They had climbed out of the shallow marsh and now crested a low knoll. Zsoronga nodded past Sorweel’s shoulder, to where, in the congestion of the near distance, the young King could see Eskeles’s absurd form fairly bowing the back of his huffing donkey. More lessons …
“The Wizard does not say,” the Successor-Prince continued when he glanced back. “But I fear that you and I shall know before this madness is done with.”
That night he dreamed of Kings arguing across an ancient floor.
“There is the surrender that leads to slavery,” the Exalt-General said. “And there is the surrender that sets one free. Soon, very soon, your people shall know that difference.”
“So says the slave!” Harweel cried, standing in a flower of outwardhooking flames.
How bright his father burned. Lines of fire skittering up the veins wrapping his arms. His hair and beard a smoking blaze. His skin blistering like pitch, shining raw, trailing lines of fiery grease …
How beautiful was his damnation.
At first he battled the slave, crying out. Porsparian was little more than hands in the darkness, fending, pressing, and then as Sorweel eventually calmed, soothing.
“Ek birim sefnarati,” the old slave murmured, though it sounded more like a mutter in his broken wood-pipe voice. “Ek birim sefnarati …Shhh … Shhh …” Over and over, little more than a shadow kneeling at the side of Sorweel’s cot.
Illumination slowly tinted the greater dark beyond the canvas planes of his tent, a slow inhalation of light.
“I saw my father burn,” he croaked to the uncomprehending slave.
For some reason, he did not begrudge the gnarled hand that rested on his shoulder. And it seemed a miracle the way the slave’s cracked-leather features gained reality in the fading gloom. Sorweel’s own grandfather had died on the Pale when he was very young, so he had never known the indulgent warmth of a father’s father’s adoration. He had never learned the way the years opened the hearts of the old to the miraculousness of the young. But he thought he could see it in Porsparian’s strange yellow-smiling eyes, in the rattle of his voice, and he found himself trusting it completely.
“Does that mean he’s damned?” he asked thickly. A grandfather, it seemed, would know. “Dreams of burning?”
The shadow of a stern memory crossed the old Shigeki’s face, and he pressed himself to his feet. Sorweel sat up in his cot, absently scratched his scalp while watching his slave’s shadowy labour. Porsparian stooped to pull the mat from the turf floor, then knelt in the manner of an old woman worshiping. As Sorweel had seen him do so many times, he plucked away the turf, then pressed the form of a face into the soil—a face that seemed unmistakably feminine despite the gloom.
Yatwer.
The slave brought dirt to his eyes, then began slowly rocking to a muttered prayer. Back and forth, without any discernible rhythm, like a man struggling against the ropes that bound him. On and on he muttered, while the dawning light pulled more and more details from obscurity: the crude black stitching of his tunic’s hem, the tufts of wiry white hair that climbed his forearms, the cross-hatching of kicked and pressed grasses. A kind of violence crept into his movements, enough to draw Sorweel anxiously forward. The Shigeki jerked from side to side, as though yanked by some interior chain. The intervals between the spasms shrank, until it seemed he flinched from a cloud of bee stings. A series of convulsions …
Sorweel leapt to his feet, stepped forward, hands held out. “Porsparian!” he cried.
But something, some rule of religious witness perhaps, held him back. He remembered the incident with the tear, when Porsparian had burned his palm, and a hollowing anxiousness seized him. He felt like a thing of paper, creased and rolled and folded into the shape of a man. Any gust, it seemed, could make a kite of him, toss him to the arches of heaven. What new madness was this?
His soiled fingers still to his eyes, the old man writhed and bucked as though kicked and beaten from within. Breath whistled from flaring nostrils. His voice had sputtered into a ragged gurgle …
Then, like grass springing back to form in the wake of boots, he was upright and still. Porsparian drew aside his hands, looked to the earth with eyes like red gelatin …
Gazed at the earthen face.
Sorweel caught his breath, blinked as though to squint away the madness. Not only had the slave’s eyes gone red (a trick, some kind of trick!), somehow the mouth pressed into the soil face had opened.
Opened?
