The white-luck warrior

Late Summer, 20 New Imperial Year (4132 Year-of-the-Tusk), The Ruins of Sauglish

Suffocation. Blindness and bewilderment.

At first Achamian thought the gag choked him, but his mouth was clear. Had they put a sack over his head? He thrashed his limbs, realizing he was unbound-but he could not move more than the span of a hand.

Sarcophagus. Coffin. He was in some kind of…

Dream.

The old Wizard's panic dwindled, even as the panic of the ancient soul he had become flared into outrage. He was Anasurimbor Nau-Cayuti, Scourge of the Consult, Prince of the High Norsirai-Dragonslayer! He beat at his stone prison with righteous fury, howled. He cursed the name of his miscreant wife.

But the enclosed chute grew hot with his exertions, and the air began failing him. Soon he was heaving, making a bellows out of his barrel chest, gasping. Soon he could do no more than scratch at his prison, and his thoughts unwound in shame and disorientation…

To think a man such as he would die scratching.

Then he was tipping and tumbling, as though his prison had been cast into a cataract. Stone cracked-a concussion that snapped his teeth. Air washed about him, so chill as to feel wet. He sucked cold, breathed against a ponderous fragment pinning him. He blinked at the night darkness, saw the moon low, glaring pale through rag-ripped clouds and thronging branches. He glimpsed broken forms strewn, sightless eyes shining in the twinkle of fallen torches. Dead Knights of Tryse. He saw his sword gleaming among rune-engraved fragments of stone, reached with nerveless fingers. But a shadow stilled him. Witless for lack of breath and confusion and horror, he gazed up at his monstrous assailant…

Phallus, greased and pendulous. Wings, scabrous and veined, folded into two horns rising high above the thing's shoulders. Window skin, revealing sheaths of raw muscle and a compound head: one skull a great oval, the second human, fused into the jaws of the former.

Aurang, the old Wizard realized with Nau-Cayuti's horror. The Horde-General. The Angel of Deceit.

The Inchoroi kicked away his blade, arched over him like a defecating dog. It wrapped fish-cold fingers about his throat. It raised him until he dangled helpless in its baleful gaze. Needles probed his breath-starved extremities.

The thing grinned-sheets of mucus pinned to its lesser skull.

Laughter like pain blown through broken flutes.

"None," the Inchoroi gasped through leprous throats. "None escape Golgottera-"

Shouting. Someone was shouting.

The Wizard bolted from the forest floor, blinking and peering in the stupefied manner of those just awoken. He coughed, convulsed as his throat warred against the gag. The world was predawn grey, the eastern sky a golding slate through skeins of branches.

The Captain. The Captain ranted at them to awaken.

"The Coffers, boys!" he cried in a macabre parody of Sarl's exclamation. The mad Sergeant chortled in delight, cried, "The Slog of Slogs!" in answer, before a realization of some kind yanked his breath short. Afterward, he watched with the wariness of a dog long-beaten.

"Today is the day we turn around!"

Achamian glimpsed Mimara rising slight and slender from a depression in the ground, her lips hanging open as she beat at the leafy detritus pasted across her arm and shoulder. Suddenly Lord Kosoter was looming over him, the twin voids tingling as always beneath his splint hauberk. He grabbed the Wizard by the shoulders, heaved him to his feet as though he were a child.

"Galian!" he shouted to the former Columnary. "Make ready."

The Captain seized the rope about the Wizard's wrists and, accompanied by Cleric, led him like a votive lamb away from the others. He had a practised hand, shoving and catching so that it seemed the Wizard continually tripped forward. Eventually, he let him fall onto his face.

The Wizard writhed like a fish, kicked himself onto his back only to crush and scrape his fingers against a branch. Lord Kosoter towered over him, more shadow than man with the brightening east behind him. His two Chorae glowered with nothingness, like the empty sockets of a skull hanging about his heart. The Wizard watched him reach beneath his hauberk and tug one free.

"Our expedition has come to a head," Lord Kosoter said, dandling the thing before him.

The old Wizard's thoughts raced. There was a path through this. There was a path through everything…

Yet one more lesson learned at Kellhus's punishing hand.

The Captain knelt beside him, leaned so low his beard brushed Achamian's own. His rough fingers worked the leather straps that held the gag in place. The Chorae was a coal that scorched the air with absence-burning oblivion…

"The time has come, Wizard. Xonghis says the solstice is several days away."

The old Wizard shrank from the Trinket, writhed as if searching for a hatch through the forest floor. The Captain pulled the gag free.

"Speak with care."

His tongue was cankered and swollen. Talking was onerous. "Wha-?" He trailed in a coughing fit. "Sol-solstice?"

The Captain's face betrayed no passion. His eyes gleamed dead within their rim of tattooed black. The ferocity of his suspicion lay compressed in the pause he took before replying.

"You claimed the Coffers were protected by powerful Wards," he fairly growled. "Curses that could only be unlocked during the solstice…"

Achamian glared, blinking. It seemed a lifetime had passed since he had said as much. Lies. Where facts were like embroidery, each one stitched across the whole cloth of others, lies were like chips of ice in water, always slipping one past the other, always melting…

"Our expedition has come to a head…"

And it came upon the Wizard as a kind of falling horror, the profundity of his ignorance.

Were the Coffers still sealed after all this time? Were they buried? Were they gutted, long emptied of their riches?

For all he knew, the Map to Ishual might lie in Golgotterath…

Even still, he heard his voice rasp, spill even more ice into the water of expediency-and with more than enough hate to sound convincing. "Th-the Wards… They yoke the movement of the planets-that is the source of their never-ending power. F-four sorcerous keys were given, one for each transition of the seasons. Summer to autumn is the only key I know."

The Captain regarded him for a flint-hearted moment.

"You lie."

"Yes," Achamian replied in a cold voice. "I lie."

Lord Kosoter turned to Cleric, who stood looming behind. His Chorae drifted a fraction nearer as he did so, blistering the Wizard's cheek with salt. Seeing the Nonman, Achamian suddenly realized what it was he needed to do. He needed to convince Kosoter to send him alone with the Nonman King-with Seswatha's ancient friend and ally.

He needed to reach what remained of Nil'giccas… Or, failing that, kill him.

But how to convince him, a being gone mad for forgetfulness?

The Captain scooped the Chorae tight into his fist. Achamian watched, trying to squint the hope from his eyes, while the man drew his knife and began sawing at his restraints.

"I smell treachery," Lord Kosoter said to his inhuman ward. "You take him. Confirm his story or kill him."

Cleric nodded. A band of dawn orange slipped across his cheek.

The old Wizard fairly shouted aloud for relief. How long had it been since the Whore had last favoured him? Seju knew he would need more of her capricious favours before this insanity was through.

His extremities prickled and stabbed at the sudden return of circulation. Groaning, he drew himself up, rubbing his hands and fingers against his forearms.

"You die no matter what," the Captain spat, speaking as if the future were as irrevocable as the past. "It's the girl who tips upon the balance."

And suddenly Achamian understood why Kosoter had elected to remain behind. Logic- scalper logic. Who knew what sorcerous traps lay buried in a legendary place like the Library? Better to hang back, to direct events from safety, with a knife held to his hostage's throat.

"And the child within her."

The Great Library of Sauglish. Even beaten to its foundations, portions of the holy fortress reared above the trees. The merest rise or gap in the screening branches afforded him glimpses. His dreaded destination.

Even still, the old Wizard found an unexpected serenity walking with the Nonman through the wooded ruins. Ragged patches of sunshine waved across the forest floor. Birdsong chirped and chattered through the canopy, light and inexhaustible. Here and there sections of wall rose from mounds like teeth from earthen gums. Layers of stonework ribbed the ravines they crossed. Blocks and fragments of every description stumped the ground. They passed a free-standing triumphal, the first thing Achamian clearly recognized from his Dreams: the Murussar, the symbolic bastion that marked the entrance to Sauglish's outlander quarter. Stripped of its inscriptions and engravings, it towered into the canopy, stone blackened, chapped with white lichens, shelved with moss. He need only blink to see the crowds bustling about its marble base: their garb ancient, their arms and armour bronze-men culled from all nations, from wild Aorsi to distant Kyraneas.

Prior to the First Apocalypse, the Holy Library had been famed throughout Earwa, the destination of poets, sorcerers, and princely embassies. Entire literary traditions had grown about the long pilgrimage to the City of Robes, the famed Caravaneeri, of which only fragments now survived. Bards and prophets haunted the niches and alcoves of every street, crying out diversion and threatening damnation. Vendors lined the ways, hawking wares from as far away as ancient Shir.

Sauglish had been infamous for its racket, the markets booming with commerce during the days, the streets clattering with teamsters during the night. There was something both tragic and beautiful, Achamian decided, in the contrast between that ancient clamour and the peaceful din he heard now-as if there were something proper in the passing of Men.

The Ganiural, the processional avenue that led to the Library, was still clearly visible beneath the mounding of centuries: a broad trough in the forest floor that followed a compass-straight bearing. The old Wizard had said nothing to Cleric in all this time: despite the wonder he felt, his outrage at his captivity remained too raw a thing to broach. But as they climbed toward the ruined Library, the scale of ages seemed to leach into his bones-generations stacked upon generations, innumerable lives snuffed after a mere handful of scratching years. The fact that the figure walking beside him had outlived all of it, long enough to break beneath the burden, loomed so large that his grudge began to seem preposterous.

"Incariol," Achamian finally said, wincing at the way speaking pained his gag-cankered tongue. "Why that name?"

The Nonman's stride did not falter. "Because I wander."

The Wizard breathed deep, knowing the time had come to plunge back into the fray. He squinted up at the figure. "And Cleric?"

The Nonman's pace slowed a fraction. A scowl furrowed his hairless brow.

"It is a tradition… I think… A tradition among the Siqu to take a Mannish name."

Siqu was the name given to Nonmen who walked among Men.

"But Incariol is not your name…"

The Nonman continued walking.

"You are Nil'giccas," the Wizard pressed. "The Last King of Mansions."

Cleric abruptly halted and with an alien air slowly turned to face him. Because they had walked shoulder to shoulder or rather, shoulder to elbow, the Nonman loomed over him, broad and hale beneath his nimil armour.

The Wizard saw turmoil in his dark eyes.

"No," the marmoreal lips said. "He is dead."

A sudden consciousness of what Seswatha had felt in the presence of the being before him descended upon Achamian. A sense of age-spanning majesty, grievous nobility, and power, angelic and unfathomable.

"No," the old Wizard said. "He is quite alive, gazing upon me."

The King of Ishterebinth stood before him, storied and immortal. The legendary hero, whose triumphs and disasters had been stamped into the very foundation of history.

Drusas Achamian fell to his knees, bent with fingers interlocked behind his neck, the way the Grandmaster of the Sohonc had bowed so many times so very many years ago, even in this, the celebrated city he once called his own…

He knelt to accord honour to the great King before him.

She watches Cleric and the Wizard vanish over the burial rim that once was Sauglish's walls, swallows against the cry climbing her throat. The sight reeks of execution.

They have reached the Coffers. The Skin Eaters, she knows, will not suffer them long.

