The old Wizard fell, cartwheeled down the beast's heap of treasure and debris. Blinking. Coughing. He tried to claw his way upright, too stunned to orchestrate the counterpoise of voices, inner and outer, required for sorcery. He beat at his burning hair and beard. He felt an arm draw him up, saw Cleric peering down at him, the porcelain lines of worry and relief. He heard the whoosh of conflagration, the clack and thunder of enormous collapses. Ancient pillars toppled. Sheets of masonry dropped. The world itself seemed to shrug, then crash upon them.
Masses of stone pummelled the Nonman's Wards, a rain of godlike fists.
The last shreds of light were pinched to utter black.
Ringing ears. The taste of dust.
"It has buried us," the Nonman King said in the clacking aftermath. "Shut us in."
– | She kicks off her boots.
She unties the laces of her jacket, pulls it back from her bare shoulders, lets it slide of its own weight down her arms. She shakes it from her wrists. It slumps across the humus.
She clasps her shift, winces at the reek of it as she draws it over her head. The swathes of down in her armpits tingle. Open air finds her breasts. Her nipples rise to the kissing breeze.
She unlaces her leather breeches. Wriggling, she pushes them below her knees. She steps from them. Open air finds her thighs… her sex.
She grabs the wire Circumfix-the one she found on the battlefield-hanging between her breasts. But she releases it, loathe to forsake the protection of symbols-even false ones.
Motionless, the scalpers gaze. Sarl gropes his crotch with his free hand. The Captain's head continues to glare from the crook of his arm. Even Koll, wasted to the very lip of death, watches with licentious hunger. They are but five, yet countless others seem to crowd them, making pews of the forested ruins, all gazing with lidless eyes, some in outrage, others with pity and hope, and still more with lust and crass desire.
She thought the Qirri would ease her passage, that it might have delivered her to the place where she had always hidden-for this was nothing new. But she was wrong. You have to be more than your motions to hide behind them, and she is not.
The Qirri has whittled her down to the bone of what happens.
She shudders with something deeper than shame, as if garments more profound than leather and fabric have been shed. The cloth of hope and flattery, perhaps-all the things she has called herself in the pursuit of her pain-numbing vanities. Sorceress. Princess. Warrior. All the lies she has conjured to hide the fact of her slavery.
For the first time, it seems, she is wholly what scripture has made of her-and nothing more. The quiver on the hip of the bowman. The pillow beneath the head of the king. She is chattel. She is sustenance. She is pleasure and progeny…
She is naked.
– | The two crouched for what seemed a hundred heartbeats after the clamour had settled, probing the cavernous black with pricked ears. They heard nothing, save the groan and clatter of settling debris.
Wielding ethereal geometries, the old Wizard and the Nonman King began heaving aside masses of rock and masonry. Throughout history, kings and princes had sought to bend the Few to menial tasks, to works that only the sweat and misery of thousands could otherwise accomplish. Roads. Fortifications. Temples. Wars had been fought to resist them. For men who could manipulate the very frame of existence, sorcerers, demanding such mean labour was nothing less than an outrage, akin to asking lords to wash the feet of beggars. As Tsotekara, the Grandmaster of the extinct Surartu, famously declared to Triamis the Great: to do as slaves was to be as slaves.
Even still, caprice demands all men, no matter how exalted their station, play the menial from time to time. Every sorcerer living knew some Cant adapted to the moving of earth.
The darkness clacked and roared with their excavations. The devastation of the Coffers stretched out behind them, easily outrunning their paltry light, a twilight world the old Wizard was loathe to consider, lest he recall the hopeless task of finding a single golden map-case amid such wrack and ruin. Only two columns stood that they could see; the others lay heaped and toppled like a felled forest. Shelves of rock continued to fall from the inverted cliffs and valleys hanging above, sporadically showering the blasted landscape with debris.
Huffing with effort, Achamian sank pinions into the mounded wreckage, raked it away with the flash of miracle lights. More debris would tumble into the gap he had cleared but never quite so much as he had removed. Braced on ever-uncertain footing-spilled gravel, canted lintels, or the curve of pillar drums-they thundered forward, dredging the entrance clear. When light at last rimmed the uppermost rocks before them, they paused to collect their breath and courage.
"The beast awaits us," Cleric said.
Achamian nodded. He could see fell Wutteat in his soul's eye, poised to flush the waiting passage with coiling fire. Ambush was a notorious tactic of the Wracu. For all their savage might, they were exceedingly intelligent and devious creatures-far more so than Sranc. They had no choice but to rush the burrow, somehow survive the sum of its power…
"One of us must shield," he said, "while the other casts into the fire."
