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 longwandering 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, twisting down in two thundering cataracts.