And somehow she just knows: This was once a place of great suffering.
A shadow blots the entrance glow, and alarm beats hot blood into the clay of her body. She sits up, as do several others. She sees a silhouette crawl through the slender orange maw, then stand.
Cleric steps into their midst, the gore on his face and nimil armour blown into crazed patterns by the wind. She sees the same white chapping across his forehead and scalp as Achamian, though not nearly so severe: Skin salted from Choric near misses, she realizes. Unwinded, he stares with spent curiosity at the spent Men, trades a long look with the Captain before turning to scan the shrouded spaces. There is a clarity and a command in his dark eyes that she has never seen before-one that both heartens and frightens her. He seems to ponder something only his eyes can descry.
"We're safe," he eventually says to Lord Kosoter. "For a time."
Finally able to move, she crawls across the uneven stone-tongues laid across tongues-to Achamian. The panic receding, she at last has room to worry, perhaps even to mourn.
"The wind," Xonghis croaks. "It's cold. High mountain cold…"
The Nonman lowers his chin in assent. "The Great Medial Screw runs near here… An immense stair that runs the entire height of the Aenaratiol."
"Can we use it to escape?" Galian blurts. He hugs his knees, slowly rocking. She glimpses a tremor fluttering through one of his hanging thumbs.
"I think so… If it is still as I… remember."
The relief is soundless and palpable. This entire time, the scalpers have had breath enough-heart enough-only for what was essential. Safety. Escape. The possibility of these secured, their souls once more slacken, their thoughts fork down paths less urgent. They look about them and wonder.
"What is this place?" Xonghis asks.
Cleric's black eyes hold Mimara for an appraising instant. "A kind of barracks… I think. For ancient captives."
"A slave pit," Mimara croaks, so softly that several of the others turn to her frowning. But she knows the Nonman has heard.
A serpentine blink. His grin reveals the arc of his fused teeth-the same as the Sranc, only not fanged and serrated. He speaks, and for a heartbeat, his face becomes a mask before the sun…
A Surillic Point sparks to life in the air above him; white light blows out and across the darkness.
The chamber is massive. Terraces climb about their lonely corner. How high or how far none can tell, since the height and breadth quickly outrun the light. But they can clearly see the chap-bronze cages that pack each of the terrace walls-cruel confinements no larger than a single man-enough for hundreds, even thousands, standing hollow save for shadows, their wretched prisoners having rotted free long, long ago.
Even though Mimara can imagine how the room once looked, the tiers of piteous faces and clutching hands, it is the graffiti, scratched out along the lowermost wall as far as the light can reach, that most afflicts her heart. The Emwama, and their proof of misery, she realizes. She can almost see their shades, massed in hopeless clots, looks averted from the horrors hanging above, ears aching…
A shudder passes through her, so deep her eyes and limbs seem to rattle in their sockets.
And she thinks, Cil-Aujas…
Some moments pass before she realizes that no one, not even Soma, shares any inkling of her dread. Instead, they are all staring into the gloom toward the corner opposite. Even Lord Kosoter.
"Sweet Sejenus!" Galian hisses, slowly coming to his feet. The wind bats his leather skirts, toggles the loose ends of the tourniquet bound about his left calf. Xonghis is already walking toward the point of their converging gazes. Gusts paw him from his stride.
"Could it be?" Xonghis calls out, his voice warbling in the wind's howl.
Several heartbeats pass before her eyes discern it, jutting from the surface of the laval ground. There, a cage of a different kind, large enough to shell a seafaring galley. Great ribs rise from the stone like a portcullis grill, curve up to meet their counterparts in a kiss of bowed spears. She sees a jawed carapace yards away, as though carried on a different current, submerged and tilted, yet standing as tall as a man, an empty eye socket just clearing the petrified stone.
"I pity you," Cleric says. "To carry such sights for so short a span."
Sarl trips to his knees, his hair drawn into a crazed rag halo. "I called him a fool!" he cries to his fellows, grinning out of some maniacal reflex. "A fool!"
