"No!" the Nonman King cried.
Coursing like a snake, it bolted through the punishing gauntlet of their sorcery, smashed through the entrance into the pale-glowing hollows beyond.
They pursued it into the breach, climbed as if up the throat of a toppled tower. But the dragon was too quick: they could already hear its shriek score the faraway sky. Climbing. Coughing. Breathless, they found themselves within the ring of the Turret, squinting up at the jagged circle of afternoon brilliance. His heart hammering with mortal violence, the old Wizard finally gained the summit.
Wutteat thrashed in the light of day, throwing up trees and gouts of dirt. It caromed against the Library walls, crashed like a thing thrown into the forest beyond. Trunks and limbs cracked. Over the wall's dusty halo, the crowns of a dozen trees convulsed and vanished. The beast spat wild gouts of fire, uttered shrieks that drove nails into their ears.
And then, suddenly, the dread beast was flying, white and black and golden, its ravaged wings buffeting the forest as though it were wheat. Scales shining, the Father of Dragons soared heavenward, spiralling and smoking like a bird afire. Astounded, the man and the Nonman watched, until finally, moth-small with distance, it vanished into the slow-tumbling flanks of a cloud.
Cleric stood atop the heights of a shattered inner wall, gazing high after the thing. Brush fires raged beyond him, throwing lines of orange across his jaw and cheek. His nimil chain glistened in the dry sunlight, and for the first time the old Wizard saw the faint lines of filigree worked across its innumerable links.
Herons. Herons and lions.
"Triumph!" Achamian cried out in relief and exaltation. "A victory worthy The Sagas!"
He hesitated in sudden realization. What did glory mean, when none could remember it?
And what was life, without glory to illuminate it?
The Nonman turned his profile to him, said nothing.
"You won't remember, will you?"
"Shadow," Nil'giccas replied, resuming his study of the distant sky. "I will remember the shadow it casts…" He turned to regard the Wizard. "Across the grief that follows."
The grief that follows.
The old Wizard matched the Nonman King's gaze for what seemed a hundred heartbeats. Finally, he nodded in slow resignation, scratched his chin beneath what remained of his beard.
"Yes," Achamian said. "Seswatha loved you as well."
Galian makes a noise, a grunt or a sob-she is not sure.
One moment he's an iron shadow grinding flaccid against her. Then he is gone.
She bolts upright, sees him arched across the forest floor, kicking his left foot, desperately clutching at his back. Koll stands above him, hunched and famine-frail, his hands clenching and unclenching. Galian flops onto his stomach, gags and screams. She sees a pommel jutting from below his left shoulder blade, a flower of crimson and black blooming through the links of his hauberk.
A breathless heartbeat passes. Xonghis rushes to assist Galian while Pokwas draws his great tulwar from his waist, sweeps it through the air before falling into his Sword-dancer stance.
"Fucking Stone Hag!" he cries. "I knew I should have cut your throat!"
Still clutching Lord Kosoter's head, Sarl sits rocking on the Captain's inert back, begins cackling. Light sparkles through the screens of foliage beyond him-from the direction of the Holy Library. A roaring whoosh follows…
Pokwas falls upon Koll in sweeping fury. His blade seems like silver ink, sketching sigils through open air. Koll effortlessly threads the gauntlet, ducking, leaping…
The Zeumi Sword-dancer pauses, eyes round in disbelief.
Koll dives to his right, cartwheels across the ground like a crab, toward Sarl and his Captain's draining corpse. The Sergeant scrambles backward.
Koll flits past him, rolls past the Captain's forgotten pack, then comes to his feet brandishing Squirrel. His stance low, his look darts from Pokwas to Xonghis, who has taken up a flanking position, his bow drawn.
More explosions rock the near distance. A titanic roar shivers the sky.
The starved Stone Hag begins laughing, a sound that begins human but ends like screaming wolves. Xonghis releases his shaft. Koll swats with Squirrel but misses. The arrow thuds into his neck.
Koll falls backward but somehow rolls back onto his feet. With his free hand he clutches the shaft. Pulls.
Screams.
