Achamian returned to find Mimara fairly surrounded by Skin Eaters, most of them Bitten. She stood childlike in the looming presence of Oxwora and Pokwas, her look one of guarded good humour. She was careful to keep her face and posture directed toward the trail, as though she expected to leave their company at any moment, as well as to not look at any one of them for more than a heartbeat. He could tell she was frightened, but not in any debilitating way.

“So you’re Ainoni, then?”

“Small wonder the Captain’s smitten …”

“Maybe he’ll stop undressing us with his cursed eyes!”

The laughter was genuine enough to make Mimara smile, but utterly unlike the raucous mirth that was their norm. Soldiers, Achamian had observed, often wore thin skins in the presence of women they could neither buy nor brutalize. A light and careless manner, a gentle concern for the small things, stretched across a sorrow and an anger that no woman could fathom. And these men were more than soldiers, more than scalpers, even. They were Skin Eaters. They were men who led lives of uncompromising viciousness and savagery. Men who could effortlessly forget the dead rapist that had been their bosom friend.

And they would try to woo what they could not take.

“It’s as I thought,” Soma said as Achamian joined them. His look was amiable enough but with an edge that advised no contradictions. “She’s one of the Bitten as well!”

The smell of contrivance hung about all their looks. They had planned this, Achamian realized, as a way of luring the prize to their fire. The question was one of how far the covenant went.

“The Ochain Passes are closed,” he said. “Blizzard.”

He watched their faces struggle to find the appropriate expressions. There was comedy in all sudden reversals, a kind of immaterial nudity, to find your designs hanging, stripped of the logic that had been their fundament. Their carnal plots depended on the expedition, and the expedition depended on the Passes.

“The decision has been made,” he said, trying hard not to sound satisfied.

“We brave the Black Halls of Cil-Aujas.”

CHAPTER NINE - Momemn

CHAPTER NINE

Momemn

A beggar’s mistake harms no one but the beggar. A king’s mistake, however, harms everyone but the king. Too often, the measure of power lies not in the number who obey your will, but in the number who suffer your stupidity.

—TRIAMIS I, JOURNALS AND DIALOGUES

Early Spring, 19 New Imperial Year (4132 Year-of-the-Tusk), Momemn

Her face seemed numb for tingling.

“Does he hear us, Mommy? Does he know?”

Esmenet clutched Kelmomas’s little hand so tight she feared she might hurt him. “Yes,” she heard herself say. The stone of the Ashery snared her words, held them close and warm, as though she spoke into a lover’s neck. “Yes. He’s the son of an earthly god.”