The White-Luck Warrior (12 page)

"And the Coffers?" Galian asked with a kind of sly intensity—one that the old Wizard did not like. "They are as you say?"

Achamian could feel Mimara watching his profile. He could only pray her look was not too revealing.

"You will return princes."

—|—

Cleric was the first to hear the cries. The sound was distant, small, like the wheeze at the bottom of an old man's breath. They had to look to one another to be sure others had heard it. The land was rutted with wandering slopes and gullies, yet no matter how steep the grade, the canopy remained unbroken above them, and nothing save a dim shower of gold and green filtered to the forest floor. This made determining the distance, let alone the direction, of the cries all but impossible. Then they heard a crack of thunder, too unnatural to be anything other than sorcerous. The scalpers all looked to Cleric—a reflex borne of previous slogs, Achamian imagined.

"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.

"Don't you see?" Galian said, imploring. Achamian could see the warning in the look he shot his Zeümi 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.