The fingers of his face break apart, then fly open.
Mimara lurches to her feet, stumbles to Galian, who lies dying.
Crying out in Zeumi, Pokwas rushes the thing called Koll, his tulwar cutting poetry into the air. Steel rings against steel. Squirrel is nicked but does not shatter. Xonghis lets fly two more arrows. The thing lunges clear the first, but the second catches it high in the thigh. It barely survives the black giant's hollering assault.
Mimara stands breathless. Qirri pulses through her, makes a war-drum of her heart.
Xonghis whirls at the sound of her approach, releases. His arrow whistles past her left ear-a sound like a rip. She plunges Galian's sword into the Imperial Tracker's exposed armpit. She feels his death, the inside of him, communicated through blade and grip.
Beyond their clearing, the forest burns about the silhouette of stumped ruins. Sarl has resumed his phlegmatic howl, his expression crushed into a thousand laughing lines.
The whooshing tulwar catches the thing called Koll mid-leap. It careens through the air, tries to land on its remaining leg, tumbles backward. Closing for the kill, the Zeumi howls in triumph…
Fails to hear her naked approach.
Smoke piled over the derelict fortifications, drawn twisting into the high blue sky. Within the ruined Library, several smaller fires fanned bright in the gusting wind, sending showers of sparks and ash over the old Wizard and the Nonman King.
"You don't have to do this!" Achamian cried.
Still standing upon the wall he had climbed to peer after the dragon, Cleric tore his runed purse from its leather cord. He stared at it meditatively, hefted it in his palm. Achamian felt his heart clutch at his breast, seeing it dandled so near open flame. He realized he has worshipped this thing. The shrivelled folds pinched into creases about its drawstring. The faint impression of weight bulging within, as though it contained a mouse. It seemed absurd that such a low object could become the talisman, the fetish from which the whole expedition had come to hang. A pouch filled with soot.
"No!" Achamian cried.
But it was too late. Cleric bent his head sideways, as if to itch his ear against his shoulder, then swung the pouch upside down. The ashes of Cu'jara Cinmoi poured out in a dun stream. The wind fanned it into ghostly nothingness.
"You don't have to do this!" the old Wizard cried.
The dark eyes fixed him.
"I do…"
"Why? Why?"
"Because I remember no triumph…" He flinched, seemed to lose the thread of his voice. Sudden fury claimed the heights of his expression. "Only betrayal!" he roared. "Heartbreak and ruin!"
A kind of indignation welled through the Wizard, the outrage that overcomes Men whenever absurdities are stacked too high. "No!" he bellowed. "I will name you! I will be your book, and you will read me! You are Nil'giccas! The Last King of Mansions-the greatest of the Siqu!"
The fires seemed to wax at the sound of Cleric's warbling laughter.
"Seswatha!" the Nonman called. "Old dead friend… Will you hear my sermon?"
Achamian could only gaze in disgust and disbelief.
The Nonman muttered blasphemies that filled his eyes and mouth with light. He stepped from the summit and was aloft, climbing a floating arc that took him high above the fires surging through the courtyard.
"'Nil'giccas!' you call- beseech! as if trying to awaken some truth slumbering within me."
Flames roiled about the silhouettes of trees. Smoke wreathed him. Heat rippled across his hanging form. And the Wizard realized that he was actually going to attack.
A Quya Maste
r of old, a hero of wars older than the Tusk, made ready his murder.
"You think Nil'giccas is something I have lost!" the Nonman King called down. "And therefore something that I can recover!"
Achamian was weary. He was bruised and he was burned-even well rested and whole, he would not dare a contest such as this. At least he was practised, thanks to the dragon. He could feel the Cants and Wards within him, tingling weaves of arcane meaning, hanging like possibilities…
Yet he did not strike.
"You forget," Cleric shouted, "that before the Nonman King's passing, I did not exist!"
The figure continued floating on a rising arc, one that took Achamian as its compass point. Sheets of stone toppled into the inferno below, kicking constellations of sparks in the wind.
"I can no more recover him than you can recover your mother's virgin womb."