The Nonman King began to nod, then whirled toward the darkness behind them.
Frowning, Achamian followed his gaze into the high void, peered squinting. He raised a thumb to scratch away a fleck of grit…
It breached the light-smoke that became a ghost that became shining, bestial reality-its claws outstretched, its wings hooked about emptiness, its horn-crowned head vanishing behind gaping jaws…
The ancient dragon dropped out of the blackness. Achamian threw up futile arms.
Conflagration.
– | The men stare at her, speechless.
"What do you see?" she asks.
Her voice seems to jar them. Galian's face darkens in unaccountable rage.
"See?" he cries, his face twitching about a compulsive blink. "I see a world of plunder. You… The Coffers yonder… And when we return, every delicacy, every peach, and every silk pillow in the Three Seas! I see a tasty world, my little Whore-Imperial, and I intend to feast!"
Whore. The word stirs something within her, a habit long forgotten. She knows this, knows how to bridle and ride the crazed passions of men…
"And your soul?" she asks without passion. "What of your soul?"
"Will be no worse for pillaging a witch, I assure you."
"And pillaging," Pokwas laughs from his side. There is something lecherous and angular in the Zeumi Sword-dancer's bearing, as if he leans over legs already prised open. She can even see the curve of his phallus through his breeches. "And pillaging… and pillaging…"
Galian strides toward her.
She wracks her soul, searching for the hate that has always been the engine of her strength, but she can only summon moments of tenderness and love. She smiles, blinking tears. She draws the curve of her belly into warm palms. This is the first time, it seems, that she dares clutch, dares the making real that comes with grasping.
Hello, little one…
He grabs her throat, turns her head from side to side.
"Sweet Sejenus…" he murmurs with an almost tender breath. "You are a true beauty… A pity about the maggot."
"Maggot?" she gasps.
"The grub you carry in your womb."
Tears spill from her eyes. "What about it?" she asks about a sob.
The Columnary leans close enough to lick her face. "I fear it will not survive me."
"No! Plea-!"
"No indeed!" he cries with renewed cruelty. "No worms in our peaches, eh, boys?"
Once again Pokwas and Xonghis laugh, this time like nervous adolescents. They have been led and they have been drawn. They have stumbled across obsessed-over boundaries, only to find themselves thinking unthinkable things.
Yatwer… Dear Goddess, please…
Her head caught in the vise of his hands, she stares down the curve of her cheeks, and somehow her gaze finds his manic glare, latches…
The Judging Eye opens.
She finds herself peering into something… inexplicable.
Contradictory passions roil through her, as if she were the scalper's lifelong mistress, the one most punished, the one who understood. For there is no sin without weakness, no transgression without want or suffering. She sees the cracks through which his infant nature bleeds. The father's cane, the brother's fists. The starving marches, and the need, to be admired, to be respected, to steal what he covets…
She loves him, and she despises. But she finds herself fearing for him most of all.
Often has she wondered how she could describe it, seeing the morality of things let alone lives. Sometimes it seems more a matter of memory than vision, like sighting a familiar treatise in the house of a friend. The object itself stews with significance, but all the passages-cherished and offending-are indistinct. Only the sum can be seen, inchoate and confounding. This is what she most often sees: the abbreviated mash that is judgment passed, the balance of a soul, good and evil, writ in a stick-figure scrawl.
But sometimes, if she concentrates, the tome of a lived life flutters open beneath the Eye, and the crimes themselves become visible, the way carnal images flicker about the glimpse of a long-absent lover.
And sometimes, more rarely still, she sees the particulars of their coming damnation.
The Columnary stares, his eyes wide with panicked fury. She clutches his wrist.
"Galian…" she hears herself gasp. "It's not too late. You can save yourself from… from…"
Something in her words or manner jars him from his intent-the trill of frantic sincerity, perhaps.
"Hell?" he laughs. "There's too many of them."
Such torment. Clenched and cringing, huddled in ways outside worldly dimensions. Prised and flayed, the innumerable petals of his soul peeled back in shrieks and sulphurous flame. Screams braided into screams, pains heaped upon agonies.
She sees it, his future, a gleam across his eyes, a fiery halo about his crown. His suffering disgorged like paint, smeared and stroked into obscene works of art. His soul passed from Ciphrang to feasting Ciphrang, dispensing anguish like milk through the endless ages.
She sees the truth of the Excruciata, the One Hundred-and-Eleven Hells depicted on the walls of the Junriuma in Sumna.
"Galian. Galian. You m-must listen. Please… You have no idea what awaits you!"