Mimara has never been a timid or fearful woman. Nor has she ever been like her mother, who continually swaddled her heart in doubt and misgivings. Their quest has doled out terrors aplenty, but almost always as calls to desperate action. There were always eyes she could claw. Always.

But the fear she feels now forbids all action. It gags her, as certainly as the Wizard had been gagged. Even her wailing is caught in the fist of her breast. It empties her limbs of blood.

The fear that taught prayer to Men.

She can feel Achamian walking alone, out there, a point of panic swamped in torpor. She can feel his doom close hoary about him.

The Captain and the others busy themselves with trivial labours. Pokwas whets his great blade. Koll seems to sleep. Xonghis fashions snares. Mimara simply sits hugging her knees, rapt, at times praying for Achamian, at times fending the images of disaster flashing through her soul's eye. She spends the early morning watches grappling with doom and futility.

But the focus of her anxiety is not long in changing.

– | Great Sauglish, the ancient City of Robes, extended about them, little more than a host of ruined grottos scattered through the forest. He would succeed in this, the old Wizard thought on his knees beneath the towering Nonman. He would wrest Cleric away from the Captain. He would recover Anasurimbor Celmomas's ancient map from the Coffers. He would find Ishual and the truth of the man who had stolen his wife.

"You are confused, mortal," Cleric said. "Rise."

And with these simple words, the old Wizard's sudden hope collapsed back into the morass of worry and embittered fear. Feeling foolish, Achamian climbed back to his feet. He gazed angrily up at the Nonman, then looked down in embarrassment and fury.

"Lord Kosoter…" he ventured as they resumed their climb. "He's your elju? Your book?"

Cleric was reluctant to speak. The old Wizard knew he had to tread carefully. Famed King of Ishterebinth or not, the Nonman walking beside him was also an Erratic, one of the Wayward.

"Yes."

"What if he lies? What if he manipulates you?"

Cleric turned to regard him, then looked to the glimpses of ruined walls in the distance before them. "What if he's treacherous?" he asked.

"Yes!" the Wizard pressed. "Surely you can see how… diseased his heart has become. Surely you can see his madness!"

"And you… you would be my book in his stead?"

Achamian paused to better choose his words.

"Seswatha," he began with an imploring look, "your old friend of yore-he dwells within me, my Lord. I cannot betray him. He cannot betray you. Let me bear the burden of your memory!"

Cleric continued in silence for several strides, his expression inscrutable.

"Seswatha…" he finally repeated. "That name… I remember. When the world burned… When Mog-Pharau shouldered the clouds… He… Seswatha fought at my side… for a time."

"Yes!" Achamian exclaimed. " Please, my Lord. Take me as your book! Leave this scalper madness behind! Regain your honour! Reclaim your glory!"

Cleric lowered his face, clutched his chin and cheek. His shoulders hitched in what Achamian took for a sob…

But was in fact a laugh.

"So…" the Nonman King said, raising eyes savage for their mirth. "You offer me oblivion?"

Too late, the old Wizard recognized his mistake.

"No… I-"

The Nonman whirled, grasped him with a strength that made the Wizard feel bone thin, bone frail. "I will not die a husk!" he cried. He rolled his head from shoulder to shoulder in his curious, mad and explosive way. He flung out his hands to clutch the air.

"No! I will ruin and I will break!"

Few things unsettle more than the violation of hidden assumptions-or make us more wary. The old Wizard had appealed to his own logic-his own vanity-forgetting that the absence of common ends was the very thing that made the mad mad. He had offered himself as a tool, not realizing that he and Mimara were the object of the bargain struck: the shade of an ancient friend and the echo of long-lost love. They were the loves to be betrayed.

They were the souls to be remembered…

"Honour?" the Nonman cried, his sneer transforming him into a gigantic Sranc. "Love? What are these but dross before oblivion? No! I will seize the world and I will shake from it what misery, what anguish, I can. I will remember!"

The old Wizard resumed walking, this time with a bearing more suited to a death march. Let the victim lead the executioner, he thought. Nil'giccas, the Last King of Mansions, was going to kill him in the Library of Sauglish.

Scenarios both disastrous and absurdly hopeful raced through Achamian's thoughts. He would ambush the Nonman with a Cant powerful enough to smash his incipient Wards-kill him before he himself was killed. He would plead and cajole, find the incantation of reason and passion that would throw Cleric from the mad track he followed. He would battle with howling fury, tear down what was left of the Sacred Library, only to be beaten down by the Quya Mage's greater might…

The impulse to survive is not easily denied, no matter how severe the calamities a man has suffered or how relentless the misfortunes.

"I mourn what Fate has made of me…" the Nonman said without warning.

The old Wizard watched his booted feet kick through forest debris.

"So what of Ishterebinth?" he asked. "Has it fallen?"

The hulking Nonman made a gesture that possessed the character of a shrug. "Fallen? No. Turned. In the absence of recollection my brothers have turned to tyranny… To Min-Uroikas."

Min-Uroikas. That he spoke this with ease attested to the severity of his condition. Among the Intact, it was a name not so much mentioned as spat or cursed. Min-Uroikas. The Pit of Obscenities. The dread stronghold that had murdered all their wives and daughters, and so doomed their entire race.

"Golgotterath," the Wizard managed to say without breath.

A heavy nod. Sickles of reflected sunlight bobbed across his scalp.

"I had forgotten that name."

"And you?" the Wizard asked. "Why have you not joined them?"

Long silence. Long enough to bring them to the base of the broken Library.

"Pride," the Nonman finally said. "I would bring about my own heartbreak. So I set out in search of those I might love…"

Achamian searched the dark glitter of his eyes. "And destroy."

A solemn nod, carrying thousands of years of inevitability. "And destroy."

Mimara does not know what alerts her to the sudden change in the air among the scalpers. Her mother once told her the bulk of discourse consisted of hidden exchanges, that most men blathered in utter ignorance of their meaning and intent. Mimara scoffed at the idea, not because it rang false, but because her mother argued it.

"Most find it difficult to stomach," the Empress said with maternal exhaustion. "They believe in a thousand things they cannot see, yet tell them the greater part of their own soul lies hidden, and they balk…"

This proved to be one of those rare comments that would flank Mimara's anger and leave her simply troubled. She could not shake the sense that the object of the exchange, the hidden object, had been her stepfather, Kellhus. The nagging suspicion that her mother had been warning her.

A part of her awakened that day. It was one thing to realize that the men who wooed her spoke through their teeth, as the Ainoni would say. But it was quite another to think that motives could hide themselves, leaving the men they moved utterly convinced of their honourable intentions.

Now she can feel it. Something hidden has happened, here, among these idle men, on the ruined outskirts of Sauglish. Something as ethereal and small as a soul committing to some resolution, yet as momentous as anything that has happened in her life.

She becomes quiet, watchful, knowing the only question is whether they realize as much…

The scalpers.

The Captain squats upon a toe of mossed stone that smacks of masonry, even though it looks natural. He stares out into random forest pockets with a kind of stationary hatred, like a man who never tires of counting his grievances. Galian and Pokwas recline against a hump in the matted humus, talking and joking in low tones. Koll sits like a cross-legged corpse, his hollow eyes sorting nothing. Sarl sits and stands, sits and stands, grinning his eyes into lines and gurgling about slogs and riches.

Xonghis alone remains both industrious and vigilant.

After a time, Galian bolts upright. With the air of settling some inaudible dispute between him and Pokwas, he asks, "What will our shares be?"

A heartbeat of astonished silence follows, such is the general terror of addressing the Captain.

"As much as you can bear and still survive," Lord Kosoter finally says. Absolutely nothing about his gaze or demeanour changes as he says this. He literally speaks as if not speaking.

"And what about the Qirri?"

Silence.

Despite the air of hard deliberation, Lord Kosoter has bred an atmosphere of volatility between him and his men, cleaving to thresholds so vague and so brittle that it seems anything beyond abject obedience might warrant execution. Galian risks his life simply asking questions for all to hear. But mentioning Qirri…

It seems nothing less than suicidal. The act of a fool.

The Captain shakes his head slowly. "Only Cleric knows."

"What if you were to demand he yield it?"

Turning his head on a hinge of granite, Lord Kosoter finally regards the former Columnary.

"The False Man is mad!" Pokwas calls out.

The Captain lowers his face, pinches his lower lip in contemplation. "Yes," he says in grim admission. "But think. A year given. Our every greed slaked." He seeks each of his men with his gaze, as if knowing he must cow them one by one. "He's delivered us to these riches."

Galian smiles like someone with arguments too devious to be refuted.

"Then why suffer him any longer?"

For the first time Mimara glimpses the fury sparking in the Captain's eyes.

"Who will deliver us back, fool?"

More silence.

A nightmarish intensity engulfs the two men.

Galian peers at the Ainoni caste-noble in mock reverence, his manner so feckless, so bold, that it raises an audible murmur from Mimara's lungs.

"I want a fire," he says.

"We march on the dark."

Galian looks to the forested deeps about them, then back to his Captain. "Yes… Skinny country, is it?" There is nothing sly about his antagonism now. "Where are the skinnies then?"

The Captain regards him for several heartbeats, his eye shadowed beneath heavy brows, his nose and cheeks like chipped flint above the brushed wire of his moustache and beard. There is something breathless, absolute about his composure. Grim deliberation glints from his eyes…

The look of a man, a murderous man, finding the shadowy centre of his enemy's web.

"Are you such a fool, Galian?" Mimara blurts aloud. The tension is too much.

But the former Columnary has eyes only for his Captain.

"You made your decision, just then," he says with a lolling smile. "Didn't you? You decided to kill me."

Lord Kosoter glares, a hoary king leaning from his stone chair. A dark, tyrannical figure, passing judgment on the fool capering before him.

"Before the slit called out," Galian presses. "That moment of silence… You thought to yourself, Kill the fool! "

There is a sudden viciousness to his intonation, and enough mimicry of the Captain's growling voice to send Pokwas laughing. Even Xonghis, who is working on his bow, grins in his enigmatic Jekki manner.

Horror bolts through her. She has just glimpsed the savage shape of what is about to happen. Conspiracy and conspirators both.

"But then you thought it before, haven't you, Captain? Every time you glimpsed me leaning with the others, something cried, 'Kill him!' in that cramp you call a soul."

The Captain remains utterly motionless, watching the Columnary's approach from his impromptu throne.

"As it turns out," Galian continues with bright humour, "we were leaning together in sedition…"

The Columnary comes to stop immediately before Lord Kosoter, easily within reach of his broadsword. A kind of boredom seems to glint in the Captain's eyes-as if mutiny were an old and tedious friend.

"And you should know that every time I glimpsed you…" Galian throws out his arms and, as if daring him to strike, leans forward in vindictive contempt. "I also heard something whisper, 'Kill him!' "

The arrow catches the Captain in the mouth. He jerks to his side as if slapped, staggers back two steps. He hangs there for a moment, spitting cracked teeth.

A cloud occludes the sun.

The Captain of the Skin Eaters, the man called Ironsoul, raises his face, not to the bowman, Xonghis, but to the bowman's maker, Galian. The shaft is visible. It skewers the lower half of his face, draws bearded skin tight. Blood spills from the ream of his bottom lip. His laughter sputters through it.

