Suddenly the others were reaching to their feet, and a haphazard wave of bones peppered the hapless Nilnameshi, who held his arms out, cursing. He made as though to throw several back at this or that figure, but ended up joining the general laughter instead.

“Loot thy brother,” the Zeümi said to Achamian in a there-you-have-it tone. The Sword-Dancer slapped his back. “Welcome to the slog, Wizard!”

Achamian laughed and nodded, glanced out beyond the circle of illumined faces to the night-hooded world. It was no simple or mean thing, the companionship of killers.

Two days following his introduction to the Bitten, Achamian glimpsed Xonghis jogging along the outside of the trudging line from the rear. The others paid him no attention: He continually roamed while the others marched. Out of boredom more than anything, Achamian asked the man what was wrong, expecting something wry and cutting in reply. Instead, the Jekki slowed his pace to stride beside him. His short-sleeved tunic revealed a grappler’s veined arms, brown beneath the reddish hint of sunburn. He was a lean, broad-shouldered man, with the aura of coiled reserve that seemed proper to a former Imperial Tracker.

“We’re being followed,” he said in his odd accent.

“Followed?”

“Yes …” He seemed to weigh his own cryptic options. “By a woman.”

Achamian nearly coughed, such was his alarm. “Who else knows?”

The Tracker’s almond-shaped eyes narrowed. His Xiuhianni blood was always more pronounced in open daylight. “Moraubon and several of the Herd.”

“Moraubon?”

Suddenly Achamian was huffing and gasping, running back along the tangled verge of the trail. The parade of walking scalpers watched him pass with frowning curiosity. Then he was all alone on the trail, running down a boulder-stumped incline, away from the river and into the mute confines of the forest. Several moments passed before he heard the first hoot, a raw laughing call, filled with malice and the open-mouthed eagerness of men bent on rutting. He heard Moraubon shouting a few moments afterwards: instructions to the others racing across the forest floor. He heard a feminine shriek—no, not a shriek, a shrill cry of defiance and frustration.

The sorcerous words were already rumbling from his lips, through the essence of the encircling world, and he was climbing, not air, but the echoes of ground across the sky, up into the interweaving limbs. Branches lashed him as he broke through the canopy, then walked over the forest crown, each step swallowing a dozen cubits, tipping for the vertigo of looking down through the towering trees. He could see the pitch of the surrounding wilderness to the horizon, ridges like wandering fins, tributaries threading dark clefts with silver, mountains looming in white judgment. He saw men running, Skin Eaters, like the shadows of mice beneath meadow thatch. Then he saw her—Mimara—kicking and thrashing in the clutches of three men.

He stepped into their midst.