The Judging eye

Spring, 20 New Imperial Year (4132 Year-of-the-Tusk), South of Mount Aenaratiol

Age. Age and darkness.

For the peoples of the Three Seas, The Chronicle of the Tusk was the ultimate measure of the ages. Nothing was more ancient. Nothing could be. Yet the Skin Eaters found themselves walking halls older than even the language of the Tusk, let alone the ivory into which it had been cut. No one had to tell them this, though they sometimes glanced at Achamian as if pleading to be told otherwise. They could see it scrawling through the light about them. They could smell it hanging in the dust. They could feel it creeping through meek bones and chastened hearts.

Here was a glory that no human, tribe or nation, could hope to match, and their hearts balked at the admission. Achamian saw it floating in their faces: lips drawn into lines, teeth set in slack jaws, eyes roaming without focus, the vacant look of blowhards confronting their tolly. Even these men, so quick to celebrate sin and debauchery, had thought the blood of Gods coursed through their veins.

Cil-Aujas, for all its silence, boomed otherwise.

What Achamian had thought a vast entrance gallery turned out to be a subterranean road. The line of walkers quickly coalesced into two bands, one following Cleric and his hanging point of sorcerous light in the lead, the other crowding Achamian and his Surrillic Cant of Illumination. For a time they seemed to shuffle more than stride, a gawking band staring up and around, painfully aware of their trespass. Everyone cringed at the sound of voices. Fragments of what might have been bone gravelled their steps. Dust fogged their ankles.

Images. Images planked every surface, virginal as exhumed graves, soaked in the gloom of unwitnessed ages. The style mirrored that of the Obsidian Gate: the walls banded with layered pictorial reliefs, the outer set like impossibly elaborate grillwork over the inner, vaulting some forty feet. The sedimentary grain, whorls of charcoal black veined with grey, made it obvious that it had been hewn from living rock. Whole sections shone like brown and black glass. Pinned between their passing points of light, the walls literally seethed with counterfeit motion.

It was the absence of weathering that distinguished the hall from the Gate. The detail baffled the eye, from the mail of the Nonmen warriors to the hair of the human slaves. Scars striping knuckles. Tears lining supplicants' cheeks. Everything had been rendered with maniacal intricacy. The effect was too lifelike, Achamian decided, the concentration too obsessive. The scenes did not so much celebrate or portray, it seemed, as reveal, to the point where it hurt to watch the passing sweep of images, parade stacked upon parade, entire hosts carved man for man, victim for victim, warring without breath or clamour.

Pir-Pahal, Achamian realized. The entire hall was dedicated to it, a great and ancient battle fought between the Nonmen and the Inchoroi. He could even recognize the principals: the traitor, Nin'janjin, and his sovereign, Cu'jara Cinmoi, the Nonman Emperor. The mighty hero, Gin'gыrima, with arms like a man's thighs. And the Inchoroi King, Sil, armoured in corpses, flanked by his inhuman kinsmen, winged monstrosities with wicked limbs, pendulous phalli, and skulls grafted into skulls.

Achamian nearly stumbled when he saw the Heron Spear raised high in Sil's articulated arms.

"Those things…" Mimara whispered from his side.

"Inchoroi," Achamian muttered. With a kind of wonder, he thought of Kellhus and his Great Ordeal, of their mad march across the wasted North to Golgotterath. The war depicted on these walls, he realized, had never ended, not truly.

Ten thousand years of woe.

"These are their memories," Achamian found himself saying aloud. "The Nonmen cut their past into the walls… as a way to make it as immortal as their bodies."

The faces of several scalpers turned toward him, some in expectation, others in annoyance. Speaking seemed a kind of sacrilege, like ill-willed gossip in the light of a funeral pyre.

On and on they walked, deeper into the bowels of the mountain. Miles passed without a terminus or a fork, just warring walls, stamped as deep as outstretched arms. The way before them resolved out of obscurity. Behind, the light of the entrance dwindled into a star, solitary in a field of absolute black.

Then with horrifying suddenness, a second gate welled out of the darkness. Several gasps echoed through the stale air. The company stumbled to a halt.

Two wolves towered before them, standing like men to either side of an unbarred portal, eyes bulging, tongues lolling. The contrast was dramatic. Gone was the intricacy of the underworld road, replaced by a more ancient, more totemic sensibility. Each wolf was three wolves, or the same wolf at three different times, the graven heads warped into three distinct postures, their stylized expressions ranging from sorrow to savagery, as if the ancient artisans had rendered an entire animal existence in a single moment of stone. Writing ringed the casings of each, densely packed in vertical columns, pictograms like numeric slashes, at once elegant and primitive. Auja-Gilcыnni, Achamian realized, the so-called First Tongue, so old that even the Nonmen had forgotten how to read or speak it-which meant this gate had to be as ancient to Nonmen as the Tusk was to Men. Everything about it spoke of rude souls awakening to the subtleties of artistic wonder…

But the fascination wilted as quickly as it had sparked. Achamian found himself swaying on his feet, light-headed, as if he had leapt too quickly from a slumber. Mimara also stumbled, brought both hands to her forehead, held them like a tent over her brows. Several mules spooked, stamped and jerked against their ropes. There was more than the ache of ages in the air. There was… something else, a lack of some kind, running perpendicular to the geometry of the real, bowing its lines with its cavernous suck. Something that whispered from the blackness between the graven beasts.

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 at 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.

"Who is it?" she asked.

The underworld cataract thundered up through the surrounding stone.

"The greatest of the Nonman Kings," Achamian replied, reaching out two fingers to touch the cold stone face. It was strange, the heedless way that statues stared and stared, their eyes bound to the panoply of dead ages. "Cu'jara Cinmoi… the Lord of Siцl, who led the Nine Mansions against the Inchoroi."

"How can you tell?" she asked, cocking her head the same as her mother. "They all look the same… Exactly the same."

"Not to each other…" He sketched a line through the mould across the Nonman King's polished cheek.

"But how can you tell?"

"Because it's written, carved into the rim of the throne…"

He drew back his fingers, pinched the silken residue between them.

"Come," the Wizard said, deliberately cutting off her next question. When she persisted, he snapped, "Leave an old man to think!"

They had palmed their lives, as the Conriyans were fond of saying. They had palmed them and given them to a Nonman-to an Erratic… To someone who was not only insane, but literally addicted to trauma and suffering. Incariol… Who was he? And more importantly, what would he do to remember?

Kuss voti lura gaial, the High Norsirai would say of their Nonmen allies during the First Apocalypse. "Trust only the thieves among them." The more honourable the Nonman, the more likely he was to betray-such was the perversity of their curse. Achamian had read accounts of Nonmen murdering their brothers, their sons, not out of spite, but because their love was so great. In a world of smoke, where the years tumbled into oblivion, acts of betrayal were like anchors; only anguish could return their life to them.

The present, the now that Men understood, the one firmly fixed at the fore of what was remembered, no longer existed for the Nonmen. They could find its semblance only in the blood and screams of loved ones.

Beyond the Cujaran Shrine they descended into a maze of desolate habitations. The darkness became liquid, it seemed so deep, and their light became the only air. Walls reared into visibility as though squeezed of ink. Doorway after doorway gaped to either side of them, revealing lanes of interior floor, featureless for the dust, swinging in counterpoise to their sorcerous lights. Stairwells climbed into rubble. Stone faces watched with callous immobility.

Eventually they came to a subterranean thoroughfare, one of several that wound along natural occlusions in Aenaratiol's heart. Seswatha had walked these, two thousand years previous, and Achamian found himself mourning the wrack and ruin. This was where the Ishroi had stacked their palaces, street upon street, climbing the sides of each fissure. Enormous pitch lanterns had burned in the open spaces, suspended in webs of chain. Gold and silver foils had skinned the fluted walls. Fountains had flowed, their waters like ropes of refracted fire.

Now all was dust and dark. For the first time, it seemed to Achamian, the company grasped the dread scale of their undertaking. It was one thing to crowd halls hunched against the mountain above them, it was quite another to file through hollows as vast as this, a thread of light and furtive movement. Where before the dark had enclosed them, now it exposed… Anything, it seemed, might descend upon them.

They made camp next to the wreckage of a collapsed lantern wheel. Bronze bars curved like ribs, reaching as high as small trees. A massive three-faced head had crashed from some unseen perch above, forming a barricade of sorts not so far away. The more daring scalpers explored the doorways and passages along the short section of street between, but only as far as the white light would take them. The rest broke into tired clots, making seats of the debris or simply sitting upon the powdered floor. Some could do no more than ponder their shadows.

Achamian found himself with Galian and Pokwas. All the Skin Eaters were sleeping in their armour by this point. Galian wore a hauberk of crude-ringed Galeoth mail, like many others, only belted and cinched in the Imperial fashion. Pokwas wore a shirt of fine Zeьmi steel, which had been patched on his right arm and left abdomen with sections of cruder Galeoth links. Over this, across his collar and shoulders, he wore the traditional Sword-Dancer halter, but the plates were too waxy to reflect much more than lines of white and dark. The silvering had been scrubbed away long ago.

