Something abyssal.
The gate swam in the Wizard's eyes, not so much a portal as a hole.
Without warning, Cleric's light waxed, bleached the heights of stone. Shadows crawled from the great wolf snouts hanging above. The Nonman turned before the entrance, blasted by illumination. Several raised their hands against the glare.
His voice seemed to boom into the surrounding darkness.
"Kneel…"
The Skin Eaters stared at him dumbstruck, watched as he slumped to his knees. For a heartbeat his eyes glared without focus, then he looked to the Men standing about him, his expression slowly tightening. Pained lines climbed his scalp.
"Kneel!" he shrieked.
Sarl cackled, though the smile that broke his barbed goatee seemed far from amused. "Cleric. Come now…"
"This was the war that broke our back!" the Nonman thundered. "This… This! All the Last Born, sires and sons, gathered beneath the copper banners of Siol and her flint-hearted King. Silverteeth! Our Tyrant-Saviour…" He rolled his head back and laughed. Two lines of white marked the tears that scored his cheeks. "This is our…" The flash of fused teeth. "Our triumph."
He shrunk, seemed to huddle into his cupped palms. Great silent sobs wracked him.
Looks were exchanged, short-lived with embarrassment. There was something eerie about the light, apart from the way it hung sourceless above them, something that rendered each of them in a distinct cast of brilliance. Perhaps it was the black walls, or the curls of white refracted across the polish of innumerable figures, but none of the shadows seemed to match up. It was as if everyone stood in the unique light of some different morning, noon, or twilight. Perhaps it was his race, or maybe it was his pose, but only Cleric seemed to belong.
Lord Kosoter crouched at his side, placed a hand on his broad back, began muttering something inaudible. Kiampas stared at the floor. Sarl looked about, eyes darting, apparently more unnerved by this act of intimacy than by the substance of Cleric's words.
"Yessss!" the Nonman hissed, as though grasping something essential and overlooked.
"This is just a fucking place," Sarl growled. "Just another fucking place…"
All of them could feel it, Achamian realized, looking from face to stricken face. Some kind of dolour, like the smoke of some hidden, panicked fire, pinching them, drawing their thoughts tight… But there was no glamour he could sense. Even the finest sorceries carried some residue of their artifice, the stain of the Mark. But there was nothing here, save the odour of ancient magicks, long dead.
Then, with a bolt of horror, he understood: The tragedy that had ruined these halls stalked them still. Cil-Aujas was a topos. A place where hell leaned heavy against the world.
He turned to Mimara, surprised to find himself gripping her hand. "Haunted," he murmured in reply to her wondering eyes. "This place-"
"Listen," Kiampas called, apparently in the grip of some abrupt resolution. "Stow your tongues-all of you! You saw the marks at the gate, all the companies that have vanished into this place. Granted, they didn't have Cleric, they didn't have a guide, but the fact remains they vanished. Maybe they lost their way, or maybe the skinnies got them. Either way, this is a slog, boys, as deadly as any other. From here on in, we march at the ready, you understand?"
"He's right," Xonghis called from the gloom to their rear. He was crouched near the wall, his Jekki pack high on his shoulders, his mailed forearms pressed against his knees. He reached to the ground before him, raised a long bone from the dust, something that could have belonged to a dog. "Dead skinny," he said. He held it to the light, then peered through it like a tube: The knobs at either end had been snapped off. He turned to the rest of the company, shrugged. "Something was hungry."
The scalpers looked around, cursed at the sight of bones scattered everywhere, like the remains of some forgotten flood, sticks beneath silt. Lord Kosoter continued to mutter in Cleric's ear, a grinding discourse, full of hate. The words "miserable wretch" climbed into clarity. Achamian found himself staring into the black portal between the towering wolves, expecting, any moment now, something…
When he blinked, he saw yammering figures from his Dreams.
"Sranc?" one of the Galeoth scalpers cried-Hoat. "What eats Sranc?" He had to be the youngest of the Skin Eaters, his body still hooked by an adolescent ranginess.
