“Captain,” Achamian says, fingers locked so that he hangs from Mimara’s shoulder. He’s already pressing her backward with staggering steps. “Listen …”
The Holy Veteran turns his bearded profile to them, nothing more. “He has this!”
But Cleric has lowered his head. Lines of reflected white hook across the contours of his skull. Trailing tendrils of smoke-darkness, the Nonman King steps around him, strides with sandals that do not quite touch ground, then turns so that he stands above Cleric’s armoured back.
“Captain,” the Wizard cries. Now it is Mimara who is drawing him backward, toward the hymn of the dragon bones. Soma grabs the ailing Wizard’s other arm.
Where Cleric holds his head bowed, the spectre raises his dead face to the ceiling, as though seeing sky rather the crushing miles of earth. The mouth works in unheard benediction. The rigid arms lift and rotate forward. The elbows fold. The hands, with fingers and thumbs held tight as though in some ritual pose, close about Cleric’s shoulders. The scalpers watch their companion raised, a silvery figure framed by a corona of black …
Even the Captain is stumbling backward now.
Holding Pokwas between them, Xonghis and Galian retreat with Mimara and the Wizard. Sarl laughs like a child at a puppet show, his yellow teeth gleaming. Conger pulls him in jerking steps.
The Nonman King holds Cleric like a doll before him, like a cup he can spill. He steps forward—into …
A violent spasm, like drawing first breath. Limbs fling outward, snap rigid, like ropes weighted with lead. Cleric’s whole body arches backward, as if bound across the curves of drawn bows. And both Nonmen can be seen, as though each were solid and the other were glass, naked limbs within armour, nimil plates beneath a gown of chained gold. The Nonman King’s face pulls forward, twists in bewildered delirium. Wrath.
For an instant, the company glimpses a floating seal, a savage emblem of hell …
The Surillic Point flickers out.
“I dream,” Cleric’s voice booms through the wind howling black, “that I am a God.”
The Skin Eaters are shouting. Mimara hears herself sob.
Achamian mutters in arcane panic. The light shed from his eyes and mouth paints Soma’s blank face against the greater dark.
A new light. It flickers like a star for long hanging heartbeat, then flares with eye-averting brilliance. A new chamber. The tiered walls rise into shadow about them, the bronze-barred cages lined like pupae across them—as before. But each encases a mad thrashing, arms reaching, hands clutching, mouths shrieking, a thousand moments of anguish, a thousand souls, condensed into a mad, smoking blur. Eyes stacked upon eyes, drawn across eyes. The arcs of teeth, a shining multitude. Swatches of welted skin.
The Emwama scream, thousands upon thousands of them, forever buried, forever sealed from their native sun. An age of torment compressed into a single wail …
Mimara screams with them.
Cleric drifts toward the abject scalpers, floating in a vertical pool of black, like tar spilled across unseen waters, his face submerged, his limbs drowned, beneath the hoary aspect of the Nonman King.
But a hunger, a voice groans through the mountain’s foundations. A hunger runs through me … splits me like rotted stone.
Achamian is hollering so hard that spittle flecks his matted beard. Even though Mimara stands next to him, she can hear nothing save the million-throated wail.
Despite his weakened state, the Wizard is yanking her backward, away from the looming visage.
How, the voice creaks through the roots of the world, could a God hunger?
Plumes of molten stone erupt from the ground about them, spitting jets of orange, gold, and baleful crimson. One of the scalpers simply vanishes. A limb falls next to Mimara, an unblistered hand attached to a forearm burnt to a charcoal nub. Lord Kosoter, who had stood his ground before the hellish approach, at last turns to run.
The whole company, or what remains of it, is running.
Nonman laughter. She has heard it enough to recognize its peculiarities by now, the deep warbling at its pith, the way its intonations hook into cruelties beyond the range of human comprehension.
Nonman laughter, booming with the lungs of a mountain.
They run, through the bones of the dragon, into the concentrating wind, and it seems a miracle they can battle through it, that they aren’t blown skidding like rags into the horror rising behind them.
