Even for men so bitten, it was no small thing to walk with a legend. And for a Wizard steeped in the ancient ways, it was cause for more than a few sleepless watches …
With the Osthwai Mountains to the southwest, night fell with the finality of a hammer. Since this was skinny country, they marched “on the dark,” as Sarl had put it, without fires or illumination of any sort. They became a company of shadows, skulkers between the trees, loathe to speak. The fact of their losses always loomed the largest, it seemed, when they made camp. A kind of desolation haunted them. They would eat with the vacant look of those thrown from the grooves of a kinder life.
Each night, Cleric wandered among them, wordlessly dispensing miniscule smudges of Qirri. He seemed taller without his cloak. Cracked blood still clotted the nimil links of his hauberk. The Nail of Heaven threw lines of blue and white across the polish of his scalp and skin. His eyes, when they blinked, seemed more animal than otherwise.
Afterward he would sit, head bowed, next to the Captain, who either sat like a stone or leaned forward to lecture the Nonman in a continuous, growling whisper. No one could fathom what was said.
The Qirri would soak into their veins, a touch of bitter on the tongue that became a slow-spreading warmth, stretching revival. And their thoughts, relieved of bodily deprivations, would climb into remembered moulds.
The shadows would begin to mutter, like children testing the absence of a violent father.
The Nonman’s voice would rise from the hushed chorus, Sheyic spoken with foreign accents and deep, alien intonations. A different kind of silence would fall across them, the Skin Eaters as well as the Wizard and the girl. A silence, not of expectation, but of men who awaited tidings of themselves. Places faraway.
And the sermon would begin, every bit as disordered and beautiful as the speaker.
“You have wandered out of light and life,” he began one night. They still picked their way through the foothills, following ridges flanged by innumerable ravines, so they had camped high. Cleric sat upon a bare stone shelf, his face toward the blackening bulk of Aenaratiol, the Ziggurat. By some fluke of happenstance, Achamian and Mimara found themselves sitting a stage higher, so they could see the mountain shadows encompass the forested tracts over his shoulders. It almost seemed they had found him thus, sitting cross-legged before the wilderness they would dare cross, a sentinel waiting to judge their folly.
“You have seen what so few of your kind have seen. Now, no matter where you walk, you will be able to look about and see the piling of powers. Empires of the sky. Empires of the deep …”
His great head leaned forward, white and waxen as a candle against the dark.
“Ever are Men stranded on the surface of things. And ever do they confuse what they see with the sum of what matters. Ever do they forget the rank insignificance of the visible. And when they do honour the beyond—the beneath—they render it according to what is familiar … They disfigure it for comfort’s sake.”
The old Wizard sat rigid.
“But you … you know … You know that what lies beyond resembles us no more than the potter resembles the urn …”
A sudden mountain gust swept the high ridges, whisked through the gnarled jack pine that crooked the stone about them. Mimara raised a hand to brush the hair from her face.
“You who have glimpsed Hell.”
“The Slog!” Sarl exclaimed in hoary tones. “The Slog of Slogs—just as I told you!” His laugh was half gurgle and half rasp.
But the company had ceased to hear these intrusions, let alone glance at their former Sergeant.
“All things have a place,” Cleric said. “Death has its place. You have plumbed the depths, passed beyond the gates of life, and you have been where only the dead have been, seen what only the dead have seen …”
The Wizard found himself flinching from the Nonman’s black-glittering gaze.
“May it greet you as an old friend when you return.”
A moment of pondering silence.
“The Coffers!” Sarl croaked, his face raisin-wrinkled with hilarity. “The Coffers, lads!”
Darkness claimed the wild horizon.
Kiampas dead. Oxwora dead. Sarl deranged. And dozens of other Skin Eaters the Wizard had never known outside the continuity of their presence … Dead.
The toll Achamian had feared had become real. Blood had been let, lives had been lost in the deep tumble, all in the name of his convictions … and the lie he had told in their dread service.
Distance and abstraction are ever the twin lures of disaster. When he paused to recollect it, that first step from his tower seemed absurd with ease. What was one step? Two? And all the walking that followed, across the wild, into the Obsidian Gate, step after step … Down into mountainous nethers.
