No one speaks as they stagger toward the edge. In the open, the fact of their losses seem to condemn them. Wounded, culled of friends and shorn of provisions, the Skin Eaters are little more than a remnant of what they were.
They squint. They purse their lips against grins of exhaustion. The heat pricks their teeth. Many fall to their knees between the pillars, stare across the vista in dismay and horror. A lake of fire, sparking like iron beneath the smith's hammer. A vast sheet, as mottled as an old crone's skin, only with skittering fire and belligerent light.
Soma sets Mimara down and falls onto all fours, staring into the grit, his back heaving. She crawls to where Pokwas has dumped Achamian in unceremonious exhaustion. He breathes. He seems intact. She rolls him onto his back, draws his slack head onto her lap. Her shoulders yank to her breathing, and she wonders whether she weeps.
"Mimara," the Wizard whispers. She bites her lower lip in joy, blinks tears.
But he thrusts her back, weakly kicks a heel through the debris. "Chorae," he rasps, his head pulled back in anguish.
Somehow she has forgotten it, though it pulls like a fatal fall against her breast. As if attention makes real, the sudden nothingness of it sucks the voice from her throat.
"Hell!" Pokwas cries in shrill panic, like a man deciding he is in fact awake. On one knee, he leans against his tulwar. He lowers his forehead to its pommel. "We've fled too far-too deep!"
Sarl raises his fists to either side of his skull, claws at his grease-grey hair. There is an infant in his face, bawling out through skin so wrinkled it seems made of cord and twine. He cackles through gum-rimmed teeth, weeps.
"It's true!" Xonghis shouts, eyes round and darting. Only he and Lord Kosoter remain standing. The wavering air flushes the substance from their figures, makes them wicker thin. They are writ with filth and Sranc blood.
"This isn't Hell," the Captain says.
"But it is!" Sarl cackles and screams, rocking like a widow beneath her husband's pyre. "Look! Look!" He raises crooked fingers to the spectacle before them.
Somehow the Captain's sword has leapt shining from its sheath. Its point tongues the pubis hollow beneath the sergeant's chin, probes wiry hair. For a moment, Sarl continues rocking, drawing the shining blade to and fro with his throat. Then he falls very still.
"This," the Captain grates, "isn't Hell."
"How do you know?" Galian cries.
"Because," the Holy Veteran says, his voice so cold it seems the sound should fog or frost. "I would remember."
With a reptilian twitch, he scores his sergeant's rutted cheek, then turns from his company. He picks his way across the ruin to the far corner of the terrace, begins descending a stair cut into the soaring crevasse walls.
For several heartbeats the scalpers stare after their Captain. No one speaks or moves. Then a bark peals through the ambient roar, and all eyes jerk to the tunnel above.
Screeching and howling, the Sranc come, like lice spilling from a dead man's ear. Cleric has fallen, she realizes with plummeting horror.
Cil-Aujas has slain her last remaining son.
Mimara finds herself racing on legs woven out of terror, following close behind Galian and Soma, who hold the semiconscious Wizard between them. They run like the lost, like those whose hearts rail more against fate than foes. Their peril is fatal and immediate, yet she stumbles and gasps, stricken with a reeling vertigo. The fall wheels out to her left, beckoning, staggering…
The lake of fire shimmers across the distances, a brilliant plate across the bottom of a vast cavern, rutted like the hollow of a long-dead tree. Soaring basalt faces steep in the heat, black rimmed in ox-blood crimson. Where the stone leans close to the glowering surface, across the grottos that hive the farther reaches, fire falls in curtains and streams. Burning gases blow in skirts across the wavering expanses. Eruptions spew radiance the height of Momemn's greatest towers.
They have fled too far, too deep. They have passed beyond the rind of the World into the outer precincts of Hell. There can be no other explanation…
Not lost. Damned.
Lord Kosoter awaits them on the first landing, his sword still drawn. She follows his gaze to the bend of the stair above them. Masses of Sranc stream across the terrace they had occupied mere moments before, literally hacking at one another to funnel onto the steps. Around the looming abdomens of stone, she can see hundreds more pouring from the tunnel's horn-mouth entrance, their white faces pinked by the hellish glow. The first of the Bashrag wade through them. The cavern roar seems to meld with their shrieks, to add thunder to their cacophony.
