Twigs and branches pinch and cut her feet, but it seems proper that she should suffer. The breeze brushes like silk across her body, but it seems proper that she should find succour for her grievances. Leaves lash her arms and outer thighs.
Horror animates her. Horror that runs with her legs. Horror that tingles throughout her body, heat rimmed with cold, as if she bleeds from a thousand internal wounds.
She clutches her belly. She assumed she would feel it hang from her as she ran, the life she carried. But it is at one with her, the centring counterweight, the ligament that binds her to future and fate.
She climbs a low rise, a place away from the eye-stabbing smoke. She turns, glimpses the flicker of sorcery. She climbs higher, searching for a break in the canopy. She sees it once again, luminescent white lines twisting like language from the Library. She sees a form hanging, a dark figure silvered about the waist and shoulders, suspended over the walled depths adjacent to a destroyed citadel-what looks like a broken amphorae jutting from the ground.
Cleric, she thinks. Ishroi…
She turns, and begins walking back the way she came.
– | The Skin Eaters lay strewn like castaway clothes. The Wizard stumbled to his knees at the sight of the carnage.
"Where is she?" he cried at the last man living-Sarl, looking like something out of a child's nightmare.
"The Coffers!" the mad scalper croaked. He raised his hands in crazed gesticulation. Something bloody flapped in the right. "Make ready, boys! Plunder them like a whore! Shake them like your purple pommel!"
"What happened here?" Achamian cried. He looked from dead man to dead man. Galian. Pokwas. Xonghis.
The Captain…
The very World pitched beneath his feet.
Suddenly the thing swinging in Sarl's hand became clear, the digits knuckled with fragments of expression…
A skin-spy's face.
"Speak up, fool! What happened? "
"Ahhh," Sarl crooned to him. "The World will be our wicked little peach! We'll be princes! Princes! "
The old Wizard seized him about the shoulders. "Where's Mimara… Where's my daughter?"
The madman nodded and gazed the way he had that second night in the Cocked Leg's common room, after smashing his wine bowl. A knowing gaze, the Wizard suddenly realized, one brimming with the intuition of the insane…
That Fate is madder still.
Achamian turned to the demand of some instinct, peered… glimpsed something slight passing through screens of smoke. He fairly doubled over for relief when she stepped naked from a fire-curtained world.
She ran to him, clutched his shoulders as he grinned and keened.
"You live!" he cried like a fool.
"As do you."
"You're naked!"
Her look of reproach made him want to cry out for joy.
"And they're dead," she said. " All of them," she added, with a glance at Sarl. "Come… We must flee this fire."
They moved with the quickness of looters racing dawn. She retrieved Squirrel, then paused at Xonghis to relieve him of the stolen Chorae, the one loose, the other affixed to a fletched shaft. Achamian gathered her clothing, threw a rotted cloak about her shoulders. Then together they stumbled and ran through the smoking galleries.
The mad Sergeant stayed, cradling the Captain's hoary head, rocking on his rump with laughter and congratulating his dead fellows.
"Kiampas! Eh? Kiampas! "
– | Night swallows the earth. Only the light of stubborn fires twinkles through the courtyards of the ruined Library.
Sitting on scorched earth, knee pressed against knee, they take Cleric's pouch and slowly press the inside out. They wet their fingers, run them along the residue. The black gathers into a thin crescent against the pad of their fingers. Out of some communal understanding, they reach across the meagre space between them, place their fingers upon the other's tongue.
Relief crashes through them as a tingling wave, leaving dizziness and nausea in its wake.
Qirri. Blessed Qirri.
They build a bier of charred wood and scrub, pile it as high as their shoulders. The corpse of the Nonman King they place upon it. They set it alight, watch the flame climb in shingles, until the illustrious form is engulfed in rushing fire. Then they climb into the starlit ruin of the Turret and descend into the absolute blackness of the Coffers. Achamian utters a Bar of Heaven, and the door of creation cracks open, revealing subterranean wrack and ruin.
"Should have used this earlier," he mutters as the light fades from his eyes and mouth.
Mimara looks to him, clutching her shoulders against memories of Cil-Aujas.
