The Library of Sauglish
In life, your soul is but the extension of your body, which reaches inward until it finds its centre in spirit. In death, your body is but the extension of your soul, which reaches outward until it finds it circumference in flesh. In both instances, all things appear the same. Thus are the dead and the living confused.
– Memgowa, The Book of Divine Acts
Yet the soul lingers like a second smell.
A sailor wrecked at sea, it clings, lest it sink and drown in Hell.
– Girgalla, Epic of Sauglish
Late Summer, 20 New Imperial Year (4132 Year-of-the-Tusk), The Ruins of Sauglish
Suffocation. Blindness and bewilderment.
At first Achamian thought the gag choked him, but his mouth was clear. Had they put a sack over his head? He thrashed his limbs, realizing he was unbound-but he could not move more than the span of a hand.
Sarcophagus. Coffin. He was in some kind of…
Dream.
The old Wizard's panic dwindled, even as the panic of the ancient soul he had become flared into outrage. He was Anasurimbor Nau-Cayuti, Scourge of the Consult, Prince of the High Norsirai-Dragonslayer! He beat at his stone prison with righteous fury, howled. He cursed the name of his miscreant wife.
But the enclosed chute grew hot with his exertions, and the air began failing him. Soon he was heaving, making a bellows out of his barrel chest, gasping. Soon he could do no more than scratch at his prison, and his thoughts unwound in shame and disorientation…
To think a man such as he would die scratching.
Then he was tipping and tumbling, as though his prison had been cast into a cataract. Stone cracked-a concussion that snapped his teeth. Air washed about him, so chill as to feel wet. He sucked cold, breathed against a ponderous fragment pinning him. He blinked at the night darkness, saw the moon low, glaring pale through rag-ripped clouds and thronging branches. He glimpsed broken forms strewn, sightless eyes shining in the twinkle of fallen torches. Dead Knights of Tryse. He saw his sword gleaming among rune-engraved fragments of stone, reached with nerveless fingers. But a shadow stilled him. Witless for lack of breath and confusion and horror, he gazed up at his monstrous assailant…
Phallus, greased and pendulous. Wings, scabrous and veined, folded into two horns rising high above the thing's shoulders. Window skin, revealing sheaths of raw muscle and a compound head: one skull a great oval, the second human, fused into the jaws of the former.
Aurang, the old Wizard realized with Nau-Cayuti's horror. The Horde-General. The Angel of Deceit.
The Inchoroi kicked away his blade, arched over him like a defecating dog. It wrapped fish-cold fingers about his throat. It raised him until he dangled helpless in its baleful gaze. Needles probed his breath-starved extremities.
The thing grinned-sheets of mucus pinned to its lesser skull.
Laughter like pain blown through broken flutes.
"None," the Inchoroi gasped through leprous throats. "None escape Golgottera-"
– | Shouting. Someone was shouting.
The Wizard bolted from the forest floor, blinking and peering in the stupefied manner of those just awoken. He coughed, convulsed as his throat warred against the gag. The world was predawn grey, the eastern sky a golding slate through skeins of branches.
The Captain. The Captain ranted at them to awaken.
"The Coffers, boys!" he cried in a macabre parody of Sarl's exclamation. The mad Sergeant chortled in delight, cried, "The Slog of Slogs!" in answer, before a realization of some kind yanked his breath short. Afterward, he watched with the wariness of a dog long-beaten.
"Today is the day we turn around!"
Achamian glimpsed Mimara rising slight and slender from a depression in the ground, her lips hanging open as she beat at the leafy detritus pasted across her arm and shoulder. Suddenly Lord Kosoter was looming over him, the twin voids tingling as always beneath his splint hauberk. He grabbed the Wizard by the shoulders, heaved him to his feet as though he were a child.
"Galian!" he shouted to the former Columnary. "Make ready."
The Captain seized the rope about the Wizard's wrists and, accompanied by Cleric, led him like a votive lamb away from the others. He had a practised hand, shoving and catching so that it seemed the Wizard continually tripped forward. Eventually, he let him fall onto his face.
The Wizard writhed like a fish, kicked himself onto his back only to crush and scrape his fingers against a branch. Lord Kosoter towered over him, more shadow than man with the brightening east behind him. His two Chorae glowered with nothingness, like the empty sockets of a skull hanging about his heart. The Wizard watched him reach beneath his hauberk and tug one free.
"Our expedition has come to a head," Lord Kosoter said, dandling the thing before him.
The old Wizard's thoughts raced. There was a path through this. There was a path through everything…
Yet one more lesson learned at Kellhus's punishing hand.
The Captain knelt beside him, leaned so low his beard brushed Achamian's own. His rough fingers worked the leather straps that held the gag in place. The Chorae was a coal that scorched the air with absence-burning oblivion…
"The time has come, Wizard. Xonghis says the solstice is several days away."
The old Wizard shrank from the Trinket, writhed as if searching for a hatch through the forest floor. The Captain pulled the gag free.
"Speak with care."
