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.