He tries to grin away his horror. He's strangling her as much as holding her now. "Witch!" he spits. "Witch!"
"Shhhhh…" she manages to whisper. "It will b-"
He slams her to the raw earth. She cries out. He thrusts apart her knees, pins her while fumbling with his breeches. Belts pinch her inner thighs. Twigs bite at her shoulders, her buttocks. Dead leaves press cold against her back, like reptilian scales. His breathing is ragged, his look unfocused. He smells of shit and rotted teeth.
The world spins and roars about the fact of his damnation.
She cries into his ear, murmurs, "I forgive you…"
Frees him of this final sin.
– | The beast had lain hidden, waiting for them to dig their way into the entrance antechamber, a dead end where they could not use the greater debris field to either flee or flank him. But it proved a treacherous trap. Had they not stood side by side, where the combined strength of their incipient defences purchased them the heartbeats they needed to reinforce their Wards, they would be dead.
Apparently Wutteat could not hear the distance between them…
Fire boiled over and around them, blinding them, ripping away the gossamer meanings they shouted against it. An inferno like no other, scorching some hard stone surfaces into liquid while exploding others.
Then the beast itself was on them, a crocodile falling upon sparrows. It clawed with feline savagery, tearing and rending, while the Gnostic sorcerer and the Quyan Mage sang in desperate tandem, slowing accumulating the glowing shells that preserved them.
The boom and crack of mountains breaking, and underneath, the rot of sorcery's unearthly murmur.
Roaring. Raging. Scales burnished, flashing as crimson as infant blood. Claws the size of wains swatting. The great saurian head ramming, snapping horns as thick as young trees.
Planes of spectral glass cracked and shattered, collapsed into aether. Rock rained down. Stone congealed like blood.
"It lives by its ears!" the old Wizard cried between thunders.
His eyes blazing, Nil'giccas nodded in immediate understanding.
The beast reared above them. Another incendiary eruption. The world beyond their defences became an amorphous glare. Wards cracked and burned…
But the Nonman King was attacking, howling in tongues as old as his race. Achamian could scarce see the light of his conjuring, just the faint blue of lines like parabolic wires, arcing into the heights…
The inferno lifted, streamed exploding across the scorched heaps to their right. The fire sputtered into a ground-strumming shriek, and they saw Wutteat, the dread Father of Dragons, flailing backward, smoke pluming from its eye socket.
"The head!" Achamian screamed. "Attack the head!"
They assailed the beast, Man and Nonman, as in days of old. They threaded the air with arrays of wicked, dazzling illumination. And it screamed, squealed even, like a pig doused in burning oil.
They stepped into the cavernous air and pursued him. Wutteat's wings kicked the ground with gusts, swept up sheets of ash and dust. Yet they could see him.
Geometries of incandescence. Geometries of destruction.
Like a moth in a jar, Wutteat smashed its shoulders into the cragged ceiling, tried to bring stone down upon them. Deaf and blind, it spat fire across hanging cliffs…
The Gnostic sorcerer hung above one of the two remaining pillars, striking the thing with scissions and concussions. The Quyan Mage sailed an arc about the beast, uttering Cants that burned. They struck and struck until the iron of its bone glowed, until Wutteat's head was smashed ruin, a charred stump possessing jaws.
The beast dropped, and Achamian rushed to jubilation, thinking they had felled it. But it crashed into a lurch that became a run, its claws kicking up stone middens. It raised its blasted snout, snuffing against a piteous growl. Unerringly it charged toward the remnants of the entrance.
"No!" the Nonman King cried.
Coursing like a snake, it bolted through the punishing gauntlet of their sorcery, smashed through the entrance into the pale-glowing hollows beyond.
They pursued it into the breach, climbed as if up the throat of a toppled tower. But the dragon was too quick: they could already hear its shriek score the faraway sky. Climbing. Coughing. Breathless, they found themselves within the ring of the Turret, squinting up at the jagged circle of afternoon brilliance. His heart hammering with mortal violence, the old Wizard finally gained the summit.
Wutteat thrashed in the light of day, throwing up trees and gouts of dirt. It caromed against the Library walls, crashed like a thing thrown into the forest beyond. Trunks and limbs cracked. Over the wall's dusty halo, the crowns of a dozen trees convulsed and vanished. The beast spat wild gouts of fire, uttered shrieks that drove nails into their ears.
And then, suddenly, the dread beast was flying, white and black and golden, its ravaged wings buffeting the forest as though it were wheat. Scales shining, the Father of Dragons soared heavenward, spiralling and smoking like a bird afire. Astounded, the man and the Nonman watched, until finally, moth-small with distance, it vanished into the slow-tumbling flanks of a cloud.