Achamian stood rooted and frail before the rising conflagration. Strike! something howled within him. Strike now!
"I am Incariol!" the Nonman screamed. " Cleric! And you shall not survive my lesson!"
But instead of attacking, the old Wizard arrayed himself with Wards, cloaked himself with shining panes of light. He had flattered himself after the underworld debacle of Cil-Aujas, told himself that perhaps Cleric was not so mighty, that the rot that had devoured so much of his soul had blunted his meanings as well…
Now he was not so sure.
Strike, you fool!
"You think me the cripple!" Nil'giccas cried. "You think Cleric the ruin of someone whole! But you are wrong, Seswatha! I am the Truth!"
The Nonman King had climbed a half-spiral above burning bark and foliage, over headless towers and blunted walls. Now he hung motionless before the monumental frame of the Turret.
"We are Many!" the Erratic roared. " We are legion! What you call your soul is nothing but a confusion, an inability! A plurality that cannot count the moments that divide it and so calls itself One."
His eyes flared white. Words boomed out, words that made a crimson globe of his head and face. The sound of vacant space ripping, a growl in the deepest pocket of the ear. Abstractions lashed the open air between them, wracked Achamian's Wards. The old Wizard raised arms against the glittering violence.
"Only when memory is stripped away!" Cleric cried out, the glow fading from his eyes. "Only then is Being revealed as pure Becoming! Only when the past dies can we shrug aside the burden that is our Soul!"
Fractal lights tangled the figure's outstretched arms. More arcane words, reverberating across ethereal surfaces. More flashing Abstractions, cracking and hissing across the glowing shells that shielded the Wizard. Fire consumed the thronging scrub and trees. Fire garnished the truncated walls. About them, the famed courtyards of the Holy Library had become burning pits.
"Only then does the Darkness sing untrammelled!" Cleric cried. "Only then!"
"And yet you seek memories!" the Wizard cried, at last delivered to tears.
"To be! Being is not a choice!"
"But you claim Being is deception!"
"Yes!"
"But that is nonsense! Madness!"
Again the Nonman King laughed.
"That is Becoming."
The forests are burning.
Pokwas jerks around so quickly that the pommel is torn from her hands. You! his glaring eyes shout. Blood spills from his strange smile.
"The Slog of Slogs!" the mad Sergeant howls in their periphery. "I told you, boys! I told you we would stack them!"
She retreats before the Sword-dancer's groping lurch. He skids to his knees, sways over sheeted leaves. His eyes find Galian, then Xonghis. He looks to her with childlike curiosity. Blood bubbles to his lips.
"I em-embrace…" he gasps. "I–I…"
He slumps to his side, flops across the ground.
She steps around him, stumbles to stand over the thing called Koll.
"Why?" she cries, and a cold part of her is surprised by the salt and heat of her tears. "Why would you save me? Sacrifice yourself! I am the daughter of your enemy! Your enemy!"
"Kill… me…" it coughs.
"Tell me! Soma!"
"Mim… Mim…"
"Who? Who is your handler?"
Something hooks her stomach. The madness of what just happened, the debasement, the transcendence, has blinded her to the obscenity. This thing before her has been cut from the meat of the World. Were it sorcerous, it would have possessed the numb glaze of unreality. It is raw and abhorrent instead. Suddenly she cannot look away from the mastications of its mouth, the way the lipless gums climb unbroken to the lidless eyes, to the air-clawing digits, which are furred and skinned and ridged with apparently random fragments of face.
Revulsion does not so much course as slam through her.
"I beg…" it gasps. "Beg you…"
Bile rises to the back of her throat. She draws away from the thing, lurches backward, falls to her rump, catches herself on a single thrown arm…
Smoke twines through the air between them, a translucent veil. Through it, she watches spasms rock the skin-spy.
Sarl rushes from nowhere, bent and bandied. He lands on the creature, drives his sword square through its chest. The thing clutches at him, but the mad Sergeant wrenches his blade with vicious strength, back and forth, as if testing a hated wagon's brake.
"Yeeesss!" he screams up to the broken canopy. "Yeeessss!"