They scramble crawling into the opposite corridor, and the cold shoots through them, aches bones from end to end. They climb against the wind, whose howl they cannot hear.
The damned call out to them, wailing with the hunger that knots and strangles and sustains all misery …
Yearning to see itself visited upon others.
It has entered the corridor behind them. He has entered …
The Wight-in-the-Mountain. The Nonman King.
She is an earthen jug, and her innards slosh like curdled milk. A single crack and she will clatter open, spill across the floor. She is failing. She feels it in her flagging attempts to haul the Wizard with her. The others have climbed ahead, almost beyond the light of the Surillic Point.
Even Soma.
Her soul gropes for strength, a kind of inward prayer, Mimara begging Mimara, and suddenly, she feels it, the qirri that Cleric had given them, like stones beneath paddling feet.
“Come! On!” she cries at the Wizard.
But the wind whips the words like autumn leaves from her mouth.
The hellish wail stamps them into ash.
They cross the bourne, from the lobed rock, the drowning ground of the slave chamber, the overflown foundations, onto the hewn floor. But it does not matter. The wind has all but defeated Achamian. She is fairly dragging him. And she can see it, boiling up through the blackness toward them, the infernal pit.
The old man is shouting. She cannot hear him, but she knows what he cries …
Leave me.
Leave me. Daughter, please …
But she refuses. This old stranger … What is it?
Why should she dare hell?
She heaves, bawling at his arm. Achamian is on his back now, and she scratches him forward, heave after heave after heave, knowing that it does not matter.
She doesn’t hear the sorcerous cry until after, only the thunderous crack, the concussion that slaps back the wind, knocks her forward to her knees. She hears it through the all-encompassing clap and rumble …
A collapse. Earth hammering ground. A mountain shrugging in and down.
The wind is gone.
A light hangs in a fog.
A ringing like blood in the ears. A sound surfacing …
Coughing. An old man coughing. She sees his silhouette resolving through the dust, a tattered old shadow.
“We need to keep moving,” a hack-pinched voice says. “I’m not sure this will stop him.”
Her eyes burn and blink. Her voice fails her.
“We need to keep moving,” the Wizard continues, his tone rueful and encouraging. “If anything he can follow the mile-long streak of shit I dragged across the floor.”
Somehow she was holding him, laughing, sobbing “Akka … Akka!”
“So far so good,” he says gently. A hand strokes her hair, and instantly, she is a child clinging. “Mimara …”
“I thuh-thought … I thought … y-you …”
“Shush. We need to keep moving.”
Arm in arm, they pass through a ruined network of corridors, following the trail kicked by the others across the dust-limned floor. After so many terrors, further fear seems ludicrous, and yet Mimara finds herself breathing against yet another clammy premonition. “How?” she finally asks. “We had the light … How could they run so far without us?”
“Because they saw that,” Achamian replies, nodding at the darkness before her.
She sees it: the outline of an arched entranceway washed in the palest of blue. Even from this distance, a deep sense of recogniti
on suffuses her, a wave of depleted exultation. She knows this light, in ways that run deeper than her waking soul. It was the light her sires were born to, all the way back to the beginning …
The light of sky.
Slim shadows move across the entrance. She hears a voice calling her name—Soma. A sudden fury burns against her exhaustion, in the way of wood soaked in mud.
As though reading her thoughts, the Wizard says, “All men are traitors in a place such as this …” When she glances at him, he adds, “Now isn’t the time for judgment.”
His face is beyond haggard in the arcane glare. Its network of ruts and wrinkles are inked black with dust, as are his cheek and temple—across all the flesh rawed by the salting. Even still, intellect and resolution glitter in his eyes, with the merest hint of gallows humour. The old Achamian is back, she realizes, even if he’s propped up by the qirri like her. Returned from the paths of the dead.
The surviving Skin Eaters are animated as well, so much so that for an absurd moment Mimara has the sense that she stands with a troupe of players dressed and painted to play a shattered company of scalpers. But it is as much the turn in their fortunes as it is Cleric’s nostrums that has heartened them.
