He saw his mother beat her way through the Pillarian Guards, heard her inconsolable scream. He watched his uncle, the Holy Shriah, grasp her shoulders as she fell upon her beloved son. He saw his sister Theliopa, absurd in her black gowns, approach in fey curiosity. He glimpsed one of his own tears falling, a liquid bead, falling, breaking upon his twin's slack cheek.
A thing so tragic. So much love would be required to heal.
"Mommy!" he cried. "Mommeeeeeeee!"
Gods make real.
There was such love in the touch of a son.
The funerary room was narrow and tall, plated with lines of blue-patterned Ainoni tile, but otherwise unadorned. Light showered through air like steam. Idols glared from small niches, almost, but never quite forgotten. Gold-gleaming censers wheezed in the corners, puffing faint ribbons of smoke. The Empress leaned against the marble pedestal in the room's centre, looking down, staring at the inert lines of her littlest.
She began with his fingers, humming an old song that made her slaves weep for recognition. Sometimes they forgot she shared their humble origins. Smiling, she looked at them as though to say, Yes, I've been you all along…
Just another slave.
She raised a forearm, cleansed it with long gentle strokes, elbow to wrist, elbow to wrist.
He was cold like clay. He was grey like clay. Yet, no matter how hard she pressed, she could not rob him of his form. He insisted on remaining her son.
She paused to cry. After a time she swallowed away the ache, cleared her throat with a gentle cough. She resumed her work and her humming. It almost seemed that she carved him more than she cleansed, that with every stroke he somehow became more real. The flawless lines and moist divets. The porcelain gleam of skin. The little mole beneath his left nipple. The constellation of freckles that reached like a shawl from shoulder to slender shoulder.
She absorbed all of it, traced and daubed and rinsed it, with movements that seemed indistinguishable from devotion.
There was such love in the touch of a son.
His chest. The low curve of his abdomen. And of course his face. Sometimes something urged her to prod and to shake, to punish him for this cruel little game. But her strokes remained unperturbed, slow and sure, as if the fact of ritual were some kind of proof against disordered souls.
She wrung the sponge, listened to the rattle of water. She smiled at her little boy, wondered at his beauty.
His hair was golden.
He smelled, she thought, as though he had been drowned in wine.
Kelmomas pretended to weep.
She bundled him tight against her breast, and he squirmed clear of the blankets crowded between them. He pressed himself against her shuddering length. Her every sob welled through him like waves of lazy heat, washed him with bliss and vindication.
"Don't let go!" she gasped, pressing her cheek back from his damp hair. "Never-never-please!"
Her face was his scripture, written with looms of skin, muscle, and tendon. And the truths he read there were holy.
He knew it so intimately he could tell whenever a mole had darkened or a lash had fallen from her eyelids. He had heard the priests prattle about their Heavens, but the truth was that paradise lay so much nearer-and tasted of salt.
Her face eclipsed him, the ligaments of anguish, the trembling lips, the diamonds streaming from her eyes.
"Kel," she sobbed. "Poor baby…"
He keened, squashed the urge to kick his feet in laughter. Yes! he cried silent glee, the limb-wagging exultation of a child redeemed. Yes!
And it had been so easy.
You are, the secret voice said, her only love remaining.
CHAPTER SIX
Marrow
Ask the dead and they will tell you.
All roads are not equal.
Verily, even maps can sin.
— Ekyannus I, 44 EPISTLES
What the world merely kills, Men murder.
— Scylvendi Proverb
Early Spring, 19 New Imperial Year (4132 Year-of-the-Tusk), The River Rohil
The Wizard picked his way through the cool forest deeps, his bones as old as his thoughts were young. He huffed and grimaced, but there was a knowing cadence to his hobble, proof of prior years spent travelling. Four days he had trudged, wending between the pillar trees, squinting at the sun's glare through the spring-thin canopy, using the slow crawl of distant landmarks to guide him to his destination…
Marrow.