All for the sake of finding Ishuäl … The name spoken by a mad barbarian so many years ago. The cradle of Anasûrimbor Kellhus. The hidden refuge of the Dûnyain.
Now, wrecked and heartbroken, they continued the long march to Sauglish, the ruined City of Robes, in the hope of plundering the Coffers, the famed sorcerous vault beneath the Library of Sauglish. Achamian had promised them riches, baubles that would make them princes. He had told them nothing of the map he hoped to find there, nor of the capricious Dreams that guided him.
He had glimpsed the Whore’s shadow from the very beginning—from the moment he had set eyes on Mimara, it seemed. All along he had known the toll of his mad mission. And yet, he had let his lies and transgressions accumulate, taking heart in flabby rationalization.
The truth, he had told himself. The truth demanded sacrifice, from him and from others.
Could a man be called murderer when he killed in the name of truth?
Come nightfall, Achamian often peered at them through the gloom, these men who had risked all in the name of his lies. Scalpers hugging themselves against the chill. Foul. Ragged. Eyes pricked with madness. Not so much broken as disfigured—crippled strong. Only yesterday, it seemed, he had watched them strut and caper, trade jokes and boasts in the manner of men in the shadow of imminent battle. They were going to follow their Captain across the ends of the earth to loot a treasury out of legend. They were going to return princes. Now, scarcely anything remained of that bombast—save Soma, whose peculiar idiocy had rendered changeless, and Sarl, who had gone insane. The old Wizard watched them and he mourned what he had done almost as much as he feared what he was about to do.
One night he caught Mimara watching his watching. She was one of those women with a canny gift for seeing into masculine faces. She was forever guessing his chaotic humours.
“You feel remorse,” she said in reply to his quizzical look.
“Cil-Aujas has made you right,” he replied under his breath. She had called him a murderer on the far side of the mountains, had threatened to reveal his lies to the others if he turned her away.
“It has wronged me more,” she replied.
In the absence of consequences, lies were as easy as breathing, as simple as song. During his days as a Mandate Schoolman, Achamian had told innumerable falsehoods to innumerable people, and a fair number of fatal truths as well. He had destroyed reputations, even lives, in the pursuit of an abstraction, the Consult. He had even killed one of his beloved pupils, Inrau, in the name of what could not be touched or seen. He found himself wondering what it must be like for his former brothers now that the Consult had been revealed. What would it be like to belong to an Imperial School, to have princes and kings stammer in your presence? According to Mimara, they even carried Shrial Warrants, holy writs that exempted them from the laws of the lands that hosted them.
Mandate Schoolmen with Shrial Warrants! What would that be like?
He would never know. On the day the Consult had ceased being mere abstraction, the day Anasûrimbor Kellhus had been declared Aspect-Emperor, he had decided to hunt another obscurity: the origins of the man who had revealed them—and in his Dreams, no less. Maybe that was his doom. Maybe
that would be the tragic irony that defined the lay of his life. Hunting smoke. Throwing the number-sticks of damnation. Sacrificing the actual for the possible.
The eternal outcast. Doubter and Believer.
With more men to kill.
Dreams are only possessed upon waking, which is why men are so keen to heap words upon them after the fact. They engulf your horizons, pin your very frame to turbulent unreality. They are the hand that reaches behind the mountains, beyond the sky, beneath the deepest sockets of the earth. They are the ignorance that tyrannizes our every choice. Dreams are the darkness that only slumber can illuminate.
The old Wizard walked slots beneath mighty foundations. The stones, he knew, were among the oldest in the complex, part of the original structure raised by Carû-Ongonean, the third and perhaps the greatest of the Umeri God-Kings. Here … This was the place where the Nonmen of the famed Tutelage, the Siqû, had come to live among the Kûniüri. This was the place where the first Quyan texts had been translated and stored, and where the first sorcerous School, the Sohonc, had been born.
Here … The famed Library of Sauglish.
Temple. Fortress. Granary of many things, wisdom and power foremost among them.