From the rehearsed character of their questions, Achamian could tell they had decided to corner him sometime earlier. They wanted to know about dragons, particularly the possibility that one might reside in the vast galleries beneath their feet. The old Wizard wasn't surprised: Ever since Kiampas's outburst at the Obsidian Gate, he had overheard the word "dragon" or its Galeoth cognate, "huцrka," at least a dozen times.

"Men have little to fear from dragons," he explained. "Without the will of the No-God, they are lazy, selfish creatures. We Men are too much trouble for them. Kill one of us today, and tomorrow you have a thousand hounding you."

"So there are dragons out there?" Galian asked. The former Imperial Columnary was the nimble sort, like Sarl, perhaps, only tempered with Nansur sensibility. Where the sergeant perpetually squinted, Galian's eyes were clear, even if they promised to frost at the slightest provocation. Pokwas, on the other hand, possessed that warm-hearted confidence that seemed to belong exclusively to men with quick wits and big hands. Unlike Galian, he was someone you only had to befriend once.

"Certainly," Achamian replied. "Many Wracu survived the First Apocalypse, and they're as immortal as the Nonmen… But like I said, they avoid Men."

"And if," Galian pressed, "we were to wander into one's lair…"

The Wizard shrugged. "It would simply wait for us to leave, if it sensed any strength in us at all."

"Even if-?"

"He's saying they're not like wild animals," Pokwas interrupted. "Bears or wolves would attack because they don't know better. But dragons know… Isn't that right?"

"Yes. Dragons know."

Achamian found himself speaking against a queer reluctance, one that he confused with shyness at first. Some time passed before he realized that it was in fact shame. He didn't want to be like these unruly men, much less respect them. Even more, he didn't want their trust or their admiration, things that both men had obviously granted him days ago, given the way they had risked their lives for his lie.

"Tell me," Pokwas said, staring with an interest that seemed almost threatening for its intensity. "What happened to the Nonmen?" Whether it was the way he steered his voice or the wariness in his eyes, Achamian knew that the Sword-Dancer was every bit as worried about Cleric as he.

"I thought I already told that story."

"He means what happened to their race," Galian said. "Why have they dwindled so?"

A momentary flash of cruelty passed through the old Wizard, not for them as men, but for their beliefs. "You can look to your Tusk for that account," he said, taking peevish relish in the word "your." "They're the False Men, remember? Cursed of the Gods. Our ancient fathers destroyed many a Mansion as great as this." In his soul's eye he could see them, the Prophets of the Tusk, as stern and as spare as the words they would carve into ivory, leading hide-clad savages through deep halls of glory, calling out in guttural tongues, murdering those who had been their slavers.

"But I thought their back had already been broken," Pokwas said. "That the Five Tribes came upon them in their twilight."

"True."

"So what happened?"

"The Inchoroi came…"

"You mean the Consult?" Galian asked.

Achamian stared at the man, not quite stunned, but speechless all the same. That a mere scalper could mention the Consult with the same familiarity as he might mention any great and obvious nation seemed beyond belief. It was a sign, he realized, of just how profoundly the world had changed during his exile. Before, when he still wore the robes of a Mandate Schoolman, all the Three Seas had laughed at him and his dire warnings of the Second Apocalypse. Golgotterath. The Consult. The Inchoroi. These had been the names of his disgrace, utterances that assured the mockery and condescension of any who might listen. But now…

Now they were religion… The holy gospel of the Aspect-Emperor.

Kellhus.

"No," he said, feeling that peculiar wariness when one crossed uncertain lines of knowing. "This was before the Consult…"

And so he told them of the millennial wars between the Nonmen and the Inchoroi. The two scalpers listened with honest fascination, their eyes lost in the middle ground between the telling and the glorious riot of the told. The first Wracu descending. The first naked hordes of Sranc. The Nonmen Ishroi whipping their chariots into screaming horizons…

Even Achamian found himself curiously overawed. To speak of distant grounds and faraway peoples was one thing, but to sit here, in the derelict halls of Cil-Aujas, speaking of the ancient Nonmen…

Voices could stir more than the living from slumber.

So instead of lingering in his explanations as he might have otherwise, Achamian struck through the heart of the matter, relating only what was essential: the treachery of Nin'janjin, the Womb-Plague and the death of Hanalinqы, the doom slumbering in the bones of the survivors' immortality. The two scalpers, it turned out, already knew many of the details: Apparently Galian had studied for the Ministrate before, as he put it, drink, hash, and whores had saved his soul.

Achamian laughed hard at that.

Every so often he glanced at Mimara to make sure all was well. She sat like a cross-legged vase with Somandutta, indulging the young caste-noble's vanity with questions about Nilnamesh. He liked the man well enough, Achamian supposed. Somandutta seemed to be one of those peculiar caste-nobles who managed to carry their sheltered upbringing into adulthood: sociable to a fault, almost absurdly confident that others meant him well. Were this Momemn, Invishi, or any other great city, Achamian had no doubt he would be one of those dog-eager courtiers, one everyone would dismiss with smiles rather than sneers.

"Do you know," the caste-noble was saying, "what my people say about women like you?"

Even still, the old Wizard remained wary. He knew enough about scalpers to know they weren't easily known. Their lives demanded too much from them.

"Tell me," Achamian asked Galian directly. "Why do you do this? Hunting Sranc. It can't be for the bounty, can it? I mean, as far as I can tell you all leave places like Marrow as poor as you arrive rich…"

The former Columnary paused in reflection. "For some, it is the money. Xonghis, for instance, leaves most of his share with the Custom House-"

"He'll never spend it," Pokwas interrupted.

"Why would you sa-?" Achamian pressed.

But Galian was shaking his head. "Your question, sorcerer, is not so wise. Scalpers scalp. Whores whore. We never ask one another why. Never."

"We even have a saying," Pokwas added in his resonant, accented voice. "'Leave it to the slog.'"

Achamian smiled. "It all comes back to the slog, does it?"

"Even kings," Galian replied with a wink, "shod their feet."

The conversation turned to more mundane fare after this. For a time, Achamian listened to the scalpers argue over who was the true inheritor of the Ancient North's greatness, the Three Seas or Zeьm. It was an old game, men taking pride over meaningless things, passing time in good-natured rivalry. He thought of how strange it must be for long-dead Cil-Aujas to hear the glory of small and petty words after so many entombed ages, let alone to feel the polishing touch of light. Perhaps that was why the entire company seemed to fall mute sooner than their weariness merited. There was a greater effort in speaking overheard words, an effort that, though infinitesimal, quickly accumulated. And this dark place, whether from the drowsing edge of dreams or with ears pricked in malice, did listen.

The disappointment on Somandutta's face was almost maudlin when Mimara abandoned him to rejoin her "father."

They had slept side by side since she had joined the company, but somehow, this night, they ended up laying face to face as well-a position that Achamian thought uncomfortably intimate but didn't seem to trouble Mimara at all. It reminded him of her mother, Esmenet, how the habits of prostitution had coloured so much of what she said and did. Wearing her nakedness the thoughtless way a smith might wear a leather apron. Talking cocks and congress the way masons might discuss trowels and arches.

So many calluses where he had only tender skin.

"Everything…" she said in a wistful tone. Her eyes seemed to track the passage of ghosts.

"Everything what?"

"The walls… The ceilings. Everywhere, limbs and people cut out of stone-images atop images… Think of the toil!"

"It wasn't always such. The Wolf Gate is an example of how they once adorned their cities. It was only when they began forgetting that they turned to this… this… excess. These are their annals, the accounting of their deeds-great and small."

"Then why not simply paint murals the way we do?"

Achamian found himself approving of this question-another long-dead habit, tingling back to life. "Nonmen can't see paintings," he said with an old man's shrug.

A frowning smile. Despite the anger that always seemed to roll about the nethers of her expression, her skeptical looks always managed to promise a fair accounting.

"It's true," Achamian said. "Paintings are naught but gibberish to their eyes. The Nonmen may resemble us, Mimara, but they are far more different than you can imagine."

"You make them sound frightening."

An old warmth touched him then, one that he had almost forgotten: the feeling of carrying another, not with arms or love or even hope, but with knowledge. Knowledge that made wise and kept safe.

"At last," he said, closing eyes that smiled. "She listens."

He felt her fingers press his shoulder, as though to poke in friendly rebuke but really just to confirm. Something swelled through him then, something that demanded he keep his eyes shut in the pretence of sleep.

He had been lonely, he realized. Lonely.

These past twenty years…

"A place where my line can outlive me," the High-King said.

Seswatha frowned in good-natured dismissal. "You have no need to fear…" Achamian leaned back in his chair, forced his thoughts from the conundrum facing him on the benjuka plate between them. Most of the private rooms in the King-Temple Annexes were little more than slots between walls of cyclopean brick, and Celmomas's study was no exception. The towering scroll-racks only added to the cloistered air. "Our foe has no hope against the Ordeal you have assembled. Think. Nimeric… Even Nil'giccas marches."