A sardonic glee, malevolent for its intensity, shines like sorcery in his eyes.

The second arrow thumps into his neck. He whirls to the side and around, as if a rope about his waist holds him staked in place. He hangs for an instant, like a thing made of wax. Then he slumps face first across the humus. A convulsive moment passes. He begins shaking, his limbs tossing with bonfire violence. A crazed, bestial scramble follows, as if an elemental wildness or disordered spirit has lain dormant within him, hidden, and only now could thrash free of human constraints.

His expression loose with horror, Galian draws his sword.

The Captain claws the leafy humus at the Columnary's feet, seizes a branch no thicker than two thumbs. His spine arches against his blooded hauberk. His head pulls back. He grimaces about his tented mouth, blows rage and spittle and blood. His eyes gleam like pearl. Snorting with effort and fury, he begins twisting and wrenching at the branch, as if it were the world's own spine-the one thing to be broken.

He roars.

Then his head is gone, bouncing about the tail of its caste-noble braid.

Silence-this time of visible things.

Mimara watches, breathless. Mortal, something cold whispers within her.

Mortal after all.

Strange, the way Qirri made hash of momentous things.

Omens of the world's end. The death of races… Standing in bare sunlight, it all seemed little more than beautiful paint, a kind of ornamentation.

The northern tower of the Muraw, the Library's forward gate, was scarce more than a mound. Wandering stretches of vertical blocks broke the slopes here and there, but otherwise it had ceased to exist. Inexplicably, the southern tower stood almost entirely intact, a cyclopean square that soared against the bald sky. Even the obsidian that had plated its base had survived. Turf and shrubs mounded its distant crown, and several tenacious trees hung rooted from its sides. Despite everything, a sudden, boyish urge to scale the tower struck the old Wizard, followed by a sense of exhausted longing.

There had been a time when he had spent days loafing among ruins far less significant than these. A time when his worries had been small enough to ignore.

Side by side, the old Wizard and the Nonman King strode into the Library's ruined precincts. The walls, or what remained of them, possessed the monumental feel of the Ziggurats in Shigek. In many cases trees, full grown yet bent and windswept, grew along their crests. Achamian could still recognize the Ursilaral, the central promenade where the One Thousand Gift-Shields had once hung, garish and beautiful, symbolizing the truce between the Sohonc and almost all the known tribes of White and High Norsirai. In Seswatha's day, the Library was often called the Citadel of Citadels because of its importance, certainly, but also because of its design: fortresses within fortresses, as if the outside were a kind of ocean, a flood to be fought chamber by grudging chamber. It possessed no fewer than nineteen courtyards, often call "pits" because of the height of the surrounding walls, with the Ursilaral, its length jawed by numerous gates, connecting most of them.

The morning sun had climbed high enough only to bathe portions of their overgrown floors so that Achamian and Cleric found themselves walking through dry shadow. The growth was mostly restricted to thickets and clutches of shrubs, forcing Achamian to follow Cleric as he hacked his way forward with his sword. Plumes of fluff swirled in dry-wind eddies. Clouds drifted across the oblong squares of blue sky above them. Bees tracked spiral courses through the air, becoming white dots when they passed into sunlight. The Wizard even glimpsed a hare bolting through the grasses.

The experience became increasingly surreal. At times the Wizard found himself staring at Cleric's labouring back, broad beneath its sheath of shining mail, wondering whether he should just attack the Nonman and be done with the suspense. At other times he played a kind of game guessing what was the ruin of what. Mounds became fountains. Rectangular breaks in walls became windows onto barracks, apartments, and scriptoriums.

And twice he caught himself squinting across the northeastern heights, looking for thunderheads massing black and terrible…

For the Whirlwind.

It was like walking through two worlds beyond the actual: the one the issue of his reading, the other the product of his Dreams. He was Achamian, exile and pariah, wearer of rotted pelts. And he was Seswatha, hero, Grandmaster of this place, both during the time when its fall was preposterous, laughable, and during the days of encroaching destruction.

"I saw these towers burn," he said in an old voice. "I saw these walls tumble."

The Nonman King paused, scanned his surroundings as if seeing the ruins about him for the very first time. Achamian wondered what it would be like, outliving great works of stone. When nations possessed the span of flowers, wouldn't everything seem but stages of ruin?

"All Ishterebinth lamented when word arrived," Cleric eventually said. "We knew then the World was doomed."

Achamian gazed at the Nonman King, pinned by an immovable melancholy.

"Why?" he asked. "Why would you lament our death when it was Men, not the Inchoroi, who destroyed all your great mansions?"

"Because we have always known we would not survive Men."

The Wizard smiled in recollection.

"Yes… Because our dooms are one."

At last, walking bent through a gate almost buried by the rising ground, they came to the Turret, the mighty citadel raised by Noshainrau the White. It was naught but an enormous ring of stone, broad enough to encase any of the great amphitheatres of Invishi or Carythusal. Pitted with bird-holes, the sloped walls rose some thirty or so cubits before cresting, a line of ragged ruin against blue sky. The shining bronze sheets were gone-the Skutiri. In Seswatha's day they had ringed the Turret's base, nine thousand, nine-hundred and ninety-nine of them, each taller than a man, and each scored with innumerable lines of sorcerous script. The sun shone imperturbable, drawing shadows across hanging nubs of stone. Wind whisked through leaves and grasses. Never, it seemed to the old Wizard, had the world seemed so lonely.

"The sorcery here is very old, very weak," the Nonman said.

Did he remember Lord Kosoter's earlier charge? Could he?

Was he accusing him of lying?

"The Coffers lie beneath these ruins," Achamian replied. "The Wards protecting it are buried deep… and quite ageless, I assure you."

Perhaps now was the time to strike.

No. Not until he knew for sure he wouldn't need the Nonman's strength.

The Turret's original gate was lost beneath ramped debris. They fought their way through a mass of scrub, then began climbing.

Of all his memories of the Holy Library, the final days lived most fiercely in Achamian's memory. Always the No-God was there… like a nagging sense, a direction steeped in dread, as if one point on the compass had been honed sharp enough to draw a gasp from his lungs. He would walk the walls and verandas and feel it… there… sometimes stationary for days on end, but always moving sooner or later-always coming closer.

And when the wind was right, he would hear the wailing of bereaved mothers from the city below.

Stillborn… Every infant stillborn.

The old Wizard stopped mid-ascent, leaned against pitted stone to recover his wind. Many years had passed since he last felt the horror that was Mog-Pharau while awake. The gaping sense of futility and loss, of things crashing, not here or there, but everywhere. The immobility of heart as much as limb or will. The horizon itself had become a revelation, taking you out of yourself and binding you to a world of dying things.

It dogged the old Wizard as he continued climbing, a great shadow lurking in his periphery, a sky-staining malevolence that leapt into existence whenever he glanced away. And the conviction that all Mankind shared the very same premonition.

Cleric stood atop the summit. The ruined walls reached to either side of him, thick enough to house pockets of grasses and shrub along their summit, climbing and dropping according to the logic of things wrecked for the passage of years.

"Something is amiss," he called down to the huffing Wizard.

He extended a hand in assistance as Achamian clambered near. There was a surprising reassurance in his grip, as if their bodies recognized a kinship too primitive not to be overlooked by their souls.

Leaning against his knees to catch his breath, the old Wizard surveyed the Turret's vacant interior. He suffered the same knee-wobbling sense of vertigo he always suffered when he found himself standing high upon fallen works. Swallows battled about the curve of the inner walls. The ages had entirely gutted the citadel, leaving only what resembled an absurdly immense granary. But he had expected as much.

What he had not expected was the great pit yawning below…

Rubble heaped about the inner foundations, making a funnel of the ground. The cracked rim of floors broken, exposing wasp-nest hollows, each a level of the Turret's cellars. Then obdurate blackness at the bottom.

"Do you smell that?" Achamian asked, frowning in disbelief.

"Yes," the Nonman King replied. "Sulphur."

She is not sure when she resumes breathing. The remaining Skin Eaters-the sane ones, anyway-immediately fall to arguing.

Galian instructs Sarl to watch her, which he does with a kind of crazed reluctance. She and the mad Sergeant take turns gazing at the Captain in disbelief. At one point, Sarl grasps the very branch that Lord Kosoter had tried to snap in his final moment. Crouching a pace away, he uses it to poke at his dead Captain's face. He presses the tip against the waxen forehead, rolls the face skyward, then jumps when it slips and rocks back to face him.

He turns to Mimara and cackles.

"He's not dead," he says like a drunk keen to slur some fact that others thought obvious. "Not the Captain, no…"

Shouts climb from the near distance. Pokwas is jabbing Galian's shoulder with a long finger.

"He's too hard for Hell."

It was like climbing down a monstrous rabbit hole.

A strange anxiousness dogged the old Wizard as the brightness climbed in stages above him. The pit fell at an angle instead of dropping vertically, opening about a ramp of packed debris and earth, like a burrow that was at once a road into the underworld. The Turret's cellars formed a kind of pitched roof above them, three distinct levels of corridors halved and chambers cracked open like eggs.

The depths opened before them, steeped in sulphurous mystery.

"Look…" Cleric said, motioning toward the side of the tunnel.

But Achamian had already glimpsed them in the grey light. Three gashes hooked like scythes: the centre one the longest, the innermost curving within its compass, while the outermost arced away at an angle.

Achamian immediately recognized the mark: any Man in the Three Seas would have. The Three Sickles had been a common heraldic device since Far Antiquity-the symbol adopted by Triamis the Great.

The scoring of long-curved claws…

The spoor of Dragons.

A profound ache climbs out from her back, roots itself in her knees and neck. But still she sits hugging her shins. She cannot move.

Galian returns, leading the others. Sarl scampers from his path, his Captain's head clutched tight to his chest.

"So what are you going to do?" she asks the Columnary.

"We're going to wait for Cleric to return. Then we're going to relieve him of that pretty pouch."

Xonghis has already yanked the two Chorae from beneath Lord Kosoter's hauberk.

Galian smiles at her in the leering manner she knows all too well. "In the meantime," he says, "we are going to feast on the banquet the gods have delivered to us."

Her look is so sour, it seems a miracle that he can grin.

"Feast… On what?"

The day is dry and bright-beautiful. Wind falls through the lazy tree-tops, shushing the bestiary that is the world. Blood clots across the leaves.

"Peaches, my sweet. Peaches."

Skidding on their rumps, the old Wizard and the Nonman King followed the burrow into airy darkness-the antechamber to the Coffers. The Upper Pausal had been reduced to balconies hanging amputated in the black. Debris choked the floors of the Pausal proper, heaped toward the sides by the passage of some monstrous bulk. Achamian shuddered, glimpsing what was left of the Nonman friezes that adorned its walls-memories of Cil-Aujas, he supposed. The Great Gate of Wheels had been obliterated; he could see its ensorcelled remains scattered through the ruin: the marmoreal white of broken incantation wheels, the chapped green of bronze cams and fittings.

Raw blackness gaped before him.

So, a dull and long-suffering portion of his soul murmured, the Coffers have been looted.