The Skin Eaters gather, beaten by gust and fate alike, gazing in awe at the iron bones of a dragon.
Wracu.
The source of the wind's cold hymn.
With light comes reason.
The Skin Eaters waste few words on the dragon, though all idle gazes seem inevitably drawn toward the rust-pitted bones. They do not speak of their fallen friends. They are scalpers, after all, violent men leading the most violent of all lives. They are long accustomed to the gaps between them-Kiampas, Oxwora, and many others. The pyre is their only constant friend.
Instead they prepare and make plans.
Somehow Galian and Xonghis have become the guiding personalities. Bleak necessity has rewritten the ranks between them, as is so often the case in the aftermath of catastrophe. Sitting on a hump of stone, the Captain simply watches and listens, grants assent with curt nods. Sarl mopes against a graffiti-etched wall, says nothing, and does little save probe the cut on his cheek with his fingers.
The mark of a sobber.
Mimara tends to Achamian while Cleric ministers to Pokwas and the others with his haphazard healing lore. The Nonman gives them all a tiny pinch of black powder, medicinal spores, which he produces from his leather satchel. "Qirri," he calls it. He claims that it will rejuvenate them, as well as help them cope with the lack of food or water. He even tells them to sprinkle some in the mouths of the two unconscious men.
It tastes of dirt and honey.
A peculiar shyness leans against her eyes whenever she looks at the Nonman. His recent exercise of power clings to him like an aura, an intimation of some dread disproportion. He seems heavier, harder by far than the Men surrounding him. It reminds her of watching Kellhus on the Andiamine Heights: the sense of gazing at a presence that somehow eclipses sight, that reaches out, arching beyond the limits of your vision, to link hands behind you…
Beneath you.
She finds herself rehearsing Achamian's earlier worries. What would he make of what she had seen? There can be no doubt, she decides. Like the Aspect-Emperor, this Incariol, or whatever his name, is one of the world's powers. An Ishroi of old.
She can still see him, leaping alone into howling masses of Sranc, hanging bright above smouldering lakes of fire. These memories, combined with the glories of the Upper Halls and the atrocities soaked into the stone of this room, seem to confirm her suspicion that Men are little more than animals to Nonmen, a variety of Sranc, a corruption of their own angelic form.
Using what spit she can muster, she begins carefully cleaning around the scabs of salt along the side of the Wizard's face. The white swatches do not coat the skin, they are the skin, down to individual moles and pores, only raised and puckered by the inflamed flesh beneath. The damage is literally skin deep and certainly not life-threatening. After the incident on the stair, his wits are what concern her the most, even though Cleric assures her he will quickly recover, especially once the qirri soaks into his veins.
"But you should not lean so close," he says, nodding to the Chorae still stuffed beneath her jerkin.
Assured that Achamian is as comfortable as possible, she sits some distance from him, and at last draws the Chorae from the sweaty pocket it has pressed into her breast. Though she has grown accustomed to its inverted presence, there is a surreality to the act of taking it into her hand, a sense that it is not the Trinket that moves so much as it is the whole of creation about it. She has no clue why it should compel her. Everything about it shrieks anathema. It is the bane of her heart's sole desire, the thing she must fear above a
ll once she begins uttering sorcery. What almost killed Achamian.
The light of the Surillic Point does not touch it, so that even its worldly aspect seems an insult to her eyes. It is a ball of shadow in her palm, its iron curve, its skein of ancient writing, illuminated only by the low crimson glow that leaks through the entrance. It seems to brood and to seethe. The abyssal dimensions of its Mark are a greater insult still. She can scarce focus when she looks with the eyes of the Few. It is as if it rolls from her sight and thought each time she centres her attention upon it.
And yet she stares and stares, like a boy gazing at some remarkable bug. Low voices flutter through the portals of the wind. She can hear some of the scalpers hammering at the dragon's teeth-even in disaster, their mercenary instincts have not abandoned them. The Wizard lies prone in her periphery.