The names seemed to relax his old friend.

"Ishuдl," Celmomas said, smiling at his own wit-or lack of it. He reached for his chalice of apple mead. "That's what I call it."

Seswatha shook his head. "Is it stocked with beer or with concubines?"

"Seeds," Celmomas replied, his eyes smiling over the rim of his cup. The golden wolf's head braided into the centre of his beard seemed to glower from beneath his wrist.

"Seeds?"

The High-King's demeanour faltered. There was always such an aura of care about him, at least when it came to the little things, like making sure he replaced his cup on the same ring of condensation.

He could be so reckless otherwise.

"For the longest time," he said, "I refused to believe you. And now that I believe…"

"Yes?"

Celmomas had a long face, one that suited the dynastic glory of his name. Solemn. Nimble yet strong-jawed. But it was too given to expressions of melancholy, especially in rooms where the gloom lay heavy. He laughed as much as the next man, Seswatha supposed, but the looks that inevitably followed-eyes slack with quiet sorrow, lips drawn into a pent line-always seemed more primitive somehow, closer to the native tenor of his heart.

"Nothing…" the High-King said with a release of old and weary air. "Just premonitions."

Seswatha studied him with new concern. "The premonitions of kings are never to be taken lightly. You know that much, old friend."

"Which is why I have built a ref-"

The creak of bronze hinges. They both yanked their gazes to the shadows that concealed the entrance. The fires pulled and twirled in the tripods set to either side of the game-table. Achamian heard the scuff of little feet, then suddenly Nau-Cayыti hurtled into his father's arms and lap.

"Whoopa!" Celmomas cried. "What warrior leaps blindly into the arms of his foe?"

The boy chortled in the grinding way of children fending fingers that tickle. "You're not my foe, Da!"

"Wait till you get older!"

Nau-Cayыti grinned with clenched teeth, struggled against his father's ringed hand, growling as much as laughing. The boy surprised him by jerking and twisting like a summer pike, clutched his white-woollen robe in an effort to brace his feet on his father's thighs. Celmomas pulled back, nearly toppled in his chair.

Achamian roared with laughter. "A wolf, my King! The boy's a wolf! You better hope he's never your enemy!"

"Cayы-Cayы!" the High-King cried, holding his hands out in surrender.

"What's this?" the young Prince asked, fumbling in the interior pockets of his father's robe. With a little grunt, he pulled a golden tube into the wobbling light. A scroll-case, cast in the likeness of twining vines.

"For me?" he gasped at his grinning father.

"Nay," Celmomas replied with mock gravity. "It's a great and powerful secret." The High-King's look found Seswatha past the boy's flaxen curls. Nau-Cayыti turned as well, so that both faces-the one innocent, the other careworn-hung motionless in the pale light.

"It's for your uncle Seswa," the High-King said.

Nau-Cayыti clutched the golden tube to his breast, more in a delighted than a covetous way. "Can I give it to him, Da?" he cried. "Please?"

Celmomas nodded in chuckling assent, but a gleam of seriousness lingered in his gaze. The Prince bounced from his father's lap, made both men start in alarm when he almost bowled into one of the tripods, then he was leaning against Seswatha's knee, beaming with pride. He held out the scroll-case in hands too small not to be clumsy, saying, "Tell me, Uncle Seswa. Tell-me-tell-me! Who's Mimara?"

Achamian bolted from his blanket with a gasp…

…only to find Incariol kneeling over him in the deep shadow. A line of light rimmed his scalp and the curve of his cheek and temple; his face was impenetrable otherwise.

The Wizard made to scramble backward, but the Nonman clasped his shoulder with a powerful hand. The bald head lowered in apology, but the face remained utterly obscured in shadow. "You were laughing," he whispered before turning away.

Achamian could only squint, slack-mouthed.

As dark as it was, he was certain that Cleric had sobbed as he drew away.

Achamian awoke far older, it seemed, than when he'd fallen asleep. His ears and teeth ached, as did every joint he had words to describe. While the Skin Eaters busied themselves preparing to depart, he sat cross-legged on his crude mat, forearms heavy against his knees, glaring more than watching. The twin lights hung above them as before, the differences in their cast as subtle and as profound as the differences in their casters. His eyes traced the verge of their illumination, from the hanging bronze of the fallen lantern wheel, along the slot-windowed walls, to the great fragments of face leaning in the debris of the ruined head. Part of him was horrified, even affronted, to discover that the previous day had not been a dream-that Cil-Aujas was real. He breathed deep the indescribable must hanging in the air, fought the urge to spit. It seemed he could feel the black miles hanging above them.

When Mimara asked for a third time what was the matter, he decided that he hated the young. Smooth faces and lithe strong limbs. Not to mention the certainty of ignorance. In his soul's eye he saw them doing jigs down blasted halls, while all he could do was hobble after them. Pompous wretches, he thought, with their dark hair and hundred-word vocabularies. Pissants.

"Huppa!" Somandutta called to him at one point, shouting the word they used to goad their mules. "Huppa-huppa! No bones are so heavy!"

"And no fools are quite so dense!" he snapped in return. He didn't so much regret the words as the general laughter that greeted them. He stared down Mimara's look of reproach, felt the petty satisfaction of winning petty contests of the will. A stab of fear accompanied the thought that he might be taking ill.

With the others watching, he had no choice but to quickly gather his things. He reminded himself that foul humours were the most slothful humours of all, and that, just as the old Ceneian slave-scholars insisted, one need only walk to escape them. He cursed himself for groaning aloud as he hoisted his pack.

Sure enough, his mood mellowed as his limbs warmed to the company's motivated pace. For a time, he did his best to recollect what Seswatha had known of Cil-Aujas, to build a map of sorts in his soul's eye. But the best he could conjure was a hazy sense of myriad levels, with the nimil mines tangling the mountain's roots and the commons and habitations reaching Aenaratiol's gouged peak. It seemed he could feel the Mansion's hollows reach like roots through the buried distances: all the enclosed spaces you might find in a great mannish city, from granaries to barracks to temples to lowly hearths, stacked one upon another, hanging in the compressed heart of a mountain. But he could pull nothing definite from these imaginings, certainly nothing that would be of any use to their journey. Even in Seswatha's day Cil-Aujas had been largely abandoned, and few were the Nonmen who could find their way through the Mansion's outer reaches. The most the old Wizard could say was that Cleric seemed to lead them true. So long as they continued following the thoroughfares that traversed these great fissures, he knew they drew nearer the Mansion's northern gates. There was comfort enough in that…

For now.

Not a watch passed, however, when the last fissure came to an end, closing above them like clutched palms. After passing through yet another hallway with historical friezes set like grillwork over deeper friezes, they came to a chamber so vast that the walls opened above and beyond the reach of either his or Cleric's light, so that it seemed they crossed a ground suspended in the void. Shrinking from the abyssal dark, the scalpers pressed close, to the point where they continually ran afoul of one another. Even Mimara walked with her cheek pressed against Achamian's arm. Not a moment passed without someone softly cursing this mule or that man. Few words were traded otherwise. Those who did call out were silenced by the sound of their own echoes, which returned so transformed as to seem another voice.

Though unnerved by the blackness, Achamian actually felt more relieved than otherwise. For the first time since passing the Wolf Gate, he thought he knew where they stood in Aenaratiol's mazed bowels. This, he was certain, was the Repositorium, where the Nonmen had shelved their dead like scrolls. And it meant not only that they had travelled almost half the way, but more importantly, that Cleric actually did remember the path through the ruined Mansion.

For the longest time nothing loomed out of the encircling darkness. With the dust chalking the air about their ankles and knees, it almost seemed they crossed a desert on some sunless world. Once Cleric called them to a clanking halt, and the entire company spent several dozen heartbeats simply standing, ears pricked, listening to the iron-hard silence… The sound of their entombment.

The appearance of bones at their feet caused more curiosity than alarm-at first. The skulls were so ancient they crumpled like beehives beneath their soles, and the bones flattened like paper. Clots of them emerged here and there, like flotsam dropped by eddies in long-dried waters, but after a while the floor became thick with them. The dull sound of the Skin Eaters' trudging became the whisk and thump of men kicking through sandy leaves. A battle had been fought here long, long ago, and the toll had been high. Soon the murmur of prayers could be heard among the men, and wide eyes sought confirmation of their fear. Sarl laughed as he always did when he sensed apprehension getting the best of his "boys," but the echoes that fell back out of the blackness sounded so sinister that he went as rigid and as pale as any of them.

Then, out of nowhere, a great slope of debris reared before them, forcing a general halt. The company milled in blank-faced confusion while Lord Kosoter and Cleric consulted. Because of the dark, it was impossible to determine the scale of the obstruction. One of the young Galeoth, Asward, began babbling in a panicked voice, something about fingers reaching up from the dust. Both Galian and Xonghis tried to talk some sense into the young man, casting wary glances at their Captain while doing so. Sarl watched with an expression of repellant satisfaction, as though eager to exercise some bloodthirsty Rule of the Slog.