His tongue was cankered and swollen. Talking was onerous. "Wha-?" He trailed in a coughing fit. "Sol-solstice?"
The Captain's face betrayed no passion. His eyes gleamed dead within their rim of tattooed black. The ferocity of his suspicion lay compressed in the pause he took before replying.
"You claimed the Coffers were protected by powerful Wards," he fairly growled. "Curses that could only be unlocked during the solstice…"
Achamian glared, blinking. It seemed a lifetime had passed since he had said as much. Lies. Where facts were like embroidery, each one stitched across the whole cloth of others, lies were like chips of ice in water, always slipping one past the other, always melting…
"Our expedition has come to a head…"
And it came upon the Wizard as a kind of falling horror, the profundity of his ignorance.
Were the Coffers still sealed after all this time? Were they buried? Were they gutted, long emptied of their riches?
For all he knew, the Map to Ishual might lie in Golgotterath…
Even still, he heard his voice rasp, spill even more ice into the water of expediency-and with more than enough hate to sound convincing. "Th-the Wards… They yoke the movement of the planets-that is the source of their never-ending power. F-four sorcerous keys were given, one for each transition of the seasons. Summer to autumn is the only key I know."
The Captain regarded him for a flint-hearted moment.
"You lie."
"Yes," Achamian replied in a cold voice. "I lie."
Lord Kosoter turned to Cleric, who stood looming behind. His Chorae drifted a fraction nearer as he did so, blistering the Wizard's cheek with salt. Seeing the Nonman, Achamian suddenly realized what it was he needed to do. He needed to convince Kosoter to send him alone with the Nonman King-with Seswatha's ancient friend and ally.
He needed to reach what remained of Nil'giccas… Or, failing that, kill him.
But how to convince him, a being gone mad for forgetfulness?
The Captain scooped the Chorae tight into his fist. Achamian watched, trying to squint the hope from his eyes, while the man drew his knife and began sawing at his restraints.
"I smell treachery," Lord Kosoter said to his inhuman ward. "You take him. Confirm his story or kill him."
Cleric nodded. A band of dawn orange slipped across his cheek.
The old Wizard fairly shouted aloud for relief. How long had it been since the Whore had last favoured him? Seju knew he would need more of her capricious favours before this insanity was through.
His extremities prickled and stabbed at the sudden return of circulation. Groaning, he drew himself up, rubbing his hands and fingers against his forearms.
"You die no matter what," the Captain spat, speaking as if the future were as irrevocable as the past. "It's the girl who tips upon the balance."
And suddenly Achamian understood why Kosoter had elected to remain behind. Logic- scalper logic. Who knew what sorcerous traps lay buried in a legendary place like the Library? Better to hang back, to direct events from safety, with a knife held to his hostage's throat.
"And the child within her."
– | The Great Library of Sauglish. Even beaten to its foundations, portions of the holy fortress reared above the trees. The merest rise or gap in the screening branches afforded him glimpses. His dreaded destination.
Even still, the old Wizard found an unexpected serenity walking with the Nonman through the wooded ruins. Ragged patches of sunshine waved across the forest floor. Birdsong chirped and chattered through the canopy, light and inexhaustible. Here and there sections of wall rose from mounds like teeth from earthen gums. Layers of stonework ribbed the ravines they crossed. Blocks and fragments of every description stumped the ground. They passed a free-standing triumphal, the first thing Achamian clearly recognized from his Dreams: the Murussar, the symbolic bastion that marked the entrance to Sauglish's outlander quarter. Stripped of its inscriptions and engravings, it towered into the canopy, stone blackened, chapped with white lichens, shelved with moss. He need only blink to see the crowds bustling about its marble base: their garb ancient, their arms and armour bronze-men culled from all nations, from wild Aorsi to distant Kyraneas.
Prior to the First Apocalypse, the Holy Library had been famed throughout Earwa, the destination of poets, sorcerers, and princely embassies. Entire literary traditions had grown about the long pilgrimage to the City of Robes, the famed Caravaneeri, of which only fragments now survived. Bards and prophets haunted the niches and alcoves of every street, crying out diversion and threatening damnation. Vendors lined the ways, hawking wares from as far away as ancient Shir.
Sauglish had been infamous for its racket, the markets booming with commerce during the days, the streets clattering with teamsters during the night. There was something both tragic and beautiful, Achamian decided, in the contrast between that ancient clamour and the peaceful din he heard now-as if there were something proper in the passing of Men.
The Ganiural, the processional avenue that led to the Library, was still clearly visible beneath the mounding of centuries: a broad trough in the forest floor that followed a compass-straight bearing. The old Wizard had said nothing to Cleric in all this time: despite the wonder he felt, his outrage at his captivity remained too raw a thing to broach. But as they climbed toward the ruined Library, the scale of ages seemed to leach into his bones-generations stacked upon generations, innumerable lives snuffed after a mere handful of scratching years. The fact that the figure walking beside him had outlived all of it, long enough to break beneath the burden, loomed so large that his grudge began to seem preposterous.