Cleric stood atop the heights of a shattered inner wall, gazing high after the thing. Brush fires raged beyond him, throwing lines of orange across his jaw and cheek. His nimil chain glistened in the dry sunlight, and for the first time the old Wizard saw the faint lines of filigree worked across its innumerable links.
Herons. Herons and lions.
"Triumph!" Achamian cried out in relief and exaltation. "A victory worthy The Sagas!"
He hesitated in sudden realization. What did glory mean, when none could remember it?
And what was life, without glory to illuminate it?
The Nonman turned his profile to him, said nothing.
"You won't remember, will you?"
"Shadow," Nil'giccas replied, resuming his study of the distant sky. "I will remember the shadow it casts…" He turned to regard the Wizard. "Across the grief that follows."
The grief that follows.
The old Wizard matched the Nonman King's gaze for what seemed a hundred heartbeats. Finally, he nodded in slow resignation, scratched his chin beneath what remained of his beard.
"Yes," Achamian said. "Seswatha loved you as well."
– | Galian makes a noise, a grunt or a sob-she is not sure.
One moment he's an iron shadow grinding flaccid against her. Then he is gone.
She bolts upright, sees him arched across the forest floor, kicking his left foot, desperately clutching at his back. Koll stands above him, hunched and famine-frail, his hands clenching and unclenching. Galian flops onto his stomach, gags and screams. She sees a pommel jutting from below his left shoulder blade, a flower of crimson and black blooming through the links of his hauberk.
A breathless heartbeat passes. Xonghis rushes to assist Galian while Pokwas draws his great tulwar from his waist, sweeps it through the air before falling into his Sword-dancer stance.
"Fucking Stone Hag!" he cries. "I knew I should have cut your throat!"
Still clutching Lord Kosoter's head, Sarl sits rocking on the Captain's inert back, begins cackling. Light sparkles through the screens of foliage beyond him-from the direction of the Holy Library. A roaring whoosh follows…
Pokwas falls upon Koll in sweeping fury. His blade seems like silver ink, sketching sigils through open air. Koll effortlessly threads the gauntlet, ducking, leaping…
The Zeumi Sword-dancer pauses, eyes round in disbelief.
Koll dives to his right, cartwheels across the ground like a crab, toward Sarl and his Captain's draining corpse. The Sergeant scrambles backward.
Koll flits past him, rolls past the Captain's forgotten pack, then comes to his feet brandishing Squirrel. His stance low, his look darts from Pokwas to Xonghis, who has taken up a flanking position, his bow drawn.
More explosions rock the near distance. A titanic roar shivers the sky.
The starved Stone Hag begins laughing, a sound that begins human but ends like screaming wolves. Xonghis releases his shaft. Koll swats with Squirrel but misses. The arrow thuds into his neck.
Koll falls backward but somehow rolls back onto his feet. With his free hand he clutches the shaft. Pulls.
Screams.
The fingers of his face break apart, then fly open.
Mimara lurches to her feet, stumbles to Galian, who lies dying.
Crying out in Zeumi, Pokwas rushes the thing called Koll, his tulwar cutting poetry into the air. Steel rings against steel. Squirrel is nicked but does not shatter. Xonghis lets fly two more arrows. The thing lunges clear the first, but the second catches it high in the thigh. It barely survives the black giant's hollering assault.
Mimara stands breathless. Qirri pulses through her, makes a war-drum of her heart.
Xonghis whirls at the sound of her approach, releases. His arrow whistles past her left ear-a sound like a rip. She plunges Galian's sword into the Imperial Tracker's exposed armpit. She feels his death, the inside of him, communicated through blade and grip.
Beyond their clearing, the forest burns about the silhouette of stumped ruins. Sarl has resumed his phlegmatic howl, his expression crushed into a thousand laughing lines.
The whooshing tulwar catches the thing called Koll mid-leap. It careens through the air, tries to land on its remaining leg, tumbles backward. Closing for the kill, the Zeumi howls in triumph…
Fails to hear her naked approach.
– | Smoke piled over the derelict fortifications, drawn twisting into the high blue sky. Within the ruined Library, several smaller fires fanned bright in the gusting wind, sending showers of sparks and ash over the old Wizard and the Nonman King.
"You don't have to do this!" Achamian cried.