Forming a plate with his palms, Porsparian lowered his fingers to the lower lip, received the waters pooling there. Old and bent and smiling, he then turned to his master and stood. His eyes had returned to normal, though the knowingness they possessed seemed anything but. He stepped forward, reached out. Muck trailed like blood from the pads of his fingers. Sorweel shrank backward, nearly toppled over his cot.
Standing across the morning-glowing canvas, Porsparian actually seemed a creature made of shadowy earth, like something moulded from the mud of an ancient river watching with the forever look of yellow eyes. “Spit,” the old slave said, stunning him with the clarity of his Sakarpic pronunciation. “To keep … face … clean.”
For several heartbeats Sorweel simply stared, dumbfounded. Where? Where had the water come from?
What kind of Three Seas trickery …
“You hide,” the old slave gasped. “Hide in gaze!”
But a kernel of understanding anchored his panic, and something within him wept, shouted in anguish and relief. The Old Gods had not forgotten! Sorweel closed his eyes, knowing that this was all the permission required. He felt the fingers smear his cheek, press in the firm manner of old men who do all things at the limit of their strength, not for anger, but to overmatch the thoughtless vitality of the young. He felt her spit at once soil and cleanse.
A mother wiping the face of her beloved son.
Look at you …
Somewhere on the plain, the priests sounded the Interval: a single note tolling pure and deep over landscapes of tented confusion. The sun was rising.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
Cil-Aujas
The world is only as deep as we can see. This is why fools think themselves profound. This is why terror is the passion of revelation.
—AJENCIS, THE THIRD ANALYTIC OF MEN
Spring, 20 New Imperial Year (4132 Year-of-the-Tusk), south of Mount Aenaratiol
Age. Age and darkness.
For the peoples of the Three Seas, The Chronicle of the Tusk was the ultimate measure of the ages. Nothing was more ancient. Nothing could be. Yet the Skin Eaters found themselves walking halls older than even the language of the Tusk, let alone the ivory into which it had been cut. No one had to tell them this, though they sometimes glanced at Achamian as if pleading to be told otherwise. They could see it scrawling through the light about them. They could smell it hanging in the dust. They could feel it creeping through meek bones and chastened hearts.
Here was a glory that no human, tribe or nation, could hope to match, and their hearts balked at the admission. Achamian saw it floating in their faces: lips drawn into lines, teeth set in slack jaws, eyes roaming without focus, the vacant look of blowhards confronting their folly. Even these men, so quick to celebrate sin and debauchery, had thought the blood of Gods coursed through their veins.
Cil-Aujas, for all its silence, boomed otherwise.
What Achamian had thought a vast entrance gallery turned out to be a subterranean road. The line of walkers quickly coalesced into two bands, one following Cleric and his hanging point of sorcerous light in the lead, the other crowding Achamian and his Surrillic Cant of Illumination. For a time they seemed to shuffle more than stride, a gawking band staring up and around, painfully aware of their trespass. Everyone cringed at the sound of voices. Fragments of what might have been bone gravelled their steps. Dust fogged their ankles.
Images. Images planked every surface, virginal as exhumed graves, soaked in the gloom of unwitnessed age
s. The style mirrored that of the Obsidian Gate: the walls banded with layered pictorial reliefs, the outer set like impossibly elaborate grillwork over the inner, vaulting some forty feet. The sedimentary grain, whorls of charcoal black veined with grey, made it obvious that it had been hewn from living rock. Whole sections shone like brown and black glass. Pinned between their passing points of light, the walls literally seethed with counterfeit motion.
It was the absence of weathering that distinguished the hall from the Gate. The detail baffled the eye, from the mail of the Nonmen warriors to the hair of the human slaves. Scars striping knuckles. Tears lining supplicants’ cheeks. Everything had been rendered with maniacal intricacy. The effect was too lifelike, Achamian decided, the concentration too obsessive. The scenes did not so much celebrate or portray, it seemed, as reveal, to the point where it hurt to watch the passing sweep of images, parade stacked upon parade, entire hosts carved man for man, victim for victim, warring without breath or clamour.
