The scalpers fear the Mop for good reason, she supposes, but for some reason her fear has left her. It is strange the way trauma deadens curiosity. To suffer cruelty in excess is to be delivered from care. The human heart sets aside its questions when the future is too capricious. This is the irony of tribulation.

To know the world will never be so bad.

- - She fairly jumps at the sound of her name, so intent and absent is her concentration. The old Wizard is beside her. Somehow he seems of a piece with their new surroundings, no different than when crossing the wild mountain heights or passing through Cil-Aujas before that. He has spent too many years among the wild and the ruined not to resemble them.

"The Judging Eye..." he begins in his curious Ainoni. There is something embarrassed in his apologetic look. "You will be furious when you realize how little I know."

"You tell me this because you are afraid."

"No. I tell you this because I truly know very little. The Judging Eye is a folk legend, like the Kahiht or the White-Luck Warrior, notions that have been traded across too many generations to possess any clear meaning..."

"I can see the fear in your eyes, old man. You think me cursed!"

The Wizard regards her for several unblinking heartbeats. Worry. Pity.

"Aye... I think you are cursed."

Mimara has told herself this from the very beginning. There is something wrong with you. There is something broken. So she assumed hearing the same from Achamian would leave her intact, confirmed more than condemned. But for some reason tears flood her eyes, and her face rebels. She raises a hand against the gaze of the others.

"But I do know," Achamian hastily adds, "that the Judging Eye involves pregnant women."

Mimara gawks at him through tears. A cold hand has reached into her abdomen and scooped away all warring sensation.

"Pregnant..." she hears herself say. "Why?"

"I don't know." He has flecks of dead leaf in his hair, and she squelches the urge to fuss over him. "Perhaps because of the profundity of childbirth. The Outside inhabits us in many ways, none so onerous as when a women brings a new soul into the world."

She sees her mother posing before a mirror, her belly broad and low with the twins, Kel and Sammi.

"So what is the curse?" she fairly cries at Achamian. "Tell me, old fool!" She rebukes herself immediately afterward, knowing that the Wizard's honesty would wither as her desperation waxed. People punish desperation as much out of compassion as petty malice.

Achamian gnaws his bottom lip. "As far as I know," he begins with obvious and infuriating care, "those with the Judging Eye give birth to dead children."

He shrugs as if to say, See? You have nothing to fear...

Cold falls through her in sheets.

"What?"

A scowl knits his brow. "The Judging Eye is the eye of the Unborn... The eye that watches from the God's own vantage."

A cleft has opened about their path: a runoff that delivers them to a shallow ravine. They follow the stream that gurgles along its creases-the water is clear but seems black given the gloom. Monstrous elms pillar the embankments, their roots like great fists clenched about earth. The stream has wedged the trees far enough apart for white to glare through seams in the canopy. Here and there the water's meandering course has gnawed hollows beneath various trees. The company ducks beneath those that had fallen across the ravine, trees like stone whales.

"But I've had... had this... for as long as I can remember."

"Which is my point exactly," Achamian says, sounding far too much like someone taking heart in invented reasons. He frowns, an expression Mimara finds horribly endearing on his shaggy old features. "But things are always tricky where the Outside is concerned. Things do not... happen... as they happen here..."

"Riddles! Why do you constantly torture me with riddles?"

"I'm just saying that in a sense your life has already been lived-for the God or the Gods, that is..."

"Which means?"

"Nothing," he says, scowling.

"Tell me what it means!"

But that cool glint has sparked in his eyes. Once again her words have cut through the fat of the old Wizard's patience and struck the bone of his intolerance. "Nothing, Mimara. Noth-"

A blood-curdling cry. She finds herself against sloped ground, tackled in the Wizard's wiry grasp. She senses the whisper of incipient sorceries-Wards strung out and around them. Cleric is booming something incomprehensible. She glimpses Sutadra staggering, a shaft and fletching jutting from his cheek. He's trying to scream but can only cough.

Again, she realizes. The Skin Eaters are dying again.

- - "Hold my belt!" Achamian cries to her, jerking himself to a crouch. "Don't let go!"

"In the trees!" someone shouts-Galian.

"Stone Hags! Stone Hags!"

Cleric's laughter booms through the hollows.

In her thirst for all things sorcerous, Mimara has read much about Mandate Schoolmen, and more still regarding the Gnosis and the famed War-Cants of the Ancient North. She knows about the incipient Wards they use to secure their person in event of surprise attacks. Even back at Achamian's collapsed tower, she had sensed them hanging about him, like faint child-scribbling marring the art of the immediate world. Now they crackle with life-preserving ugliness.

Arrows pelt the Wizard's Wards, sparking into nothingness. She throws her gaze to and fro, trying to make sense of the surrounding madness. She hears shouts beyond those of her companions. She glimpses shadowy figures ducking along the heights to either side: bowmen, possessing the rangy gait and mien of scalpers. The ravine has delivered them to a human ambush. Galian and Pokwas squat behind a heaped dead fall nearby. Sutadra is down. Soma she cannot see. Cleric has a sorcerous bulwark of his own. The Captain stands tall at his side.