All Achamian knew of this place was what his Galeoth slave, Geraus, had told him. It was a Scalpoi entrepфt located at the westward end of the long navigable stretch of the River Rohil, a place where the companies of scalpers who worked the hinterland could collect their bounties and purchase supplies. As the nearest centre of any description to the tower, this was where Geraus would come, three or four times a year, to sell his pelts and, with the gold Achamian gave him, secure those goods they could not improvise for themselves. An even-tempered, slow-speaking man, Geraus had always taken wary delight in telling them the stories of his visits. Perhaps because the journey was both arduous and perilous-Tisthanna rarely forgave Achamian the weeks of Geraus's absence-or perhaps because they simply marked a deviation from the routine of his life, Geraus was given to foot-stomping airs for the days immediately following his return. Only when his tales were completed would he retreat to the borders of his gentle and dependable self. They had always been his time to shine, for the slave of the great Wizard to be "world-shouldered," as the Galeoth say.
For the most part, the visits seemed to be skulking, secretive affairs, transactions made between trusted men and trusted men only. A bag of beans, to hear Geraus speak of it, was as valuable and fraught with complication as a purse of gold or a bale of scalps. He made no secret of his discretion-in fact, he seemed to take great pride in it. Even when his children were infants, Geraus seemed bent on impressing them with the inestimable survival value of humility. The greatest virtue of any slave, he always seemed to be saying, was the ability to pass unnoticed.
No different than a spy, Achamian could not help reflecting.
To think he had believed those days dead and gone, wandering the Three Seas, passing from court to court, holding his head high before sneering kings and potentates-a Schoolman still. Even though he had shed the fat, even though he wore wool and animal skins instead of muslin and myrrh, the simple fact of striking for unseen horizons had brought his past back to prickling life. Sometimes, when he glanced up through greening limbs, he would see the turquoise skies of Kian, or when he knelt to refill his waterskin, the heaving black of the northern Meneanor. Blinks had become glimpses, each with its own history, its own peculiar sense and beauty. Caste-noble courtiers laughing, their faces painted white. Steaming delicacies served by oiled slaves. Fortifications sheathed in enamelled tiles, gleaming beneath arid suns. A black-skinned prostitute drawing high her knees.
Twenty years had slipped away, and not a day had passed.
He already found himself mourning Geraus and his family, far more than he would have imagined. Slaves were funny that way. It was as though the fact of ownership shrouded certain obvious and essential human connections. You assumed it would be the conveniences you would miss, not the slaves who provided them. Now, Achamian could care less about the comforts-they seemed contemptible. And something inner shook whenever he thought of their faces-laughing or crying, it did not matter-something jarred loose by the knowledge he would never sit with them again.
It made him feel like a weepy grandfather.
Perhaps it was good, this suicidal turn his life had taken.
He paused, savoured the gilded granduer of the evening wilderness seen from afar. The escarpment scrawled along the horizon, a long-wandering band of vertical stone mellowing in the dusk, buttressed by scree-and-boulder-choked ramps that descended into the forests below. He could see the Long-Braid Falls, so named because of the way the River Rohil divided about a great head of stone on the scarp's edge, tw
isting down in two thundering cataracts.
Marrow lay immediately below, soaked in the waterfall's rose-powder haze. The original town, according to Geraus, had been built downriver but had crept like a caterpillar to the escarpment's base as scalp broker after scalp broker vied to be the first to greet the westward-bound Scalpoi. Now, hacked out of the surrounding forest, it looked like a sore scabbed in pitch and wood, huts piled upon shanties, all clapped together using logs and orphaned materials, packed along the riverbank, encrusting the lower terraces of the cliff.
It was fully dark before Achamian reached the town's derelict outskirts. Timber posts were all that remained of the original Marrow. He could see them standing in the surrounding bracken, as silent as the moonlight that illuminated them, some rotted, some leaning, all of them possessing a funereal solitude that he found unnerving. Various characters and random marks scored those nearest the track, the residue of uncounted travellers with their innumerable vanities and frustrations. Shining between gaps in the darkling clouds, the Nail of Heaven allowed him to decipher several.
