The company gathered on the platform beneath it, loose clots of men drifting to a halt, mouths open. The Skin Eaters had expected many things, daydreams of a storied destination, but they were quite unprepared for what they beheld. Achamian could see it in the way they craned and peered, like emissaries of a backward yet imperious people trying to see past their awe. The entrance was unbarred, an ovoid of impenetrable black set in an immense arched recess, which was panelled with reliefs that formed a skein over yet deeper narratives, so that the scenes depicted possessed a startling depth. Nonmen figures twined across every surface, weathered to the point where you could scarcely distinguish the armoured from the naked, frozen in antique postures of triumph or ceremonial tedium. Shepherds with lambs about their shoulders. Warriors fending lions and jackals. Captives baring necks to the swords of princes. On and on, the lives of the dead in miniature. Four pillars flanked the threshold, the outermost pair soaring tall as netia pine, yet hollow, great cylinders of interlocking figures and faces; the innermost solid, three snakes intercoiling, their heads lost in the vaulted gloom, their rattled tails forming three-pronged bases.
Curses filled the silence, some murmured, others spoken quite out loud. Such was the monumental delicacy, the profusion of figure and detail, that the forms seemed more revealed than rendered, as though the sheeted cliffs were naught but mud rinsed from the stone of ossified souls. Even half-ruined, there was too much, too much beauty, too much detail, and certainly too much toil, a grandeur made wicked by the demands it exacted on simpler souls. It was a place that begged to be challenged, overthrown.
For the first time, Achamian thought he understood the crude bronze of Nostol’s betrayal.
“What are we doing?” Mimara whispered from his side.
“Recalling ourselves … I think.”
“Look,” Xonghis said in his deadpan accent. “The other companies …” He nodded to the left serpentine pillar: Various symbols had been scratched into the lower coils, childish white slashes across weathered scales. “Their signs.”
The Skin Eaters gathered round, careful to heed the invisible line that marked the entrance side of the pillar. Xonghis knelt between two of the rattle tails, which rose like roots, each thicker than a man. He ran his outstretched fingers and palm over each mark, as though testing extinguished fires for heat. Different Skin Eaters called out the names of the companies they recognized as he did so. He lingered over the sign of a weeping eye. “This one,” he said, looking back significantly, “was marked the most recently.”
“The Bloody Picks,” Galian said, frowning. “They left, when?”
“More than a fortnight ago,” Pokwas replied.
The following silence persisted longer than it should. There was heartbreak in these furtive marks, a childishness that made the ancient works rising about them seem iron heavy, nigh invincible. Scratches. Caricatures with buffoonish themes. They were so obviously the residue of a lesser race, one whose triumph lay not in the nobility of arms and intellect, but in treachery and the perversities of fortune.
“See,” Achamian heard Kiampas mutter to Sarl. “There …” He followed the direction of the man’s finger, saw what looked like a Galeoth kite-shield chalked long and skinny across the lower coils of the serpents.
“The High Shields, as I said.”
“It can’t be their sign,” Sarl snapped, as though assertion alone could make things true. “Their bones lie on the Long Side.” Even as he said this he stooped to fetch a stone from his feet. Everyone watched as he began scratching the mark of the Skin Eaters across one of the serpent’s backs: a mandible with gumless teeth.
“What I would like to know,” Sarl said, the gravel of his tone rendered thin and abrasive by the soaring works of glass and stone, “is how we could have gone so long without coming here.”
His meaning was plain. The Skin Eaters were a legend, as was this place, and all legends were drawn together sooner or later—such was the song that decided all things. Such was the logic.
His face pinched into a cackle. “This is the slog of slogs, boys!”
Cleric, meanwhile, had wandered forward, effortlessly crossing the incorporeal boundary that seemed to hold everyone else back, turning in a slow circle as he did so.
“Where are you?” he bellowed—so violently even the hardest of the Skin Eaters started. “The Gate unguarded? And with the world grown so dark? This is an outrage! Outrage!”