Their Captain's pose says it all. Away is lost to them. Only death and bitter vengeance remain.
Here the Skin Eaters stand.
"We all knew it would come to this!" Sarl cries and cackles. The cut on his cheek bleeds and grins. "Hell and skinnies, boys! Hell and Sranc!"
Achamian is dumped across the steps immediately below the landing. Those who haven't cast away their shields form a new line, five abreast, from the cavern wall to the landing's rotted edge. The Sranc plunge headlong toward them, their faces twisted in fury and licentious hunger. She sees several tumble off the stairs edge, kick screaming into the sheets of fire below.
Lord Kosoter seizes her shoulder with his free hand. "Rouse him, girl!" he shouts, his eyes fixed on the wild-limbed deluge about to descend upon them. He need not utter the sum of his intent: Rouse the Wizard or we're dead.
She squats next to Achamian. A scab of salt has fallen away, and blood wells across his flayed cheek, but he has slumped back into unconsciousness. The heat buffets her, and for a dizzied moment she almost topples, would have slipped were it not for Achamian's sudden grip.
She stares at him. A clutched joy sparks through her, only to be pinched into oblivion by his crazed look.
His lips work in palsied twitches. "Esmi?" he cries.
"Akka! Sranc come… Only you can save us!"
"Don't you see, woman? He's Dыnyain! He awakens us to drive us deeper into sleep! He makes us love!"
"Akka! Please!"
"Origins! Origins are the truth of us!" A fury screws his face, so poisonous she feels the shame of it even through her panic. "I will show you!" he snarls.
A numbness sops through her, a recognition…
"Akka."
Inhuman baying. Her body whips her face around of its own accord.
"Move!" Pokwas booms, pressing between his brothers to stand at the fore of the line. The rising stair has become a rope of wagging blades and caterwauling faces. The creatures scramble down the steps like famished apes. Those at the fore literally launch themselves from several steps up, come hacking down on the black-skinned scalper. The great tulwar swoops around and out and the grim dance begins, body and sword swinging in flawless counterpoise. Pitted blades shatter. Crude shields are cloven. Limbs are struck spinning. The Sword-Dancer does not so much kill as harvest, keening in his strange Zeьmi tongue. Blood slaps the chapped walls, greases the stair, sails in rags and strings over the plummet.
Mimara stands above the Wizard, one foot planted on the landing, the other two steps down. She yanks Squirrel from its sheath, holds the Seleukaran steel high, so that it seems to boil with the hellish light.
She is Anasыrimbor Mimara, child-whore and Princess-Imperial. She will die spitting and brawling, be it at Cil-Aujas or the Gates of Hell.
"My dreams show me the way!" the unhinged Wizard bellows from her feet. He fumbles trying to press himself from the stone. "I will track him, Esmi! Pursue him to the very womb!"
For eleven miraculous heartbeats Pokwas stems the descending tide. The foremost Sranc begin panicking, try to claw back in terror, but the mobs above drive them skidding down the gored steps, into the arc of the Zeьmi blade. The corpses heap before the Sword-Dancer, sluice outward like piled fish.
Then the black javelins begin falling…
One of the surviving Galeoth scalpers is killed outright, caught above the clavicle and pun
ched backward. He trips over the Wizard and topples downward, spinning across a dozen steps before scudding over the stair's edge. Mimara merely stands dumbfounded as two javelins lance the open spaces to either side of her, ripping the air like gauze. Pokwas literally bats one with his sword, sends it darting over the edge. But a second rings off his battle cap. He crashes in a tangle at the feet of his fellow Skin Eaters.
The Sranc fall upon them.