Still standing upon the wall he had climbed to peer after the dragon, Cleric tore his runed purse from its leather cord. He stared at it meditatively, hefted it in his palm. Achamian felt his heart clutch at his breast, seeing it dandled so near open flame. He realized he has worshipped this thing. The shrivelled folds pinched into creases about its drawstring. The faint impression of weight bulging within, as though it contained a mouse. It seemed absurd that such a low object could become the talisman, the fetish from which the whole expedition had come to hang. A pouch filled with soot.
"No!" Achamian cried.
But it was too late. Cleric bent his head sideways, as if to itch his ear against his shoulder, then swung the pouch upside down. The ashes of Cu'jara Cinmoi poured out in a dun stream. The wind fanned it into ghostly nothingness.
"You don't have to do this!" the old Wizard cried.
The dark eyes fixed him.
"I do…"
"Why? Why?"
"Because I remember no triumph…" He flinched, seemed to lose the thread of his voice. Sudden fury claimed the heights of his expression. "Only betrayal!" he roared. "Heartbreak and ruin!"
A kind of indignation welled through the Wizard, the outrage that overcomes Men whenever absurdities are stacked too high. "No!" he bellowed. "I will name you! I will be your book, and you will read me! You are Nil'giccas! The Last King of Mansions-the greatest of the Siqu!"
The fires seemed to wax at the sound of Cleric's warbling laughter.
"Seswatha!" the Nonman called. "Old dead friend… Will you hear my sermon?"
Achamian could only gaze in disgust and disbelief.
The Nonman muttered blasphemies that filled his eyes and mouth with light. He stepped from the summit and was aloft, climbing a floating arc that took him high above the fires surging through the courtyard.
"'Nil'giccas!' you call- beseech! as if trying to awaken some truth slumbering within me."
Flames roiled about the silhouettes of trees. Smoke wreathed him. Heat rippled across his hanging form. And the Wizard realized that he was actually going to attack.
A Quya Master of old, a hero of wars older than the Tusk, made ready his murder.
"You think Nil'giccas is something I have lost!" the Nonman King called down. "And therefore something that I can recover!"
Achamian was weary. He was bruised and he was burned-even well rested and whole, he would not dare a contest such as this. At least he was practised, thanks to the dragon. He could feel the Cants and Wards within him, tingling weaves of arcane meaning, hanging like possibilities…
Yet he did not strike.
"You forget," Cleric shouted, "that before the Nonman King's passing, I did not exist!"
The figure continued floating on a rising arc, one that took Achamian as its compass point. Sheets of stone toppled into the inferno below, kicking constellations of sparks in the wind.
"I can no more recover him than you can recover your mother's virgin womb."
Achamian stood rooted and frail before the rising conflagration. Strike! something howled within him. Strike now!
"I am Incariol!" the Nonman screamed. " Cleric! And you shall not survive my lesson!"
But instead of attacking, the old Wizard arrayed himself with Wards, cloaked himself with shining panes of light. He had flattered himself after the underworld debacle of Cil-Aujas, told himself that perhaps Cleric was not so mighty, that the rot that had devoured so much of his soul had blunted his meanings as well…
Now he was not so sure.
Strike, you fool!
"You think me the cripple!" Nil'giccas cried. "You think Cleric the ruin of someone whole! But you are wrong, Seswatha! I am the Truth !"
The Nonman King had climbed a half-spiral above burning bark and foliage, over headless towers and blunted walls. Now he hung motionless before the monumental frame of the Turret.
"We are Many!" the Erratic roared. " We are legion! What you call your soul is nothing but a confusion, an inability! A plurality that cannot count the moments that divide it and so calls itself One."
His eyes flared white. Words boomed out, words that made a crimson globe of his head and face. The sound of vacant space ripping, a growl in the deepest pocket of the ear. Abstractions lashed the open air between them, wracked Achamian's Wards. The old Wizard raised arms against the glittering violence.
"Only when memory is stripped away!" Cleric cried out, the glow fading from his eyes. "Only then is Being revealed as pure Becoming! Only when the past dies can we shrug aside the burden that is our Soul!"
Fractal lights tangled the figure's outstretched arms. More arcane words, reverberating across ethereal surfaces. More flashing Abstractions, cracking and hissing across the glowing shells that shielded the Wizard. Fire consumed the thronging scrub and trees. Fire garnished the truncated walls. About them, the famed courtyards of the Holy Library had become burning pits.
"Only then does the Darkness sing untrammelled!" Cleric cried. "Only then!"
"And yet you seek memories!" the Wizard cried, at last delivered to tears.
"To be! Being is not a choice!"
"But you claim Being is deception!"
"Yes!"
"But that is nonsense! Madness!"
Again the Nonman King laughed.
"That is Becoming."