The mad Sergeant turns to her with canines bared. His eyes are crimson slits. Blood sops his beard.
"A real chopper!"
The thrashing weakens beneath him. The facial digits fall slack at the same instant. Sarl lowers his cheek against the fist he holds atop his pommel. Gasping, he wipes a filthy cuff across his face, manages only to smear the blood. He releases his sword, then with a chuckle like a dog's growl, he draws his knife. He crawls over the creature, sways above it with a knee on either of its shoulders.
She watches dumbstruck.
"Spider-face," he grunts, hacking and sawing with his knife. A manic grin squeezes his eyes into two more creases. "A thousand gold Kellics at least!"
Madness, is all she can think.
She runs, heedless of her bearings or her nakedness.
Away. She must get away from all the madness.
The whole World burns.
And so they battled, the Gnostic Wizard uttering no Cants, the Quyan Mage speaking no Wards. Broken walls encircled them, surrounded in turn by the oily tumble of smoke and trees wrapped in shining flame.
Hanging high before the Turret, the inhuman Mage blazed with arcane meaning, unleashed a logic raised to killing light.
His feet braced against the earth, the human Wizard sang his unholy counterargument, wrapping himself in glowing spheres, long-winded pyramidal forms, planes arrayed to deflect dread energies outward.
The First Quyan Fold. The Ribs of Gotagga.
Burning cables. Sparks so brilliant they blinded. Concussions so immense they blew sheets of debris from the crests of the surrounding walls. Blisters of warding light cracked, slumped before sheering into nothingness.
And the dread voices droned on, unravelling into echoes too cavernous to be called sound, ringing from Heaven's vault as if it loomed as low as a cellar ceiling.
Achamian shouted between gasps of fiery air. He raised Ward after Ward, only to see them smashed, swept away.
The Third Concentric. The ever-risky Cross of Arches.
But the Quya Master was like a sun above him, glaring with destruction, cracking his defences with wicked and relentless incandescence. Beating. Hammering. Scissoring. A rain of cataclysms. Until Achamian was breathless and stammering, able to cough out only the lowest and quickest Wards.
For the briefest of instants, the underworld angel above him paused.
"Madness!" the Wizard cried out in sobbing frustration. "This is not you!"
Fire crackled and hissed, filling the heartbeat of silence between them.
"Can't you see!" the Nonman King cried. "You
r appeals only incite me! You will die and I will remember! Because all you do is reach for the love I bear you!"
"No! I will not strike you!"
The face of Nil'giccas resolved from the dwindling glare. The setting sun rimmed his scalp with sickles of gold. "I remember… I remember your name…"
Light filled his howling mouth-blasphemous meaning…
At long last the Wizard struck.
An Odaini Concussion Cant. Simple and low, meant only to stun-to knock back into reason perhaps. But Nil'giccas had floated above sharp ruin…
He plummeted from on high, broke about a low spine of stone. The ground fires caught and consumed him.
The old Wizard puffed out the flames with a sorcerous cry. He hobbled around blocks and between flanged foundations, swallowing at the sobs that wracked him. Streamers of smoke twisted and dissolved about his passage.
He found the Nonman King prostrate across a shoulder-high segment of wall, bent as though he had half fallen from bed. Black scored his milk-white skin. Blisters puckered his cheek and scalp. Blood sopped the heron and lion links of his nimil harness. He seemed that much more broken, given the perfection of his form.
"What just happened?" Nil'giccas gasped, hacking gouts of blood with the words. His lips worked about the glistening arc of his fused teeth. "Wh-what just…"
"You found glory," the old Wizard croaked. He coughed as if at some fact too acrid to be breathed. He reached out to clutch the Nonman's cheek, saw Death swirl up in the eyes of his ancient friend. He watched the spark of sight dull into sightlessness. Cleric's body heaved, then settled, as if finally coming to peace with its own anguished corporeality.
Blood pooled in the mortises.
Burned, battered, the old Wizard looked about, from the wreckage of the Library out to the blazing forests of Sauglish. This was how it would end, he realized… The was how all of it would end.
Heartbreak and fire.
She runs.
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