The Judging Eye (31 page)

His scrutiny did not go
unnoticed. The first time he noticed the man watching him, Achamian simply
looked away. But when he glanced back moments afterwards, the man was still
staring—intently. Achamian recognized him as the Ketyai who had arrived at the
company's initial muster in Marrow fussing over the hems of his white
Nilnameshi gowns. What might have been a hard moment passed between them, then
the man was standing, talking, and nodding in his direction. As one, most of
the others in his eclectic group followed his eyes, some craning their necks,
some leaning to see past their fellows—a series of hooded, cursory looks.
Achamian had seen them all innumerable times on the trail, wondered about their
stories, but he had shared no words with any of them. He imagined it wouldn't
much matter even if he had. Like mead-hall tables, campfires seemed to make
foreigners of everyone.

The Nilnameshi strode from the
others to come crouch by Achamian's humble little flame. He smiled and
shrugged, introduced himself as Somandutta. He was relatively young,
clean-shaven, as was the custom for Nilnameshi caste-nobles, with amiable eyes
and a full-lipped mouth—the kind of man who inspired husbands to be more
gracious to their wives. He seemed to blink continually, but it was a habit
that only seemed ludicrous the first time you noticed it, then became quite
natural after.

"You're not one of
them," he said, nodding with raised brows toward the Captain's fire.
"And you certainly aren't one of the Herd." He tipped his head to his
right, in the direction of three neighbouring firepits, each of them crammed
with younger flame-yellowed faces, most sporting long Galeoth moustaches.
"That means you must be one of the Bitten."

"The Bitten?"

"Yes," he said,
smiling broadly. "One of us."

"One of you."

The generous face regarded him
for a moment, as though trying to decide how to interpret his tone. Then he
shrugged, smiled like somebody remembering a sensible deathbed promise.
"Come," he simply said. "Your beard has the punch of
smoke."

Even though he had no clue what
the Nilnameshi meant, Achamian found himself following the man. The "punch
of smoke," as it turned out, referred to hashish. A pipe was handed to him
the instant he stepped up to the fire, and the next thing Achamian knew he was
sitting cross-legged at the puffing centre of their attention. Out of
nervousness perhaps, he drew deep.

The smoke burned like molten
lead. They roared with laughter as he hacked himself purple.

"See!" He heard
Somandutta cry. "It wasn't just me!"

"Wizard!" someone
growled and cheered. Others took it up—"Wiz-Wiza-Wizard!"—and
Achamian found himself smiling and choking and nodding in bleary-eyed
acknowledgment. He even waved.

"You get used to it. You
get used to it," someone assured him while rubbing the small of his back.
"Only the good mud for the slog, my old friend. It has to take us
far!"

"See!" Somandutta
repeated as though the world's last sane man. "It's
not
me!"

The hashish was already soaking
through Achamian's senses by the time Somandutta, or Soma as the others called
him, went around the circle with introductions. Achamian had met such groups
before, strangers hammered into families by the privations of the road. Once
they lowered their hackles, he knew, they would find in him cause to celebrate
their fraternity. Every family was eager to prove itself exceptional in some
way.

There was Galian, perhaps the
eldest member of Bitten. In his youth he had been a soldier in the old Nansur
Army; he had even fought in the famed Battle of Kiyuth, where Ikurei Conphas,
the last of the Nansur Emperors, had overcome the nomadic Scylvendi. The giant
that Soma had earlier called Ox was Oxwora, a renegade son of the famed
Yalgrota, one of the heroes of the First Holy War. There was Xonghis, a Jekki
hillman who had been a former Imperial Tracker. He, Soma explained, was the
Captain's "peach," by which he meant his most prized possession.
"If he gets a chill," the Nilnameshi caste-noble said, "you must
surrender your cloak and rub his feet!" The other giant of the group was
Pokwas, or Pox as he was called. According to Somandutta, he was a disgraced
Zeümi Sword-Dancer, come to eke out a living among the unwashed barbarians of
the Three Seas. "It's always Zeüm this or Zeüm that with him," the
Nilnameshi explained with mock disgust. "Zeüm invented children. Zeüm
invented wind..." There was Sutadra, or Soot, whom Achamian had already
identified as Kianene because of his goatee and long moustaches. Apparently
Soot refused to speak of his past, which meant, Soma said with exaggerated
menace, he was a fugitive of some description. "Likely a Fanim
heretic." And lastly, there was Moraubon, a rangy Galeoth who had once
been a Shrial Priest, "until he discovered that peaches don't grow on
prayers." Apparently the question of whether he was "half
skinny" was a matter of ongoing debate.