"Incariol," Achamian finally said, wincing at the way speaking pained his gag-cankered tongue. "Why that name?"
The Nonman's stride did not falter. "Because I wander."
The Wizard breathed deep, knowing the time had come to plunge back into the fray. He squinted up at the figure. "And Cleric?"
The Nonman's pace slowed a fraction. A scowl furrowed his hairless brow.
"It is a tradition… I think… A tradition among the Siqu to take a Mannish name."
Siqu was the name given to Nonmen who walked among Men.
"But Incariol is not your name…"
The Nonman continued walking.
"You are Nil'giccas," the Wizard pressed. "The Last King of Mansions."
Cleric abruptly halted and with an alien air slowly turned to face him. Because they had walked shoulder to shoulder or rather, shoulder to elbow, the Nonman loomed over him, broad and hale beneath his nimil armour.
The Wizard saw turmoil in his dark eyes.
"No," the marmoreal lips said. "He is dead."
A sudden consciousness of what Seswatha had felt in the presence of the being before him descended upon Achamian. A sense of age-spanning majesty, grievous nobility, and power, angelic and unfathomable.
"No," the old Wizard said. "He is quite alive, gazing upon me."
The King of Ishterebinth stood before him, storied and immortal. The legendary hero, whose triumphs and disasters had been stamped into the very foundation of history.
Drusas Achamian fell to his knees, bent with fingers interlocked behind his neck, the way the Grandmaster of the Sohonc had bowed so many times so very many years ago, even in this, the celebrated city he once called his own…
He knelt to accord honour to the great King before him.
– | She watches Cleric and the Wizard vanish over the burial rim that once was Sauglish's walls, swallows against the cry climbing her throat. The sight reeks of execution.
They have reached the Coffers. The Skin Eaters, she knows, will not suffer them long.
Mimara has never been a timid or fearful woman. Nor has she ever been like her mother, who continually swaddled her heart in doubt and misgivings. Their quest has doled out terrors aplenty, but almost always as calls to desperate action. There were always eyes she could claw. Always.
But the fear she feels now forbids all action. It gags her, as certainly as the Wizard had been gagged. Even her wailing is caught in the fist of her breast. It empties her limbs of blood.
The fear that taught prayer to Men.
She can feel Achamian walking alone, out there, a point of panic swamped in torpor. She can feel his doom close hoary about him.
The Captain and the others busy themselves with trivial labours. Pokwas whets his great blade. Koll seems to sleep. Xonghis fashions snares. Mimara simply sits hugging her knees, rapt, at times praying for Achamian, at times fending the images of disaster flashing through her soul's eye. She spends the early morning watches grappling with doom and futility.
But the focus of her anxiety is not long in changing.
– | Great Sauglish, the ancient City of Robes, extended about them, little more than a host of ruined grottos scattered through the forest. He would succeed in this, the old Wizard thought on his knees beneath the towering Nonman. He would wrest Cleric away from the Captain. He would recover Anasurimbor Celmomas's ancient map from the Coffers. He would find Ishual and the truth of the man who had stolen his wife.
"You are confused, mortal," Cleric said. "Rise."
And with these simple words, the old Wizard's sudden hope collapsed back into the morass of worry and embittered fear. Feeling foolish, Achamian climbed back to his feet. He gazed angrily up at the Nonman, then looked down in embarrassment and fury.
"Lord Kosoter…" he ventured as they resumed their climb. "He's your elju? Your book?"
Cleric was reluctant to speak. The old Wizard knew he had to tread carefully. Famed King of Ishterebinth or not, the Nonman walking beside him was also an Erratic, one of the Wayward.
"Yes."
"What if he lies? What if he manipulates you?"
Cleric turned to regard him, then looked to the glimpses of ruined walls in the distance before them. "What if he's treacherous?" he asked.
"Yes!" the Wizard pressed. "Surely you can see how… diseased his heart has become. Surely you can see his madness!"
"And you… you would be my book in his stead?"
Achamian paused to better choose his words.
"Seswatha," he began with an imploring look, "your old friend of yore-he dwells within me, my Lord. I cannot betray him. He cannot betray you. Let me bear the burden of your memory!"
Cleric continued in silence for several strides, his expression inscrutable.
"Seswatha…" he finally repeated. "That name… I remember. When the world burned… When Mog-Pharau shouldered the clouds… He… Seswatha fought at my side… for a time."
"Yes!" Achamian exclaimed. " Please, my Lord. Take me as your book! Leave this scalper madness behind! Regain your honour! Reclaim your glory!"
Cleric lowered his face, clutched his chin and cheek. His shoulders hitched in what Achamian took for a sob…
But was in fact a laugh.
"So…" the Nonman King said, raising eyes savage for their mirth. "You offer me oblivion?"
Too late, the old Wizard recognized his mistake.
"No… I-"
The Nonman whirled, grasped him with a strength that made the Wizard feel bone thin, bone frail. "I will not die a husk!" he cried. He rolled his head from shoulder to shoulder in his curious, mad and explosive way. He flung out his hands to clutch the air.