Despite his stature, he seemed a mere sliver, frail and warm-blooded, before the great maw of black about him. Only the depth of his sorcerous Mark bespoke his might.
“Cûncari!” he boomed, growing frantic. “Jiss! Cûncari!”
The Captain strode to him, clapped a hand on his shoulder.
“They’re dead, you fool. Ancient dead.”
The cowled darkness that was his face turned to the Captain, held him in eyeless scrutiny, then lifted skyward, as though studying the lay of illumination across the hanging slopes. As the gathered company watched, he raised two hands and drew back, for the first time, his leather hood. The gesture seemed obscene, venal, a flouting of some aboriginal modesty.
He turned to regard his fellow scalpers, smiling as if taking heart in their astonishment. His fused teeth gleamed with spit. His skin was white and utterly hairless, so much so that he looked fungal, like something pulled from forest compost. His features were youthful, drawn with the same fine lines and flawless proportions as all his race.
The face of a Sranc.
“Yes,” he said, closing lashless eyelids. His pupils seemed as big as coins when he opened them, black with hooks of reflected silver. “Yes,” he fairly cried, laughing now.
“They are dead.”
Night did not so much rise over the great fissure as the day was snatched away.
They had difficulty scrounging for fuel, so the entire company ended up crowding about a single fire, oppressed by the works hanging above them. Small desultory conversations marbled the silence, but no one took the stage and addressed the company as a whole, aside from Sarl of course, who had the habit of pitching his declarations in all directions. Most simply sat, knees hooked in the ring of their arms, and stared up at the thousand lozenge faces and figures above them, black-limned in flickering yellow-white. With the outer reliefs set like grillwork over the inner, the firelight seemed to animate the panels, to imbue them with the illusion of strain and motion. Several Skin Eaters swore that this or that scene had changed. Sarl, however, was always quick to make fools of them.
“See that one there, with the little one bending with the water urn before the row of tall ones? See it? Now, look away. Now look back. See? See! That big one popped his prick in the little one’s arse, I swear it!”
Laughter, honest, yet rationed all the same. Dread encircled them, and Sarl kept careful watch, making sure it did not take hold in his Captain’s men.
“Dirty Nonmen buggers, eh, Cleric? Cleric?”
The Nonman merely smiled, as pale as a ghoul in the firelight.
Time and again, Achamian found himself stealing glances in his direction. It was almost impossible not to ponder the connection of the two, the ruined Mansion, harrowed in the First Apocalypse, and the ruined Nonman, as old as languages and peoples. Cil-Aujas and Incariol.
Mimara leaned against him, and in some distracted corner of his soul he noted the difference, the way she leaned rather than clutched at his hand as her mother had. She was talking to Soma, who sat cross-legged next to her, staring at his palms like a shy poet. More out of the absence of alternatives than out of concern, Achamian listened, his gaze drifting from scene to engraved scene.
“You have the look and the manner of a Lady,” the Nilnameshi said.
“My mother was a whore.”
“Ah, but what is parentage, really? Me? I burned my ancestor lists long ago.”
A mock disapproving pause. “Doesn’t that frighten you?”
“Frighten?”
“Look around you. I
would hazard that all these men, even the most vicious, bear some record of their forebears.”
“And why should that frighten me?”
“Because,” Mimara said, “it means they’re bound to the unbroken line of their fathers, back into the mists of yore. It means when they die, entire hosts will cast nets for their souls.” Achamian felt her shoulders hitch in a pity-for-the-doomed shrug. “But you … you merely wander between oblivions, from the nothingness of your birth to the nothingness of your death.”
“Between oblivions?”
“Like flotsam.”
“Like flotsam?”
“Yes. Doesn’t that frighten you?”
Achamian found himself scowling at the shadowy pageants chiselled above. An improbable number of faces stared out and down from the graven dramas, their eyes gouged into blank pits, their noses worn to points over mouthless chins. The priest to the right of the butchered stag. The child at the knee of the nursing mother. The warrior with the broken shield. Among the thousands of figures that vaulted the blackness above their fire, hundreds watched those who would watch them, as though the moments that framed them could not isolate their attention.