"I could have saved more of my beard!" he explains with a rueful smile.
They labour by sorcerous light, wracked by a thirst and a hunger they do not feel. Deep into the night.
They find a shirt of ensorcelled mail, golden, as light as silk and as hard as nimil. Sheara, the Wizard calls it, "Sun-skin," a far antique gift from the School of Mihtrul. Mimara sheds her rags and dons it against her naked skin. Cinched about the waist it falls to her thighs, humming with a warmth all its own. She stows her Chorae in her boot to avoid killing the ancient magic. They find a bronze knife engraved with runes that glower in certain angles of light. This too Mimara takes, as a complement to poor Squirrel.
At last they find it, the golden map-case from Achamian's Dreams.
"It's broken," he murmurs with something resembling horror.
She watches the Wizard pry apart the tubing, then gingerly draw out the vellum sheet curled within.
They emerge from the Turret looking like wraiths for the dust and filth that powders them. Dawn has broken. The walls loom dark and chill against the gold of the eastern sky. Tailings of smoke rise from random clutches of ash and charcoal. Silence rings through the waking chorus of birdsong.
The bier has burned down to a smoking heap. All that remains of Nil'giccas is his nimil hauberk, which lies unscathed save for black scorching. With wary fingers, the Wizard pulls it open, revealing the chalk of a different ash. Mimara gathers it along the edge of her new knife, spoons it with breathless care into the Nonman King's rune-stamped pouch…
"Look," the Wizard says in a cracked voice.
She turns, sees a figure watching them from a cleft in the great outer wall. Sarl, she realizes after a heartbeat of ocular confusion, for hanging below the Sergeant's scrambled grin another face smiles. The Captain, she realizes with more numbness than horror. Sarl has braided the severed head's hair into his beard, so that the face swings about his groin, lips tented about an arrow shaft. A maniacal grimace.
"Sometimes the dead bounce!" she remembers the mad Sergeant crying on the ashen plains. "Sometimes old men awaken behind the eyes of babes! Sometimes wolves…"
Sarl. The last surviving Skin Eater.
She finishes gathering the ash, and the Wizard pulls the nimil shirt from the heap. It smokes as he shakes it. He drapes it over the singed pelts that clad him. Too large, and without hooks or clasps, it hangs as a kind of cloak from his shoulders, black belied by a low, silvery glimmer.
Still propped between stone jaws, Sarl watches them from a distance. Sunlight warms the world beyond him.
Once again they sit knee to knee, as father and daughter. Once again they taste the other's finger. But this time the ash is more white than black, and the strength that shivers through them has a more melancholy tenor. The Captain and the mad Sergeant are still watching them when they turn.
Mimara gazes at him, thinking she should at least call out. But even from a distance she can see the blood painting the creases of his face. And the Captain's mood looks exceedingly foul.
"A real chopper!"
By some miracle an oak leaf falls before her, swinging to and fro through the air. She picks it out of emptiness. Purple lines vein the lobes of waxy green. Yielding to an unaccountable impulse, she takes Cleric's pouch and taps a small pile of ash into the bowl of the leaf, which she then folds around it. Gazing a
t Sarl, she sets the small packet upon a low marble stump jutting from the earth before her-an armless shoulder.
"What are you doing?" Achamian asks.
"I don't know."
The scalper watches them, as taut and intent as any other starving animal. They hear a low-clucking gurgle…
Then horns, Sranc horns, pitch doom across the horizon. Mimara clutches her belly through her armour.
"Come," she says to the old Wizard. "I tire of Sauglish."
INTERLUDE
Ishual
The heroes among us, they are the true slaves. Thrust against the limits of mortality, they alone feel the bite of their shackles. So they rage. So they fight.
We only have as much freedom as we have slack in our chains. Only those who dare nothing are truly free.
— Suortagal, Epimeditations
Late Summer, 20 New Imperial Year (4132 Year-of-the-Tusk), Kuniuri
They flee through the forests and valleys of what was once Kuniuri, more exposed, more fugitive, than at any time in their tumultuous lives. A week passes before the skinnies find them.
