Achamian blinked, suddenly feeling very feeble and very old. The Consult? Here?
The entire time.
"He revealed himself to save me…"
The confusion did not so much lift as part about necessity, leaving only naked alarm and the focus that came with it.
" Somandutta! I am speaking to you!"
The affable brown face turned to him, smiling with…
An Odaini Concussion Cant was the first thing to the old Wizard's lips.
Without warning, Soma leapt over the milling scalpers, boggling eyes and snuffing voices. He twisted mid-air with an acrobat's grace, landed with the scuttling fury of a crab. He was two-thirds across the courtyard before Achamian had finished. He leapt, sailing over the ruined wall as the Cant smashed stone and scabbed mortar.
The company stood pale and uncomprehending.
"Let that be a warning!" Sarl cackled in abject glee. He turned to the Hags as if they were unkempt cousins requiring lessons in jnanic etiquette. "Steer clear the peach, lads!" He glanced at Achamian, his eyes possessing enough of the old canniness to unnerve the old Wizard.
"What the Captain doesn't gut, the Schoolman blasts!"
They slept in bare sunlight.
As was proper, since nothing was as it should be. Battling men instead of Sranc. Taking refuge in a fallen fortress. Finding a skin-spy in their midst, then saying nothing of it.
The Qirri had faded and, despite the longing looks, the Nonman kept his pouch hidden in his satchel. Of exhaustion's many modalities, perhaps none is so onerous as apathy, the loss of sense and desire, where you wish only to cease wishing, where mere breathing becomes a kind of thoughtless toil.
Achamian's sleep was fitful, plagued by flies-the biting kind-and worries, too numerous and inchoate to resolve into anything comprehensible. Soma. The Sranc pursuing them. The Captain. Cleric. Mimara. The dead in Cil-Aujas. His lies. Her curse…
And of course Kellhus… and Esmenet.
Fire and their lack of numbers had convinced Lord Kosoter that the outer walls were indefensible, so they had retreated to the shattered citadel. At some point the structure had collapsed inward, leaving only the great blocks of the foundation intact. Centuries of vegetation had choked the inner ruin with uneven earth so that the remaining walls, which towered the height of three men along their outer faces, climbed only chest high for those standing within. The scalpers salvaged what they could find, those few trifles left behind by the retreating "Imperials," as they called them. Then they climbed into the citadel's earthen gut to await the inevitable.