He could feel the note of falsity, like a cold coin in the slick palm of his voice. He cursed himself for a fool, even as he sought her gaze, hoping that a sincere look might carry what his words could not. The Erratic and his ability to lead them through this deserted warren was their immediate concern. The fact that Achamian used them to another purpose … Weren’t all words simply tools in the end?

“So he’s Ishroi, then …” Mimara said. The lilt in her tone told him that she knew something was amiss. When had he ever urged her into the murk of his ruminations?

“Such figures don’t easily slip through the cracks of history, Mimara. And what history I haven’t lived through Seswatha, I’ve read many times. Moithural, Hosûtil, Shimbor—all the mannish translators and chroniclers of the Nonmen. I assure you, there’s no mention of any Incariol, nowhere, not even in their own Pit of Years …” Despite himself, his voice was striking more, not fewer, tin notes of insincerity.

Her gaze was bolt-forward now, apparently following Cleric’s light and the small mob of men and pack animals labouring beneath it. From their vantage, the Skin Eaters seemed to pick their way across the vast back of nothingness. Here and there small clearings of floor opened between them, bloomed colourless and flat in the illumination, only to be obscured by kicked dust and the drift of shadowy legs.

They had travelled past the point of sturdy grounds.

“This Judging Eye,” she said with cool resignation. “It’s a curse, isn’t it? An affliction …”

Many years had passed since last he had suffered this feeling, not simply of too much happening too quickly, but of some dread intent in motion, as though all these things, the Nonman, the Captain, the dead scalper out there, and now Mimara, were like the suckered arms of the octopuses he and his father had sometimes pulled from the Meneanor Sea—limbs webbed in the sinew of a singular Fate.

Circumstances always encompassed, but sometimes they encircled as well, as many-chambered as this mountain and every bit as dark. His heart seemed to beat against sagging bandages.

“Just legends,” he said. “Nothing more.”

“But you’ve read them all,” she said in a high, scathing voice.

He raised a knobbed hand to silence her, nodded to the interval of darkness separating them from the company. A figure had surfaced from the advancing perimeter of their light, became what looked like, for a mad moment, a wizened ape armoured in human rags …

It was Sarl. He waited for them, alone in the darkness, smiling, his lips stretched longer than the arc of his gums and teeth. “Well-well-well,” he called in the tones of a cracked flute. Even in the dark the man squinted.

“We’ll speak of this later,” Achamian said to Mimara, halting her with a gentle hand on her elbow. She frowned and in a careless moment looked to the sergeant with naked fury. Though the man remained some several paces distant, there was no way he could have failed to see her anger.