"No! I will ruin and I will break!"
Few things unsettle more than the violation of hidden assumptions-or make us more wary. The old Wizard had appealed to his own logic-his own vanity-forgetting that the absence of common ends was the very thing that made the mad mad. He had offered himself as a tool, not realizing that he and Mimara were the object of the bargain struck: the shade of an ancient friend and the echo of long-lost love. They were the loves to be betrayed.
They were the souls to be remembered…
"Honour?" the Nonman cried, his sneer transforming him into a gigantic Sranc. "Love? What are these but dross before oblivion? No! I will seize the world and I will shake from it what misery, what anguish, I can. I will remember!"
– | The old Wizard resumed walking, this time with a bearing more suited to a death march. Let the victim lead the executioner, he thought. Nil'giccas, the Last King of Mansions, was going to kill him in the Library of Sauglish.
Scenarios both disastrous and absurdly hopeful raced through Achamian's thoughts. He would ambush the Nonman with a Cant powerful enough to smash his incipient Wards-kill him before he himself was killed. He would plead and cajole, find the incantation of reason and passion that would throw Cleric from the mad track he followed. He would battle with howling fury, tear down what was left of the Sacred Library, only to be beaten down by the Quya Mage's greater might…
The impulse to survive is not easily denied, no matter how severe the calamities a man has suffered or how relentless the misfortunes.
"I mourn what Fate has made of me…" the Nonman said without warning.
The old Wizard watched his booted feet kick through forest debris.
"So what of Ishterebinth?" he asked. "Has it fallen?"
The hulking Nonman made a gesture that possessed the character of a shrug. "Fallen? No. Turned. In the absence of recollection my brothers have turned to tyranny… To Min-Uroikas."
Min-Uroikas. That he spoke this with ease attested to the severity of his condition. Among the Intact, it was a name not so much mentioned as spat or cursed. Min-Uroikas. The Pit of Obscenities. The dread stronghold that had murdered all their wives and daughters, and so doomed their entire race.
"Golgotterath," the Wizard managed to say without breath.
A heavy nod. Sickles of reflected sunlight bobbed across his scalp.
"I had forgotten that name."
"And you?" the Wizard asked. "Why have you not joined them?"
Long silence. Long enough to bring them to the base of the broken Library.
"Pride," the Nonman finally said. "I would bring about my own heartbreak. So I set out in search of those I might love…"
Achamian searched the dark glitter of his eyes. "And destroy."
A solemn nod, carrying thousands of years of inevitability. "And destroy."
– | Mimara does not know what alerts her to the sudden change in the air among the scalpers. Her mother once told her the bulk of discourse consisted of hidden exchanges, that most men blathered in utter ignorance of their meaning and intent. Mimara scoffed at the idea, not because it rang false, but because her mother argued it.
"Most find it difficult to stomach," the Empress said with maternal exhaustion. "They believe in a thousand things they cannot see, yet tell them the greater part of their own soul lies hidden, and they balk…"
This proved to be one of those rare comments that would flank Mimara's anger and leave her simply troubled. She could not shake the sense that the object of the exchange, the hidden object, had been her stepfather, Kellhus. The nagging suspicion that her mother had been warning her.
A part of her awakened that day. It was one thing to realize that the men who wooed her spoke through their teeth, as the Ainoni would say. But it was quite another to think that motives could hide themselves, leaving the men they moved utterly convinced of their honourable intentions.
Now she can feel it. Something hidden has happened, here, among these idle men, on the ruined outskirts of Sauglish. Something as ethereal and small as a soul committing to some resolution, yet as momentous as anything that has happened in her life.
She becomes quiet, watchful, knowing the only question is whether they realize as much…
The scalpers.
The Captain squats upon a toe of mossed stone that smacks of masonry, even though it looks natural. He stares out into random forest pockets with a kind of stationary hatred, like a man who never tires of counting his grievances. Galian and Pokwas recline against a hump in the matted humus, talking and joking in low tones. Koll sits like a cross-legged corpse, his hollow eyes sorting nothing. Sarl sits and stands, sits and stands, grinning his eyes into lines and gurgling about slogs and riches.
Xonghis alone remains both industrious and vigilant.
After a time, Galian bolts upright. With the air of settling some inaudible dispute between him and Pokwas, he asks, "What will our shares be?"
A heartbeat of astonished silence follows, such is the general terror of addressing the Captain.
"As much as you can bear and still survive," Lord Kosoter finally says. Absolutely nothing about his gaze or demeanour changes as he says this. He literally speaks as if not speaking.
"And what about the Qirri?"
Silence.
Despite the air of hard deliberation, Lord Kosoter has bred an atmosphere of volatility between him and his men, cleaving to thresholds so vague and so brittle that it seems anything beyond abject obedience might warrant execution. Galian risks his life simply asking questions for all to hear. But mentioning Qirri…
It seems nothing less than suicidal. The act of a fool.
The Captain shakes his head slowly. "Only Cleric knows."
"What if you were to demand he yield it?"