Tired and annoyed, Achamian simply walked into the blackness, leaving his sorcerous light hanging behind him. When Mimara called out, he simply waved a vague hand. The residue of death stirred no horror in him-it was the living he feared. The blackness enveloped him, and when he turned, he was struck by an almost gleeful sense of impunity. The Skin Eaters clung to their little shoal of light, peered like orphans into the oceans of dark. Where they had seemed so cocksure and dangerous on the trail, now they looked forlorn and defenceless, a clutch of refugees desperate to escape the calamities that pursued them.

This, Achamian thought to himself, is how Kellhus sees us…

He knew the sound of his arcane voice would startle them, that they would point and cry out at the sight of his mouth and eyes burning in the blackness. But they needed to be reminded-all of them-of who he was…

He spoke the Bar of Heaven.

A line appeared between his outstretched arms, shimmering white, bright enough for the blood to glow through his hands. Then it sundered the shrouded heights, brilliant and instantaneous as lightning. In a blink, the Repositorium lay revealed unto its farthest corners…

The ruined cemetery of Cil-Aujas.

Great ribs and sockets of living stone ravined the ceiling. Hanging from its contours, hundreds of ancient chains cluttered the open reaches, some broken midway to the floor, others still bearing the bronze lantern wheels that had once served as illumination. The floors beneath stretched for what seemed a mile, white with illumination and dust, puckered and furrowed by the long wandering lines of ancient dead. In the distances behind and to either side of the company, walls had been hewn from the scarped confusion, gaining heights easily as great as any of Carythusal's famed towers. Tombs pocked them, row upon row of black holes framed with graven script and images, lending them a wasp-nest malignancy. Immediately before the company, however, the enormous sheaves of debris continued climbing and climbing, sloping up to the very ceiling… Some kind of catastrophic collapse.

The implication was as obvious as it was immediate: The way was barred.

Everyone-save Lord Kosoter and Cleric-gawked and blinked at the spectacle. Achamian could feel the Captain's bone-hollowing gaze as he walked toward the others. The Bar faded like a furnace coal, allowing the darkness to reclaim its dominion. Within heartbeats, the company was every bit as stranded as before.

Kiampas, answering to some unseen signal, suddenly declared the day's march over, though no one had any way of knowing whether a day had in fact passed. As awed as they were dismayed, the Skin Eaters began stumbling about, preparing camp. Mimara clutched Achamian's arm, her eyes alight with a kind of enthralled greed…

"Can you teach me that!" she cried under her breath.

He knew her well enough to see she was bursting with questions, that she would likely plague him for hours if she could. And to his surprise, he found himself disarmed by her interest, which for the first time seemed honest instead of fraught with anger and calculation as before. To be a student required a peculiar kind of capitulation, a willingness not simply to do as one was told, but to surrender the movements of one's soul to the unknown complexities of another's. A willingness, not simply to be moved, but to be remade.

How could he not respond? Despite all his violent resolutions to the contrary, his was a teacher's soul.

But the time wasn't right. "Yes-yes," he said, speaking with gentle impatience. He grasped her shoulder to forestall her protest, sought Cleric through the commotion. He needed to know just how much the Nonman remembered. Their passage through the Repositorium was blocked, thanks to the ancient calamity heaped before them. If Cleric knew of no other way through the peril that was Cil-Aujas, they would be forced to backtrack, to begin the long trek back to the Obsidian Gate. If he pretended or remembered falsely, they could very well be dead.

He was about to explain as much to Mimara when Lord Kosoter suddenly appeared next to them, reeking in his hoary old Ainoni armour and dress. Steel grey hairs manged his plaited beard. Beneath his mailed breast, his Chorae hummed with unseen menace.

"No more," he said, his voice as flat as frozen water. "No more"-his tongue tested the edge of his teeth-"antics."

It was impossible not to be affected by the man's dead gaze, but Achamian found himself returning his stare with enough self-possession to wonder at the man's anger. Was it simple jealously? Or did the famed Captain fear that awe of another might undermine his authority?

"What?" Mimara said angrily. "We should have stumbled on through the dark?"

Achamian watched the eyes slouch toward her, glimpsed the mayhem behind their frigid calm. For all her ferocious pride, his gaze bled her white.

"As you wish," Achamian said quickly, like a man trying to call the attention of wolves. "Captain. As you wish."

Lord Kosoter continued staring at Mimara for several heartbeats. When he looked back at Achamian, his eyes seemed to carry some mortal piece of her. He nodded, not so much at Achamian's concession, it seemed, as at the fear that stuttered through the Wizard's heart.

Your sins, the dead eyes whispered. Her damnation.

They sat about a fire of bones. Without the merest wind, the smoke spewed directly upward, a column of black floating into black. The reek of it was strange, like something sodden and already burned.

The Skin Eaters had congregated at the edges of the rubble, where streams of ruin had created a bowl with boulders large enough for men to sit and lean forward. Lord Kosoter sat between his two sergeants, Sarl and Kiampas, absorbed in the shining length of his Ainoni sword. Again and again, he drew his whetstone along its length, then raised it, as if to study the way the edge cut the play of reflected flames. Everything about his manner spoke of indifference, utter and absolute, as though he sat with a relative's hated children. Achamian had taken a seat nearly opposite him, with Mimara at his side. Galian, Oxwora, and the other Bitten formed the first tier, those close enough to actually feel the fire's acrid heat. The others sat scattered through the shadows. Cleric squatted apart from them all, high on the back of a monolithic stone. The shadow of his perch rode high on his chest, so that only his right arm and head fell in the firelight. Whenever Achamian looked away from him, he seemed to lose substance, to become a kind of dismembered reality… A headless face and a palmless hand, come to speak and to seize.

For the longest time the chatter was small, with words traded only between those seated side by side, or nearly such. Many simply gnawed on their salted rations, staring into the firelight. When men laughed they did so quietly, with the between-you-and-I circumspection of temple services and funeral pyres. No one dared mention the precariousness of their situation, at least no one that Achamian heard. Fear of fear was ever the greatest censor.

Eventually the talk petered out, and a gazing silence fell over the company. Ash glowed ruby and orange through blackened eye sockets. Fused Nonmen teeth gleamed like wet jewels.

Then without warning, Cleric addressed them from on high.

"I remember," he began. "Yes…"

Achamian looked up in exasperated relief, thinking the Nonman meant he remembered another way through Cil-Aujas. But something in the regard of the others told the Wizard otherwise. He glanced around at those nearest the fire, noticed Sarl staring at him, not the Nonman, with manic intensity. See! his expression seemed to shout. Now you shall understand us!

"You ask yourselves," Cleric continued, his shoulders slumped, his great pupils boring into the flames. "You ask, 'What is this that I do? Why have I followed unknown men, merciless men, into the deeps?' You do not ask yourself what it means. But you feel the question-ah, yes! Your breath grows short, your skin clammy. Your eyes burn for peering into the black, for looking to the very limit of your feeble vision…"

His voice was cavernous, greased with inhuman resonances. He spoke like one grown weary of his own wisdom.

"Fear. This is how you ask the question. For you are Men, and fear is ever the way your race questions great things."

He lowered his face to the shadows, continued speaking to his palms and their millennial calluses.

"I remember… I remember asking a wise man, once… though whether it was last year or a thousand years ago I cannot tell. I asked him, 'Why do Men fear the dark?' I could tell he thought the question wise, though I felt no wisdom in asking it. 'Because darkness,' he told me, 'is ignorance made visible.' 'And do Men despise ignorance?' I asked. 'No,' he said, 'they prize it above all things-all things! — but only so long as it remains invisible.'"

The words implied accusation, but the Nonman's tone was reassuring, as though he ministered to the wretched and the lost. He spoke true to his slog-name, Achamian realized, as the inhuman priest of scar-hearted men.

Cleric.

"We Nonmen…" he continued telling his hands, "we think the dark holy, or at least we did before time and treachery leached all the ancient concerns from our souls…"

"The dark?" Galian said, and his voice warm and human-and as such, so very frail. "Holy?"

The Nonman lifted his flawless white face to the light, smiled at the Nansur scalper's questioning gaze.

"Of course… Think on it, my mortal friend. The dark is oblivion made manifest. And oblivion encircles us always. It is the ocean, and we are naught but silvery bubbles. It leans all about us. You see it every time you glimpse the horizon-though you know it not. In the light, our eyes are what blinds us. But in the dark-in the dark! — the line of the horizon opens… opens like a mouth… and oblivion gapes."

Though the Nonman's expression seemed bemused and ironic, Achamian, with his second, more ancient soul, recognized it as distinctively Cыnuroi-what they called noi'ra, bliss in pain.

"You must understand," Cleric said. "For my kind, holiness begins where comprehension ends. Ignorance stakes us out, marks our limits, draws the line between us and what transcends. For us, the true God is the unknown God, the God that outruns our febrile words, our flattering thoughts…"

These words trailed into the wheezing murmur of their fire. Few of the scalpers, Achamian noted, dared look the Nonman in the eye as he spoke, but rather watched the flames boil into noxious smoke.