Shivers scuttle like spiders from her palm to her heart and throat, pimpling her entire skin. She glares at it, concentrates her breath and being upon its weightless horror, as if using it to mortify her soul the way shakers use whips and nails to mortify their flesh. She floats in the prickle of her own sweat.
The suffering begins. The pain…
It's like thumbing a deep bruise at first, and she almost revels its odd, almost honey sweetness. But the sensation unravels, opens into an ache that swells about wincing serrations, as if teeth were chewing their own mouth through sealed muscle and skin. The violence spreads. The clubs begin falling, and her body rebels down to its rooted bowel, gagging at memories of salt. Emptiness itself… Lying cupped in her palm, a sheering void, throwing hooks about her, a million lacerating stings.
She grunts spit between clenched teeth, grins like a dying ape. Anguish wracks her, as deep as deep, but the smallest nub of her remains, an untouched sip, still conscious of the Wizard lying in her periphery, and it sees that he is the same yet transfigured, an old ailing man, and a corpse boiled in the fires of damnation…
The Judging Eye has opened.
She feels it leaning through her worldly eyes, pressing forward, throwing off the agony like rotted clothes, snuffing fact from sight, drawing out the sanctity and the sin. With terrible fixation it stares into the oblivion spilling from her palm…
And somehow, impossibly, passes through.
She blinks on the far side of contradiction, her face and shoulders pulled back in a warm wind, a breath, a premonition of summer rain. And she sees it, a point of luminous white, a certainty, shining out from the pit that blackens her grasp. A voice rises, a voice without word or tone, drowsy with compassion, and the light grows and grows, shrinking the abyss to a rind, to the false foil that it is, burning to dust, and the glory, the magnificence, shines forth, radiant, blinding…
And she holds all… In her hand she holds it!
A Tear of God.
Through the cold of the wind's preternatural singing, she hears, "Mimara?"
She sits hunched over her prize, utterly bewildered.
"Are you okay?"
She holds a light in her hand, a different light, one that shines but does not illumine, a star that glitters as bright as the Nail of Heaven.
"Where did you get that?" Soma asks. He is crouching before her, nodding to the Chorae in her palm-or to what used to be a Chorae…
"You see it?" she asks, coughing at the waver in her voice.
He shrugs. "A Tear of God," he says with matter-of-fact exhaustion. "Here we are, trying to hammer loose dragon teeth, and you've already found your fortune."
"I did not come for riches." She studies his dark, handsome face through the threads of shining white radiating from her palm. "So you don't see the light?"
He glances up at the Surillic Point, frowning. "I see it plainly enough…" He looks back to her, eyebrows raised. "It's you I'm having difficulty seeing, with that thing pressed against your skin. You look like a… breathing shadow…"
"I mean this," she says, raising her palm. "What do you see when you look at this?"
He makes the face he always makes when he suspects the others are joking at his expense: a mingling of hurt, resentment, and an eagerness to please. "A ball of shadow," he says slowly.
She pulls her empty coin purse from beneath her belt, hastily drops the Chorae in it. She vaguely hears Soma say, "Ah, much better," but pays him no attention. She cranes around looking for Lord Kosoter. She can sense his Chorae the way she can sense her own, but it also feels different, like an outward shining instead of a pinprick of inhaling black. She sees him dozing against the wall with several others, his square beard crushed against the blood-painted splint of his hauberk. But since his Chorae is pocketed, she has no way of knowing whether it also shines in her natural sight.
Fear flushes through her, seems to pull the ancient slave chamber into a slow roll about the axis of her heart. Something is happening to me…
This is when she notices the stranger.
There, in the very midst of them. She initially thinks that it's Cleric-his face is all but identical-but Cleric sits several paces beyond, his legs crossed, his head bowed in prayer or exhaustion.
Another Nonman?
He sits the way the others sit, back hunched against the wind, eyes closed, as though taking inventory of inner pains. An archaic headdress falls to his back and shoulders, a crown of silvered thorns chased by a skirt of tiny black rods. His garb is violet and voluminous but wrapped in a manner that reveals segments of his corselet, a kind of mail wrought from innumerable golden figurines. White skin is visible beneath, as smooth as ivory.