He stood motionless, gazing in abject dismay.

So much suffered… So many dead…

For nothing.

The great refrain of his miserable life.

The madness, when he pondered it, was that he had believed it could be otherwise, that he would trek all this distance- survive this far — and actually find the Coffers intact, the map to Ishual waiting for him like a low-hanging plum. He almost laughed aloud for thinking it, the thought that Fate might be kind.

This, he realized-this was what his fate had been all along. Snared in the machinations of his enemy, who had known his mission even before he had tripped across it. Confronted with the preposterous issue of his preposterous hopes. He had sought truth and had been delivered to madmen and a Dragon instead-a Dragon!

A Wracu of old.

He could almost hear the skies laugh.

Sparing neither word nor glance, the old Wizard and the Nonman King stepped across the cracked threshold and at long last passed into the Coffers.

The reek watered his eyes, mingled with his terror so that it seemed he wept for fear. Sulphur. The smoke of predatory life. And rot, profound and gangrenous. The putrefaction that ties a string to your stomach and pulls hard whenever breath is drawn too deep.

Achamian could feel as much as hear the thing breathing in the blackness, the whoosh of enormous furnace bellows. He could scarce see the debris beneath his feet, yet the sound grew into a kind of vision, such is the mischief of imagination. Great lungs betokened great limbs. The deep reptilian creak conjured images of scaled hides, of lipless jaws and grinning teeth…

A mighty horror awaited them, and a portion of the old Wizard did not want to see. A portion of him preferred the hysterics of his soul's eye.

They came to a slope of heaped ruin, picked their way to the summit. The blackness yawned out about them, a motionless vacuum. Cleric uttered a sorcerous phrase; his eyes and mouth flared with meaning. The pale brilliance of a Surillic Point appeared above them, and the blackness fled to far places, leaving a globe of empty, illuminated air…

Dragon. Wracu.

According to legend, the first Sohonc discovered a vast cavern when laying the Library's foundations. They dredged the depths, squared the walls, pillared the open spaces, creating a secret, subterranean citadel. It was Noshainrau, whose sorcerous research had cast such long shadows across the future, who would make it his School's treasury, a vault for the world's greatest glories and darkest terrors.

The famed Coffers.

Perhaps the ancient architects had feared the ceiling the earth had provided them. Perhaps the chaotic weave of natural lines offended their sense of beauty and proportion. Either way, they constructed a roof with the post and lintel principles they used to raise their temples. This second ceiling had long since collapsed in its centre, littering the floor with the ruin of giant stone beams and the cracked drums of toppled pillars. Peering between the remaining columns, the old Wizard had the impression of a black lake hanging above all that could be seen, as if the very world had been turned on its head.

Gone were the ponderous lantern wheels. Gone were the narrow aisles. Gone were the racks and shelves that had organized a thousand years of sorcerous hoarding. Treasure and debris matted the floors, a ragged landscape of contradictions that piled higher toward the chamber's heart. Coins gravelling the wrack of shattered frescoes. A tripod capsized in a swell of mounded powder. A crown staved beneath a jutting beam of granite. A chest of cracked bronze, spilling rivulets of jewels between horns of broken stone.

Because of age-old accumulations of dust and tarnish, nothing glittered, nothing gleamed.

Apart from the Dragon.

The shadows cast by intervening columns were absolute, so only fragments of the beast could be seen. Horned ridges. Wings folded into scarred curtains. Scales like overlapping shields, pale with filth and bronze. A single nostril weeping smoke.

The beast was old, Achamian realized. Exceedingly old. Wracu never stopped growing, so it stood to reason that any dragon he encountered in his waking life would dwarf the ancient monstrosities from his Dreams…

But this.

Wings that could have tarped the Shilla Amphitheatre in faraway Aoknyssus. A torso broad enough to hull the largest Cironji carrack, yet long enough to coil about the small mountain of treasure and ruin. Were it to rear onto its hind legs, the beast would stand as tall as any of the Mop's unnatural trees.

The bellow lungs continued to roar and croak in the deeps of Achamian's hearing. The sulphur pinched his own breath, quick and shallow and warm-blooded. Nausea rooted through his innards.

He turned to Cleric. Bleached in his own light, the Nonman King stood rapt, his left boot braced against a headless statue. The Surillic Point made polished marble of his skin, a diamond weave of his nimil hauberk. He looked more thoughtful than afraid or astounded.

"This…" Cleric murmured, his gaze fixed on the slumbering beast. "This is where I am meant to die."

"You and my loincloth," Achamian replied.

The Nonman turned to him, his face blank and wondering. A vagrant pain seemed to seize his expression. Then Nil'giccas, King of the Last Mansion, laughed. The sound boomed through the hollows, a cackle that rolled like thunder, deep and earthen and utterly-insanely-unafraid.

Achamian grimaced more than smiled.

"Ah… Seswatha," Cleric said, swallowing his mirth. "How I cherish your wi-"

"Old," the very ground seemed to croak. "So very old…"

Rasping through roped mucus, sheathed in a bottomless wheeze. The voice was more than loud, more than deep; it was great in the sense of absurd disproportions, words cast across faraway orders of strength and immensity. Achamian suddenly felt like a fly in the presence of a Sempis crocodile.

The scrape and scuff of shifting debris. The tinkle of little things falling. The Dragon stirred upon its heap, raised its armoured chest on limbs crooked and knotted like hoary old treetrunks. Riven with horror, Achamian watched the head wag across a lane of pale light, the crest battered and majestic…

The saurian skull long-jawed and wicked…

"We have flown and flown, seeking your cities… but ruin was all we could find. ruin and vermin Sranc…"

Dust rained from the crotches of every hanging seam, every granite joist. The ancient Wracu hoisted its head, exposed its segmented throat in absolute confidence of its invulnerability. In an absurd instant, Achamian grasped the reason why the ancient Kuniuri called them Suthaugi…

"Tell me… has the world ended?"

Worms.

"The world yet lives," Cleric called into the gloom. "In the South, where snow falls as rain."

Wisps of fire. Exhalations mighty enough to throw ships from their courses. The thing's head lowered in their direction, at last fully revealed in Cleric's light.

"The world lives…"

Achamian did not so much will himself to move as will himself to will. So much is forgotten in the flush of abject terror-from a man's bowel to his breathing.

"The beast is dead," Cleric murmured. "Dead and blind."

The old Wizard struggled to peer through his terror, to study the great head beyond the jaws, to see more than the predatory malevolence in its lines. It differed from the ancient Dragons of his Dreams-no surprise given the florid diversity characteristic of the species. Its head was more aquiline, as if built to root out prey hidden in burrows. And a mane of black iron tusks flared from its brows, bloomed into chattering skirts along the back of the beast's skull. But where smaller horns serrated the line of the beast's left brow, only stumps and savaged tissue adorned the right. The eye beneath, he could see, had rotted away long, long ago…

"What do you mean?" the old Wizard muttered in reply. "It breathes …"

But Men's eyes, once attuned to a possibility, scavenge evidence of their own volition: suddenly the old Wizard saw the bronze hide sagging like a hauberk, as if detached from the greased flesh beneath. The shrunken gums. The second eye socket, rotted as hollow as the first…

" I breathe …" the yawing, croaking voice boomed through the underworld spaces. "It is my curse to breathe, so long as the world lives."

The Dragon was dead-or almost so…

"Turn from this place," the bronze-shelled corpse said. "flee to your hearths, and tell those who would listen how you survived for telling the first, the father, the world yet lived."

Madness. Madness and more madness.

But there was always more world than explanation. To come so far… so close… There was no turning from this place.

"May I beg but one dispensation?" Achamian cried.

A hissing pause. "Grasping," the dead beast said, shadowy and mountainous. "Men are forever grasping."

"I search for a map," the old Wizard said.

Cleric regarded him.

"Turn from this place, mortal. I will not part with the merest fraction of my hoard."

"But what use could you have of trinkets and baubles?"

"To lure fools such as you! Turn from this place- turn! Come to me when the world has truly ended."

"I will not!" the old Wizard cried, casting his frail voice against the Dragon's booming echo. Thought and passion raced panicked through his soul. All at once, he found himself marvelling at his own stubborn courage, weighing the mad consequences of his baiting, and wondering-wondering most of all-that a Dragon could be dead, yet speak and breath still…

"I cannot!"

The Wracu laughed, a sound like a thousand hacking lungs.

"Avarice and necessity are ever confused in the souls of men."

"No… No! Necessity alone drives me!"

"So does fancy become scripture…"

The old Wizard grappled with his anger, the urge to retort. The Coffers! he reminded himself, hearing Sarl's crazed voice as he did so. The Coffers!

"So does greed become God."

In a blink, it seemed, he saw through the fog of the intervening weeks and the lies that accumulated in his veins. In a heartbeat, the confusion that was Qirri vanished, leaving windswept fact in its wake. He had murdered men with his fictions, imperilled the woman he loved-he had marched across the desolate bosom of Earwa- for this moment, this very encounter.

It happens…

He breathed deep, held the foul air against his hammering heart.

"A bargain then!" he cried in sudden inspiration. "I would strike a bargain with you!"

The grating of coiled limbs. The heaving of air through rotting windpipes.

"What could you have that I might desire, mortal?"

The old Wizard clawed his scalp.

"Truth… Truth is all I have."

The Wracu raised its bulk from the heap's summit, wagged its enormous crown in the air.

"Yessss… you reek of suffering…"

As deep as graves, the eyeless sockets fixed on the old Wizard.

"I smell deeds long dead, and fears- immortal fears. Perhaps you possess riches after all…"

It creaked forward, loosing tiny landslides of debris and treasure.

"Truth it is, manling."

It descended its miserly summit, then more than two elephants tall at the shoulder stalked the blackness beyond the immediate pillars, dragging ruin in its wake.

"Show me one truth, and you shall have your merest fraction."

Achamian retreated, fairly stumbled doing so. "I–I'm not sure how to begin."

He glimpsed its dead-grinning maw between columns.

"Whatis this map you seek?"

The will to lie leaned hard against the old Wizard's thought, but he resisted, understanding that the beast before him was as much spirit as flesh… Who can say what the dead hear, when their ears are pricked to the voices of the living?

So he began describing his Dreams, the way Anasurimbor Celmomas had charged Seswatha with the map to Ishual, the final refuge of the ancient Kuniuric High-Kings. But he quickly became tangled in words. Every name he mentioned, required more names to be explained-names piled upon names, all begging explanation.

The eyeless creature yawned, revealing the furnace that smouldered within the dead hull of its frame. " Truth is our bargain," it rumbled, croaking out of the blackness. The head, cadaverous and crocodilian, leaned forward menacingly. "What is this map you seek?"

The old Wizard blinked at the monstrous spectre, chewed his bottom lip…

"Vengeance," he said.

"And whom do you seek to murder?"

"Anasurimbor Kellhus, the Aspect-Emperor."

"And his crime? What indignity did he inflict upon you?"

Instead of glimpsing Esmenet, the old Wizard saw Mimara in his soul's eye, pregnant and derelict, a prisoner of the Captain. If he failed here… If he stumbled…

"Enough!" he cried. "You have your truth!"