Pir-Pahal, Achamian realized. The entire hall was dedicated to it, a great and ancient battle fought between the Nonmen and the Inchoroi. He could even recognize the principals: the traitor, Nin’janjin, and his sovereign, Cu’jara Cinmoi, the Nonman Emperor. The mighty hero, Gin’gûrima, with arms like a man’s thighs. And the Inchoroi King, Sil, armoured in corpses, flanked by his inhuman kinsmen, winged monstrosities with wicked limbs, pendulous phalli, and skulls grafted into skulls.
Achamian nearly stumbled when he saw the Heron Spear raised high in Sil’s articulated arms.
“Those things …” Mimara whispered from his side.
“Inchoroi,” Achamian muttered. With a kind of wonder, he thought of Kellhus and his Great Ordeal, of their mad march across the wasted North to Golgotterath. The war depicted on these walls, he realized, had never ended, not truly.
Ten thousand years of woe.
“These are their memories,” Achamian found himself saying aloud. “The Nonmen cut their past into the walls … as a way to make it as immortal as their bodies.”
The faces of several scalpers turned toward him, some in expectation, others in annoyance. Speaking seemed a kind of sacrilege, like ill-willed gossip in the light of a funeral pyre.
On and on they walked, deeper into the bowels of the mountain. Miles passed without a terminus or a fork, just warring walls, stamped as deep as outstretched arms. The way before them resolved out of obscurity. Behind, the light of the entrance dwindled into a star, solitary in a field of absolute black.
Then with horrifying suddenness, a second gate welled out of the darkness. Several gasps echoed through the stale air. The company stumbled to a halt.
Two wolves towered before them, standing like men to either side of an unbarred portal, eyes bulging, tongues lolling. The contrast was dramatic. Gone was the intricacy of the underworld road, replaced by a more ancient, more totemic sensibility. Each wolf was three wolves, or the same wolf at three different times, the graven heads warped into three distinct postures, their stylized expressions ranging from sorrow to savagery, as if the ancient artisans had rendered an entire animal existence in a single moment of stone. Writing ringed the casings of each, densely packed in vertical columns, pictograms like numeric slashes, at once elegant and primitive. Auja-Gilcûnni, Achamian realized, the so-called First Tongue, so old that even the Nonmen had forgotten how to read or speak it—which meant this gate had to be as ancient to Nonmen as the Tusk was to Men. Everything about it spoke of rude souls awakening to the subtleties of artistic wonder …
But the fascination wilted as quickly as it had sparked. Achamian found himself swaying on his feet, light-headed, as if he had leapt too quickly from a slumber. Mimara also stumbled, brought both hands to her forehead, held them like a tent over her brows. Several mules spooked, stamped and jerked against their ropes. There was more than the ache of ages in the air. There was … something else, a lack of some kind, running perpendicular to the geometry of the real, bowing its lines with its cavernous suck. Something that whispered from the blackness between the graven beasts.
Something abyssal.
The gate swam in the Wizard’s eyes, not so much a portal as a hole.
Without warning, Cleric’s light waxed, bleached the heights of stone. Shadows crawled from the great wolf snouts hanging above. The Nonman turned before the entrance, blasted by illumination. Several raised their hands against the glare.
His voice seemed to boom into the surrounding darkness.
“Kneel …”
The Skin Eaters stared at him dumbstruck, watched as he slumped to his knees. For a heartbeat his eyes glared without focus, then he looked to the Men standing about him, his expression slowly tightening. Pained lines climbed his scalp.
“Kneel!” he shrieked.
Sarl cackled, though the smile that broke his barbed goatee seemed far from amused. “Cleric. Come now …”
“This was the war that broke our back!” the Nonman thundered. “This … This! All the Last Born, sires and sons, gathered beneath the copper banners of Siol and her flint-hearted King. Silverteeth! Our Tyrant-Saviour …” He rolled his head back and laughed. Two lines of white marked the tears that scored his cheeks. “This is our …” The flash of fused teeth. “Our triumph.”
He shrunk, seemed to huddle into his cupped palms. Great silent sobs wracked him.