Nights of madness follow.
She finds it strange the way they simply appear out of otherwise idyllic forests. Sranc. Famished mobs of them. They are like a nocturnal cancer, poisonous for not belonging. The Wizard explains their manufacture, how in ages lost the Inchoroi used the Tekne to pervert the Bios of the Nonmen. "They coveted the world," he says, "so they fashioned a race that would spare it, creatures that would hunt their foes only, consuming the low things of the earth otherwise."
The fugitive couple cleaves to the sun as much as possible during the days, but they are often attacked regardless. The old Wizard wants to walk above the mayhem, but she refuses to abandon her two Chorae. So each night they search for high places where they can huddle behind his Wards.
It is always the same. The old Wizard bids her to crouch at his side, to take care that she not let her Chorae stray too close to the circuit of his sorcerous defences. And he sings his mad-muttering song, assails their howling rush with wicked lights. They do not stop. They never stop, not even when the smoke of their burning bodies pillars the sky. They throw themselves at the glowing curves, shrieking and wheezing and hacking. Crude axes, hammers, and swords. Loose strips of iron for armour. Gibbering chieftains decked in what totems and heirlooms the brutes recognize. And their deranged faces, indistinguishable from the porcelain perfection of Nil'giccas when expressionless, crazed with seams and wrinkles otherwise, enough to make Sarl seem a smooth-cheeked youth in comparison.
The Wizard lets the abominations gather, until all is threshing madness about them-until it seems the two of them occupy a glowing bubble in Hell. Then, while Mimara hugs the earth, he cuts them down with glittering Compasses of Noshainrau. The slaughter is magnificent and appalling. And yet still they come, night after night, their dog phalluses prodding their dog bellies.
The rare nights when they fail to appear, she dreams of them, night terrors that give voice to the screams she denies herself while awake.
Food is scarce, so much so they sometimes sob for the rare deer the Wizard is able to take down. Once, on the reeded verge of a marsh, he fells a massive, hoary old creature he calls a musk-ox. The smell alone would have made her gag were she still a child of the brothel, let alone the Andiamine Heights. Yet they fall upon the carcass like starving dogs. The mosquitoes are so bad the Wizard raises Wards against them.
Sleep is the rarest of luxuries. They double their ration of Qirri, then double it yet again. She comes to appreciate the subtlety of tyranny, the way it lurches into stark prominence in times of scarcity and withdraws into invisibility in times of plenty. She manages to forget her old misgivings. For all the Wizard's power, they would be dead a hundred times were it not for the Qirri and the illicit strength that is its gift…
Were it not for Nil'giccas.
She whispers prayers for him sometimes, Cleric, even though she knows his soul is irrevocably lost to Hell. There is no harm in prayers.
He screams somewhere, she thinks. His shade.
The attacks begin to abate when the Demua Mountains first serrate the curtains of mist across the horizon. The Wizard's ancient Map makes no sense whatsoever to her eyes. Scroll-work frames the interior, the pale residue of paints that had once illuminated the thing but had long since moulted. Achamian tells her how the ancient Kuniuri, like all peoples, observed customs of representation peculiar to them and them alone. The Map, he says, counts mountains, uses them as markers to find Ishual.
"What do you expect to find?"
"Honeycakes and beer!" he snaps.
The testiness of his old manner is quick to return whenever she raises questions that recall the mad proportions of his gambit. After all the death and toil, the possibility that they will find nothing remains-a fact the old Wizard is loathe to consider.
But she has learned how to weather his moods, just as he has learned how to master hers. They no longer fall into spirals of senseless retribution-at least not as frequently.
"Akka… Come now."
"The truth of Kellhus! I've told you this a hundred times, Mimara-more!"
She glares at him.
Achamian collects himself with a long-drawn breath. "One cannot raise walls against what has been forgotten," he says, reciting a proverb she has heard before. "And nothing is so forgotten as Ishual. For two thousand years it has survived-in the very shadow of Golgotterath, no less!"