"He hunts," Pox
explained, his grin as broad as his black face, "with both bows
strung."

Collectively, the seven of them
were the only remaining members of the original company first assembled by Lord
Kosoter some ten years previous. They called themselves the Bitten because they
had been "gnawed" for so many long slogs. As it so happened, each and
every one of them had been literally bitten by Sranc as well—and sported the scars
to prove it. Pox even stood and dropped his leggings to reveal a puckered
crescent across his left cheek, among other things.

"Sweet Sejenus,"
Galian exclaimed. "That solves the mystery of Soma's missing beard!"

Raucous laughter.

"Was that where it was
hiding?" Achamian asked as innocently as a crafty old man could manage.

The Bitten fell dead silent. For
a moment all he could hear was the talk and laughter from the other campfires
echoing through the sieve of the surrounding forest. He had taken that step, so
fateful in the company of close-knit strangers, between watching and
participating.

"Where
what
was
hiding?" Xonghis asked.

"The skinny that bit
him."

Somandutta was the first to
howl. Then all the Bitten joined in, rocking on their mats, trading looks like
sips of priceless wine, or simply rolling their eyes heavenward, shining
beneath the eternal arches of the night.

And Drusas Achamian found
himself friends with the men he had in all likelihood killed.

***

Ever since striking out from his
tower, Achamian had been afraid that his old body would fail him, that he would
develop any one of the innumerable ailments that deny the long road to the
aged. For some reason, he had assumed that his far thinner frame would also be
far weaker. But he was pleasantly surprised to find his legs growing more and
more roped with muscle, and his wind becoming deep—to the point where he had no
difficulty managing even the most punishing pace.

Walking in file, leading their
small mule trains, they followed a broad trail that generally ran parallel to
the river. For long tracts it was treacherous going, as the trail had been
scuffed deep enough to expose knobbed roots and buried rocks. The Osthwai
Mountains loomed vast and magnificent above them, their peaks lost in a dark
shoal of clouds as wide as the horizon. They seemed to eat the eastern sky in
imperceptible increments.

They passed several inbound
companies, lines of lean, lean men, hunched beneath their remaining provisions
and cord-threaded scalps, not a beast of burden to be seen. They would have
looked macabre, like skeletons marching in stolen skins, were they not so
jubilant at the prospect of gaining Marrow.

"They were forced to winter
in the Wilds," Soma explained to Achamian. "We were almost caught
ourselves. The Ochain Passes have been especially treacherous these past couple
of years." He bent his head to his feet, as though inspecting his boots
for scuffs. "It's like the world is getting colder," he added after
several steps.

Tidings and jibes were shared
back and forth as the companies passed. The newest whores. The worsening
conditions in the Osthwai. The brokers who kept "forgetting their
thumbs" when counting. Rumours of the Stone-Hags, a pirate company cum
bandit army that apparently hunted scalpers the way scalpers hunted Sranc.
Which tavern-keeps were watering their wine. And as always, the unaccountable
cunning of the skinnies.

"The trees!" one particularly
hoary Norsirai said. "They came at us out of the trees! Like monkeys with
fucking knives..."