Turning his head on a hinge of granite, Lord Kosoter finally regards the former Columnary.
"The False Man is mad!" Pokwas calls out.
The Captain lowers his face, pinches his lower lip in contemplation. "Yes," he says in grim admission. "But think. A year given. Our every greed slaked." He seeks each of his men with his gaze, as if knowing he must cow them one by one. "He's delivered us to these riches."
Galian smiles like someone with arguments too devious to be refuted.
"Then why suffer him any longer?"
For the first time Mimara glimpses the fury sparking in the Captain's eyes.
"Who will deliver us back, fool?"
More silence.
A nightmarish intensity engulfs the two men.
Galian peers at the Ainoni caste-noble in mock reverence, his manner so feckless, so bold, that it raises an audible murmur from Mimara's lungs.
"I want a fire," he says.
"We march on the dark."
Galian looks to the forested deeps about them, then back to his Captain. "Yes… Skinny country, is it?" There is nothing sly about his antagonism now. "Where are the skinnies then?"
The Captain regards him for several heartbeats, his eye shadowed beneath heavy brows, his nose and cheeks like chipped flint above the brushed wire of his moustache and beard. There is something breathless, absolute about his composure. Grim deliberation glints from his eyes…
The look of a man, a murderous man, finding the shadowy centre of his enemy's web.
"Are you such a fool, Galian?" Mimara blurts aloud. The tension is too much.
But the former Columnary has eyes only for his Captain.
"You made your decision, just then," he says with a lolling smile. "Didn't you? You decided to kill me."
Lord Kosoter glares, a hoary king leaning from his stone chair. A dark, tyrannical figure, passing judgment on the fool capering before him.
"Before the slit called out," Galian presses. "That moment of silence… You thought to yourself, Kill the fool! "
There is a sudden viciousness to his intonation, and enough mimicry of the Captain's growling voice to send Pokwas laughing. Even Xonghis, who is working on his bow, grins in his enigmatic Jekki manner.
Horror bolts through her. She has just glimpsed the savage shape of what is about to happen. Conspiracy and conspirators both.
"But then you thought it before, haven't you, Captain? Every time you glimpsed me leaning with the others, something cried, 'Kill him!' in that cramp you call a soul."
The Captain remains utterly motionless, watching the Columnary's approach from his impromptu throne.
"As it turns out," Galian continues with bright humour, "we were leaning together in sedition…"
The Columnary comes to stop immediately before Lord Kosoter, easily within reach of his broadsword. A kind of boredom seems to glint in the Captain's eyes-as if mutiny were an old and tedious friend.
"And you should know that every time I glimpsed you…" Galian throws out his arms and, as if daring him to strike, leans forward in vindictive contempt. "I also heard something whisper, 'Kill him!' "
The arrow catches the Captain in the mouth. He jerks to his side as if slapped, staggers back two steps. He hangs there for a moment, spitting cracked teeth.
A cloud occludes the sun.
The Captain of the Skin Eaters, the man called Ironsoul, raises his face, not to the bowman, Xonghis, but to the bowman's maker, Galian. The shaft is visible. It skewers the lower half of his face, draws bearded skin tight. Blood spills from the ream of his bottom lip. His laughter sputters through it.
A sardonic glee, malevolent for its intensity, shines like sorcery in his eyes.
The second arrow thumps into his neck. He whirls to the side and around, as if a rope about his waist holds him staked in place. He hangs for an instant, like a thing made of wax. Then he slumps face first across the humus. A convulsive moment passes. He begins shaking, his limbs tossing with bonfire violence. A crazed, bestial scramble follows, as if an elemental wildness or disordered spirit has lain dormant within him, hidden, and only now could thrash free of human constraints.
His expression loose with horror, Galian draws his sword.
The Captain claws the leafy humus at the Columnary's feet, seizes a branch no thicker than two thumbs. His spine arches against his blooded hauberk. His head pulls back. He grimaces about his tented mouth, blows rage and spittle and blood. His eyes gleam like pearl. Snorting with effort and fury, he begins twisting and wrenching at the branch, as if it were the world's own spine-the one thing to be broken.
He roars.
Then his head is gone, bouncing about the tail of its caste-noble braid.
Silence-this time of visible things.
Mimara watches, breathless. Mortal, something cold whispers within her.
Mortal after all.
– | Strange, the way Qirri made hash of momentous things.
Omens of the world's end. The death of races… Standing in bare sunlight, it all seemed little more than beautiful paint, a kind of ornamentation.
The northern tower of the Muraw, the Library's forward gate, was scarce more than a mound. Wandering stretches of vertical blocks broke the slopes here and there, but otherwise it had ceased to exist. Inexplicably, the southern tower stood almost entirely intact, a cyclopean square that soared against the bald sky. Even the obsidian that had plated its base had survived. Turf and shrubs mounded its distant crown, and several tenacious trees hung rooted from its sides. Despite everything, a sudden, boyish urge to scale the tower struck the old Wizard, followed by a sense of exhausted longing.