They have found their way out of Cil-Aujas.
“I know this place,” the Wizard rasps. “Even among the Nonmen, it was a wonder.”
“Cleric called it the Screw,” Galian says hoarsely, staring up like all the others. He looks different with days of growth across his jaw and chin, less like the cynical wit and more like his brothers. “The Great Medial Screw.”
The must of soaked masonry. The ring of voices across stone and water. They stand on a terrace set in curved walls that wrap out through the vagaries of Achamian’s light to form a perfect cylinder, one that soars as far as any of them can see, terminating in a point of shining white. Elongated glyphs band the surface, some as tall as a man, others engraved in panels no larger than a hand. A stair ascends from the terrace, as broad as a Galeoth wain, winding in helical loops into the obscurity above. Glittering water threads the open air, falling from unguessed heights into the pool that forms a mirror-black plate three or four lengths below the terrace. For a vertiginous moment, Mimara has the impression of staring up from the bottom of an inconceivable well, as though she were no more than a mite, waiting for gods to draw water. It seems impossible that this shaft runs the entire height of the mountain, that a single work can link the heavens to the hell at their feet.
“It’ll take days,” she murmurs.
“At least we have water,” Pokwas says. He leans out, still precarious on his feet, so that Xonghis and Soma reach out to catch hold his steel-plated girdle. Eyes closed, the Sword-Dancer lists into the nearest of the silver threads and wincing, begins pawing the grime and the blood from his face. He takes a long drink before retreating from the unrailed edge. He warns the others to be wary the water’s bite—“It falls fast enough to crack teeth!”—but he swears that it is clean and good. Godsent.
They begin taking turns, the man behind holding the belt or hauberk of the man before.
Agitated, Achamian continually stares into the black depths of the hallway they had just fled from. “We don’t have time for this,” he warns Lord Kosoter.
A wordless stare is his only reply, and Mimara finds herself relieved.
Suddenly water is the only thing she can think about. How long has it been since their last drink? Never in her life, not even on the slave ship that still haunts her nightmares, has she suffered such deprivations. The qirri is there, a kind of inner hand holding her upright, assisting cramped limbs, but the body it braces teeters on the brink of collapse. When the qirri wears away …
She must have water.
Perhaps seeing the thirst in her eyes, Soma surrenders his place in the small crowd. She thanks him grudgingly, unable to forgive the image of his fleeing back as she hauled Achamian alone through the corridor mere moments before. What was it about such circumstances, hidden so far from the sun, that they could incite courage one moment and plunder it the next? Was she so different from Somandutta?
He holds her belt and she leans out over the edge, raises her face to the silver stream. It hurts, just as Pokwas has warned, a bite so cold it numbs. She rinses it across her face, a kind exquisite cruelty, feels it slip like daggers across her scalp. Then she opens her lips to the crystalline plummet, and chill life sluices into her. Her teeth ache unto cracking, but the taste is clean as a child’s love. She drinks. There is milk in water, when the body is in dire need. Through teary eyes she glimpses the blue star high above, and her heart leaps with the certainty of sky—sky! They have passed through Cil-Aujas, survived its underworld teeth. They have walked the outskirts of Hell. Now they stand on the long threshold of freedom … Sky!
Sky and water.
She pulls away, her face numbed to a mask, watches the rivulets fall from her, add their concentric ripples to those warring soundless across the black pool below. She glimpses her own reflection, a light-rimmed shadow.
She hears Achamian arguing behind her, explaining that sorcerers cannot fly, they can only walk the echoes of the ground in the sky. “If there is a pit in the ground below,” he croaks, “there is a pit in the sky as well!”
Then she feels it … Feels it?
Soma has pulled her back to the safety of the terrace, but she lingers at the edge, still gazing at the black waters below.
She feels it rising.