"Do you see now why this trek is holy?" the deep voice resumed. "Do you see the prayer in our descent?"

No one dared breath, let alone reply. The hanging face turned to survey each of them.

"Have any of you ever knelt so deep?"

Five heartbeats passed.

"This God of yours…" Pokwas said unexpectedly. "How can you pray to something you cannot comprehend? How can you worship?"

"Pray?" A snort of breath that might have indicated amusement in a man. "There is no prayer, Sword-Dancer. But there is worship. We worship that which transcends us by making idols of our finitude, our frailty…" He rolled his face as if working an ancient kink, then repeated, "We… we…"

He slumped into himself, his head bowed like a galley slave chained about the neck. The fire of bones gleamed across the white of his bare scalp.

Achamian battled the scowl from his face. To embrace mystery was one thing, to render it divine was quite another. What the Nonman said sounded too like Kellhus, and too little like what Achamian knew of Nonmen mystery cults. Again he found himself contemplating the blasted complexion of the Erratic's Mark: Whomever he was, he was as powerful as he was old… With scarce thousands of Nonmen remaining, how could have Achamian not heard of him?

Incariol.

"If the dark truly is the God," Sarl muttered through gravel. He squinted out at the black spaces with the leather of his face. "I'd say we're in His almighty belly right about now…"

Throughout the entirety of Cleric's sermon, Lord Kosoter had continued sharpening his sword, as though he were the reaper who would harvest the Nonman's final meaning. At long last, he paused, stood to sheath his fish-silver blade. The fire lent him an infernal aspect, soaking his tattered battledress in crimson, gleaming across the plaits of his square beard and filling his eyes as surely as it filled the skulls at his feet.

A sparking air of expectancy-the Captain spoke so rarely it always seemed you heard his voice for the first vicious time.

But another sound spoke in his stead. Thin, as if carried on a thread, exhausted by echoes…

The shell of a human sound. A man wailing, where no man should be.

Blinking in the bright light of another Bar of Heaven, the company fanned out over the vast expanse of the Repositorium, their shadows stretched as long as walking trees across the ashen floor before them.

The cry had trailed into nothingness almost as soon as it had appeared, leaving the company scrambling for their weapons and their feet. Everyone instinctively turned to Cleric seated upon his high stone dolmen. The Nonman had simply pointed into the blackness, perpendicular to the way they had originally come.

The seven youngest of the Skin Eaters remained with the mules, while the twenty-odd others struck out in the direction indicated by Cleric, swords drawn, shields raised. As unnerved as any of them, Achamian and Mimara took their place in the wide-walking line, their backs bathed in light, their faces in shadow. Galian and Pokwas moved to the right of them, while Sarl and the Captain advanced to their left. No one uttered a word, but walked, like Achamian, with ears so keen the silence seemed to roar. Drawn like tendons before them, their shadows were so black that their boots vanished into them with every step.

For almost an entire watch, they traversed an either-or world of light and dark, with a crevassed landscape for a ceiling and black-mouthed tombs for walls. The ancient lantern chains, though evenly spaced and sparely positioned, flayed the open spaces, forming curtains across the grim distances. And Achamian could not but think that here was an image of the Apocalypse that threatened them all.

Despite the brilliance of the light behind them, the darkness grew ever more bold. Soon they seemed a peculiar line of half-men, backs without bodies, moving as thin as branches waving in the wind. The dust that fogged their strides formed ethereal shadows across the lanes of light between them, like steam in low morning sun. Still no one spoke. Everyone held shield and sword at the ready.

And the mighty Repositorium gaped on and on.

When they found the man, he was kneeling in a desert plain of dust, his face raised to the glittering vision that was the now distant Bar of Heaven. The Skin Eaters formed a thin and wary circle about him, peering against the tricks of the gloom. Though his eyes were clearly open, he did not seem to see any of them. He was another scalper-the necklaces of teeth he wore atop his hauberk made that much plain. His skin was Ketyai dark, and his beard had been crudely plaited in the Conriyan fashion, though none of his gear seemed to hail from that nation. At first he seemed greased in pitch, so pale was the distant light. None of the Skin Eaters saw the crimson sheen until they were but several paces away.

"Blood." Xonghis was the first to mutter. "This man has battled…"

"Perimeter positions!" Sarl yelled to the astonished company. "Move-move!"

The Skin Eaters scattered, their gear clanking as they raced to form a thin rank in the murk beyond the stranger. Achamian approached with the Captain and the others, holding Mimara a pace behind him with an outstretched arm. They gathered to either side of the man, standing so as not to obscure the light. Answering to some look or gesture from Lord Kosoter, Xonghis tossed his shield to the floor and knelt before the unknown scalper. Achamian stepped over the shield, glimpsing the three shrunken Sranc heads, joined at the chins, that adorned its centre. Where before he had pressed Mimara back, now he could feel her tugging on the back of his hide cloak, silently urging him to keep his distance. When he glanced back at her, she nodded toward the stranger, directing his gaze to the man's lap.

The scalper held on to a hand, its fingers cupped like dearly won gold between his palms…

A woman's severed hand.

"I've seen him before," Kiampas said. "He's one of the Picks. The Bloody Picks."

The smeared face flinched at those words. For the first time, the dark eyes wandered from the Bar of Heaven, which rose incandescent on the ingrown horizon. He seemed to search the gaps between their leaning faces.

"Light…" the Pick whispered. He brought the severed hand to his cheek, closed his eyes, and swayed like a child. "Didn't I promise you light?"

He shrunk from the fingers Xonghis placed on his shoulder. "What happened?" the Imperial Tracker asked, the sternness of his tone somehow softened by the cadences of his Jekki accent. "Where's your company?"

The man looked at him as though he were some kind of tragic intrusion. "My company…" he repeated.

"Yes," the Tracker said. "The Bloody Picks. What happened to them? What happened to…"

Xonghis looked up to Kiampas, but it was Lord Kosoter who said, "Captain Mittades."

"Captain Mittades," the Tracker repeated. "What happened to him?"

The man began shaking. "M-my-my-my…" he began, blinking his eyes with each stutter. "M-m-m-my c-c-company?" The severed hand had sunk back to his lap.

"Yes. What happened?"

A look of incredulity stretched about rigid terror.

"My c-company? It was too-too-too-too dark-too dark to see the blood… You could only hear it!" His expression clenched at this, his lips pulled inward, as though he were suddenly toothless. "He-he-hear it sucking at their feet as they ran, slapping the walls like little boy hands. Draining like piss… It was too daaaark!"

"Whose feet?" Sarl's saw-toothed voice broke in. "Whose hands?"

"There's no light inside," the man sobbed. "Our skin. Our skin is too thick. It wraps-like a shroud-it keeps the blackness in. And my heart-my heart! — it looks and looks and it can't see!" A shower of spittle. "There's nothing to see!"

Something wild and violent jerked through the man, as if he were a sack filled with rabid vermin. And in the light, it all seemed too stark, too obvious to the naked eye, the twitch and fracture of a man's breaking. His eyes rolling beneath a stationary film of reflected white. His face caped in black, the lines of his anguish bleeding ink this way and that. Even Xonghis leaned backward.

The stranger began rocking side to side. A kind of pained tooth-to-tooth grin broke his beard. "In the dark there is always touch… you see?" He waved the severed hand in a bawling, loose-wristed manner. A thread of blood pattered across Mimara's tunic. "I held on. I–I didn't l-l-let go! I held on. I held on. I held on. I h-he-held on!" His eyes ceased seeing anything illuminated, became so crazed as to seem painted. "Gamarrah! Gamarrah! I got you! Don't let go. No-no, don't! Don't! Don't let go!"

Lord Kosoter stepped forward, stood so that his shadow blotted the Pick entirely. He pressed Xonghis to the side with his left hand.

"I held on!" the Pick shrieked.

As though breaking hard ground with a spade, the Captain plunged his sword down through the man's corselet, snapping one of the Sranc-teeth necklaces. He drove the point deep, from the man's clavicle to his belly. The Pick jerked and spasmed, shook like sodden cloth on a slave's drying-stick. The Captain wrenched his sword clear; the body fell backward, arms unrolling, its feet pinned beneath it. The severed hand rolled soundlessly through the dust. Of its own volition, the man's hand seemed to twitch and grope. Senseless fingertip touched senseless fingertip.

Lord Kosoter spat. In a hiss that was almost a whisper, he said, "Sobber."

Sarl's face crunched into a wheezing laugh. "No sobbers!" he cried, bending his voice to the others. "That's the Rule. No sobbers on the slog!"

Achamian glanced from Xonghis to Kiampas, saw the same expressionless mask he hoped to fake. The Nonman, Cleric, stood with his mouth open, as though trying to catch some taste of what they all smelled. Achamian blinked, let go a shuddering breath. Everything had happened so quickly, too quickly for his heart to feel, let alone for his soul to comprehend. All he knew was that something was wrong… Something in the man's gibberish had carried the deep bruise of truth.

