“Ye-years,” Achamian stammers. “Years ago.”
She sees Serw?’s impossible leap before she feels the air rushing to fill the boy’s absence. The abomination pirouettes beneath the radial felt ceiling, lands rolling into another explosive leap through the threshold. Mimara can scarcely snap her head about quickly enough.
She blinks tears of astonished joy, battles the urge to smile. Of course! she silently cries, clutching her belly. Of course he heard her!
He is D?nyain.
Alarums were raised, howls, clipped and guttural, leaping from breast to breast, igniting outward across the slumbering Scylvendi host.
And the boy sprinted—ran the way his dead father had shown him, the way he had been bred …
Alive.
He was young. He was fleet. He was neither weightless nor cumbersome, but that occult in-between, smoke when soaring, grass when twisting, stone when striking. He flew through a necklace of nocturnal grottos, Scylvendi warriors crawling to their feet, milling in confusion, gazing at random points of sky the way Men are prone when keen to distant calls. They could scarcely see, let alone seize him. They could scarcely comprehend …
He flitted through, over and between, beyond any hope of catching. Only their cries could outrun him. Shouts of coordination rang hoarse through the forest, different throats, different positions, pinpointing him in the racing black. He sensed mobs closing into ranks.
He need only turn, and the coalescing order dissolved into more confusion. Soft humus underfoot. Close arboreal air. The pinched musk of warriors long on the trail. And the freedom of the long run …
Torches wagged and glittered through ragged black screens. The Scylvendi host had morphed into a single beast, a far-flung composite, teeming like ants through detritus and dark. He would turn, and it would momentarily dissolve, then reassemble about ligaments of voice. He found his way blunted, though his feet scissored just as quick. He began as a spear thrown, but now he became a sparrow. He zig-zagged, continually tacking at intervals decreed by threat and happenstance. Glimpses of swazond girding arms in torchlight, blades bouncing moonlight, and horn bows raised. Choruses of shouts tracked him, forcing him into what pockets of obscurity the forest encampment possessed. Grim, outraged expressions. Tentacles of plainsmen twined across the tracts, curled about the most recent spate of hollering. He began doubling back, forcing the beast, vast and aggregate, to crash into itself. The sparrow became a gnat, a scribble. He took to the trees, leaping and swinging through arthritic lattices. Horses floating beneath. He heard shafts popping through foliage, ticking from bark, thudding into wood—sometimes about him, but almost always behind him. Savage faces squinting to peer. So long as he could astonish and shock the Scylvendi, so long as the darkness baffled their stunted sight, he could pass like smoke through their midst.
Only the blond woman could hope to catch him …
The one with fists for a face.
It seemed Achamian could feel the wind of their passing long after they had vanished outside.
“Call it back,” Mimara said dully, fixing the King-of-Tribes in a stunned gaze.
Cnaiür leaned back, casually snatched a crab-apple from a small hide sack behind him. He halved the thing with a single bite, then studied the exposed flesh, white bruised with lime.
“Call it back!” Mimara cried, this time with menace as much as urgency.
“That-that thing!” the old Wizard sputtered on the heels of her demand. “Scylvendi fool! That thing is deceit! As much inside as without! Lies stacked upon lies until it mocks a soul! Cnaiür! Cnaiür! You lie with Golgotterath! Don’t you see?”
The barbarian seized him by the windpipe, stood from a crouch, hoisting him on a swing. Achamian kicked, gripped the strapped forearm desperate to relieve his throat of his own weight, to gain distance from the Chorae bound to his navel.
“Enough!” Mimara shrieked.
And to the old Wizard’s floundering amazement, the mad Scylvendi heeded her, dumped him in a rancid sheaf upon the mats. Achamian scrambled to his feet, stood beside Mimara, who, like him, could only stare puzzled and aghast at the sight of Cnaiür urs Ski?tha, breaker-of-horses-and-men, laughing in a manner both grotesque and maniacal—laughing at him.
Nausea welled through the old Wizard. For the first time he truly believed he was going to die.
“She!” the King-of-Tribes barked. “She sees too much to see anything! But you, sorcerer, you are the fool—truly! So busy peering after what cannot be seen, you forever kick upon the ground at your own feet!”