For a moment she can neither breathe nor speak. Then at last she says, "So-soma?"
"Mim-Mimara?" he replies, trying to sound mocking. He is always trying to rally her.
"Who," she asks without looking at the Nilnameshi caste-noble, "is that?" For a moment, she is frightened that he won't see this as well…
That she has gone mad.
The following pause both reassures and terrifies. "What the-?"
She hears him draw his sword, a sound that, even through scarcely audible in the wind, instantly rouses the others.
Everyone is up and shouting, raising battered shields and notched swords. Soma steps before Mimara, falls into stance, his scimitar raised above his head. On the figure's far side, Cleric lifts his eyes, blinks with feline curiosity.
Turning his head on a slow swivel, the stranger looks about, but never quite at any of them. He then lowers his face to his sandalled feet once again. Mimara notices that the wind does not touch the lavish cloth about his shoulders, though it whips and pins the clothing of everyone standing about him.
"Sweet Seju!" Galian hisses. "He… he has no shadow!"
"Quiet," Lord Kosoter grates, invoking an instinct Mimara feels all too keenly. A sense of mortal peril seems to ride the wind, a tingling certainty that the Nonman before them is less flesh or blood than a dread gate, a catastrophic threshold.
He is perfectly motionless. He possesses a predator's vigilance for sound and motion.
Even still, Cleric warily approaches the figure, his nimil armour shining through the webbing of blood. His expression is astonished, so stunned that he almost seems human. He kneels below the figure and, looking up, gently calls, "Cousin?"
The face rises. The small bars on his headdress swing about his jawline. They shine like obsidian.
No sound comes from the opening lips. Instead, the entire company starts when they hear Pokwas and Achamian rasp, " You — you…" in ragged unison.
Sarl cackles like a drunk who has scared tears from his grandchildren.
"Yes, Cousin… I have returned."
Again the lips move, and the voices of the two unconscious men rise into the void of sound, the one reeded by age, the other deep and melodious.
" They — they called — called us — us false — false."
"They are children who can never grow," Cleric replies. "They could do no different."
" I–I loved — loved them — them. I–I loved — loved them — them so — so muc
h — much."
"So did we all, at one time."
" They — they betrayed — trayed."
"They were our punishment. Our pride was too great."
" They — they betrayed — trayed. You — you betrayed — trayed…"
"You have dwelt here too long, Cousin."
" I–I am — am lost — lost. All — all the — the doors — doors are — are different — rent, and — and the — the thresholds — holds… they — they are — are holy — lee no — no more — more."
"Yes. Our age has passed. Cil-Aujas is fallen. Fallen into darkness."
" No — no. Not — not darkness — ness…"
With a flourish, the Nonman King comes to his feet, his hands thrust out and back so that his spine arches, and Mimara can see that his robe is in fact no robe but a dark bolt of silken material wrapped about his armpits and across his shoulders. The shimmering tails of it fall to the ground. His corselet is sleeveless, yet hangs to his sandalled feet, revealing as much of his graven nudity as it conceals. His phallus hangs like a snake in the shadow of his thighs.
" Hell — hell."
Still kneeling, Cleric gazes up at the impossible figure, anguish and indecision warring across his expression.
" Damnation — shun, Cousin — sin. How — How? How — How could — could we — we forget — get?"
A sorrow flattens the glittering black eyes. "Not I. I have never forgotten…"
The points of their swords sinking, the Skin Eaters gape at the two Nonmen, the living and the dead, for they understand that the one bearing the crown draws no breath. Mimara wants to flee. It seems she can feel the whole of her skin, from the cuts about her knuckles to the folds of her sex, alive to some plummet she cannot see or fathom. But she remains as motionless as the others.
Cleric knows him.
The wind prods her in contrary directions, thumbs without substance. The jutting bones of iron hum and howl, a dirge to dragon hollows. The cage-ringed walls rise into black. Across the rising tiers, the ancient bronze begins to creak, to rattle…
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