"To me!" Achamian cries to the others. He's standing now, his feet braced in water and muck, and she has pulled herself beside him. "Close about me!"

Other shouts, other voices, across the heights and through the gloom. Their attackers, crying out in alarm. "Gur-gurwik-wikka!" she hears a broken chorus cry, one of the few Gallish words she understands.

Gurwikka. Sorcerer.

Achamian has already begun his otherworldly mutter. His eyes and mouth flare white, painting the figures crowding about them in shades of blue.

She senses a rush of shadows above, sees men shimming down trees. They drop to the forest floor, scramble for earthen cover. They're running-fleeing.

"Stone Hags!" Pokwas booms, crying out the name like a curse. Only Galian's scarred grip prevents the Sword-dancer from bolting after them.

A thunderous crack-somewhere to the fore of their small column. She sees Cleric's silhouette against the glare of roiling fire. A sorcerer assails him. A man hangs between vaulting branches, dressed in black, his limbs like rag-bound sticks. An ethereal dragon head rears from his hands, vomits fire...

She squints against sunset brilliance.

A whooshing hiss returns her gaze to things more immediate. Achamian stands rigid, his hands raised, his face a mask of grizzled skin across sunlight. He sweeps a line of blinding white across the heights of the ravine. She throws a forearm across her eyes, glimpses her shadow as it chases a circle across the ground... The Compass of Noshainrau.

Fire laves barked surfaces. Wood explodes into char.

But where the trees on the Galeoth side of the mountains toppled, the leviathans of the Mop merely groan and crack. Leaves shower across the ravine. A burning clutch of branches crashes into the creek, bursts into steam. Flutters of deeper movement catch her eye: more men fleeing...

Stone Hags.

She looks again to the Nonman. He stands unharmed before flashing breakers of fire, crying out in his mundane voice but in a tongue she does not understand. "Houk'hir!" he shouts in a booming laugh. "Gimu hitiloi pir milisis!" The sorcerous mutter of his opponent continues to rise up out of space and substance. The figure still hangs above the ravine, black against swatches of sky and levels of brightening green...

Achamian is gripping her arm, as if holding her back from some ill-advised rush.

Smoke blooms from nothingness, piles outward from the heart of every hollow. Within heartbeats a pall has obscured the overmatched sorcerer.

Cleric simply stands as before, both feet planted in the shining course of the stream. His laughter is strange, like a murder of crows crying across thunder.

- - For several moments no one does anything more than stare and breathe.

The Captain climbs alone to the crest of the ravine, lifts himself onto the back of a long-fallen tree, one that reaches across the gully like a collapsed temple column. A lone shaft of sunlight illuminates him and the tattered remnants of his dress. Light hooks about the dents in his shield and armour.

"Knife our bales?" he roars into the crotched depths. "Our bales?"

Sarl starts cackling, hard enough to begin hacking phlegm.

Lord Kosoter turns, rakes the surrounding dark with a look of preternatural fury. "I will stab out your eyes!" he bellows. "Gut your peach! I will kick vomit from your teeth!"

Mimara finds herself kneeling beside Sutadra-she is not sure why. The Kianene has curled onto his side, hissing breaths that end in grunts, holding riven hands to either side of the arrow embedded in his cheek.

They have shared no words, she and this man. They have lived shoulder to elbow on the trail for weeks, and yet they have scarcely exchanged glances. How could such a thing be? How could this life dwindling beneath her be little more than scenery one moment and... and...

"Please-please," she mumbles. "Tell me what to do..."

The heathen scalper fixes her in his gaze-a look of absurd urgency. He sputters something but can only speak blood. His goatee, which has become a full beard since Cil-Aujas, is clotted with it.

"Stone Hags," she hears Galian say in explanation to Achamian. "Bandits. A scalper company that preys on its own. They saw our numbers, I'm guessing, thought we were low-hanging fruit." A wry laugh.

"Aye," Pokwas says. "Sorcerous fruit."

Hands held out and helpless, she stares down at the dying stranger. Why are you doing this? something cries within her. He's dying. There's nothing to be done! Why- The Judging Eye opens.

"But have we seen the end of them?" the old Wizard asks.

"Depends," Galian replies. "No one knows what they do over the winter months, where they go. They could be desperate."

And she learns what it means to stare into the moral sum of a man's life. Sutadra...

Soot, the others had called him.

You can count the bruises on your heart easily enough, but numbering sins is a far trickier matter. Men are eternally forgetting for their benefit. They leave it to the World to remember, and to the Outside to call them to harsh account. One hundred Heavens, as Protathis famously wrote, for one thousand Hells.

She can see it all, intuitions bundled into the wrinkled architecture of his skin, the squint about his eyes, the cuts across his knuckles. Sin and redemption, written in the language of a flawed life. The oversights, the hypocrisies, the mistakes, the accumulation of petty jealousies and innumerable small selfish acts. A wife struck on a wedding night. A son neglected for contempt of weakness. A mistress abandoned. And beneath these cankers, she sees the black cancer of far greater crimes, the offences that could be neither denied nor forgiven. Villages burned on fraudulent suspicions. Innocents massacred.