It looks and looks and it can't see!

"Cut him open," he heard himself say to Xonghis, who by now was standing at his side.

"What?"

"Cut him open… I need to see his heart."

Our skin is too thick…

The Imperial Tracker glanced from his Captain to Sarl, who said, "Do as he says," pinched through a scarcely restrained cackle. For all the world, the bandy-legged sergeant seemed like a man who had gambled everything on the mad turns of this encounter-nothing could spoil his run. Xonghis knelt in their midst, pulling a Jekki saw-knife from his boot as he did so. The dead Pick lay in his own inert shadow, his blood making black wool of the surrounding dust. His chest thudded like a broken drum when Xonghis cracked his ribcage. The Tracker worked with the thoughtless concentration of a long-time hunter: deer, wolf, or man, it was all the same to him, it seemed.

He pulled the heart from the overflowing cup that was the Pick's breast, held the gory mass up for Achamian to inspect. The shadow of his arm fell long across the floor beyond.

"Rinse it."

With a kind of bemused scowl, the Imperial Tracker shrugged and reached back with his free hand. He raised his waterskin to his teeth to unstop, grinning as though it were whisky. His fingernails shone fresh and pink as he gingerly rinsed the blood from the lobes. The water drained rose from the back of his knuckles. He kneaded the heart, turning the clear meat to his palm. The tubular cluster at the top was soaked white.

Suddenly he stopped. Everyone leaned forward, breathless, struck by the sight of a scar or suture along one of the heart's fat-sheathed chambers. With his thumb Xonghis pressed open the upper lid…

A human eye stared at them.

"Sweet Seju!" Sarl hissed, stumbling back bandy-limbed.

The Imperial Tracker laid the heart on the Pick's gore-soaked stomach, but carefully, as though fearful of waking something asleep.

"What does it mean?" Kiampas cried.

But Achamian was staring directly at Cleric. "Do you know the way forward?" he asked. "Do you remember?"

The ageless face regarded him for an inscrutable moment. "Yes."

"What does it mean?" Kiampas fairly shouted, demanding the Wizard's attention. "How did you know?"

Achamian looked to him. "This place is cursed."

"It's not time to follow the donkey shit home yet," the Captain growled.

"Cursed?" Kiampas pressed. "What do you mean? Haunted?"

Achamian matched the sergeant's gaze, silently thanked the Hundred for his sober eyes. The two of them had much to discuss.

"What happened here-"

"Means nothing," Lord Kosoter grated, his voice and manner as menacing as the dead eye watching. "There's nothing here but skinnies. And they're coming to shim our skulls."

The Captain's word signalled the end of the matter. Nothing was said to the others, but they all knew that something had happened. On the long walk back, Sarl harangued them with the Captain's story. The skinnies had got the best of the Bloody Picks, true, but then they were the Picks, and not the Skin Eaters. They didn't have their Captain, nor did they have two "light-spitters," as scalpers were wont to call sorcerers.

"This is the slog of all slogs, boys!" he cried with a peculiar, red-faced savagery that was all his own. "We run for the Coffers, and nothing-nothing! — will stop us!"

Certainly not skinnies.

Those who had seen the eye in the Pick's heart could only trade worried glances. The grandeur of the underworld Mansion had become hoary with threat. The long ache of emptiness and uncertainty had been replaced with the pang of teeming things. Mimara even clutched Achamian's hand, but every time he glanced at her, she was staring at the cavernous hollows opening above them, peering through the chains, as though following the stages of brightening light. She seemed younger, somehow, more fragile with beauty. The curve of her cheeks, like the outer edge of an opened oyster shell. Her compact lips. Her wide eyes, lashed with quill strokes. For the first time, it seemed, he noticed how much lighter her skin was than his or her mother's. For the first time he wondered about her real father, about the twist of caprice that had seen her born, rather than aborted by Esmenet's whore-shell.

They would survive this, he told himself. They had to survive this.

The great sheaf of debris that had originally halted them rose white in the light of the blinding Bar, so that it resembled the decayed outskirts of a glacier. Those left behind to guard the mules and supplies came running toward them like farm dogs: Obviously they had spent the entire time stewing in their terror. Sarl and Kiampas immediately began shouting, instructing everyone to stow their gear and ready the mules-despite the obvious exhaustion of all.

There would be no more sleep in the Black Halls of Cil-Aujas.

The Outside was leaking in. Hell.

The Bar of Heaven had burned for quite some time; Achamian could feel the picking toll of maintaining its meaning in the nethers of his soul-like holding a sum in thought for a span of hours. Even still, he hesitated before dispelling it, struck by the image of the Skin Eaters bending and bustling in its soaring glare. Sarl watching, more priest than slaver, with a scrutiny that could only be called ravenous. Kiampas wandering among the company's more recent recruits, or the Herd as the originals called them, slapping shoulders and tightening straps, offering what small wisdoms and assurances he could. Galian working closer to Xonghis than was necessary, shooting pressing looks at the almond-eyed Tracker whenever opportunity afforded. The former Columnary was too savvy not to know something was amiss. Achamian imagined it was only a matter of time before they all knew that Sarl was "coughing up their cracks"-as they liked to put it. Pokwas berating a harried Somandutta, who because of his refusal to relinquish his Nilnameshi garb was perpetually delaying the others. Every so often the tall black man glanced at the others, flashed them the broad smile hidden behind his outraged expression. Glum Sutadra, the Kianene everyone insisted was a Fanim heretic, packing his kit with the slow-handed intensity of a mortal ritual. Monstrous Oxwora towering head and shoulders above the rest, laughing at something thought or heard, pinch-faced Sranc heads swinging in his wild Thunyeri mane. One of the younger Galeoth boys, Rainon, scratching the veined cheek of his favourite mule, whispering encouragements he obviously didn't believe…

And Cleric standing over the Captain as he tightened the lacing on his Ainoni boots, staring with bland fixity at Achamian, his eyes so much older than the ceramic face that held them-like holes.

"What is it?" Mimara asked from his periphery.

"Nothing," Achamian said, looking away from the Nonman, letting go the cramped meaning that was the Bar of Heaven. The line dimmed, as if it were a seam in a slowly closing door, then was clipped into nothingness. There was a moment of jeering cries and blackness, so utter it seemed to possess its own sound, followed by a sorcerous murmur and the reappearance of the twin points of light, like the eyes of two different races opening in the same invisible face.

The Skin Eaters resumed their work, though now many cast anxious looks into the darkness that leaned heavy about them.

The plan, Sarl announced after conferring with Lord Kosoter, was simply to continue with all possible haste. Odds were, he told them, they would encounter nothing at all, given the vast extent of Cil-Aujas. Odds were, whatever destroyed the Bloody Picks had withdrawn to the depths to lick their wounds and to count their spoils. Nevertheless, they were to march "on the sharp," as he put it, which meant without undue noise and with eyes and hearts and weapons held ready. "From here on in," he ground out, "we'll be the only ghosts in these halls."

These words, Achamian was quite certain, had been directed at him.

They resumed their march, skirting the flanks of the enormous collapse, walking for the most part beyond the tailings thrown by the catastrophe. The twin lights soundlessly mapped the tangle of debris, painting this or that clutch of monolithic stone, throwing double shadows that here and there resembled wings. The ancient slaughter, or whatever it was that had scattered so many dead across these reaches, continued to choke the floor, but the bones were so reed-brittle that the scalpers kicked through them the way they might humps of grass. With every step, Achamian saw knobs and shards of mouldered bone thrown free of the dust. He found himself wondering if this was the place…

The place where grief had burned through the rind of worldly things.

"How?" Mimara whispered in Ainoni from below his shoulder, her tone such that he immediately knew she referred to the dead scalper. "I saw no sorcery, and neither did you-I could see it in your face. So how could a heart have an eye in it?"

He found himself glancing to either side, counting those who might overhear. "Has anyone told you what happened when the First Holy War camped on the Plains of Mengedda?"

"Of course. The Battleplain. The earth began vomiting the dead within it. Mother told me that bones choked the grasses."

He swallowed rather than immediately reply. There was much he had intended to say, but a chorus of unwanted memories knelled through him, of how he and her mother had fled the Plains of Mengedda for the mountains, of how they had loved between sunlit trees…

And declared themselves man and wife.

"This is like that."

He could almost taste the sourness of her pause. "I feel enlightened already."

She had a Gift for smacking the generosity from him, he would grant her that much.

"Look," he said. "The boundaries between the World and Outside are like those between waking and sleep, reason and madness. Wherever the World slumbers or goes mad, the boundaries break down, and the Outside leaks through…" He glanced about to make sure no one was listening. "This place is a topos, like I already said. We literally walk the verge of Hell."

When she failed to immediately reply, Achamian congratulated himself on having silenced her.

"You mean the Dialectic," she said after several thoughtful steps. "The Dialectic of Substance and Desire…"

Though Achamian knew the phrase-knew it very well-it struck him as incomprehensible.