– | The forests are burning.
Pokwas jerks around so quickly that the pommel is torn from her hands. You! his glaring eyes shout. Blood spills from his strange smile.
"The Slog of Slogs!" the mad Sergeant howls in their periphery. "I told you, boys! I told you we would stack them!"
She retreats before the Sword-dancer's groping lurch. He skids to his knees, sways over sheeted leaves. His eyes find Galian, then Xonghis. He looks to her with childlike curiosity. Blood bubbles to his lips.
"I em-embrace…" he gasps. "I-I…"
He slumps to his side, flops across the ground.
She steps around him, stumbles to stand over the thing called Koll.
"Why?" she cries, and a cold part of her is surprised by the salt and heat of her tears. "Why would you save me? Sacrifice yourself! I am the daughter of your enemy! Your enemy!"
"Kill… me…" it coughs.
"Tell me! Soma!"
"Mim… Mim…"
"Who? Who is your handler?"
Something hooks her stomach. The madness of what just happened, the debasement, the transcendence, has blinded her to the obscenity. This thing before her has been cut from the meat of the World. Were it sorcerous, it would have possessed the numb glaze of unreality. It is raw and abhorrent instead. Suddenly she cannot look away from the mastications of its mouth, the way the lipless gums climb unbroken to the lidless eyes, to the air-clawing digits, which are furred and skinned and ridged with apparently random fragments of face.
Revulsion does not so much course as slam through her.
"I beg…" it gasps. "Beg you…"
Bile rises to the back of her throat. She draws away from the thing, lurches backward, falls to her rump, catches herself on a single thrown arm…
Smoke twines through the air between them, a translucent veil. Through it, she watches spasms rock the skin-spy.
Sarl rushes from nowhere, bent and bandied. He lands on the creature, drives his sword square through its chest. The thing clutches at him, but the mad Sergeant wrenches his blade with vicious strength, back and forth, as if testing a hated wagon's brake.
"Yeeesss!" he screams up to the broken canopy. "Yeeessss!"
The mad Sergeant turns to her with canines bared. His eyes are crimson slits. Blood sops his beard.
"A real chopper!"
The thrashing weakens beneath him. The facial digits fall slack at the same instant. Sarl lowers his cheek against the fist he holds atop his pommel. Gasping, he wipes a filthy cuff across his face, manages only to smear the blood. He releases his sword, then with a chuckle like a dog's growl, he draws his knife. He crawls over the creature, sways above it with a knee on either of its shoulders.
She watches dumbstruck.
"Spider-face," he grunts, hacking and sawing with his knife. A manic grin squeezes his eyes into two more creases. "A thousand gold Kellics at least!"
Madness, is all she can think.
She runs, heedless of her bearings or her nakedness.
Away. She must get away from all the madness.
The whole World burns.
– | And so they battled, the Gnostic Wizard uttering no Cants, the Quyan Mage speaking no Wards. Broken walls encircled them, surrounded in turn by the oily tumble of smoke and trees wrapped in shining flame.
Hanging high before the Turret, the inhuman Mage blazed with arcane meaning, unleashed a logic raised to killing light.
His feet braced against the earth, the human Wizard sang his unholy counterargument, wrapping himself in glowing spheres, long-winded pyramidal forms, planes arrayed to deflect dread energies outward.
The First Quyan Fold. The Ribs of Gotagga.
Burning cables. Sparks so brilliant they blinded. Concussions so immense they blew sheets of debris from the crests of the surrounding walls. Blisters of warding light cracked, slumped before sheering into nothingness.
And the dread voices droned on, unravelling into echoes too cavernous to be called sound, ringing from Heaven's vault as if it loomed as low as a cellar ceiling.
Achamian shouted between gasps of fiery air. He raised Ward after Ward, only to see them smashed, swept away.
The Third Concentric. The ever-risky Cross of Arches.
But the Quya Master was like a sun above him, glaring with destruction, cracking his defences with wicked and relentless incandescence. Beating. Hammering. Scissoring. A rain of cataclysms. Until Achamian was breathless and stammering, able to cough out only the lowest and quickest Wards.
For the briefest of instants, the underworld angel above him paused.
"Madness!" the Wizard cried out in sobbing frustration. "This is not you!"
Fire crackled and hissed, filling the heartbeat of silence between them.
"Can't you see!" the Nonman King cried. "Your appeals only incite me! You will die and I will remember! Because all you do is reach for the love I bear you!"
"No! I will not strike you!"
The face of Nil'giccas resolved from the dwindling glare. The setting sun rimmed his scalp with sickles of gold. "I remember… I remember your name…"
Light filled his howling mouth-blasphemous meaning…
At long last the Wizard struck.