There had been a time when he had spent days loafing among ruins far less significant than these. A time when his worries had been small enough to ignore.
Side by side, the old Wizard and the Nonman King strode into the Library's ruined precincts. The walls, or what remained of them, possessed the monumental feel of the Ziggurats in Shigek. In many cases trees, full grown yet bent and windswept, grew along their crests. Achamian could still recognize the Ursilaral, the central promenade where the One Thousand Gift-Shields had once hung, garish and beautiful, symbolizing the truce between the Sohonc and almost all the known tribes of White and High Norsirai. In Seswatha's day, the Library was often called the Citadel of Citadels because of its importance, certainly, but also because of its design: fortresses within fortresses, as if the outside were a kind of ocean, a flood to be fought chamber by grudging chamber. It possessed no fewer than nineteen courtyards, often call "pits" because of the height of the surrounding walls, with the Ursilaral, its length jawed by numerous gates, connecting most of them.
The morning sun had climbed high enough only to bathe portions of their overgrown floors so that Achamian and Cleric found themselves walking through dry shadow. The growth was mostly restricted to thickets and clutches of shrubs, forcing Achamian to follow Cleric as he hacked his way forward with his sword. Plumes of fluff swirled in dry-wind eddies. Clouds drifted across the oblong squares of blue sky above them. Bees tracked spiral courses through the air, becoming white dots when they passed into sunlight. The Wizard even glimpsed a hare bolting through the grasses.
The experience became increasingly surreal. At times the Wizard found himself staring at Cleric's labouring back, broad beneath its sheath of shining mail, wondering whether he should just attack the Nonman and be done with the suspense. At other times he played a kind of game guessing what was the ruin of what. Mounds became fountains. Rectangular breaks in walls became windows onto barracks, apartments, and scriptoriums.
And twice he caught himself squinting across the northeastern heights, looking for thunderheads massing black and terrible…
For the Whirlwind.
It was like walking through two worlds beyond the actual: the one the issue of his reading, the other the product of his Dreams. He was Achamian, exile and pariah, wearer of rotted pelts. And he was Seswatha, hero, Grandmaster of this place, both during the time when its fall was preposterous, laughable, and during the days of encroaching destruction.
"I saw these towers burn," he said in an old voice. "I saw these walls tumble."
The Nonman King paused, scanned his surroundings as if seeing the ruins about him for the very first time. Achamian wondered what it would be like, outliving great works of stone. When nations possessed the span of flowers, wouldn't everything seem but stages of ruin?
"All Ishterebinth lamented when word arrived," Cleric eventually said. "We knew then the World was doomed."
Achamian gazed at the Nonman King, pinned by an immovable melancholy.
"Why?" he asked. "Why would you lament our death when it was Men, not the Inchoroi, who destroyed all your great mansions?"
"Because we have always known we would not survive Men."
The Wizard smiled in recollection.
"Yes… Because our dooms are one."
– | At last, walking bent through a gate almost buried by the rising ground, they came to the Turret, the mighty citadel raised by Noshainrau the White. It was naught but an enormous ring of stone, broad enough to encase any of the great amphitheatres of Invishi or Carythusal. Pitted with bird-holes, the sloped walls rose some thirty or so cubits before cresting, a line of ragged ruin against blue sky. The shining bronze sheets were gone-the Skutiri. In Seswatha's day they had ringed the Turret's base, nine thousand, nine-hundred and ninety-nine of them, each taller than a man, and each scored with innumerable lines of sorcerous script. The sun shone imperturbable, drawing shadows across hanging nubs of stone. Wind whisked through leaves and grasses. Never, it seemed to the old Wizard, had the world seemed so lonely.
"The sorcery here is very old, very weak," the Nonman said.
Did he remember Lord Kosoter's earlier charge? Could he?
Was he accusing him of lying?
"The Coffers lie beneath these ruins," Achamian replied. "The Wards protecting it are buried deep… and quite ageless, I assure you."
Perhaps now was the time to strike.
No. Not until he knew for sure he wouldn't need the Nonman's strength.
The Turret's original gate was lost beneath ramped debris. They fought their way through a mass of scrub, then began climbing.
Of all his memories of the Holy Library, the final days lived most fiercely in Achamian's memory. Always the No-God was there… like a nagging sense, a direction steeped in dread, as if one point on the compass had been honed sharp enough to draw a gasp from his lungs. He would walk the walls and verandas and feel it… there… sometimes stationary for days on end, but always moving sooner or later-always coming closer.
And when the wind was right, he would hear the wailing of bereaved mothers from the city below.
Stillborn… Every infant stillborn.
The old Wizard stopped mid-ascent, leaned against pitted stone to recover his wind. Many years had passed since he last felt the horror that was Mog-Pharau while awake. The gaping sense of futility and loss, of things crashing, not here or there, but everywhere. The immobility of heart as much as limb or will. The horizon itself had become a revelation, taking you out of yourself and binding you to a world of dying things.