Achamian listened without
comment, both fascinated and dismayed. Like all Mandate Schoolman, he looked at
the world with the arrogance of someone who had survived—even if only in
proxy—the greatest depravities circumstance could offer. But what happened in
the Wilds, whatever it was that edged their voices when the Skin Eaters spoke
of it, was different somehow. They too carried the look and posture of survivors,
but of something more mean, more poisonous, than the death of nations. There
was the wickedness that cut throats, and there was the wickedness that put
whole peoples to the sword. Scalpers, Achamian realized, dwelt somewhere in the
lunatic in-between.

And for the first time he
understood: He had no real comprehension of what was to come.

The point was brought home by
the half-starved man he saw slumped, his face between his knees, beneath the
hanging veils of a willow. Before he knew what he was doing, Achamian was
kneeling at the man's side, pressing him upright. The fellow was as light as
kindling pine. His face was sunken in the way Achamian had seen in Caraskand
during the First Holy War, so that the edges and the irregularities of the
skull beneath pressed clear through the skin, chipping short the cheeks and
pitting the sockets. His eyes were as flat and waxen as any guttered candle.

The man said nothing, seemed to
stare into the same.

Pokwas dropped a large hand on
Achamian's shoulder, startling him. "Where you fall is where you
lie," the Sword-Dancer said. "It's a Rule. No pity on the slog,
friend."

"What kind of soldiers
leave their comrades to die?"

"Soldiers who aren't
soldiers," Pokwas replied with a noncommital shrug. "Scalpers."

Even though the Sword-Dancer's
tone said it all—the Wilds were simply a place too hard for ritual observance
or futile compassion—Achamian wanted to ask him what he meant. The old
indignant need to challenge, to contest, welled sharp within his breast.
Instead, he simply shrugged and obediently followed the towering man back into
the long-walking file.

Achamian the talker, the asker
of questions, had died a long time ago.

***

But the episode continued to
occupy the old Wizard's thoughts, not the cruelty so much as the pathos. He had
been away for so long a part of him had forgotten that men could die so
ignominiously, like dogs skulking into the weeds to pant their last. The image
of the unfortunate refused to fade: the eyes clouding, the lips mouthing the
air, the body like sticks in the sack of his skin. How could he not feel like a
fool? Between his Dreams of the First Apocalypse and his memories of the First
Holy War, he could scarce imagine anyone who had seen more death and
degradation than he. And yet there it was, the fact of a dying stranger, like
an added weight, a tightness that robbed him of his wind.

Was it some kind of premonition?
Or was he simply growing soft? He had seen it many times, the way compassion
made rotted fruit of old men's hearts. The vitality of his old bones had
surprised him. Perhaps his spirit was what would fail...

Something always failed him.

The trail wound on and on
through the forest deeps, a track that had seen countless scalpers strut or
shamble. Though Somandutta paced him on several occasions, trying to draw him
into some inane topic of conversation, Achamian remained silent, walking and
brooding.

That night he made a point of
sitting next to Pokwas at the fire. The mood was celebratory. Xonghis had
felled a doe, which the company then portioned according to rank—the unborn
fetus included. Achamian said nothing, knowing that the sacrilege of consuming
pregnant game would mean nothing to these men.

"I'm curious,"
Achamian asked after eating his fill, "about these Rules of the
Slog..."

The black man said nothing at
first. He looked particularly fierce, limned in firelight, his lips drawn back
as he tore meat from bone. He chewed in contemplation a moment, then said,
"Yah."

"If it were, say,
Galian
lying at the side of th—"

"It would be the
same," the Zeümi interrupted through a mouthful of venison. He looked to
Galian as he said this, shrugged in mock apology.

"But he's your... your
brother
,
is he not?"

"Course he is."

Galian made kissing noises from
across the fire.

"So," Achamian
pressed, "what about the rules of brotherhood?"

This time it was Galian who
answered. "The only rules on the slog, Wizard, are the rules
of the
slog
."

Achamian scowled, pausing to
sort between a number of different questions, but Galian interrupted him before
he could speak. "Brotherhood is well and fine," the former Columnary
said, "so long as it doesn't cost. As soon as it becomes a luxury..."
He shrugged, resumed gnawing on the bone he still held in his right hand.
"The skinnies," he said with an air of distracted finality.