"I fuck Sranc," one said in fresh-cut Gallish.
"Horjon forgot to sleep with his ass to the wall," another claimed in Ainoni pictograms-beside a blot that could have been sun-cooked blood.
The roar of the falls climbed high into the night, and the first of the mists beaded his skin. A sense of menace ringed the lights of habitation before him. How long had it been since he had last braved a place like this? The carnival of strangers.
His mule in tow, Achamian trudged into what appeared to be the main thoroughfare. He was half-breathless by this time, his body suffused with the falling-forward hum of slogging through distances of mud. His cloak seemed lined with ingots of lead, so pendulous it had become. The town's name was appropriate, he decided. Marrow. He could almost imagine that he tramped through the muck of halved bones.
Shadowy men reeled through the ruts around and beside him, some alone, their eyes hollow and alert, others in cackling groups, their lips and looks relaxed by a consciousness of numbers. Everyone was sodden. Everyone shouted over the thunder of the falls. Most were armed and armoured. Many were caked in blood, either because they were wounded or because they were unwashed.
These were the Scalpoi, sanctioned by the writ of the Aspect-Emperor, drawn from the four corners of the New Empire: wild-haired Galeoth, smooth-cheeked Nansur, great-bearded Tydonni, even lazy-lidded Nilnameshi-they were all here, trading scalps for Imperial kellics and shrial remissions.
Feeling harried by a succession of long looks, Achamian hunched deeper into the hood of his cloak. He knew he was anything but conspicuous, that part of him had simply forgotten how to trust in anonymity. Even still he found himself shrinking from the touch of other eyes, belligerent or curious, it did not matter. There was an unruliness in the air, a whiff of some profound lawlessness, which he initially ascribed to the release of pent urgencies. The Scalpoi spent months far from any hearth, warring and hunting Sranc through the trackless Wilds. He could scarce imagine a more savage calling, or a greater warrant for excess.
But as the mad parade thickened, he realized that the abandon was more than simply a matter of glutting frustrated lusts. There were too many men from too many different castes, creeds, and nations. Caste-nobles from Cingulat. Runaway slaves from Ce Tydonn. Fanim heretics from Girgash. It was as though common origins were all that guaranteed civilization, a shared language of life, and that everything was fury and miscommunication otherwise. Hungers-that was all these men had in common. Instincts. What had made these men wild wasn't the wilderness, or even the mad savagery of the Sranc, it was the inability to trust anything more than the bestial in one another.
Fear, he told himself. Fear and lust and fury… Trust in these, old man. It seemed the only commandment a place such as Marrow could countenance.
He trudged onward, more wary than ever. He smelled whisky, vomit, and shallow latrines. He heard songs and laughter and weeping, the ghostly notes of a lute plucked from the bowl of the night. He glimpsed smiles-the glint of gold from yellow-rotted teeth. He saw lantern-limned interiors, raucous, illuminated worlds, filled with hard words and mad, murderous looks. He saw the glimmer of naked steel. He watched a roaring Galeoth man hammer another, over and over, until the man was little more than a blood-soaked worm flexing and squirming in the muck. A drunk harlot, her flabby arms bruised and bare, accosted him. "Fancy a peach?" she drawled, groping between his thighs.
He felt the flare of dwindled memory, the twitch of old, life-preserving habits, no less prudent for becoming vestigial. He gripped the pommel of his knife beneath his cloak.
He passed the lightless Custom House with its threadbare Circumfix hanging slack in the windless gloom. Marrow was an outpost of the New Empire-it wouldn't do to forget that. He passed a lazaret with its aura of astringent, feces, and infection. He passed a low-raftered opium den, as well as several booming taverns and two half-tented brothels, oozing moans and mercantile giggles into the general night. He even happened upon a wooden post-and-lintel temple to Yatwer, filled with chimes and chants-some evening ceremony, Achamian supposed. All the while the cataract whooshed and rumbled, the motionless blast of water against stone. Clear beads dripped from the rim of his cowl.
He tried not to think of the girl. Mimara.