"Is not truth infinite?"

Mucus snapping like bowstrings.

"Yes, bu-"

"Is!"

The great bulk stamped forward one step, fissuring stone…

"Not!"

The iron-horned chin dropped, as a wolf…

"Truth!"

Fire wicked from carcass nostrils…

"Infinite?"

The pillared landscape hummed with reverberations. Sulphur and rot settled as a mist through the black. The old Wizard fairly cried out for sudden weight of Cleric's hand on his shoulder.

"He plays you," the Nonman said, his face white and serene. "There is no separating him from his hoard. He is too wicked, and he has slumbered here too long…"

The Last Nonman King turned back toward the scaled abomination.

"He?" Achamian asked witless.

"Wutteat."

Like some beast in nocturnal seas, the Wracu shrank into the darkness. Laughter like sloughing cliffsides crashed through the ancient hollows.

"He dies from the outside," Cleric said, "because Hell sustains him from within."

"Cunning…" the Wracu groaned out from the black.

"Cunning-cunning Ishroi!"

"I have seen this before," Nil'giccas said, peering after the thing. He turned to the old Wizard and smiled. "I remember."

Achamian gazed at the Nonman, found himself wondering who was more hoary, more impossible: the ancient, undead Dragon or the ancient, inhuman King.

"So what do we do?"

Something resembling dark humour flashed in the Nonman's eyes. Without explanation, he began picking his way toward the wheezing blackness.

"Run," he called to the old Wizard behind him. "Save them while you still can."

"Them?"

A passing glance over his nimil-armoured shoulder.

"Your wife and child."

Like most dwellings in the slums of Carythusal, the Worm, the brothel Mimara had lived in was walled against everything surrounding and open only within. Two mercenaries-little more than thugs, really-manned the entrance, festooned with ornamental menace. Every mouth needs fangs. But once past them, all was carpeted invitation. Gold paint. Garish tapestries representing battles that may or may not have happened. Incense and obscure liquors. Sunlight showered the courtyard gardens. Patrons reclined on embroidered settees in the reception hall, talking and laughing in low, shameless voices…

Their eyes flicking to and fro, as if counting the bare-chested children.

The bedding cells lined the eastward wall, as demanded by luck and tradition. Despite her price she would be chosen. She was always chosen. Leading him by a single, callus-horned finger, she would hear grunts and whimpers and moans, and sometimes shrieks and sobs. A kind of numbness would own her, and she would flatten against her motions as if against a wall in a slice of shadow. And she would be hidden, even as she scampered nude before the lecherous eyes of many.

Very similar to Qirri, when she thought about it, watching Galian's hanging grin.

Perhaps this would be easy… dying.

The old Wizard did not flee. He found himself chasing the Nonman King instead, muttering Wards as he tripped across the floors. With every step the Nonman King dragged his Surillic Point with him, illuminating the wasted interior of the Coffers.

Rather than retreat, the great Wracu watched eyeless.

"Wutteat!" Cleric bellowed.

Cold pricked the Wizard's skin, for Wutteat was a name drawn from the most ancient days of the War, when Men were little more than slaves or vermin. Wutteat the Terrible. The Black-and-Golden…

The Father of Dragons.

Revealed in all his decayed glory, the Wracu reared with chitinous grace, its neck hooking like a swan's, its mammoth head poised low. Blinding vomit cracked its lizard grin.

Fire.

Stone blasting. Gold melting. Unlike anything Achamian had ever dreamed. The world vanished, and all became white blindness, roaring, sparking. His outermost Wards simply blew away. His innermost buckled about cracks like incandescent veins.

"Cleric!" he cried, feeling a tongue of flame lap his arm and cheek.

There was no time. Blinking, he stepped into the air, into utter blackness-the Nonman's Surillic Point had winked into nonexistence.

Everyone was blind.

The wheezing grate of furnace bellows. Then a second geyser of fiery gold, this one roiling beneath his feet. Thunder and clacking stone. The light of it painted the ceiling and high pillars in pulsing tan and yellow. Crying out new Wards, Achamian climbed into the gap of a collapsed lintel, stepped through the grand chamber's false ceiling high into the dark.

"I am Quya!" the Nonman King cried from places unseen. "I am Ishroi! Five of your sons and daughters have I slain!"

"You are but a snail!" the impossible beast roared. "A snail torn from its shell!"

"I am Nil'giccas- I am Cleric! And you will hear my sermon!"

Even high and hidden, Achamian could tell the Nonman ran as he called out, sprinted over ruin.

"Fool. I am the first. My hide is bronze. My bones are iron!"

Above the ceiling, the old Wizard floated through a second, more barren world, one roofed with hanging precipices and floored with racks of masonry, ancient and enormous.

"You are blind!" Cleric shouted, the resonance of his voice thinned by the thunder that it followed. "You are a beggar, a scavenger, a prisoner of your own spite! Your flesh is rotted. The stone of your strength cracked long ago!"

"As the ages have rotted your soul, Cunuroi!"

The beast spit another cataract of roaring fire, illuminating all the chinks and breaches in the ceiling. Achamian walked across emptiness, toward the central pit, which given the darkness of the cavernous attic, glowed like an afterlife of fire. Robbed of their supporting columns, the granite lintels had sheered according to the caprice of load and fracture. He alighted on the longest of these ribs, strode down the length of its powdered back. Fires small and large burned throughout the pillared spaces below. He saw Cleric-the briefest of glimpses-flit between distant pillars and vanish into far shadows. He was running circles…

"If I perish a fool!" the Nonman cried, "then I perish my own fool! Not a slave like you, Wracu'jaroi!"

Achamian paused at the hanging precipice, gazed down upon the heaving beast. Coiled like a bloated serpent, the Father of Dragons turned and turned to the sound of Cleric's voice, like a leashed dog about its stake, only retching fire instead of barking, maelstroms that engulfed the scorched aisles.

"I exceed my makers," the scale-shining beast thundered. "Not even the Black Heaven commands me!"

The old Wizard swayed on his perch, squinted against the smoke and sparks that buffeted his Wards. Cleric distracted the creature, he knew. Using taunts to goad its pride, the Nonman King provoked it precisely so that Achamian could do what he was doing…

If only he knew what that was.

"Spinning in circles," Cleric cried laughing, "twisting hide against hide! So it has always been, Wracu'jaroi! Think! Think of the desolate ages!"

The blind beast stamped to and fro directly below. It swung its horn-crowned head in an attempt to anticipate the running Nonman, spewed torrents of braided fire. Achamian swayed, nearly retched for the reek of putrescence.

"Desolation is my birthright!"

Think, old man! Think!

"Such things that I remember, Cunuroi! Twisting in the void for sailing ages! Watching my makers descend as locusts upon world after world, reducing each to one hundred and forty-four thousand-and wailing to find themselves still damned!"

Dragons! Monstrosities literally bred to battle and destroy the ancient Quya. So much of the Gnostic armoury was devoted to sorcerous duals or the mass killing of mundane Men…

What did Seswatha use?

"Only to arrive here broken and exhausted!" Cleric cried.

"Yes- yes! At last, the promised world! I was the first-the first! With Dread Sil upon my shoulders, I was the first to step from our hallowed ark, to set eyes upon the land of our redemption!"

The Nonman's laughter rose clear as sunlight from the booming echoes.

"And now look at you! Blind! Hidden in the dirt! Curled about the shit of dead ages!"

A cry like the blast of many waters. "Because this world yet lives!" the undead beast roared. "Because this world refuses to die!"

Teetering above the monstrosity, Achamian shouted his Cant, a skinny old man hollering in a skinny old voice. The Noviratic Spike, a Gnostic War-Cant contrived to batter through great city gates.

"Murder! Murder is our salvation!"

Light balled in Achamian's outstretched palms. The mighty Wracu lashed its head from side to panicked side, raised its smoking snout at the instant of the Cant's completion. Lines of light snapped in and out, deflecting and intersecting, forming a flying sheet of triangles, reproducing tip to tip, base to base, flashing down as swift as any bolt or arrow…

A noise that struck blood from the skin.

The Spike exploded against the creature's left shoulder, hammered it squealing down the side of its mound. Thrashing, Wutteat howled fire into the air. A brilliant geyser jetted up through the ceiling pit, a rooster's tail of brilliance washed across the cavern roof. Cascades of raw stone came crashing down.

Achamian crouched low on the lintel, muttered Ward after Ward.

A thunderclap from below.

And he heard it through the dragon's mewling shriek: the sound of a Nonman Quya singing his world-breaking song. The sound of a famed Ishroi, a hero of dead ages, closing with his ancient foe.

The old Wizard stood firm on his perch, cried out another Noviratic Cant. Below him, the Father of Dragons coiled in defence, spewed fire into looms of Quyan incandescence. Light flared from the Wizard's palms, made crimson glass of his hands…

But the dragon had coiled to leap, not to shield. The Wizard's Spike gouged slopes of treasure and rubble. Mouldered and wretched, the dragon vaulted into the underworld attic, stretched forth its diseased wings. For a crazed heartbeat, Achamian found himself standing frail and astonished beneath the plated monstrosity. Light from the conflagration below illuminated its undersides, gleamed across horns and scaled flanges. Wings scooped dark air…

It knew, Achamian realized. The beast drew back its battered skull, yanked open its maw in a feline hiss.

It knew precisely where he stood.

Fire.

Wards dissolving like egg whites in a stream. Concussions. Blistering skin. The triggering of incipient Wards…

The pier of stone collapsed beneath his feet.

"Years uncounted!" it boomed from the cavern attic. "Ten thousand seasons have I lived without eyes!"

The old Wizard fell, cartwheeled down the beast's heap of treasure and debris. Blinking. Coughing. He tried to claw his way upright, too stunned to orchestrate the counterpoise of voices, inner and outer, required for sorcery. He beat at his burning hair and beard. He felt an arm draw him up, saw Cleric peering down at him, the porcelain lines of worry and relief. He heard the whoosh of conflagration, the clack and thunder of enormous collapses. Ancient pillars toppled. Sheets of masonry dropped. The world itself seemed to shrug, then crash upon them.

Masses of stone pummelled the Nonman's Wards, a rain of godlike fists.

The last shreds of light were pinched to utter black.

Ringing ears. The taste of dust.

"It has buried us," the Nonman King said in the clacking aftermath. "Shut us in."

– | She kicks off her boots.

She unties the laces of her jacket, pulls it back from her bare shoulders, lets it slide of its own weight down her arms. She shakes it from her wrists. It slumps across the humus.

She clasps her shift, winces at the reek of it as she draws it over her head. The swathes of down in her armpits tingle. Open air finds her breasts. Her nipples rise to the kissing breeze.

She unlaces her leather breeches. Wriggling, she pushes them below her knees. She steps from them. Open air finds her thighs… her sex.

She grabs the wire Circumfix-the one she found on the battlefield-hanging between her breasts. But she releases it, loathe to forsake the protection of symbols-even false ones.

Motionless, the scalpers gaze. Sarl gropes his crotch with his free hand. The Captain's head continues to glare from the crook of his arm. Even Koll, wasted to the very lip of death, watches with licentious hunger. They are but five, yet countless others seem to crowd them, making pews of the forested ruins, all gazing with lidless eyes, some in outrage, others with pity and hope, and still more with lust and crass desire.