"You've read Ajencis," he said with more sarcasm than he intended. The Dialectic of Substance and Desire was the cornerstone of the great Kyranean philosopher's metaphysics, the notion that the differences between the World and the Outside were more a matter of degree than kind. Where substance in the World denied desire-save where the latter took the form of sorcery-it became ever more pliant as one passed through the spheres of the Outside, where the dead-hoarding realities conformed to the wills of the Gods and Demons.

Mimara was staring at her booted feet plowing through the dust. "Kellhus," she said. "You know, the man you hope to kill? He encouraged me to explore his library…" She stared at him, her expression mussed with conflicting passions. "I once thought I could be like my father."

The accusation in her voice called for pity, and yet he found himself with nothing but bitter words to answer. "Father? And who might that be?"

They walked without speaking for what seemed a long while. It was odd the way anger could shrink the great frame of silence into a thing, nasty and small, shared between two people. Achamian could feel it, palpable, binding them pursed lip to pursed lip, the need to punish the infidelities of the tongue.

Why did he let her get the best of him?

The Skin Eaters laboured in the circumscribed lights, leaning beneath the bulk of their packs like caste-menials beneath firewood. The younger ones led the mules in short trains of two or three, while the others walked the wary margins of the group, swords or spears drawn against the blackness. Though the memory of the Repositorium burned bright in his soul's eye, Achamian could not shake the sense that they marched into the void. If Cil-Aujas indeed plumbed the World to its very limit, as he had told Mimara, might they not simply wander into the precincts of Hell?

He occupied himself with this thought for a time, pondering his various readings of those who had allegedly passed alive into the Afterlife. The legend of Mimomitta from ancient Kyranean lore. The parable of Juraleal from The Chronicle of the Tusk. And of course the rumours his slave, Geraus, had told him about Kellhus…

Mimara walked beside him as before, but her damp presence had hardened into something prickling sharp. Is it true, he wanted to ask, that Kellhus wears the severed heads of demons about his girdle? These words, he was certain, would heal their momentary feud. As loath to encourage her as he had been, he had made a habit of avoiding her opinions.

The simple act of asking would say much.

Instead, he rubbed his face, muttering curses. What kind of rank foolishness was this? Pining over harsh words to a cracked and warped woman!

"I watched you," Mimara abruptly said, staring at the procession of chains through the upper reaches of his light. For a moment he assumed this was just more hounding, then she said, "You don't trust the Nonman. I could see it in your eyes."

Achamian scanned the distance to be sure Cleric was far enough away not to hear, then looked at her with the mixture of annoyance and mystification that was fast becoming his "Mimara-face," even as part of him recognized that this was her peace offering.

"Now is not the time, girl," he said brusquely. That she could worry about such a thing given what they had just heard-not to mention what they might find-was beyond Achamian. If anything made her seem crazed, he told himself, it wasn't so much her intellect as the disorder of her cares.

"Is it his Mark?" she persisted, again speaking in Ainoni. "Is that why you fear him?"

As though to match her absurdity with his own, Achamian began mumbling the song his slave's children had sung and sung until he had cried aloud for them to stop. It seemed he could even hear them, piping about the edges of his husky baritone, voices that had floated with innocence and chanting delight. Voices he dearly missed.

"Stinky feet, hide my sweet, walk the river cool…"

"Sometimes," Mimara persisted, "when I glimpse him in the corner of my eye…"

"Stinky bum, sniff your thumb, swim the water pool…"

"…he seems like something monstrous, a shambling wreck, black and rotted and… and…"

Suddenly the song and the peevishness that had provoked it were forgotten. Achamian found himself listening with arched attentiveness-a horror-spurred concentration.

She worked her mouth for a moment, lips pert about some lozenge of inexplicability, then looked to him helplessly.

"And it's like you can taste his evil," he heard himself say. "Not so much on your tongue as in your gums. Your teeth ache for it."

A peculiar vulnerability afflicted her look, as though she had admitted something beyond her courage. "Not always," she said.

"And it's more than just the Nonman, isn't it?" Something peculiar fizzed through his voice, something like a pang, but too fraught with fear. "Sometimes… Sometimes I look this way as well, don't I?"

"So you see the same?" she blurted.

He shook his head in a way he hoped seemed lackadaisical. "No. What I see is what you see typically, the shadow of ruin and decay, the ugliness of the deficient and incomplete. You're describing something different. Something moral as opposed to merely aesthetic…" He paused to catch his breath. What new madness was this? "What antique Mandate scholars called the Judging Eye."

He had watched her carefully as he spoke, hoping to see the glint of thrill in her eyes. But there was naught but concern. This had been gnawing at her for quite some time, he realized.

"The Judging Eye," she repeated in flawless Ainoni. "And what is that?"

His heart crawled into his throat. He coughed it loose, then swallowed it back into his chest. "It means that you don't simply apprehend the Mark of sorcery, you see the sin as well…" He trailed, then laughed, despite the horror that flexed through him.

"And that's funny?" she asked, her voice warbling with indignation.

"No, girl… It's just that…"

"That what?"

"Your stepfather… Kellhus."

He had improvised this, not willing to stray too far into the truth. But once spoken it seemed every bit as true and far more terrible with significance. Such was the perversity of things that Men often recognized their own arguments only after they had spoken them. "Kellhus…" he repeated numbly.

"What about him?"

"He says the Old Law has been revoked, that Men are at long last ready for the New…" The words of the Mandate Catechism came back to him unbidden, and with the heat of truths drawn intact from the crucible of deception. Though you lose your soul, you shall gain the world…

"Think," he continued. "If sorcery is no longer abomination, then…" Let her think it was this, he told himself. Perhaps it would even serve to discourage her. "Then why would you see it as such?"

He was surprised to discover he had stopped walking, that he stood riven, staring at the woman whose parentage had stirred so many echoes of heartbreak and whose unscrupulous obstinacy threatened everything. The last of the Skin Eaters had passed them, casting dubious backward glances as they marched with the mule-train beyond the limits of his light. Within heartbeats it was just the two of them, flanked by knolls of heaped basalt, plains of dust, and bones bleached as light as charcoal by the ages. Cleric's light had tapered to a point, and the company had dwindled to a floating procession of shining helms and trudging shadows.

Silence sealed them as utterly as the blackness.

"I always knew something was… wrong," she said softly. "I mean, I read and I read, everything I could find about sorcery and the Mark. And nowhere, not once, was there any mention of what I see. I thought it was because it was so… unpredictable, you know, just when I would see the… the good of the evil. But when I see it, it burns so… so… I mean, it strikes me so much deeper than at any other time. It was too profound to go without saying, to be left out of the records… I just knew that something had to be different. That something had to be wrong!"

First her arrival, and now this. She had the Judging Eye-she could see not just sorcery, but the damnation it betokened… To think he had convinced himself the Whore of Fate would leave him be!

"And now you're saying," she began hesitantly, "that I'm a kind of… proof?" She blinked in the stammering manner of people finding their way through unsought revelations. "Proof of my stepfather's… falsity?"

She was right… and yet what more proof did he, Drusas Achamian, need? That night twenty years ago, on the eve of the First Holy War's final triumph, the Scylvendi Chieftain had told him everything, given him all the proof he would ever need, enough to fuel decades of bitter hate-enough to deliver these scalpers to their doom. Anasыrimbor Kellhus was Dыnyain, and the Dыnyain cared for naught but domination. Of course he was false.

It was for her sake that the Wizard trembled. She possessed the Judging Eye!

He thought of their coupling, and the sordid passions that had driven it. A cold sweat compressed the skin and wool beneath his pack. He could feel the pity hanging like wet string in his expression, the way his look saw past what she was now-the pale image of her mother standing small in white light-into the torment that awaited her.

"We have more immediate concerns at the moment," he said in a rallying voice.

"You mean Cleric," she replied, her little hands balled into slack fists. She was looking at him with the kind of wilful focus that spoke of contravening interests. Soon, he knew, she would come at him with questions, relentless questions, and he needed to consider carefully the kinds of answers he could and could not give.

"Yes," he said, drawing her by the elbow after the others. "Incariol." He thought of how men always did this, managed the thoughts of others, and wondered why it should exact such a toll from him. "His Mark means he's old… older than you could imagine. And that means he's not only a Quya Mage, but Ishroi, a Nonman noble…"

He could feel the note of falsity, like a cold coin in the slick palm of his voice. He cursed himself for a fool, even as he sought her gaze, hoping that a sincere look might carry what his words could not. The Erratic and his ability to lead them through this deserted warren was their immediate concern. The fact that Achamian used them to another purpose… Weren't all words simply tools in the end?

"So he's Ishroi, then…" Mimara said. The lilt in her tone told him that she knew something was amiss. When had he ever urged her into the murk of his ruminations?

"Such figures don't easily slip through the cracks of history, Mimara. And what history I haven't lived through Seswatha, I've read many times. Moithural, Hosыtil, Shimbor-all the mannish translators and chroniclers of the Nonmen. I assure you, there's no mention of any Incariol, nowhere, not even in their own Pit of Years…" Despite himself, his voice was striking more, not fewer, tin notes of insincerity.

