The Judging Eye (22 page)

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?"

Haubrezer kept his head
inclined, though it seemed that he stared at his eyebrows rather than the
grim-talking shadows beyond the smoke.

"Ho. No mean Scalpoi,
those. They the Veteran's Men. The Skin Eaters."

"The Skin Eaters?"

A sour grin, as though the man
had been starved of the facial musculature needed to pull his lips from his
teeth. "Geraus was right. You hermit, to be sure. Ask anyone here
around"—he gestured wide with a scapular hand—"they will tell you,
ya, step aside for the Skin Eaters. Famed. The whole River know. They bring
down more bales than
rutta
—anyone. Ho. Step aside for the Skin Eaters,
or they strike you down.
Hauza kup.
Down but good."

Achamian leaned back to appraise
what suddenly seemed more a hostile tribe than another alehouse trestle. Though
all the other long-tables were packed, the three men Haubrezer referred to sat
alone, neither rigid nor at their ease, yet with a posture that suggested an
intense inward focus, a violent disregard for matters not their own. The image
of them wavered in the sparked air above the hearth: the first—the bearer of
the Chorae—with the squared-and-plaited beard of an Ainoni or a Conriyan; the
second with long white hair, a goatee, and a weather-pruned face; and the
broad-shouldered third—the sorcerer—cowled in black-beaten leather.

Achamian glanced back up at
Haubrezer. "Do I require an introduction?"

"Not from the likes of
me."

***

An acute sensitivity to his
surroundings beset Achamian while crossing the common room, which for him
amounted to a kind of bodily awareness of some imminent undertaking—some
reckless leap. He winced at the odour of sweat festering in leather. The outer thunder
of the Long-Braid Falls shivered through air and timber alike, so that the room
seemed a motionless bubble in a torrent. And the guttural patois everyone
spoke—a kind of mongrel marriage of Gallish and Sheyic—struck him with an
ancient and impossible taste: the First Holy War, twenty long years gone by.

He thought of Kellhus and found
his resolution rekindled.

The pulse of a fool...

Achamian had no illusions about
the men he was about to meet. The New Empire had signalled the end of the once
lucrative mercenary trade, but it did not signal the end of those willing to
kill for compensation. He had spent the greater part of his life in the
proximity of such men—in the company of those who would think him weak. He had
long ago learned how to mime the proper postures, how to redress the defects of
the heart with the advantages of intellect. He knew how to treat with such
men—or so he thought.

His first heartbeat in their
presence told him otherwise.

The cowled man, the sorcerer,
turned to him, but only far enough to reveal a temple and jawline as white and
as smooth as boiled bone. Obdurate black shrouded his eyes. The small,
silver-haired man graced him with a nimble, shining look and a smile that
seemed to welcome the derision to come. But the square-bearded one, the man
Haubrezer had identified as the Captain, continued staring into his wine-bowl
as before. Achamian understood instantly he was the kind of man who begrudged
others everything.

"Are you the Ainoni they
call Kosoter?" he asked. "Ironsoul. The Captain of the Skin
Eaters?"