She thought the Qirri would ease her passage, that it might have delivered her to the place where she had always hidden-for this was nothing new. But she was wrong. You have to be more than your motions to hide behind them, and she is not.

The Qirri has whittled her down to the bone of what happens.

She shudders with something deeper than shame, as if garments more profound than leather and fabric have been shed. The cloth of hope and flattery, perhaps-all the things she has called herself in the pursuit of her pain-numbing vanities. Sorceress. Princess. Warrior. All the lies she has conjured to hide the fact of her slavery.

For the first time, it seems, she is wholly what scripture has made of her-and nothing more. The quiver on the hip of the bowman. The pillow beneath the head of the king. She is chattel. She is sustenance. She is pleasure and progeny…

She is naked.

The two crouched for what seemed a hundred heartbeats after the clamour had settled, probing the cavernous black with pricked ears. They heard nothing, save the groan and clatter of settling debris.

Wielding ethereal geometries, the old Wizard and the Nonman King began heaving aside masses of rock and masonry. Throughout history, kings and princes had sought to bend the Few to menial tasks, to works that only the sweat and misery of thousands could otherwise accomplish. Roads. Fortifications. Temples. Wars had been fought to resist them. For men who could manipulate the very frame of existence, sorcerers, demanding such mean labour was nothing less than an outrage, akin to asking lords to wash the feet of beggars. As Tsotekara, the Grandmaster of the extinct Surartu, famously declared to Triamis the Great: to do as slaves was to be as slaves.

Even still, caprice demands all men, no matter how exalted their station, play the menial from time to time. Every sorcerer living knew some Cant adapted to the moving of earth.

The darkness clacked and roared with their excavations. The devastation of the Coffers stretched out behind them, easily outrunning their paltry light, a twilight world the old Wizard was loathe to consider, lest he recall the hopeless task of finding a single golden map-case amid such wrack and ruin. Only two columns stood that they could see; the others lay heaped and toppled like a felled forest. Shelves of rock continued to fall from the inverted cliffs and valleys hanging above, sporadically showering the blasted landscape with debris.

Huffing with effort, Achamian sank pinions into the mounded wreckage, raked it away with the flash of miracle lights. More debris would tumble into the gap he had cleared but never quite so much as he had removed. Braced on ever-uncertain footing-spilled gravel, canted lintels, or the curve of pillar drums-they thundered forward, dredging the entrance clear. When light at last rimmed the uppermost rocks before them, they paused to collect their breath and courage.

"The beast awaits us," Cleric said.

Achamian nodded. He could see fell Wutteat in his soul's eye, poised to flush the waiting passage with coiling fire. Ambush was a notorious tactic of the Wracu. For all their savage might, they were exceedingly intelligent and devious creatures-far more so than Sranc. They had no choice but to rush the burrow, somehow survive the sum of its power…

"One of us must shield," he said, "while the other casts into the fire."

The Nonman King began to nod, then whirled toward the darkness behind them.

Frowning, Achamian followed his gaze into the high void, peered squinting. He raised a thumb to scratch away a fleck of grit…

It breached the light-smoke that became a ghost that became shining, bestial reality-its claws outstretched, its wings hooked about emptiness, its horn-crowned head vanishing behind gaping jaws…

The ancient dragon dropped out of the blackness. Achamian threw up futile arms.

Conflagration.

The men stare at her, speechless.

"What do you see?" she asks.

Her voice seems to jar them. Galian's face darkens in unaccountable rage.

"See?" he cries, his face twitching about a compulsive blink. "I see a world of plunder. You… The Coffers yonder… And when we return, every delicacy, every peach, and every silk pillow in the Three Seas! I see a tasty world, my little Whore-Imperial, and I intend to feast!"

Whore. The word stirs something within her, a habit long forgotten. She knows this, knows how to bridle and ride the crazed passions of men…

"And your soul?" she asks without passion. "What of your soul?"

"Will be no worse for pillaging a witch, I assure you."

"And pillaging," Pokwas laughs from his side. There is something lecherous and angular in the Zeumi Sword-dancer's bearing, as if he leans over legs already prised open. She can even see the curve of his phallus through his breeches. "And pillaging… and pillaging…"

Galian strides toward her.

She wracks her soul, searching for the hate that has always been the engine of her strength, but she can only summon moments of tenderness and love. She smiles, blinking tears. She draws the curve of her belly into warm palms. This is the first time, it seems, that she dares clutch, dares the making real that comes with grasping.

Hello, little one…

He grabs her throat, turns her head from side to side.

"Sweet Sejenus…" he murmurs with an almost tender breath. "You are a true beauty… A pity about the maggot."

"Maggot?" she gasps.

"The grub you carry in your womb."

Tears spill from her eyes. "What about it?" she asks about a sob.

The Columnary leans close enough to lick her face. "I fear it will not survive me."

"No! Plea-!"

"No indeed!" he cries with renewed cruelty. "No worms in our peaches, eh, boys?"

Once again Pokwas and Xonghis laugh, this time like nervous adolescents. They have been led and they have been drawn. They have stumbled across obsessed-over boundaries, only to find themselves thinking unthinkable things.

Yatwer… Dear Goddess, please…

Her head caught in the vise of his hands, she stares down the curve of her cheeks, and somehow her gaze finds his manic glare, latches…

The Judging Eye opens.

She finds herself peering into something… inexplicable.

Contradictory passions roil through her, as if she were the scalper's lifelong mistress, the one most punished, the one who understood. For there is no sin without weakness, no transgression without want or suffering. She sees the cracks through which his infant nature bleeds. The father's cane, the brother's fists. The starving marches, and the need, to be admired, to be respected, to steal what he covets…

She loves him, and she despises. But she finds herself fearing for him most of all.

Often has she wondered how she could describe it, seeing the morality of things let alone lives. Sometimes it seems more a matter of memory than vision, like sighting a familiar treatise in the house of a friend. The object itself stews with significance, but all the passages-cherished and offending-are indistinct. Only the sum can be seen, inchoate and confounding. This is what she most often sees: the abbreviated mash that is judgment passed, the balance of a soul, good and evil, writ in a stick-figure scrawl.

But sometimes, if she concentrates, the tome of a lived life flutters open beneath the Eye, and the crimes themselves become visible, the way carnal images flicker about the glimpse of a long-absent lover.

And sometimes, more rarely still, she sees the particulars of their coming damnation.

The Columnary stares, his eyes wide with panicked fury. She clutches his wrist.

"Galian…" she hears herself gasp. "It's not too late. You can save yourself from… from…"

Something in her words or manner jars him from his intent-the trill of frantic sincerity, perhaps.

"Hell?" he laughs. "There's too many of them."

Such torment. Clenched and cringing, huddled in ways outside worldly dimensions. Prised and flayed, the innumerable petals of his soul peeled back in shrieks and sulphurous flame. Screams braided into screams, pains heaped upon agonies.

She sees it, his future, a gleam across his eyes, a fiery halo about his crown. His suffering disgorged like paint, smeared and stroked into obscene works of art. His soul passed from Ciphrang to feasting Ciphrang, dispensing anguish like milk through the endless ages.

She sees the truth of the Excruciata, the One Hundred-and-Eleven Hells depicted on the walls of the Junriuma in Sumna.

"Galian. Galian. You m-must listen. Please… You have no idea what awaits you!"

He tries to grin away his horror. He's strangling her as much as holding her now. "Witch!" he spits. "Witch!"

"Shhhhh…" she manages to whisper. "It will b-"

He slams her to the raw earth. She cries out. He thrusts apart her knees, pins her while fumbling with his breeches. Belts pinch her inner thighs. Twigs bite at her shoulders, her buttocks. Dead leaves press cold against her back, like reptilian scales. His breathing is ragged, his look unfocused. He smells of shit and rotted teeth.

The world spins and roars about the fact of his damnation.

She cries into his ear, murmurs, "I forgive you…"

Frees him of this final sin.

The beast had lain hidden, waiting for them to dig their way into the entrance antechamber, a dead end where they could not use the greater debris field to either flee or flank him. But it proved a treacherous trap. Had they not stood side by side, where the combined strength of their incipient defences purchased them the heartbeats they needed to reinforce their Wards, they would be dead.

Apparently Wutteat could not hear the distance between them…

Fire boiled over and around them, blinding them, ripping away the gossamer meanings they shouted against it. An inferno like no other, scorching some hard stone surfaces into liquid while exploding others.

Then the beast itself was on them, a crocodile falling upon sparrows. It clawed with feline savagery, tearing and rending, while the Gnostic sorcerer and the Quyan Mage sang in desperate tandem, slowing accumulating the glowing shells that preserved them.

The boom and crack of mountains breaking, and underneath, the rot of sorcery's unearthly murmur.

Roaring. Raging. Scales burnished, flashing as crimson as infant blood. Claws the size of wains swatting. The great saurian head ramming, snapping horns as thick as young trees.

Planes of spectral glass cracked and shattered, collapsed into aether. Rock rained down. Stone congealed like blood.

"It lives by its ears!" the old Wizard cried between thunders.

His eyes blazing, Nil'giccas nodded in immediate understanding.

The beast reared above them. Another incendiary eruption. The world beyond their defences became an amorphous glare. Wards cracked and burned…

But the Nonman King was attacking, howling in tongues as old as his race. Achamian could scarce see the light of his conjuring, just the faint blue of lines like parabolic wires, arcing into the heights…

The inferno lifted, streamed exploding across the scorched heaps to their right. The fire sputtered into a ground-strumming shriek, and they saw Wutteat, the dread Father of Dragons, flailing backward, smoke pluming from its eye socket.

"The head!" Achamian screamed. "Attack the head!"

They assailed the beast, Man and Nonman, as in days of old. They threaded the air with arrays of wicked, dazzling illumination. And it screamed, squealed even, like a pig doused in burning oil.

They stepped into the cavernous air and pursued him. Wutteat's wings kicked the ground with gusts, swept up sheets of ash and dust. Yet they could see him.

Geometries of incandescence. Geometries of destruction.

Like a moth in a jar, Wutteat smashed its shoulders into the cragged ceiling, tried to bring stone down upon them. Deaf and blind, it spat fire across hanging cliffs…

The Gnostic sorcerer hung above one of the two remaining pillars, striking the thing with scissions and concussions. The Quyan Mage sailed an arc about the beast, uttering Cants that burned. They struck and struck until the iron of its bone glowed, until Wutteat's head was smashed ruin, a charred stump possessing jaws.

The beast dropped, and Achamian rushed to jubilation, thinking they had felled it. But it crashed into a lurch that became a run, its claws kicking up stone middens. It raised its blasted snout, snuffing against a piteous growl. Unerringly it charged toward the remnants of the entrance.

"No!" the Nonman King cried.

Coursing like a snake, it bolted through the punishing gauntlet of their sorcery, smashed through the entrance into the pale-glowing hollows beyond.