She sees a flicker in the deeps, like lightning through dark and distant clouds. “Akka?” she murmurs, but it is too late. She realizes that it is too late. In her soul’s eye she sees Xonghis on one knee before the Obsidian Gate, a lifetime ago it seems, scratching the sign of the Skin Eaters next to the signs of all the other lost companies.
It was always too late. No one leaves the Black Halls.
Through dark water, Hell rises in the guise of a great graven seal, like a shield stamped with packed skulls and living faces, winding in fractal rings about the long-dead Nonman King. It pauses beneath the surface, its limbs languorous and submerged. Veins of blackness pulse up across the walls. It stares across the bourne, pondering the unspeakable, then raises its lips to kiss the inverted surface, and exhales the shriek and torment that is its air.
The others hear it only as horror, inborn and sourceless, as buried within them as they are buried in Cil-Aujas. Mimara turns to their sudden silence. In a moment of madness it seems that she can see their hearts through their caged breasts, that she can see the eyes open …
Achamian falls to his knees, clutching his chest. He looks to her in pleading horror. Lord Kosoter stumbles backward into the corridor. Some clutch their faces; others begin to shriek and scream. Soma stands riven. Sarl cackles and bawls, his eyes pinched into lines between red wrinkles.
“I can’t seeeeee!” the crease-faced sergeant gibbers. “I-look-I-look-I-look …”
The Unholy Seal rears glistening from the water, weeping strings of fire. It towers over them in leaning accusation. It roars, the sound so near, so ingrown that it seems they stand in the throat of a Demon-God. A voice claps through their souls, so loud it draws blood through the pores of their skin.
The Gates are no longer guarded.
Mimara is also on her knees, also shrieking, yet her fingers somehow find her purse, begin fumbling, pinching the Chorae that nearly killed the Wizard. She cringes beneath the looming aspect, a child beneath a collapsing city wall. She hugs her limbs against the piercing pleas of little mouths, the moaning masses of the damned …
And somehow lifts her Tear of God.
She knows not what she does. She knows only what she glimpsed in the slave chamber, that single slow heartbeat of light and revelation. She knows what she saw with the Judging Eye.
The Chorae burns as a sun in her fingers, making red wine of her hand and forearm, revealing the shadow of her bones, and yet drawing the eye instead of rebuking it, a light that does not blind.
?
??I guard them!” she weeps, standing frail beneath the white-bleached Seal. “I hold the Gates!”
Of all their ordeals, none would be so great as climbing the Great Medial Screw. Where the Sranc had taken their toll in blood and lives, and the Wight-in-the-Mountain, or whatever it was they had encountered in the closeted deeps, had taken its toll in terror and spirit, the endless stairs of the Screw took everything that remained: courage, strength, and endurance—endurance above all. Climbing. Climbing. Climbing. Clinging to seams as they picked their way over collapsed sections. Hurrying past the hundreds of gaping black portals. Bending back their faces to remind themselves of the sky they sought, to wonder at the way it waxed and grew.
The first time the high blue point they climbed toward began darkening they had despaired, fearing they had been shut in, until they realized that it was simply night. They had been buried so long they had forgotten the cycle of the days.
Sometimes, with the inscrutable ideograms struck into the curvature of the endlessly rising walls, it seemed they crawled through the curled inside of a scroll. Sometimes, given the way the Screw crossed the course of some natural shaft, here bricked, here hewn, Achamian was reminded of the canals of Momemn, where cut waterways linked natural estuaries. But always he was struck by the ambition, the marriage of patience and hubris that had made such a work possible. A stair as tall as a mountain. There was a kind of madness in the fact of the Screw, one that dwarfed even the famed Ziggurats of Shigek.
Mimara had said nothing in two days. When he tried coaxing words from her, she would simply gaze at him. Her lips would twitch, sometimes they would even part, but no words would come, and a kind of helpless remorse would dim her eyes. He spent quite some time trying to puzzle through what had happened, to make sense of the crazed image of her, holding nothing but a Chorae, the same existential pit she carried beneath her belt now, quailing beneath a horror that should have devoured her whole, from the flesh of her fingertips to the final spark of her soul.