“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.”