Proof of souls.
Skin prickling, Achamian glanced back toward Cleric, who stared as before into the pit of the entrance. Several heartbeats passed before the immaculate face turned—inevitably, it seemed—to answer his scrutiny. A kind of blank intensity leapt between them, born more of exhaustion than affinity, flattening the dozen or so Skin Eaters who leaned in and out of their line of sight.
They watched each other, Wizard and Nonman, for one heartbeat, two, three … Then, without rancour or acknowledgment, they looked away.
“I suppose it does,” Achamian heard Soma admit after a long silence. The man invariably erred, Achamian had noticed, when it came to honesty. He was always revealing too much.
“Frighten you?” Mimara replied. “Of course it does.”
Soon the talk sputtered out altogether, and the scalpers unrolled their mats and bedding across the pitted stone of the platform. Men kicked stones clicking into the night. The moon hung over the fissure for a time, disclosing the scarps and ravines in a curious light, one that argued stillness, uncompromising, absolute, like mice in the panning eyes of owls.
Few slept well. The black mouth of the Obsidian Gate seemed to inhale endlessly.
The ruins revealed in the morning light were more melancholy than malevolent. Hands eroded into paws. Heads worn into eggs. The layered panels appeared more riddled with fractures, more pocked with gaps. For the first time, it seemed, they noticed the little appendages scattered like gravel across the platform. Nocturnal fears had become sunlit fragments.
Even still, the company ate in comparative silence, punctuated by the low comments and laughs typically reserved for recollections of hard drinking. Forced normalcy as a remedy for uncertain nerves. Their small fire burned through what little fuel remained before Achamian had a chance to boil water for his tea, forcing him to mutter a furtive Cant. This filled him with dread for some reason.
They paused to watch Xonghis confer in low tones with Lord Kosoter. Then they entered the Black Halls of Cil-Aujas with nary a commemorating word, let alone the fanfare Men typically attach to fatal endeavours. They simply assembled, leading their mules, then followed Cleric and their Captain in a file some thirty-five souls long. With Mimara at his side, Achamian glanced skyward one final time before joining the string of vanishing figures. In the slot of a hanging ravine, the Nail of Heaven twinkled alone in the endless blue, a beacon of all things high and open …
A final call to those who would dare the nethers of the earth.
CHAPTER TWELVE
The Andiamine Heights
Little snake, what poison in your bite!
Little snake, what fear you should strike!
But they don’t know, little snake—oh no!
They can’t see the tiny places you go ...
—ZEÜMI NURSERY SONG
Early Spring, 19 New Imperial Year (4132 Year-of-the-Tusk), Momemn
Kelmomas had known his father had returned almost immediately. He saw it in a host of subtle cues that he didn’t even know he could read: an imperceptible contraction in the Guards’ posture, an alertness of pose and look in the Apparati, and a long-jog breathlessness in the slaves. Even the air assumed a careful taste, as though the drafts themselves had grown wary. Nevertheless, Kelmomas didn’t realize he knew until he overheard one of the choir slaves gossiping about the Yatwerian Matriarch pissing herself beneath the Holy Mantle.
He’s come to console Mother, the secret voice said.
Alone in the playroom, Kelmomas continued working on his model of Momemn, carving meticulous little obelisks out of balsa, long after darkness draped the Enclosure. A kind of childish indecision had overcome him, a listless need to continue poking at whatever he happened to be doing, to simply exist for a petulant time, thinking and acting stubbornly counter to fact.
It had always been like this with his father. Not fear, just a kind of canny reluctance, rootless and long-winded.
Eventually he had to relent—that too was part of the game—so he made his way to his mother’s private apartments. He could hear his older brother, Inrilatas, ranting about the Gods in his locked room. His brother had broken his voice bludgeoning the walls years ago, yet still he croaked, on and on and on, as though flooding his room in some lunatic search for leaks. He never stopped raving, which was why he was always kept locked in his room. Kelmomas had not seen him for more than three years.
