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 suncooked 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.