But she also sees the clear skin of heroism and sacrifice. The white of devotion. The gold of unconditional love. The gleam of loyalty and long silence. The high blue of indomitable strength.

Sutadra, she realizes, is a good man broken down, a man forced, time and again, to pitch his scruples against the unscalable walls of circumstance-forced. A man who erred for the sake of mad and overwhelming expediencies. A man besieged by history...

Regret. This is what drives him. This is what delivered him to the scalpers. The will to suffer for his sins...

And she loves him-this mute stranger! One cannot see as much as she sees and not feel love. She loves him the way one must love someone with such a tragic past. She knows as a lover knows, or a wife.

She knows he is damned.

He kicks against the mud of the stream, gazes with eyes pinned to sights unseen. He makes fish mouths, and she glimpses the arrow digging into the back of his throat. A small cry escapes him, the kind you would expect from a dying child or dog.

"Shhh..." she murmurs through burning lips. She's been weeping. "Paradise," she lies. "Paradise awaits you..."

But a shadow has fallen across them, a darker gloom. The Captain-she knows this without looking. Even as she turns her face up, the Judging Eye closes, but still she glimpses blasted back, coal-orange eyes leering from a charred face...

He raises his boot and kicks the arrow down. Wood popping in meat. Sutadra's body jerks, flutters like a thread in the wind.

"You rot where you fall," the Captain says with a queer and menacing determination.

Mimara cannot breathe. There is a softness in the Kianene's passing, a sense of fire passing into powdery ash. She raises numb fingers to brush the bootprint from the dead man's nose and beard but cannot bring herself to touch the greying skin.

"Weakness!" the Captain screams at the others. "The Stone Hags struck because they could smell our weakness! No more! No more wallowing! No more womanish regret! This is a slog!"

"The Slog of Slogs!" Sarl screeches out, chortling.

"And I am the Rule of Rules," the Captain grates.

- - Xonghis altered their course, leading them away from the Stone Hags and their flight. They left Sutadra behind them, sprawled across the muck, the broken arrow jutting like a thumb from his swelling face. Scalpers lie where they fall-such was the Rule. The cyclopean trunks were not long in obscuring him.

Sutadra had always been a mystery to Achamian-and to the others, from what he could tell. Galian sometimes made a show of asking the Kianene his opinion, then taking his silence as proof of agreement. "See!" he would crow as the others laughed. "Even Soot knows!"

This was the way with some men. They sealed themselves in, bricked their ears and their mouths, and spent their remaining days speaking only with their eyes-until these too became inscrutable. Many, you could wager, held chaos in their hearts, shrill and juvenile. But since ignorance is immovable, they seem immovable, imperturbable. Such is the power of silence. For all Achamian knew, Sutadra was little more than a weak-willed fool, a peevish coward behind the blind of an impassive demeanour.

But he would always remember him as strong.

None of this, however, explained Mimara's reaction. Her tears. Her subsequent silence. After the debacle in the mines of Cil-Aujas, he had assumed she would be immune to terror and violence. He tried to sound her out, but she simply looked away, blinking.

So he paced Galian and Pokwas for a time, asking about the Stone Hags. The bandits had haunted the Mop for some five years now, long enough to become the scourge of the Long Side. Pokwas absolutely despised them: preying upon one's own was an outrage for the Zeumi, apparently. Galian regarded them with the same wry contempt he took to everything. "It takes figs to do what they do!" he cried at one point, obviously trying to bait his towering friend. "As big and black as your own!" Achamian was inclined to agree. Hunting Sranc was one thing. Hunting Men who hunted Sranc was something else entirely.

They told him the story of the Stone Hag captain, Pafaras, the Mysunsai Schoolman who had assailed Cleric. According to rumour, he was a notorious Breacher, someone who failed to expedite his arcane contracts: a cardinal sin for a School of mercenaries. He had been chased into the wilds more than a decade ago.

"He was the first spitter to chase the Bounty," Galian explained. "Pompous. One of those fools who turns the world upside down when he finds himself at the end of the line. Arrogant unto comedy. They say he was outlawed for burning down an Imperial Custom House in one of the old camps."

And so the Stone Hags were born. Scalper companies always vanished in skinny country, swallowed up as if they had never been. "It's chop-chop-chop with the skinnies," Pokwas said. "Runners always die." But the Stone Hags invariably left survivors, and so word of their atrocities spread and multiplied.

"More famous than the Skin Eaters," Galian said cheerfully. "The one and only."

Achamian stole several glances at Mimara over the course of their account, still puzzled by her blank face and distracted gait. Had she somehow come to know Sutadra?

"He died the death allotted to him," he said, resuming his place at her side. "Sutadra..." he added in response to her sharp look.

"Why? What makes you say that?" Her eyes gleamed with defensive tears.

The old Wizard scratched his beard and swallowed, reminded himself to take care, that it was Mimara he was speaking to. "I thought you mourned his loss."