She watches him the way she always watches him when he annoys her with the vehemence of his claims. Never, it seems to her, has she known a man more desperate to be believed. She looks down to her belly, which she holds in two palms, murmurs, "Your father can be a fool sometimes…"
" Think, Mimara," he says, balling his fists about his exasperation. As much as he hates discussing Ishual, he despises recalling his paternity more. "The Dunyain sent one son into the wild. One son, and within twenty years he commands all the Three Seas! We are here to remember — nothing more, nothing less. Remember and if need be, raise walls."
"Against the Aspect-Emperor."
"Against the Truth."
Days of peace follow. The mountains pile into prominence on the horizon. They remind her, curiously enough, of the Meneanor Sea in winter, with dark waves arrayed in chaotic ranks, white-capped and cloven. After spending several watches examining the Map and staring across the range, the Wizard decides they have come too far south, so they strike north across the Demua's gullied foundations.
She wonders at her burgeoning pregnancy. In the brothel pregnancy was nothing less than a horrific affliction-suffering for those forced to abort, heartbreak for those who carried to term, since invariably the infant would be taken. What little she knows she has gleaned from her mother when she carried the twins. But where the Empress had continually huffed and complained, Mimara's swollen womb seems little more than a flimsy satchel, she carries it so easily.
The Qirri again, she realizes. She avoids all thought of what the ash might be doing to her child.
She weeps the night she feels the first series of kicks, such is her relief. The old Wizard refuses to place his palm on her belly, and she flies into a fury, a madness unlike any she has suffered. She shouts and throws stones until he finally accedes. Of course the babe has ceased moving.
They happen upon a clutch of deer, and Achamian fells four of them before they can sprint into wooded obscurity. They feast. Then, in preparation for their eventual trek into the mountains, she skins the animals using the ensorcelled knife she found in the Coffers. "Chipmunk," she calls it. The work horrifies her, more for its ease than its bloodiness. She thought she would need to sharpen the blade, its edge felt so rounded, but the Wizard bade her to use it regardless. "Mihtrulic knives possess otherworldly edges," he tells her. "And they cut only according to your desire." He is right about the knife, but it disturbs her, peeling deer like rotted pears.
Draped in furs, they work their way into the mountainous
footings. Since they know nothing of treating pelts, the skins rot even as they warm them. After two days of the Wizard gingerly rolling and unrolling the parchment and peering this way and that-including, alarmingly, behind them-he finally becomes excited, begins muttering, "Yes! Yes!" He raises two fingers to the south, gripes at her until she spies two peaks to the immediate south. "There!" he says. "That mighty ramp of snow climbing between them…"
A glacier. The first she has ever seen.
"The Gate of Ishual."
The horns return that nightfall-a chorus of them, communicating from different points across the forests below. "Mobbing…" Mimara gasps, remembering the madness of the Mop.
They continue fleeing through the dark, relying on the Qirri to carry them. They follow high ridges, running at a ramshackle trot. The stars astound her for their strewn brilliance. The Wizard tries to show her a constellation of ancient fame-the "Flail," he calls it-but she cannot pick out its principals. "Only in my Dreams have I seen it so high in the sky," he says. "Only as Seswatha." They skid down ravines and trip across gorges. They scramble until their fingers bleed. At last they find themselves staggering across sloping moraine, the glacier rearing enormous blue beneath a flaring Nail of Heaven.
They come across a river, which they follow until it breaks into a braid of white blasting streams. The glacier looms ever higher. The Sranc horns, when they blare, always sound incrementally closer.
Their breaths begin piling before them.
They gain the ice just as the sun broaches the low eastern horizon. The ice fields flash into kaleidoscopic life, blues sheeted with white and gold. For all the beauty, the crossing is arduous. Mimara quickly loses count of her falls. But at last they gain the glacier proper. Twice, they cross chasms with inner faces that gleam like mantlets of knives before plunging into blackness. They skirt blue-rimmed pits that rumble with hidden waters. They need only glance over their shoulder to see the Sranc-hundreds upon hundreds, thousands-filtering like some kind of plague across the icefields. The two climb and climb, race across fields of powdered snow, until their legs cease burning and simply become numb, until their hearts hammer like trinkets of tin.
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