His mother’s apartments were located down the hallway. He padded across the rug-strewn floor as silently as he could, his ears keen to the sound of his parents’ voices filtering through innumerable wheezing cracks and surfaces. He paused outside the iron door, his breath as thin as a cat’s.
“I know it pains you,” Father was saying, “but you must have Theliopa with you in all your dealings.”
“You fear skin-spies?” his mother replied.
Their voices possessed the weary burnish of a long and impassioned conversation. But the roots of his father’s exhaustion stopped short of the deeper intonations that warbled in and out of his discourse. A hearteasing hum, and a kind of ursine growl, far too low to be consciously heard by Mother. These spoke from something as unwinded as it was inscrutable, an occluded soul, entirely hidden from lesser ears.
He manages her, the voice said. He sees through her face the way you do, only with far more clarity, and he shapes his voice accordingly.
How do you know? Kelmomas asked angrily, stung by the thought that anyone, even Father, could see further than him. Further into her.
“The nearer the Great Ordeal comes,” Father said, “the more desperate the Consult grows, the more likely they will unleash what agents remain. Keep Theliopa with you at all times. Aside from my brother, she’s the only one who can reliably see their true faces.”
Kelmomas smiled at the thought of the skin-spies. Agents of the Apocalypse. He loved hearing the stories about their wicked depredations during the First Holy War. And he had gurgled with delight watching the black one being flayed—carefully, so that Mother wouldn’t see, of course. Somehow, he just knew he would be one of the few who could see past their faces, just as he could see past his father’s voice. If he found one, he decided, he would keep it secret, he would simply watch it, spy on it—he so dearly loved spying. What a game it would make!
He wondered who was faster …
“You fear they’ll attack the Andiamine Heights?” Real horror shivered through Mother’s voice as she said this, the horror of events scarcely survived.
All the more reason to trap it like a bug, Kelmomas decided. He would say things, cryptic things, that would make it wonder. He needed something to tease now that Samarmas was gone.
“What better way to distract me than by striking at my hearth?”
“But nothing distracts you,” Mother said, her tone so desolate t
hat only silence could follow. Kelmomas found himself leaning toward the door, such was the ache that emanated from the quiet beyond. It seemed he could hear them breathing, each following their own tangled string of thoughts. It seemed he could smell the absence of contact between them. Tears welled in his eyes.
She knows, the voice said. Someone has told her the truth about Father.
“When must you leave?” Mother asked.
“Tonight.”
Kelmomas made ready to push through the door … Mother was hurting! And it was Father—Father! How could he have missed this before?
He’ll see you, the voice warned.
Father?
None know how much he sees …
This puzzled the young Prince-Imperial. He stood motionless before the cast door, his hand arrested mid-air …
But she needs me—Mommy! Think of the warm cuddling, the tickles, the kisses on the cheek!
He’s the root, the voice replied, and you’re but the branch. Remember, the Strength burns brightest in him.
For reasons Kelmomas was entirely unable to fathom, that dropped his hand like lead.
The Strength.
He turned, ran like a loping athlete—one-two-three-leap!—down the halls past the bemused Pillarian Guards. As a Prince-Imperial, he had the run of the Andiamine Heights, though he was forbidden to leave its halls and gardens without the express permission of the Empress. So run he did, down the tapestried halls, through the slave barracks and into the kitchens. It was here that he palmed a silver skewer. A couple of the more matronly slaves stopped to ruffle his hair and pinch his cheeks. “Poor boy,” they said. “You loved your brother dearly, didn’t you?” He looked through their faces, made them blush with compliments. He worked his way to the Atrium, but the great doors to the Imperial Audience Hall had long been shut. No matter, the entrance to one of the second-floor galleries remained propped open. He decided to climb the twining stairs upside down, walking on his hands.