Every one of them, Achamian realized, every company that had dared these halls. All of them had paused before this broken gate and suffered the very same premonition. And still they marched onward, carrying their war, whatever it was, deeper, deeper…
Never to be seen again.
"Where are the doors?" Galian blurted. He looked around in the quarrelsome manner that some use to conceal their fright. "What does it mean? Gates without doors?"
But questions always came too late. Events had to be pushed passed the point of denial; only then could the pain of asking begin.
They spent their first night in the grand chamber beyond the Wolf Gate. Achamian hung his sorcerous light high in the air, an abstract point of brilliance that illuminated the ceiling and the finned capitals of the pillars ascending about them. The light seemed to creep down, dim enough to be shut out by closed eyes, expansive enough to provide the illusion of security. Alien images glared from on high, their recesses inked in utter black.
True to his word, Kiampas organized shifts and posted sentries along their perimeter of light. Cleric sat alone on the dust and stone, gazing into the passageway they would take upon waking. Lord Kosoter stretched across his mat and seemed to fall instantly asleep, even though Sarl sat cross-legged at his side, muttering inanity after inanity, pausing only to cackle at the turns of his own wit. The rest of the company formed sullen clots across the floor, tossing on their mats or sitting and talking in low tones. Their crowd of mules stood in the nearby shadows, looking absurd against the surrounding grandeur.
The air remained chill enough to fog deep exhalations.
Achamian sat next to Mimara with his back against one of the columns. For the longest time she seemed transfixed by the light, staring endlessly at its silver flare.
"The script," she said, her voice thick from disuse. "Can you read it?"
"No."
An inaudible snort. "The all-knowing Wizard…"
"No one can read it."
"Ah… I was worried I had misjudged you."
He looked at her prepared to scowl, but the mischief in her eyes demanded he chuckle. A great weight seemed to fall through him.
"Remember this, Mimara."
"Remember what?"
"This place."
"Why?"
"Because it's old. Older than old."
"Older than him?" she asked, nodding toward the figure of Cleric sitting in the pillared gloom.
His momentary sense of generosity drained away. "Far older."
A moment passed, suffused by the low tingle of repose in perilous circumstances-a dripping sense of doom. Mimara continued her furtive examination of Cleric.
"What's wrong with him?" she eventually whispered.
He did not want to think of the Nonman, Achamian realized, let alone speak of him. Travelling with an Erratic was every bit as perilous as traveling these halls, if not more so. A fact that begged the forbidden question: How much would Achamian risk to see his obsession through? How many souls would he doom?
His mood blackened.
"Hush," he said, frowning in habitual irritation. What was she doing here? Why did she plague him? Everything! Twenty years of toil! Perhaps even the world! She risked it all for a hunger she could never sate. "They can hear far better than we can."
"Tell me in a tongue he can't understand then," she replied, speaking flawless Ainoni.
A long look, too sour to be surprised. "Ainon," he said. "Is that where they took you?"
The curiosity faded from her eyes. She slouched onto her mat and turned without a word-as he knew she would. Silence spread deep and mountainous through the graven
hollows. He sat rigid.
When he glanced up he was certain he saw Cleric's face turn away from them…
Back to the impenetrable black of Cil-Aujas.
The Library of Sauglish burned beneath him in his Dream, its towers squat and monumental within garlands of flame. Dragons banked about mighty plumes of smoke. The glitter of sorcery sparked across the heights-the blinding calligraphy of the Gnosis.
Its wings threshing the air, Skafra bared corroded teeth, shrieked out to the horizon, to the whirlwind roping black across the distant plains. A rumble deeper than a final heartbeat.
And Achamian hung unseen, an insubstantial witness… Alone.
Where? Where was Seswatha?
They found the mummified corpse of a boy no more than a hundred paces down the passageway Cleric had chosen for them. He was curled as though about a kitten, his back to the wall. He had been at most thirteen or fourteen summers old, Xonghis estimated. The Imperial Tracker had no idea how long he had lain there, but he pointed to the propitiatory coins that had been set on his hip and thigh: three full coppers, two grey with dust, one still bright-gifts for the Ur-Mother-not the coins, but the acts of surrendering them. Apparently others had passed this way as well. With the rest of the company clustered about him, Soma fell to one knee and added a fourth, whispering a prayer in his native tongue. His eyes sought out Mimara afterwards, as though seeking confirmation of his gallantry.