They pursued it into the breach, climbed as if up the throat of a toppled tower. But the dragon was too quick: they could already hear its shriek score the faraway sky. Climbing. Coughing. Breathless, they found themselves within the ring of the Turret, squinting up at the jagged circle of afternoon brilliance. His heart hammering with mortal violence, the old Wizard finally gained the summit.

Wutteat thrashed in the light of day, throwing up trees and gouts of dirt. It caromed against the Library walls, crashed like a thing thrown into the forest beyond. Trunks and limbs cracked. Over the wall's dusty halo, the crowns of a dozen trees convulsed and vanished. The beast spat wild gouts of fire, uttered shrieks that drove nails into their ears.

And then, suddenly, the dread beast was flying, white and black and golden, its ravaged wings buffeting the forest as though it were wheat. Scales shining, the Father of Dragons soared heavenward, spiralling and smoking like a bird afire. Astounded, the man and the Nonman watched, until finally, moth-small with distance, it vanished into the slow-tumbling flanks of a cloud.

Cleric stood atop the heights of a shattered inner wall, gazing high after the thing. Brush fires raged beyond him, throwing lines of orange across his jaw and cheek. His nimil chain glistened in the dry sunlight, and for the first time the old Wizard saw the faint lines of filigree worked across its innumerable links.

Herons. Herons and lions.

"Triumph!" Achamian cried out in relief and exaltation. "A victory worthy The Sagas!"

He hesitated in sudden realization. What did glory mean, when none could remember it?

And what was life, without glory to illuminate it?

The Nonman turned his profile to him, said nothing.

"You won't remember, will you?"

"Shadow," Nil'giccas replied, resuming his study of the distant sky. "I will remember the shadow it casts…" He turned to regard the Wizard. "Across the grief that follows."

The grief that follows.

The old Wizard matched the Nonman King's gaze for what seemed a hundred heartbeats. Finally, he nodded in slow resignation, scratched his chin beneath what remained of his beard.

"Yes," Achamian said. "Seswatha loved you as well."

Galian makes a noise, a grunt or a sob-she is not sure.

One moment he's an iron shadow grinding flaccid against her. Then he is gone.

She bolts upright, sees him arched across the forest floor, kicking his left foot, desperately clutching at his back. Koll stands above him, hunched and famine-frail, his hands clenching and unclenching. Galian flops onto his stomach, gags and screams. She sees a pommel jutting from below his left shoulder blade, a flower of crimson and black blooming through the links of his hauberk.

A breathless heartbeat passes. Xonghis rushes to assist Galian while Pokwas draws his great tulwar from his waist, sweeps it through the air before falling into his Sword-dancer stance.

"Fucking Stone Hag!" he cries. "I knew I should have cut your throat!"

Still clutching Lord Kosoter's head, Sarl sits rocking on the Captain's inert back, begins cackling. Light sparkles through the screens of foliage beyond him-from the direction of the Holy Library. A roaring whoosh follows…

Pokwas falls upon Koll in sweeping fury. His blade seems like silver ink, sketching sigils through open air. Koll effortlessly threads the gauntlet, ducking, leaping…

The Zeumi Sword-dancer pauses, eyes round in disbelief.

Koll dives to his right, cartwheels across the ground like a crab, toward Sarl and his Captain's draining corpse. The Sergeant scrambles backward.

Koll flits past him, rolls past the Captain's forgotten pack, then comes to his feet brandishing Squirrel. His stance low, his look darts from Pokwas to Xonghis, who has taken up a flanking position, his bow drawn.

More explosions rock the near distance. A titanic roar shivers the sky.

The starved Stone Hag begins laughing, a sound that begins human but ends like screaming wolves. Xonghis releases his shaft. Koll swats with Squirrel but misses. The arrow thuds into his neck.

Koll falls backward but somehow rolls back onto his feet. With his free hand he clutches the shaft. Pulls.

Screams.

The fingers of his face break apart, then fly open.

Mimara lurches to her feet, stumbles to Galian, who lies dying.

Crying out in Zeumi, Pokwas rushes the thing called Koll, his tulwar cutting poetry into the air. Steel rings against steel. Squirrel is nicked but does not shatter. Xonghis lets fly two more arrows. The thing lunges clear the first, but the second catches it high in the thigh. It barely survives the black giant's hollering assault.

Mimara stands breathless. Qirri pulses through her, makes a war-drum of her heart.

Xonghis whirls at the sound of her approach, releases. His arrow whistles past her left ear-a sound like a rip. She plunges Galian's sword into the Imperial Tracker's exposed armpit. She feels his death, the inside of him, communicated through blade and grip.

Beyond their clearing, the forest burns about the silhouette of stumped ruins. Sarl has resumed his phlegmatic howl, his expression crushed into a thousand laughing lines.

The whooshing tulwar catches the thing called Koll mid-leap. It careens through the air, tries to land on its remaining leg, tumbles backward. Closing for the kill, the Zeumi howls in triumph…

Fails to hear her naked approach.

Smoke piled over the derelict fortifications, drawn twisting into the high blue sky. Within the ruined Library, several smaller fires fanned bright in the gusting wind, sending showers of sparks and ash over the old Wizard and the Nonman King.

"You don't have to do this!" Achamian cried.

Still standing upon the wall he had climbed to peer after the dragon, Cleric tore his runed purse from its leather cord. He stared at it meditatively, hefted it in his palm. Achamian felt his heart clutch at his breast, seeing it dandled so near open flame. He realized he has worshipped this thing. The shrivelled folds pinched into creases about its drawstring. The faint impression of weight bulging within, as though it contained a mouse. It seemed absurd that such a low object could become the talisman, the fetish from which the whole expedition had come to hang. A pouch filled with soot.

"No!" Achamian cried.

But it was too late. Cleric bent his head sideways, as if to itch his ear against his shoulder, then swung the pouch upside down. The ashes of Cu'jara Cinmoi poured out in a dun stream. The wind fanned it into ghostly nothingness.

"You don't have to do this!" the old Wizard cried.

The dark eyes fixed him.

"I do…"

"Why? Why?"

"Because I remember no triumph…" He flinched, seemed to lose the thread of his voice. Sudden fury claimed the heights of his expression. "Only betrayal!" he roared. "Heartbreak and ruin!"

A kind of indignation welled through the Wizard, the outrage that overcomes Men whenever absurdities are stacked too high. "No!" he bellowed. "I will name you! I will be your book, and you will read me! You are Nil'giccas! The Last King of Mansions-the greatest of the Siqu!"

The fires seemed to wax at the sound of Cleric's warbling laughter.

"Seswatha!" the Nonman called. "Old dead friend… Will you hear my sermon?"

Achamian could only gaze in disgust and disbelief.

The Nonman muttered blasphemies that filled his eyes and mouth with light. He stepped from the summit and was aloft, climbing a floating arc that took him high above the fires surging through the courtyard.

"'Nil'giccas!' you call- beseech! as if trying to awaken some truth slumbering within me."

Flames roiled about the silhouettes of trees. Smoke wreathed him. Heat rippled across his hanging form. And the Wizard realized that he was actually going to attack.

A Quya Master of old, a hero of wars older than the Tusk, made ready his murder.

"You think Nil'giccas is something I have lost!" the Nonman King called down. "And therefore something that I can recover!"

Achamian was weary. He was bruised and he was burned-even well rested and whole, he would not dare a contest such as this. At least he was practised, thanks to the dragon. He could feel the Cants and Wards within him, tingling weaves of arcane meaning, hanging like possibilities…

Yet he did not strike.

"You forget," Cleric shouted, "that before the Nonman King's passing, I did not exist!"

The figure continued floating on a rising arc, one that took Achamian as its compass point. Sheets of stone toppled into the inferno below, kicking constellations of sparks in the wind.

"I can no more recover him than you can recover your mother's virgin womb."

Achamian stood rooted and frail before the rising conflagration. Strike! something howled within him. Strike now!

"I am Incariol!" the Nonman screamed. " Cleric! And you shall not survive my lesson!"

But instead of attacking, the old Wizard arrayed himself with Wards, cloaked himself with shining panes of light. He had flattered himself after the underworld debacle of Cil-Aujas, told himself that perhaps Cleric was not so mighty, that the rot that had devoured so much of his soul had blunted his meanings as well…

Now he was not so sure.

Strike, you fool!

"You think me the cripple!" Nil'giccas cried. "You think Cleric the ruin of someone whole! But you are wrong, Seswatha! I am the Truth!"

The Nonman King had climbed a half-spiral above burning bark and foliage, over headless towers and blunted walls. Now he hung motionless before the monumental frame of the Turret.

"We are Many!" the Erratic roared. " We are legion! What you call your soul is nothing but a confusion, an inability! A plurality that cannot count the moments that divide it and so calls itself One."

His eyes flared white. Words boomed out, words that made a crimson globe of his head and face. The sound of vacant space ripping, a growl in the deepest pocket of the ear. Abstractions lashed the open air between them, wracked Achamian's Wards. The old Wizard raised arms against the glittering violence.

"Only when memory is stripped away!" Cleric cried out, the glow fading from his eyes. "Only then is Being revealed as pure Becoming! Only when the past dies can we shrug aside the burden that is our Soul!"

Fractal lights tangled the figure's outstretched arms. More arcane words, reverberating across ethereal surfaces. More flashing Abstractions, cracking and hissing across the glowing shells that shielded the Wizard. Fire consumed the thronging scrub and trees. Fire garnished the truncated walls. About them, the famed courtyards of the Holy Library had become burning pits.

"Only then does the Darkness sing untrammelled!" Cleric cried. "Only then!"

"And yet you seek memories!" the Wizard cried, at last delivered to tears.

"To be! Being is not a choice!"

"But you claim Being is deception!"

"Yes!"

"But that is nonsense! Madness!"

Again the Nonman King laughed.

"That is Becoming."

The forests are burning.

Pokwas jerks around so quickly that the pommel is torn from her hands. You! his glaring eyes shout. Blood spills from his strange smile.

"The Slog of Slogs!" the mad Sergeant howls in their periphery. "I told you, boys! I told you we would stack them!"

She retreats before the Sword-dancer's groping lurch. He skids to his knees, sways over sheeted leaves. His eyes find Galian, then Xonghis. He looks to her with childlike curiosity. Blood bubbles to his lips.

"I em-embrace…" he gasps. "I–I…"

He slumps to his side, flops across the ground.

She steps around him, stumbles to stand over the thing called Koll.

"Why?" she cries, and a cold part of her is surprised by the salt and heat of her tears. "Why would you save me? Sacrifice yourself! I am the daughter of your enemy! Your enemy!"

"Kill… me…" it coughs.

"Tell me! Soma!"

"Mim… Mim…"

"Who? Who is your handler?"

Something hooks her stomach. The madness of what just happened, the debasement, the transcendence, has blinded her to the obscenity. This thing before her has been cut from the meat of the World. Were it sorcerous, it would have possessed the numb glaze of unreality. It is raw and abhorrent instead. Suddenly she cannot look away from the mastications of its mouth, the way the lipless gums climb unbroken to the lidless eyes, to the air-clawing digits, which are furred and skinned and ridged with apparently random fragments of face.

Revulsion does not so much course as slam through her.