It dogged the old Wizard as he continued climbing, a great shadow lurking in his periphery, a sky-staining malevolence that leapt into existence whenever he glanced away. And the conviction that all Mankind shared the very same premonition.
Cleric stood atop the summit. The ruined walls reached to either side of him, thick enough to house pockets of grasses and shrub along their summit, climbing and dropping according to the logic of things wrecked for the passage of years.
"Something is amiss," he called down to the huffing Wizard.
He extended a hand in assistance as Achamian clambered near. There was a surprising reassurance in his grip, as if their bodies recognized a kinship too primitive not to be overlooked by their souls.
Leaning against his knees to catch his breath, the old Wizard surveyed the Turret's vacant interior. He suffered the same knee-wobbling sense of vertigo he always suffered when he found himself standing high upon fallen works. Swallows battled about the curve of the inner walls. The ages had entirely gutted the citadel, leaving only what resembled an absurdly immense granary. But he had expected as much.
What he had not expected was the great pit yawning below…
Rubble heaped about the inner foundations, making a funnel of the ground. The cracked rim of floors broken, exposing wasp-nest hollows, each a level of the Turret's cellars. Then obdurate blackness at the bottom.
"Do you smell that?" Achamian asked, frowning in disbelief.
"Yes," the Nonman King replied. "Sulphur."
– | She is not sure when she resumes breathing. The remaining Skin Eaters-the sane ones, anyway-immediately fall to arguing.
Galian instructs Sarl to watch her, which he does with a kind of crazed reluctance. She and the mad Sergeant take turns gazing at the Captain in disbelief. At one point, Sarl grasps the very branch that Lord Kosoter had tried to snap in his final moment. Crouching a pace away, he uses it to poke at his dead Captain's face. He presses the tip against the waxen forehead, rolls the face skyward, then jumps when it slips and rocks back to face him.
He turns to Mimara and cackles.
"He's not dead," he says like a drunk keen to slur some fact that others thought obvious. "Not the Captain, no…"
Shouts climb from the near distance. Pokwas is jabbing Galian's shoulder with a long finger.
"He's too hard for Hell."
– | It was like climbing down a monstrous rabbit hole.
A strange anxiousness dogged the old Wizard as the brightness climbed in stages above him. The pit fell at an angle instead of dropping vertically, opening about a ramp of packed debris and earth, like a burrow that was at once a road into the underworld. The Turret's cellars formed a kind of pitched roof above them, three distinct levels of corridors halved and chambers cracked open like eggs.
The depths opened before them, steeped in sulphurous mystery.
"Look…" Cleric said, motioning toward the side of the tunnel.
But Achamian had already glimpsed them in the grey light. Three gashes hooked like scythes: the centre one the longest, the innermost curving within its compass, while the outermost arced away at an angle.
Achamian immediately recognized the mark: any Man in the Three Seas would have. The Three Sickles had been a common heraldic device since Far Antiquity-the symbol adopted by Triamis the Great.
The scoring of long-curved claws…
The spoor of Dragons.
– | A profound ache climbs out from her back, roots itself in her knees and neck. But still she sits hugging her shins. She cannot move.
Galian returns, leading the others. Sarl scampers from his path, his Captain's head clutched tight to his chest.
"So what are you going to do?" she asks the Columnary.
"We're going to wait for Cleric to return. Then we're going to relieve him of that pretty pouch."
Xonghis has already yanked the two Chorae from beneath Lord Kosoter's hauberk.
Galian smiles at her in the leering manner she knows all too well. "In the meantime," he says, "we are going to feast on the banquet the gods have delivered to us."
Her look is so sour, it seems a miracle that he can grin.
"Feast… On what?"
The day is dry and bright-beautiful. Wind falls through the lazy tree-tops, shushing the bestiary that is the world. Blood clots across the leaves.
"Peaches, my sweet. Peaches."
– | Skidding on their rumps, the old Wizard and the Nonman King followed the burrow into airy darkness-the antechamber to the Coffers. The Upper Pausal had been reduced to balconies hanging amputated in the black. Debris choked the floors of the Pausal proper, heaped toward the sides by the passage of some monstrous bulk. Achamian shuddered, glimpsing what was left of the Nonman friezes that adorned its walls-memories of Cil-Aujas, he supposed. The Great Gate of Wheels had been obliterated; he could see its ensorcelled remains scattered through the ruin: the marmoreal white of broken incantation wheels, the chapped green of bronze cams and fittings.
Raw blackness gaped before him.
So, a dull and long-suffering portion of his soul murmured, the Coffers have been looted.
He stood motionless, gazing in abject dismay.
So much suffered… So many dead…
For nothing.
The great refrain of his miserable life.
The madness, when he pondered it, was that he had believed it could be otherwise, that he would trek all this distance- survive this far -and actually find the Coffers intact, the map to Ishual waiting for him like a low-hanging plum. He almost laughed aloud for thinking it, the thought that Fate might be kind.
This, he realized-this was what his fate had been all along. Snared in the machinations of his enemy, who had known his mission even before he had tripped across it. Confronted with the preposterous issue of his preposterous hopes. He had sought truth and had been delivered to madmen and a Dragon instead-a Dragon!