Her gaze was bolt-forward now, apparently following Cleric's light and the small mob of men and pack animals labouring beneath it. From their vantage, the Skin Eaters seemed to pick their way across the vast back of nothingness. Here and there small clearings of floor opened between them, bloomed colourless and flat in the illumination, only to be obscured by kicked dust and the drift of shadowy legs.

They had travelled past the point of sturdy grounds.

"This Judging Eye," she said with cool resignation. "It's a curse, isn't it? An affliction…"

Many years had passed since last he had suffered this feeling, not simply of too much happening too quickly, but of some dread intent in motion, as though all these things, the Nonman, the Captain, the dead scalper out there, and now Mimara, were like the suckered arms of the octopuses he and his father had sometimes pulled from the Meneanor Sea-limbs webbed in the sinew of a singular Fate.

Circumstances always encompassed, but sometimes they encircled as well, as many-chambered as this mountain and every bit as dark. His heart seemed to beat against sagging bandages.

"Just legends," he said. "Nothing more."

"But you've read them all," she said in a high, scathing voice.

He raised a knobbed hand to silence her, nodded to the interval of darkness separating them from the company. A figure had surfaced from the advancing perimeter of their light, became what looked like, for a mad moment, a wizened ape armoured in human rags…

It was Sarl. He waited for them, alone in the darkness, smiling, his lips stretched longer than the arc of his gums and teeth. "Well-well-well," he called in the tones of a cracked flute. Even in the dark the man squinted.

"We'll speak of this later," Achamian said to Mimara, halting her with a gentle hand on her elbow. She frowned and in a careless moment looked to the sergeant with naked fury. Though the man remained some several paces distant, there was no way he could have failed to see her anger.

"You take the light," Achamian said quickly.

"Me?"

"You have the Gift of the Few. You can grasp it with your soul, even without any real sorcerous training… If you think on it, you should actually be able to feel the possibility."

For the bulk of his life, Achamian had shared his calling's contempt of witches. There was no reason for this hatred, he knew, outside the capricious customs of the Three Seas. Kellhus had taught him as much, one of many truths he had used to better deceive. Men condemned others to better celebrate themselves. And what could be easier to condemn than women?

But as he watched her eyes probe inward, he was struck by the practicality of her wonder, the way her expression made this novelty look more like a recollection. It was almost as if women possessed a kind of sanity that men could only find on the far side of tribulation. Witches, he found himself thinking, were not only a good thing, they could very well be a necessity. Especially the witch-to-be before him.

"Yes," she said. "I can feel it. It's like… It's…" She trailed in smiling indecision.

"It's a small Cant," he said, grateful that Sarl, for whatever reason, had granted them this moment together. With a finger, he redirected the light so that it rested several feet above her head. "Something called the Surillic Point…"

"Surillic Point," she repeated, her voice hot with breath.

"So," he continued, "picture yourself in your soul's eye." He paused a heartbeat. "Now picture the light, not as you see it, but as you see its Mark."

She nodded, staring at him with forked concentration. The light stretched the outline of her face across her breast and shoulder.

"Now picture you and the Point walking together. Hold fast that image. It'll be trying at first, but with practice it'll become thoughtless, like any other reflex."

Her gaze fell blank to his wool-covered chest. Without prompting, she took two steps, her eyes climbing in upward astonishment to watch the glaring light track her move for move. She looked back about to laugh, only to stub her toe against some dust-furred detritus. She grinned as she snatched back her balance. Her shadow bloomed and compressed beneath her.

"Hurry," he said. "Catch the others."

She made no secret of her disgust as she strode past the sergeant, walking like a slave with an amphora poised atop her head. Then she began trotting down the path the others had sloughed through the dust.

And she glowed, the old Wizard thought, not only against the stalking black, but against so many memories of harm.

Achamian followed her as far as Sarl. The man stood slightly humped beneath the weight of his pack, the straps of which had bunched folds of mail across the front of his hauberk. Standing so close to him reminded Achamian of the dead Pick, the heart, and the knowledge that they were not alone in these black-bowel deeps. Mimara's light was fast receding, and he saw Sarl's eyes flit toward the encroaching darkness. Without a word, they both began following the woman.

"What do you want, Sergeant?" The company's passage had left an aura of dust in the air, and Achamian could feel it fur the insides of his mouth. His chest wanted to cough the words.

"The Captain asked me to speak to you." Sarl looked even more wrinkled in the gloom. His face was grey and grimace-marked, like a corpse exhumed from black peat. The Wizard breathed against the bristle of bodily alarm, fought the urge to ball his hands into fists. He almost always felt this whenever Sarl strayed too near, ever since the man had smashed his wine-bowl in the Cocked Leg.

"Did he now."

"Yes," Sarl said in a breathy rasp, smiling like an uncle fishing for a nephew's love. That was the thing about the man's ceaseless posturing: Even when the passions were appropriate, the underlying intensities were all wrong. "You see, he thinks you're… too honest, let us say."

"Honest."

"And arrogant."

"Arrogant," Achamian repeated. There was something deadening about the discourse of fools. It was as if his patience were a pool that was only so deep, and Sarl's every word were a rock…

"Look," Sarl said. "We are learned men, you and I-"

"I assure you, Sergeant, there's very little that you and I share."

"Oho! The grief old Sarl gets for his diplomacy!"

"Diplomacy."

"Yes, diplomacy!" he cried in sudden savagery. "Fine fucking words spoken to fine fucking fools!"

Mimara had drawn far ahead of them by now, so that they walked in the least glimmer of light, more the rims of men than possessing human substance, stepping by memory of grounds glimpsed ahead. Sarl was a threat, both to him and his quest-if Achamian had suspected as much before, he knew now. All he need do was speak to the madman in his true voice, right here, right now, and that threat would vanish, become more ash to powder this dead Mansion's floor.

"What?" the fool continued. "Did you not think the Captain knew we walked through a vast tomb? Did you not think he would have commanded Cleric to illuminate it? And what do you do? You decide to show the bones to all! To let simple men know they walked beneath inhuman tombs. Darkness shields as much as it threatens, Schoolman! And you must remember the first rule!"

There was reason in what he was saying. But then that was the problem with reason: It was as much a whore as Fate. Like rope, you could use it to truss or snare any atrocity…

Another lesson learned at Kellhus's knee.

"Another Rule of the Slog, is it?"

"Oh yes… The rules that have made this company a legend in the Wilds. Do you hear me? A legend!"

"So what is the first rule, Sergeant?"

"The Captain always knows. Do you hear me? The Captain always knows!"

All at once, the hand-waving, wire-grinning complexity of the sergeant seemed to focus into one simple truth: Sarl did not just revere his Captain, he worshipped him. Achamian nearly spit, so sour was the disgust that welled through him. To think that after all these years, he marched in the company of fanatics once again!

"You think you can cow me?" he heard himself shout. "A Holy Veteran, like your Captain? What my eyes have seen, Sergeant. I have spat at the feet of the Aspect-Emperor himself! I possess a strength, a might, that can scar mountains, rout entire hosts, turn your bones into boiling oil! And you presume-presume! — to threaten me?"

Sarl laughed, but with a breath clipped by wariness. "You've stepped outside the circle of your skill, Schoolman. This is the slog, not the Holy War, and certainly not some infernal School. Here, our lives depend upon the resolve of our brothers. The knee that cracks pulls ten men down. Recall that. There will be no second warning."

Achamian knew he should be politic, conciliatory, but he was too weary, and too much had happened. Wrath had flooded all the blind chambers of his heart.

"I am not one of you! I am not a Schoolman, and I am certainly not a Skin Eater! And this, my friend, is not your-"

His anger sputtered, blew away and outward like smoke. Horror plunged in.

Sarl actually continued several more steps before realizing he was alone. "What?" he called uneasily from the almost total dark. The lights ahead of them seemed to hang in absolute blackness, a vision of little men toiling into the void.

Over the course of his long life, Achamian had been asked many times what it was like to see the world with the arcane senses of the Few. He would usually answer that it was just as manifold and multifarious as the world revealed by mundane senses-and every bit as difficult to describe. Sometimes he would say it was like a different kind of hearing.

Sarl forgotten, he found himself looking down, even though he could see neither the ground nor his feet. It seemed he could hear calling: the Skin Eaters shouting out their names.

There were galleries immediately below them, stretching many miles into the entombed fundament. Before, he had known this as an abstraction, as something drawn from the uncertain palette of memory. But now he could feel those wending spaces, not directly, but through the constellation of absences, the pits in the stitch of existence, that moved through them.

Chorae…

Tears of God, at least a dozen of them, borne by something that prowled the halls beneath their feet.

The riot of thought and passion that so often heralded disaster. The apprehension of meaning to be had where no sense could be found, not because he was too simple, but because he was too small and the conspiracies were too great.

Sarl was little more than a direction in the viscous black. "Run!" the Wizard cried. "Run!"