“Don’t let go!” she gasped, pressing her cheek back from his damp hair. “Never-never-please!”

Her face was his scripture, written with looms of skin, muscle, and tendon. And the truths he read there were holy.

He knew it so intimately he could tell whenever a mole had darkened or a lash had fallen from her eyelids. He had heard the priests prattle about their Heavens, but the truth was that paradise lay so much nearer—and tasted of salt.

Her face eclipsed him, the ligaments of anguish, the trembling lips, the diamonds streaming from her eyes.

“Kel,” she sobbed. “Poor baby …”

He keened, squashed the urge to kick his feet in laughter. Yes! he cried in silent glee, the limb-wagging exultation of a child redeemed. Yes!

And it had been so easy.

You are, the secret voice said, her only love remaining.

CHAPTER SIX - Marrow

CHAPTER SIX

Marrow

Ask the dead and they will tell you. All roads are not equal. Verily, even maps can sin.

—EKYANNUS I, 44 EPISTLES

What the world merely kills, Men murder.

—SCYLVENDI PROVERB

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

The Wizard picked his way through the cool forest deeps, his bones as old as his thoughts were young. He huffed and grimaced, but there was a knowing cadence to his hobble, proof of prior years spent travelling. Four days he had trudged, wending between the pillar trees, squinting at the sun’s glare through the spring-thin canopy, using the slow crawl of distant landmarks to guide him to his destination …

Marrow.

All Achamian knew of this place was what his Galeoth slave, Geraus, had told him. It was a Scalpoi entrepôt located at the westward end of the long navigable stretch of the River Rohil, a place where the companies of scalpers who worked the hinterland could collect their bounties and purchase supplies. As the nearest centre of any description to the tower, this was where Geraus would come, three or four times a year, to sell his pelts and, with the gold Achamian gave him, secure those goods they could not improvise for themselves. An even-tempered, slow-speaking man, Geraus had always taken wary delight in telling them the stories of his visits. Perhaps because the journey was both arduous and perilous—Tisthanna rarely forgave Achamian the weeks of Geraus’s absence—or perhaps because they simply marked a deviation from the routine of his life, Geraus was given to foot-stomping airs for the days immediately following his return. Only when his tales were completed would he retreat to the borders of his gentle and dependable self. They had always been his time to shine, for the slave of the great Wizard to be “world-shouldered,” as the Galeoth say.