An Odaini Concussion Cant. Simple and low, meant only to stun-to knock back into reason perhaps. But Nil'giccas had floated above sharp ruin…
He plummeted from on high, broke about a low spine of stone. The ground fires caught and consumed him.
The old Wizard puffed out the flames with a sorcerous cry. He hobbled around blocks and between flanged foundations, swallowing at the sobs that wracked him. Streamers of smoke twisted and dissolved about his passage.
He found the Nonman King prostrate across a shoulder-high segment of wall, bent as though he had half fallen from bed. Black scored his milk-white skin. Blisters puckered his cheek and scalp. Blood sopped the heron and lion links of his nimil harness. He seemed that much more broken, given the perfection of his form.
"What just happened?" Nil'giccas gasped, hacking gouts of blood with the words. His lips worked about the glistening arc of his fused teeth. "Wh-what just…"
"You found glory," the old Wizard croaked. He coughed as if at some fact too acrid to be breathed. He reached out to clutch the Nonman's cheek, saw Death swirl up in the eyes of his ancient friend. He watched the spark of sight dull into sightlessness. Cleric's body heaved, then settled, as if finally coming to peace with its own anguished corporeality.
Blood pooled in the mortises.
Burned, battered, the old Wizard looked about, from the wreckage of the Library out to the blazing forests of Sauglish. This was how it would end, he realized… The was how all of it would end.
Heartbreak and fire.
– | She runs.
Twigs and branches pinch and cut her feet, but it seems proper that she should suffer. The breeze brushes like silk across her body, but it seems proper that she should find succour for her grievances. Leaves lash her arms and outer thighs.
Horror animates her. Horror that runs with her legs. Horror that tingles throughout her body, heat rimmed with cold, as if she bleeds from a thousand internal wounds.
She clutches her belly. She assumed she would feel it hang from her as she ran, the life she carried. But it is at one with her, the centring counterweight, the ligament that binds her to future and fate.
She climbs a low rise, a place away from the eye-stabbing smoke. She turns, glimpses the flicker of sorcery. She climbs higher, searching for a break in the canopy. She sees it once again, luminescent white lines twisting like language from the Library. She sees a form hanging, a dark figure silvered about the waist and shoulders, suspended over the walled depths adjacent to a destroyed citadel-what looks like a broken amphorae jutting from the ground.
Cleric, she thinks. Ishroi…
She turns, and begins walking back the way she came.
– | The Skin Eaters lay strewn like castaway clothes. The Wizard stumbled to his knees at the sight of the carnage.
"Where is she?" he cried at the last man living-Sarl, looking like something out of a child's nightmare.
"The Coffers!" the mad scalper croaked. He raised his hands in crazed gesticulation. Something bloody flapped in the right. "Make ready, boys! Plunder them like a whore! Shake them like your purple pommel!"
"What happened here?" Achamian cried. He looked from dead man to dead man. Galian. Pokwas. Xonghis.
The Captain…
The very World pitched beneath his feet.
Suddenly the thing swinging in Sarl's hand became clear, the digits knuckled with fragments of expression…
A skin-spy's face.
"Speak up, fool! What happened? "
"Ahhh," Sarl crooned to him. "The World will be our wicked little peach! We'll be princes! Princes! "
The old Wizard seized him about the shoulders. "Where's Mimara… Where's my daughter?"
The madman nodded and gazed the way he had that second night in the Cocked Leg's common room, after smashing his wine bowl. A knowing gaze, the Wizard suddenly realized, one brimming with the intuition of the insane…
That Fate is madder still.
Achamian turned to the demand of some instinct, peered… glimpsed something slight passing through screens of smoke. He fairly doubled over for relief when she stepped naked from a fire-curtained world.
She ran to him, clutched his shoulders as he grinned and keened.
"You live!" he cried like a fool.
"As do you."
"You're naked!"
Her look of reproach made him want to cry out for joy.
"And they're dead," she said. " All of them," she added, with a glance at Sarl. "Come… We must flee this fire."
They moved with the quickness of looters racing dawn. She retrieved Squirrel, then paused at Xonghis to relieve him of the stolen Chorae, the one loose, the other affixed to a fletched shaft. Achamian gathered her clothing, threw a rotted cloak about her shoulders. Then together they stumbled and ran through the smoking galleries.
The mad Sergeant stayed, cradling the Captain's hoary head, rocking on his rump with laughter and congratulating his dead fellows.