Looks were exchanged, short-lived with embarrassment. There was something eerie about the light, apart from the way it hung sourceless above them, something that rendered each of them in a distinct cast of brilliance. Perhaps it was the black walls, or the curls of white refracted across the polish of innumerable figures, but none of the shadows seemed to match up. It was as if everyone stood in the unique light of some different morning, noon, or twilight. Perhaps it was his race, or maybe it was his pose, but only Cleric seemed to belong.
Lord Kosoter crouched at his side, placed a hand on his broad back, began muttering something inaudible. Kiampas stared at the floor. Sarl looked about, eyes darting, apparently more unnerved by this act of intimacy than by the substance of Cleric’s words.
“Yessss!” the Nonman hissed, as though grasping something essential and overlooked.
“This is just a fucking place,” Sarl growled. “Just another fucking place …”
All of them could feel it, Achamian realized, looking from face to stricken face. Some kind of dolour, like the smoke of some hidden, panicked fire, pinching them, drawing their thoughts tight … But there was no glamour he could sense. Even the finest sorceries carried some residue of their artifice, the stain of the Mark. But there was nothing here, save the odour of ancient magicks, long dead.
Then, with a bolt of horror, he understood: The tragedy that had ruined these halls stalked them still. Cil-Aujas was a topos. A place where hell leaned heavy against the world.
He turned to Mimara, surprised to find himself gripping her hand. “Haunted,” he murmured in reply to her wondering eyes. “This place—”
“Listen,” Kiampas called, apparently in the grip of some abrupt resolution. “Stow your tongues—all of you! You saw the marks at the gate, all the companies that have vanished into this place. Granted, they didn’t have Cleric, they didn’t have a guide, but the fact remains they vanished. Maybe they lost their way, or maybe the skinnies got them. Either way, this is a slog, boys, as deadly as any other. From here on in, we march at the ready, you understand?”
“He’s right,” Xonghis called from the gloom to their rear. He was crouched near the wall, his Jekki pack high on his shoulders, his mailed forearms pressed against his knees. He reached to the ground before him, raised a long bone from the dust, something that could have belonged to a dog. “Dead skinny,” he said. He held it to the light, then peered through it like a tube: The knobs at either end had been snapped off. He turned to the rest of the company, shrugged. “Something was hungry.”
The scalpers looked around, cursed at the sight of bones scattered everywhere, like the remains of some f
orgotten flood, sticks beneath silt. Lord Kosoter continued to mutter in Cleric’s ear, a grinding discourse, full of hate. The words “miserable wretch” climbed into clarity. Achamian found himself staring into the black portal between the towering wolves, expecting, any moment now, something …
When he blinked, he saw yammering figures from his Dreams.
“Sranc?” one of the Galeoth scalpers cried—Hoat. “What eats Sranc?” He had to be the youngest of the Skin Eaters, his body still hooked by an adolescent ranginess.
Every one of them, Achamian realized, every company that had dared these halls. All of them had paused before this broken gate and suffered the very same premonition. And still they marched onward, carrying their war, whatever it was, deeper, deeper …
Never to be seen again.
“Where are the doors?” Galian blurted. He looked around in the quarrelsome manner that some use to conceal their fright. “What does it mean? Gates without doors?”
But questions always came too late. Events had to be pushed passed the point of denial; only then could the pain of asking begin.
They spent their first night in the grand chamber beyond the Wolf Gate. Achamian hung his sorcerous light high in the air, an abstract point of brilliance that illuminated the ceiling and the finned capitals of the pillars ascending about them. The light seemed to creep down, dim enough to be shut out by closed eyes, expansive enough to provide the illusion of security. Alien images glared from on high, their recesses inked in utter black.
True to his word, Kiampas organized shifts and posted sentries along their perimeter of light. Cleric sat alone on the dust and stone, gazing into the passageway they would take upon waking. Lord Kosoter stretched across his mat and seemed to fall instantly asleep, even though Sarl sat cross-legged at his side, muttering inanity after inanity, pausing only to cackle at the turns of his own wit. The rest of the company formed sullen clots across the floor, tossing on their mats or sitting and talking in low tones. Their crowd of mules stood in the nearby shadows, looking absurd against the surrounding grandeur.