By the time he found the inn Geraus had mentioned, the Cocked Leg, he was almost accustomed to the uproar. Marrow, he decided while leading his mule into the rear courtyard, was not so different from the great polyglot cities of his youth. More vicious, roughed in timber instead of monumental stone, and lacking the size that allowed indifference and mass anonymity to congeal into urban tolerance-there was no unspoken agreement to overlook one another's perversions here. Anyone could be judged at any moment. But even still, it possessed the same sense of possibility, accidental and collective, humming across every public threshold, as though the congregation of strangers was all it took to generate alternatives…
Freedom.
A night in such a place could have a million endings, Achamian realized. That was its wonder and horror both.
A night in Marrow.
The room was small. The woollen bedding reeked of mould and must. The innkeeper had not liked the looks of him, that much was certain. Show the pauper to the pauper's room-that was the ancient rule. Nevertheless, Achamian found himself smiling as he doffed his dripping cloak and squared his supplies and belongings. It seemed he had set out for Marrow a sleeping hermit and had arrived an awakening spy.
This was good, he told himself as he followed the stairs and halls toward the thunder of the Cocked Leg's common room. Most auspicious. Now all he required was some luck.
He grinned in anticipation, did his best to ignore the bloody handprints decorating the wall.
Achamian's adventurous mood evaporated as soon as he pressed his way into the smoky, low-timbered room. The shock nearly struck him breathless, so long had it been since he had last observed other men with his arcane eyes. There was another sorcerer here-an old and accomplished one given the black and blasted depth of his Mark-sitting in the far corner. And there was someone carrying a Chorae as well. A cursed Tear of God, so-called because its merest touch destroyed sorcerers and their desecrations.
Of course, he could see the Mark whenever he looked to his own hands or glimpsed his reflection in sitting water, but it was like his skin, something too near to he truly visible. Seeing its eye-twisting stain on another-especially after so many years immersed in the clarity of the Uncreated, the World as untouched by sorcerers and their blasphemous voices-made him feel… young.
Young with fear.
Turning his back on the presence, Achamian made his way to the barkeep, whom he easily recognized from his slave's description. According to Geraus, his name was Haubrezer, one of the three Tydonni brothers who owned the Cocked Leg. Achamian bowed his head, even though he had yet to see anyone observing jnan since arriving here. "My name is Akka," he said.
"Ya," the tall, stork-skinny man replied. His voice wasn't so much deep as it was dark. "You the old pick. This no land for the slow and crooked, ya know."
Achamian feigned an old man's baffled good humour. It seemed absurd that the venerable Norsirai slur for Ketyai, "pick," could still sting after so many years.
"My slave, Geraus, said you could assist me."
Coming to Marrow had always been the plan-as had hiring a company of Scalpoi. Mimara had simply forced him to abbreviate his timetable, to begin his journey before knowing his destination. Her coming had rattled him in more ways than he cared to admit-the suspicions, the resemblance to her mother, the pointed questions, their sad coupling-but the consequences of her never coming would have been disastrous.
At least now he knew why Fate had sent her to him-as a boot in the rump.
"Yaa," Haubrezer brayed. "Good man, Geraus." A searching look, rendered severe by the angularity of his face. He struck Achamian as one of those men whose souls had adapted to the peculiarities of their body. Stooped and long-fingered, mantislike both in patience and predatoriness. He did not hunt, Achamian decided, so much as he waited.
"Indeed."
Haubrezer stared with an almost bovine relentlessness-bored to tears, yet prepared to die chewing his cud. The man seemed to have compensated for his awkwardness by slowing everything down, including his intellect. Slowness had a way of laying out the grace that dwelt in all things, even the most ungainly. It was the reason why proud drunks took care to walk as though under water.
At last, the large eyes blinked in conclusion. "Ya. The ones you look for…" He lowered his veined forehead toward the back corner, on the far side of the smoking central hearth.
Toward the sorcerer and the Chorae that Achamian had sensed upon entering the common room.
But of course…
"Are you sure?"
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