"Kiampas! Eh? Kiampas! "
– | Night swallows the earth. Only the light of stubborn fires twinkles through the courtyards of the ruined Library.
Sitting on scorched earth, knee pressed against knee, they take Cleric's pouch and slowly press the inside out. They wet their fingers, run them along the residue. The black gathers into a thin crescent against the pad of their fingers. Out of some communal understanding, they reach across the meagre space between them, place their fingers upon the other's tongue.
Relief crashes through them as a tingling wave, leaving dizziness and nausea in its wake.
Qirri. Blessed Qirri.
They build a bier of charred wood and scrub, pile it as high as their shoulders. The corpse of the Nonman King they place upon it. They set it alight, watch the flame climb in shingles, until the illustrious form is engulfed in rushing fire. Then they climb into the starlit ruin of the Turret and descend into the absolute blackness of the Coffers. Achamian utters a Bar of Heaven, and the door of creation cracks open, revealing subterranean wrack and ruin.
"Should have used this earlier," he mutters as the light fades from his eyes and mouth.
Mimara looks to him, clutching her shoulders against memories of Cil-Aujas.
"I could have saved more of my beard!" he explains with a rueful smile.
They labour by sorcerous light, wracked by a thirst and a hunger they do not feel. Deep into the night.
They find a shirt of ensorcelled mail, golden, as light as silk and as hard as nimil. Sheara, the Wizard calls it, "Sun-skin," a far antique gift from the School of Mihtrul. Mimara sheds her rags and dons it against her naked skin. Cinched about the waist it falls to her thighs, humming with a warmth all its own. She stows her Chorae in her boot to avoid killing the ancient magic. They find a bronze knife engraved with runes that glower in certain angles of light. This too Mimara takes, as a complement to poor Squirrel.
At last they find it, the golden map-case from Achamian's Dreams.
"It's broken," he murmurs with something resembling horror.
She watches the Wizard pry apart the tubing, then gingerly draw out the vellum sheet curled within.
They emerge from the Turret looking like wraiths for the dust and filth that powders them. Dawn has broken. The walls loom dark and chill against the gold of the eastern sky. Tailings of smoke rise from random clutches of ash and charcoal. Silence rings through the waking chorus of birdsong.
The bier has burned down to a smoking heap. All that remains of Nil'giccas is his nimil hauberk, which lies unscathed save for black scorching. With wary fingers, the Wizard pulls it open, revealing the chalk of a different ash. Mimara gathers it along the edge of her new knife, spoons it with breathless care into the Nonman King's rune-stamped pouch…
"Look," the Wizard says in a cracked voice.
She turns, sees a figure watching them from a cleft in the great outer wall. Sarl, she realizes after a heartbeat of ocular confusion, for hanging below the Sergeant's scrambled grin another face smiles. The Captain, she realizes with more numbness than horror. Sarl has braided the severed head's hair into his beard, so that the face swings about his groin, lips tented about an arrow shaft. A maniacal grimace.
"Sometimes the dead bounce!" she remembers the mad Sergeant crying on the ashen plains. "Sometimes old men awaken behind the eyes of babes! Sometimes wolves…"
Sarl. The last surviving Skin Eater.
She finishes gathering the ash, and the Wizard pulls the nimil shirt from the heap. It smokes as he shakes it. He drapes it over the singed pelts that clad him. Too large, and without hooks or clasps, it hangs as a kind of cloak from his shoulders, black belied by a low, silvery glimmer.
Still propped between stone jaws, Sarl watches them from a distance. Sunlight warms the world beyond him.
Once again they sit knee to knee, as father and daughter. Once again they taste the other's finger. But this time the ash is more white than black, and the strength that shivers through them has a more melancholy tenor. The Captain and the mad Sergeant are still watching them when they turn.
Mimara gazes at him, thinking she should at least call out. But even from a distance she can see the blood painting the creases of his face. And the Captain's mood looks exceedingly foul.
"A real chopper!"
By some miracle an oak leaf falls before her, swinging to and fro through the air. She picks it out of emptiness. Purple lines vein the lobes of waxy green. Yielding to an unaccountable impulse, she takes Cleric's pouch and taps a small pile of ash into the bowl of the leaf, which she then folds around it. Gazing at Sarl, she sets the small packet upon a low marble stump jutting from the earth before her-an armless shoulder.
"What are you doing?" Achamian asks.
"I don't know."
The scalper watches them, as taut and intent as any other starving animal. They hear a low-clucking gurgle…
Then horns, Sranc horns, pitch doom across the horizon. Mimara clutches her belly through her armour.
"Come," she says to the old Wizard. "I tire of Sauglish."