Roaring, the scalpers lean into their shields and hack and hammer. They exact a cleaving, puncturing toll. Somehow, Pokwas is pulled clear. Lord Kosoter skewers the frenzied skinny drawn with him, kicks its face to slush. Her boots skidding, Mimara throws her shoulder to the press, even manages to spear two by poking Squirrel through the thicket of straining limbs and locked weapons. But looking up, she sees the savage multitudes that bear down upon them. The crush pitches one Sranc after another over the stair's outer brink. Some even crawl across the bristling surface of their brethren. The first of the Bashrag lumber near, one with a Chorae gouging hollow its grotesque breast. And the crazed column piles higher and higher, winding along the contour of the cavern wall, to the peak of the stair, to the terrace…
She sees Cleric, stepping out over the ruined amphitheatre, hanging, shimmed in white light against the black-and-ruby ramparts. The Nonman turns toward them, striding across empty air. His sorcerous song somehow rises through all noise and clamour, like blood squeezed from the world's own marrow. Brilliant parabolas hook across the open spaces, fall at intervals along the teeming stair. And arcs beget arcs, jumping from Sranc to shrieking Sranc, multiplying to the force and tenor of Cleric's arcane call. He comes to a halt, hangs motionless over the burning lake, his eyes and mouth glittering like stars, his hands outstretched. Incandescent scissions. Looms of light. The Skin Eaters cease their backward skid, begin hewing their way forward. Above them, their foes are thrashing and burning, caught in blinding webs, dazzling geometries.
Their inhuman screams sink needles into their ears.
And she thinks, Ishroi…
Lord Kosoter is bellowing, commanding them to run, but Mimara finds herself stumbling to a pause on the second landing. Above, the stairs are pulped with smoking Sranc corpses. But two Bashrag remain untouched-Chorae-bearers. She watches them heave blistered corpses across the long fall between them and Cleric. Three fall short, revolving like thrown axes as they arc into the cauldron below. A fourth slaps across the Nonman's Quyan Ward, which had been all but invisible for the glare. The carcass smokes, drawing a burning smear as it slides down and away, into the incinerating brilliance below.
Laughing, Cleric calls out yet another Cant, and lines like the glimmer along a razor parse the intervening air. They slice into the base of the precarious stair, and the steps falls away, immolated in streamers of black dust. The lower Bashrag slides on malformed heels and plummets, shrieking with elephantine lungs. The other flees back up the stair, stamping through the glistening dead.
But Soma has her by the arm, pulls her running after the others. For the first time she catches the whiff of cooler air twining through the blanketing convections. The force of it grows and grows, until it numbs her face and dandles her hair, slides aching fingers across her sweat-lathered scalp. Lobes of black stone submerge the base of the stair, ridged and wrinkled like skin. She and Soma run across them with ginger strides, hastening to catch the others. She sees them vanish into the mouth of a partially buried corridor-the source of the frigid blast.
Hair and clothing whip out behind them. A vacant howl overpowers all other sound. She leans against the gust, which seems to pull her onto her toes. Her jerkin flattens against her, as chill as dead skin. She glances back to the lake of fire and the wrecked amphitheatre, but her eyes are too pinched with cold to see much more than pitch blots and hairy explosions of crimson and gold.
The corridor descends at a shallow gradient, so that the petrified flow presses them tighter beneath the ceiling vaults. Soon they are crouching. Soma shouts something to her, but his words are blown away like fluff. The wind is so cold it scalds their flushed skin, drives nails down to the bone. The ceiling angles lower and lower, and it seems all Aenaratiol's mountainous weight closes about them. They are on their hands and knees, literally climbing against a tempest gale. Sting and blackness blind them.
The wind abates. They tip forward, as though thrown clear of white-water currents. Hands clutch them from the dark.
Mouths screeching into light. Shadows flitting across devious angles.
Run! something cried within him. Sweet-sweet Sejenus! You must run!
And yet Achamian sat at his ease, his alarm more coloured by curiosity than by panic. He wore the fine cloth of a courtier, and the tang of incense mellowed the air. Jasmine. Cinnamon-musk.
The low ceilings of the Annexes hung about him, the groaning post-and-lintel architecture of an age before arches. He smiled at the image of his High-King across the benjuka plate, then looked down to the little boy leaning into his lap, Nau-Cayыti bearing a gilded scroll-case too heavy for his tender arms. Father and son laughed as he hefted the golden tube.
The shouts of the dying scraped across stone… but in some other place.
"What is it, Da?" the young Prince called to his father.
"A map, Cayы. To a strong place. A hidden place."
"Ishuдl," Seswatha said, mussing the child's hair with his free hand.
"I love maps, Da! Can I see it? Please? What's Ishuдl?"