The walls seemed to close about him, so narrow was the way. Candles squatted in sconces along the walls. Whenever he neared one, it sparked to white life, while the one previous vanished into strings of smoke. Over and over, until it seemed there was but one flame leaping from wick to wick.
But the illumination was never quite enough. For every ten steps, five took him through absolute shadow, allowing him to see the layering of ancient Wards without the confusion of worldly sight. Ugly, the way all sorcery is ugly, and yet beautiful all the same, like the rigging of great ships, only ethereal—and as deadly as gallows. In the millennium since its construction, the Library—and the Sohonc—had never been conquered. The Cond Yoke. The Skettic invasions. No matter what the conquering nation, civilized or barbaric, they all sheathed their swords and came to terms. Whether perfumed and erudite like Osseoratha or unwashed and illiterate like Aulyanau the Conqueror, they all came to Sauglish bearing gifts instead of threats … They all knew.
This was the Library.
The corridor ended in blind walls. Holding tight the ornate map-case Celmomas had given him, the Grandmaster spoke the sorcerous words. Meaning flashed through his eyes and mouth, and he trod through monolithic stone. The Cant of Sideways Stepping.
Blinking, he found himself in the Upper Pausal, a narrow rostrum overlooking the Pausal proper, a dark antechamber long and deep enough to hold a war galley. Batteries of candles set below sparked to spontaneous life. Seswatha descended the right stair, map-case firmly in hand. Of all the innumerable rooms of the Library, only the Pausal could boast Nonmen artisanship because only it had been hewn out of living rock. Twining figures adorned the walls, frieze stacked upon frieze, representations of the Tutelage and the first great peace between the High Norsirai and the False Men—as the Tusk called the Cûnuroi. But like so many who entered this room, Seswatha scarcely noticed them. And how could he when the stigmatic blemish of sorcery so assaulted his gaze?
It was always the same whenever one of the Few, those who could see the mark that the sorcerous cut into the natural, walked the Pausal. One thing and one thing only commanded their gaze … the Great Gate of Wheels. The portal that was a lock, and the lock that was a portal.
The entrance to the Coffers.
To mundane eyes it was a wonder of scale and machination. To arcane eyes it was nothing less than a miracle of interlocking deformities: enormous incantation wheels carved from milk-white marble, turning through a frame of bronze set with constellations of faces carved of black diorite, instilled animata—or proxies, as they called them—enslaved souls, whose only purpose was to complete the circuit between watcher and watched that was the foundation of all reality, sorcerous or not. So hideous was the Mark of the thing, so metaphysically disfigured, that bile bubbled to the back of his throat whenever he found himself before it.
Quya magic. Deeper than deep.
Seswatha paused on the stair, warred with his stomach. He looked down and for some reason felt no surprise, no alarm, to see that the golden map-case had become an infant’s inert form. Blue and grey. Mottled with black bruising, as if it had perished while lying on its face. Slicked with the sweat of the dead.
Such is the madness of dreams that we can assume the continuity of even the most jarring things. An infant corpse, it seemed, had always been what he carried. Achamian followed the grooves of the Dream thoughtful only of what had been thought, oblivious to the discrepancies. Only when he came to a halt beneath the arcane machinery of the Gate, only when he commanded the proxies to roll back the Gate, did he find himself skidding across unlived life …
Squirming. The dead baby was twisting and straining against his hands.
The Great Gate of Wheels rumbled to cracking life. At last the Archmage gazed down in horror.
Black eyes shining up with newborn bleariness. Fat-webbed arms reaching out, tiny fingers clutching.
Revulsion. Flailing panic. He cast the thing the way a boy might throw off a spider or a snake, but it simply hung in the air before him, made a cradle of empty space. Behind it, the wheels of the Gate continued their groaning tumble.
“This,” Seswatha gasped, “is not what hap—!”
The last of the great bronze cogs had ceased their clacking. The Gate of Wheels was drawing open …
The infant had dropped from the air. A golden tube clattered where it had fallen. Beyond it, the ponderous bronze machinery of the Gate folded into blackness. A gust swept out across the antechamber.
Achamian stood immobile.