"You need to watch that one," Achamian murmured to her as they continued down the corridor. They had not spoken since waking, and he found himself regretting the way he had cut short their conversation the previous night. It seemed absurd, offering words like coins in the bowels of a mountain, but the small things never went away, no matter how tremendous the circumstance. Not for him, anyway.
"Not really," she said with a weariness Achamian found vaguely alarming. Their was peril in feminine exhaustion-men understood this instinctively. "It's usually the quiet ones you need to watch. The ones waiting for the door to clap behind them…"
The sound of other voices welled into her silence. A debate had broken out regarding the fate and provenance of the dead child. Strangely enough, the boy and the mystery of his end had inspired a return to normalcy of sorts.
"Ainon taught me that," she added with reassuring bitterness. "You know… where they took me."
The expedition marched on, a collection of pale faces in the long murk. The conversation, quite inexplicably, turned to which trades were the hardest on the hands. Galian insisted that fishermen had the worst of it, what with all the knots and nets. Xonghis described the cane fields of High Ainon, endless miles of them along the upper Secharib Plains, and how the field slaves always had bleeding fingers. Everyone agreed that if you included feet, fullers were the sorriest lot.
"Imagine marching in piss day in and day out-and without moving a cubit!"
Then they started on beggars, trading tales of this or that wretch. Soma's claim to have seen a beggar without arms or legs was met with general derision. Soma was always claiming things. "So how did he pick up his coins?" one of the younger wits asked. "With his pecker?" In the spirit of mockery, Galian went one better, saying he saw a headless beggar when he was in the Imperial Army. "For the longest time we thought he was a sack of ripe turnips, until he began begging, that is…"
"And what did he beg for?" Oxwora asked. The giant's voice always seemed to boom, no matter how low he pitched it.
"To be turned right side up, what else?"
Laughter crashed through the abandoned halls. Only Soma remained unimpressed.
"How could he speak without a head?"
"You seem to manage well enough!"
A cackling swell. The crew always enjoyed a good joke at Soma's expense.
"In Zeьm-" Pokwas began.
"The beggars give you money," Galian interrupted. "We know."
"Not at all." The Sword-Dancer laughed. "They trek into the Wilds to skin skinnies…"
A general cry of outrage and laughter.
"Which explains all the silver you owe me," Oxwora exclaimed.
And on it went.
Judging by her expressions, Mimara found the banter terribly amusing, a fact not lost on the scalpers-Somandutta in particular. Achamian, however, found it difficult to concede more than a smile here and there, usually at turns that escaped the others. He could not stop pondering the blackness about them, about how garish and exposed they must sound to those listening in the deeps. A gaggle of children.
Someone listened. Of that much he was certain.
Someone or something.
With Lord Kosoter at his side, Cleric led them through a veritable labyrinth. Corridors. Halls. Galleries. Some struck as straight as a rule, others wound in the random pose of worms suspended in water, or like the writing of weevils beneath the bark of dead trees. All of them hummed with the enormity of the mountain they plumbed: the walls seemed to bow, the floors buckle, the ceilings tingled with crushing weight. At some point, their entombment had become palpable. Cil-Aujas became a world of wedged things, of great collapses, immense torsions, all held in check by stone and ancient cunning. More than once, Achamian found himself gasping, as though breathing against some irresistible grip. The air tasted of tombs-stone joists and age-long motionlessness-but it was plentiful enough. Even still, something animal within him cried suffocation.
It was the lack of sky, he decided. He tried not to think of his earlier premonitions.
The banter dwindled into silence, leaving the arrhythmic percussion of footfalls and the sonorous complaints of this or that mule in its wake.