"Come…" Celmomas said, his smile at once dark and indulgent-the smile of a father bent on hardening his son to a vicious world. The boy obediently darted back to his father's side. Achamian studied the golden vines twining along the case's length, the Umeri script stamped into concentric rings at either end. It seemed implausibly heavy-enough to make wrists wobble.
"A king," Celmomas was saying, "stands before his people in all things, Cayы. A king rides at the fore. This is why he must always make ready, always prepare. For his foe is ever the future. Condic marauders on our eastern frontier. Assassins in an embassy of Shir. Sranc. Pestilence… Calamity awaits us all, even you, my son.
"Some petition astrologers, soothsayers, false prophets in all their guises. Low men, mean men, who exchange words of comfort for gold. Me, I put my faith in stone, in iron, in blood, and in secrecy-secrecy above all! — for these things serve in all times. All times! The day words conquer the future is the day the dead begin to speak."
He turned to Seswatha. The wolf's head braided into his beard flashed in the glowering light.
"This, my friend-this is why I built Ishuдl. For Kыniьri. For House Anasыrimbor. It is our final bulwark against catastrophe… Against the darkest future."
Achamian placed the scroll-case on the table before him, so that it seemed the prize of the pieces arrayed on the benjuka plate beyond it. He looked up to meet his chieftain's pensive gaze, found himself pondering the archaic script. "Doom," it read, "should you find me broken."
"The inscription… What does it mean?"
"Keep it, old friend. Make it your deepest secret."
"These dreams you have been having… You must tell me more!"
The ages seemed to lie like a mountain above them, centuries compressed into stone, hope suffocated beneath the heaping of generations. Strangers warred and screamed… Somewhere, in the catacombs with them.
Toe! Toe to the line!
"Keep it," Anasыrimbor Celmomas said. "Bury it in the Coffers."
There is music in the wind. A whistling smeared into a discordant call, a song played to the rhythms of blowing rags and floating dead.
Even after her eyes adjust, she can scarce credit what has happened. She simply lies, her back and limbs pressed against the heat radiating from the clumped stone, her skin shrinking from the chill that courses over her. She breathes. Her clothing grips like moss. Cramps gnaw at the vast numbness that floats through her. She is rooted, immovable, barely alive.
The entrance is little more than a
horizontal slot, the petrified stone runs so high. It glows a baleful orange, their only source of light.
The company lies scattered about her in the gloom. Galian has collapsed on his shield, breathing in spasms. Pokwas is on his stomach where he was dropped, his cheek pressed into a black-glistening pool of blood. His back rises and falls to the rhythm of slow life. Achamian lies unconscious as well, or near-unconscious. His head periodically jerks to the pluck of some unseen tendon. Soma sits in the posture of a mystic, his head lolling against the wall. Sarl is curled on his side, heaving spittle. The others, Xonghis, Sutadra, Conger, and three whose names she cannot remember, are likewise sprawled across the stone.
The last of the Skin Eaters.
Only Lord Kosoter stands. His head hangs like a stone from his shoulders. His helm lost, his grey and black hair ropes down, twines outward in the wind, obscuring his face and terrible gaze. Somehow his shadow, thrown from the pale entrance light, seems to fall across them all.
They lie in a chamber of some kind, the dimensions of which escape the feeble light, gathered in a corner where the cycling gusts are broken by the confluence of walls. The air is too fleet and too cold to possess smell. She first notices the graffiti while watching Soma. Strings of white-scratched characters score the wall all about him, the lines so dense where the hardened flow meets the wall as to almost seem like decoration, but thinning out into lone scribbles about his shoulders and neck-according, she realizes, to the original floor and the limited reach of its ancient authors.
The wind flutes in the dark, eerie and disharmonious.
She ponders the scratches with the clarity of concentration that comes only with absolute exhaustion. Her soul, which so often seemed to be petalled like a flower, a thing of frail confusion, has become as simple as a stone, a lamp that can shine upon one thing and one thing only. The signs themselves mean nothing to her, nor, she imagines, to anyone living. But the character of their scratching almost shouts too loud. These are human signs, she realizes, scraped in the throes of human anguish. Names. Curses. Pleas.
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