Wind roiled and twisted. His gown tugged at his limbs. A rumble shivered through the walls and lintels, deep, as if a tempest lashed some world inside the world. The Gate, which stood within the Library’s deepest heart, now opened onto the sky—not the Coffers, the sky! And he could see the Library, as though the Pausal hung from a great height above it. Bastions collapsing. Walls flying outward in strings of sand. And he could see it … the horror of horrors within billowing skirts of dust and debris, a mountain of black-spinning wind that linked wrecked earth to flickering clouds. Existence itself howled.
TELL ME … the Whirlwind said.
WHAT DO YOU SEE?
WHAT AM I?
The Mandate libraries in Atyersus possessed many maps, some old, others new. On all save the most ancient, the land the Skin Eaters dared cross was called the Meorn Wilderness, a name that carried many implications for the learned squints that regarded it.
The scalpers, however, simply called it the Long Side. They had heard the stories, of course. They knew the vast forests they plumbed had once been cultivated horizons. Even more, they had seen the ruins: the stone-stumped grottos that were the lost city of Teleol, and the fortress of Maimor—or Fatwall, as they called it. They knew of the Meori Empire. They knew that once, so very long ago, the wilderness and savagery had lain to the south of the Osthwai Mountains. And the thoughtful among them would wonder at the way the slow leakage of years could bring about such grand and dramatic reversals.
When the first companies of Scalpoi had crossed into the Wilderness some ten years previous, they had been overwhelmed by the numbers and the ferocity of the Sranc clans they had found. The “Stick Days,” the old veterans called them, because every slog seemed a throw of the number-sticks. But the game was plentiful. And the foothills offered endless possibilities for ambush—the key to nearly every Captain’s success. Within a matter of five years, the Scalpoi had driven the Sranc into the lowland forests, the Great Mop, taking so many scalps that the Holy Bounty had to be halved, lest the New Empire go bankrupt.
The reconquest of the Great Meori Empire had begun, albeit by Men who resembled the Sranc more than otherwise. When Fatwall, or Maimor, was discovered, the Holy Aspect-Emperor even sent a Judge and a company of Ministrate Pikemen to
occupy the abandoned fortress over the summer months. Many among the Imperial Apparati spoke of reclaiming all the ancient Meori provinces—from the Osthwai Mountains to the Sea of Cerish—within ten scant years. Some even argued the Holy Bounty should take precedence over the Great Ordeal. Why wage war against one, they dared ask, when with mere gold you could battle against all?
But the forests, vast and deep and dark, made a mockery of these hopes. No matter how many companies filed into them, no matter how many bales of scalps they carried out, the frontier ceased its creeping retreat and remained fixed, year after year. For the first time since the calling of the Holy Bounty the Sranc did not dwindle and withdraw. One Imperial Mathematician, the notorious Mepmerat of Shigek, claimed that the Scalpoi had at last encountered a population of Sranc that could reproduce as fast as they could slaughter—that the Bounty had become futile, in effect. He would be imprisoned for his impious accuracy.
For their part, the Scalpoi cared nothing for squint-eyed calculations or petty political aspirations. One need only probe the verges of the Great Mop to understand why the skinnies had stopped running. The Mop was like no forest known to Men of the Three Seas. Trees so vast and hoary they had raised berms about their bases, creating troughs like the swells of a stormy sea. The thatching of the canopy so dense that little more than grey-green light attenuated the filtered gloom. The ground devoid of undergrowth, broken only by the colossal bones of trees long dead. For Sranc, the Mop was a kind of paradise: perpetually dark with easy earth rich in grubs. It provided for all but their most dread appetites.
That is, until the coming of Men.
Xonghis had led them down from the mountains into the foothills at a northwest tangent, so nearly a week passed before the expedition entered the Mop. The plan was to skirt the forest’s edges and march to Fatwall, ancient Maimor, with the hope of resupplying. Mimara fairly clung to the Wizard during this time, sometimes actually leaned against him, even though she possessed no real wounds of consequence. Her mother had done the same, years before in the First Holy War, and the memories would have struck Achamian deep—pain deep—had not the pandemonium of the previous days been so complete. He could scarce blink without glimpsing some shredded glimpse of their ordeal.