The sound of water rose so gradually out of the silence that it seemed sudden when they finally noticed it. The walls and ceiling of the passage they followed flared outward, like the mouth of an intricately carved horn, becoming ever more dim in the twin points of sorcerous light. After several steps, the walls fell away altogether, and they stepped into booming space. Through membranes of mist, the lights reached out, paling, revealing hanging scarps and cavernous spaces-a great chasm of some kind. The floor became a kind of stone catwalk, slicked with rust-coloured moulds. Water tumbled beneath, a rush of diamonds, broken only by the shadow of the catwalk, leaping and wheeling into void. Achamian found himself looking away, dizzied by how its sheeting plunge made his footing drift. He heard the mules kick and scream in the train immediately behind him. Near the head of their long file, he could see Cleric's light gather against the cavern's far heights, then fold into the tubular hollows of another corridor.
Except that it wasn't another corridor, but the entrance to some kind of shrine. The room was neither large nor small-about the size of a temple prayer floor-with a low circular ceiling spoked like a wheel. Friezes panelled the walls-were-animals with multiple heads and limbs-but not to the convoluted depths found elsewhere. The scalpers, Achamian could tell, thought them representations of devils: More than a few whispered homespun charms. But he knew better, recognizing in the figures a sensibility kindred to that of the Wolf Gate. It wasn't monsters that glared from the walls, he knew, but rather the many poses of natural beasts compressed into one image. Before they began forgetting, the Nonmen had been obsessed with the mysteries of time, particularly with the way the present seemed to bear the past and the future within it.
Long-lived, they had worshipped Becoming… the bane of Men.
While the company milled beneath the low ceilings, Sarl and Kiampas organized the replenishment of their water supply. The leather buckets they normally used to scoop water from gorges were unpacked. A relay was set up, and soon armed men were squatting all across the chamber filling skins. Achamian paced the walls in the meantime, studying the graven images with Mimara in tow. He showed her where innumerable ancient penitents had worn indentations into the walls-with their foreheads, he explained.
When she asked him whom they prayed to, he cast about looking for Cleric, once again loath to say anything the Erratic might overhear. He found him standing a
t the far end of the chamber, his bald head bowed and gleaming. A great statue loomed before him, a magisterial Nonman hewn from the walls, at once hanging with arms and legs outstretched-a pose curiously reminiscent of the Circumfix-and sitting rigid upon a throne, his knees pressed together beneath flattened hands. Mould had stained the stone black and crimson, but otherwise the figure seemed untouched, blank eyes staring out. Rather than answer Mimara's query, Achamian simply motioned for her to follow, pressing past the crowded scalpers toward Cleric.
"Tir hoila ishrahoi," the Erratic was saying, his eyes and forehead covered by a long-fingered hand-the Nonman gesture of homage. There could be no doubt he spoke to the statue, rather than prayed to something beyond.
"Coi ri pirith mutoi'on…"
Achamian paused and, for reasons he did not understand, started translating, speaking in a low murmur. Compared to the harmonic resonances of Cleric, his voice sounded as coarse as yarn.
"You, soul of splendour, whose arm hath slain thousands…"
"Tir miyil oitossi, kun ri mursal arilil hi… Tir…"
"You, eye of wrath, whose words hath cracked mountains… You…"
"Tirsa hir'gingall vo'is?"
"Where is your judgment now?"
The Nonman began laughing in his mad, chin-to-breast way. He looked to Achamian, smiled his inscrutable white-lipped smile. He leaned his head as though against some swinging weight. "Where is it, eh, Wizard?" he said in the mocking way he often replied to Sarl's jokes. His features gleamed like hand-worn soapstone.
"Where does all the judgment go?"
Then without warning, Cleric turned to forge alone into the black, drawing his spectral light like a wall-brushing gown. Achamian gazed after him, more astounded than mystified. For the first time, it seemed, he had seen Cleric for what he was… Not simply a survivor of this ruin, but of a piece with it.
A second labyrinth.
Mimara stepped into the Nonman's place, apparently to better peer at the statue. Their water-skins filled, the scalpers had begun filing past them, their looks unreadable. Mimara seemed so small and beautiful in the shadow of their warlike statue that Achamian found himself standing as though to shield her.
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