A Wracu of old.
He could almost hear the skies laugh.
Sparing neither word nor glance, the old Wizard and the Nonman King stepped across the cracked threshold and at long last passed into the Coffers.
The reek watered his eyes, mingled with his terror so that it seemed he wept for fear. Sulphur. The smoke of predatory life. And rot, profound and gangrenous. The putrefaction that ties a string to your stomach and pulls hard whenever breath is drawn too deep.
Achamian could feel as much as hear the thing breathing in the blackness, the whoosh of enormous furnace bellows. He could scarce see the debris beneath his feet, yet the sound grew into a kind of vision, such is the mischief of imagination. Great lungs betokened great limbs. The deep reptilian creak conjured images of scaled hides, of lipless jaws and grinning teeth…
A mighty horror awaited them, and a portion of the old Wizard did not want to see. A portion of him preferred the hysterics of his soul's eye.
They came to a slope of heaped ruin, picked their way to the summit. The blackness yawned out about them, a motionless vacuum. Cleric uttered a sorcerous phrase; his eyes and mouth flared with meaning. The pale brilliance of a Surillic Point appeared above them, and the blackness fled to far places, leaving a globe of empty, illuminated air…
Dragon. Wracu.
According to legend, the first Sohonc discovered a vast cavern when laying the Library's foundations. They dredged the depths, squared the walls, pillared the open spaces, creating a secret, subterranean citadel. It was Noshainrau, whose sorcerous research had cast such long shadows across the future, who would make it his School's treasury, a vault for the world's greatest glories and darkest terrors.
The famed Coffers.
Perhaps the ancient architects had feared the ceiling the earth had provided them. Perhaps the chaotic weave of natural lines offended their sense of beauty and proportion. Either way, they constructed a roof with the post and lintel principles they used to raise their temples. This second ceiling had long since collapsed in its centre, littering the floor with the ruin of giant stone beams and the cracked drums of toppled pillars. Peering between the remaining columns, the old Wizard had the impression of a black lake hanging above all that could be seen, as if the very world had been turned on its head.
Gone were the ponderous lantern wheels. Gone were the narrow aisles. Gone were the racks and shelves that had organized a thousand years of sorcerous hoarding. Treasure and debris matted the floors, a ragged landscape of contradictions that piled higher toward the chamber's heart. Coins gravelling the wrack of shattered frescoes. A tripod capsized in a swell of mounded powder. A crown staved beneath a jutting beam of granite. A chest of cracked bronze, spilling rivulets of jewels between horns of broken stone.
Because of age-old accumulations of dust and tarnish, nothing glittered, nothing gleamed.
Apart from the Dragon.
The shadows cast by intervening columns were absolute, so only fragments of the beast could be seen. Horned ridges. Wings folded into scarred curtains. Scales like overlapping shields, pale with filth and bronze. A single nostril weeping smoke.
The beast was old, Achamian realized. Exceedingly old. Wracu never stopped growing, so it stood to reason that any dragon he encountered in his waking life would dwarf the ancient monstrosities from his Dreams…
But this.
Wings that could have tarped the Shilla Amphitheatre in faraway Aoknyssus. A torso broad enough to hull the largest Cironji carrack, yet long enough to coil about the small mountain of treasure and ruin. Were it to rear onto its hind legs, the beast would stand as tall as any of the Mop's unnatural trees.
The bellow lungs continued to roar and croak in the deeps of Achamian's hearing. The sulphur pinched his own breath, quick and shallow and warm-blooded. Nausea rooted through his innards.
He turned to Cleric. Bleached in his own light, the Nonman King stood rapt, his left boot braced against a headless statue. The Surillic Point made polished marble of his skin, a diamond weave of his nimil hauberk. He looked more thoughtful than afraid or astounded.
"This…" Cleric murmured, his gaze fixed on the slumbering beast. "This is where I am meant to die."
"You and my loincloth," Achamian replied.
The Nonman turned to him, his face blank and wondering. A vagrant pain seemed to seize his expression. Then Nil'giccas, King of the Last Mansion, laughed. The sound boomed through the hollows, a cackle that rolled like thunder, deep and earthen and utterly-insanely-unafraid.
Achamian grimaced more than smiled.
"Ah… Seswatha," Cleric said, swallowing his mirth. "How I cherish your wi-"
"OLD," the very ground seemed to croak. "SO VERY OLD…"
Rasping through roped mucus, sheathed in a bottomless wheeze. The voice was more than loud, more than deep; it was great in the sense of absurd disproportions, words cast across faraway orders of strength and immensity. Achamian suddenly felt like a fly in the presence of a Sempis crocodile.
The scrape and scuff of shifting debris. The tinkle of little things falling. The Dragon stirred upon its heap, raised its armoured chest on limbs crooked and knotted like hoary old treetrunks. Riven with horror, Achamian watched the head wag across a lane of pale light, the crest battered and majestic…
The saurian skull long-jawed and wicked…