"I beg…" it gasps. "Beg you…"

Bile rises to the back of her throat. She draws away from the thing, lurches backward, falls to her rump, catches herself on a single thrown arm…

Smoke twines through the air between them, a translucent veil. Through it, she watches spasms rock the skin-spy.

Sarl rushes from nowhere, bent and bandied. He lands on the creature, drives his sword square through its chest. The thing clutches at him, but the mad Sergeant wrenches his blade with vicious strength, back and forth, as if testing a hated wagon's brake.

"Yeeesss!" he screams up to the broken canopy. "Yeeessss!"

The mad Sergeant turns to her with canines bared. His eyes are crimson slits. Blood sops his beard.

"A real chopper!"

The thrashing weakens beneath him. The facial digits fall slack at the same instant. Sarl lowers his cheek against the fist he holds atop his pommel. Gasping, he wipes a filthy cuff across his face, manages only to smear the blood. He releases his sword, then with a chuckle like a dog's growl, he draws his knife. He crawls over the creature, sways above it with a knee on either of its shoulders.

She watches dumbstruck.

"Spider-face," he grunts, hacking and sawing with his knife. A manic grin squeezes his eyes into two more creases. "A thousand gold Kellics at least!"

Madness, is all she can think.

She runs, heedless of her bearings or her nakedness.

Away. She must get away from all the madness.

The whole World burns.

And so they battled, the Gnostic Wizard uttering no Cants, the Quyan Mage speaking no Wards. Broken walls encircled them, surrounded in turn by the oily tumble of smoke and trees wrapped in shining flame.

Hanging high before the Turret, the inhuman Mage blazed with arcane meaning, unleashed a logic raised to killing light.

His feet braced against the earth, the human Wizard sang his unholy counterargument, wrapping himself in glowing spheres, long-winded pyramidal forms, planes arrayed to deflect dread energies outward.

The First Quyan Fold. The Ribs of Gotagga.

Burning cables. Sparks so brilliant they blinded. Concussions so immense they blew sheets of debris from the crests of the surrounding walls. Blisters of warding light cracked, slumped before sheering into nothingness.

And the dread voices droned on, unravelling into echoes too cavernous to be called sound, ringing from Heaven's vault as if it loomed as low as a cellar ceiling.

Achamian shouted between gasps of fiery air. He raised Ward after Ward, only to see them smashed, swept away.

The Third Concentric. The ever-risky Cross of Arches.

But the Quya Master was like a sun above him, glaring with destruction, cracking his defences with wicked and relentless incandescence. Beating. Hammering. Scissoring. A rain of cataclysms. Until Achamian was breathless and stammering, able to cough out only the lowest and quickest Wards.

For the briefest of instants, the underworld angel above him paused.

"Madness!" the Wizard cried out in sobbing frustration. "This is not you!"

Fire crackled and hissed, filling the heartbeat of silence between them.

"Can't you see!" the Nonman King cried. "Your appeals only incite me! You will die and I will remember! Because all you do is reach for the love I bear you!"

"No! I will not strike you!"

The face of Nil'giccas resolved from the dwindling glare. The setting sun rimmed his scalp with sickles of gold. "I remember… I remember your name…"

Light filled his howling mouth-blasphemous meaning…

At long last the Wizard struck.

An Odaini Concussion Cant. Simple and low, meant only to stun-to knock back into reason perhaps. But Nil'giccas had floated above sharp ruin…

He plummeted from on high, broke about a low spine of stone. The ground fires caught and consumed him.

The old Wizard puffed out the flames with a sorcerous cry. He hobbled around blocks and between flanged foundations, swallowing at the sobs that wracked him. Streamers of smoke twisted and dissolved about his passage.

He found the Nonman King prostrate across a shoulder-high segment of wall, bent as though he had half fallen from bed. Black scored his milk-white skin. Blisters puckered his cheek and scalp. Blood sopped the heron and lion links of his nimil harness. He seemed that much more broken, given the perfection of his form.

"What just happened?" Nil'giccas gasped, hacking gouts of blood with the words. His lips worked about the glistening arc of his fused teeth. "Wh-what just…"

"You found glory," the old Wizard croaked. He coughed as if at some fact too acrid to be breathed. He reached out to clutch the Nonman's cheek, saw Death swirl up in the eyes of his ancient friend. He watched the spark of sight dull into sightlessness. Cleric's body heaved, then settled, as if finally coming to peace with its own anguished corporeality.

Blood pooled in the mortises.

Burned, battered, the old Wizard looked about, from the wreckage of the Library out to the blazing forests of Sauglish. This was how it would end, he realized… The was how all of it would end.

Heartbreak and fire.

She runs.

Twigs and branches pinch and cut her feet, but it seems proper that she should suffer. The breeze brushes like silk across her body, but it seems proper that she should find succour for her grievances. Leaves lash her arms and outer thighs.

Horror animates her. Horror that runs with her legs. Horror that tingles throughout her body, heat rimmed with cold, as if she bleeds from a thousand internal wounds.

She clutches her belly. She assumed she would feel it hang from her as she ran, the life she carried. But it is at one with her, the centring counterweight, the ligament that binds her to future and fate.

She climbs a low rise, a place away from the eye-stabbing smoke. She turns, glimpses the flicker of sorcery. She climbs higher, searching for a break in the canopy. She sees it once again, luminescent white lines twisting like language from the Library. She sees a form hanging, a dark figure silvered about the waist and shoulders, suspended over the walled depths adjacent to a destroyed citadel-what looks like a broken amphorae jutting from the ground.

Cleric, she thinks. Ishroi…

She turns, and begins walking back the way she came.

– | The Skin Eaters lay strewn like castaway clothes. The Wizard stumbled to his knees at the sight of the carnage.

"Where is she?" he cried at the last man living-Sarl, looking like something out of a child's nightmare.

"The Coffers!" the mad scalper croaked. He raised his hands in crazed gesticulation. Something bloody flapped in the right. "Make ready, boys! Plunder them like a whore! Shake them like your purple pommel!"

"What happened here?" Achamian cried. He looked from dead man to dead man. Galian. Pokwas. Xonghis.

The Captain…

The very World pitched beneath his feet.

Suddenly the thing swinging in Sarl's hand became clear, the digits knuckled with fragments of expression…

A skin-spy's face.

"Speak up, fool! What happened? "

"Ahhh," Sarl crooned to him. "The World will be our wicked little peach! We'll be princes! Princes! "

The old Wizard seized him about the shoulders. "Where's Mimara… Where's my daughter?"

The madman nodded and gazed the way he had that second night in the Cocked Leg's common room, after smashing his wine bowl. A knowing gaze, the Wizard suddenly realized, one brimming with the intuition of the insane…

That Fate is madder still.

Achamian turned to the demand of some instinct, peered… glimpsed something slight passing through screens of smoke. He fairly doubled over for relief when she stepped naked from a fire-curtained world.

She ran to him, clutched his shoulders as he grinned and keened.

"You live!" he cried like a fool.

"As do you."

"You're naked!"

Her look of reproach made him want to cry out for joy.

"And they're dead," she said. " All of them," she added, with a glance at Sarl. "Come… We must flee this fire."

They moved with the quickness of looters racing dawn. She retrieved Squirrel, then paused at Xonghis to relieve him of the stolen Chorae, the one loose, the other affixed to a fletched shaft. Achamian gathered her clothing, threw a rotted cloak about her shoulders. Then together they stumbled and ran through the smoking galleries.

The mad Sergeant stayed, cradling the Captain's hoary head, rocking on his rump with laughter and congratulating his dead fellows.

"Kiampas! Eh? Kiampas! "

– | Night swallows the earth. Only the light of stubborn fires twinkles through the courtyards of the ruined Library.

Sitting on scorched earth, knee pressed against knee, they take Cleric's pouch and slowly press the inside out. They wet their fingers, run them along the residue. The black gathers into a thin crescent against the pad of their fingers. Out of some communal understanding, they reach across the meagre space between them, place their fingers upon the other's tongue.

Relief crashes through them as a tingling wave, leaving dizziness and nausea in its wake.

Qirri. Blessed Qirri.

They build a bier of charred wood and scrub, pile it as high as their shoulders. The corpse of the Nonman King they place upon it. They set it alight, watch the flame climb in shingles, until the illustrious form is engulfed in rushing fire. Then they climb into the starlit ruin of the Turret and descend into the absolute blackness of the Coffers. Achamian utters a Bar of Heaven, and the door of creation cracks open, revealing subterranean wrack and ruin.

"Should have used this earlier," he mutters as the light fades from his eyes and mouth.

Mimara looks to him, clutching her shoulders against memories of Cil-Aujas.

"I could have saved more of my beard!" he explains with a rueful smile.

They labour by sorcerous light, wracked by a thirst and a hunger they do not feel. Deep into the night.

They find a shirt of ensorcelled mail, golden, as light as silk and as hard as nimil. Sheara, the Wizard calls it, "Sun-skin," a far antique gift from the School of Mihtrul. Mimara sheds her rags and dons it against her naked skin. Cinched about the waist it falls to her thighs, humming with a warmth all its own. She stows her Chorae in her boot to avoid killing the ancient magic. They find a bronze knife engraved with runes that glower in certain angles of light. This too Mimara takes, as a complement to poor Squirrel.

At last they find it, the golden map-case from Achamian's Dreams.

"It's broken," he murmurs with something resembling horror.

She watches the Wizard pry apart the tubing, then gingerly draw out the vellum sheet curled within.

They emerge from the Turret looking like wraiths for the dust and filth that powders them. Dawn has broken. The walls loom dark and chill against the gold of the eastern sky. Tailings of smoke rise from random clutches of ash and charcoal. Silence rings through the waking chorus of birdsong.

The bier has burned down to a smoking heap. All that remains of Nil'giccas is his nimil hauberk, which lies unscathed save for black scorching. With wary fingers, the Wizard pulls it open, revealing the chalk of a different ash. Mimara gathers it along the edge of her new knife, spoons it with breathless care into the Nonman King's rune-stamped pouch…

"Look," the Wizard says in a cracked voice.

She turns, sees a figure watching them from a cleft in the great outer wall. Sarl, she realizes after a heartbeat of ocular confusion, for hanging below the Sergeant's scrambled grin another face smiles. The Captain, she realizes with more numbness than horror. Sarl has braided the severed head's hair into his beard, so that the face swings about his groin, lips tented about an arrow shaft. A maniacal grimace.

"Sometimes the dead bounce!" she remembers the mad Sergeant crying on the ashen plains. "Sometimes old men awaken behind the eyes of babes! Sometimes wolves…"

Sarl. The last surviving Skin Eater.

She finishes gathering the ash, and the Wizard pulls the nimil shirt from the heap. It smokes as he shakes it. He drapes it over the singed pelts that clad him. Too large, and without hooks or clasps, it hangs as a kind of cloak from his shoulders, black belied by a low, silvery glimmer.

Still propped between stone jaws, Sarl watches them from a distance. Sunlight warms the world beyond him.

Once again they sit knee to knee, as father and daughter. Once again they taste the other's finger. But this time the ash is more white than black, and the strength that shivers through them has a more melancholy tenor. The Captain and the mad Sergeant are still watching them when they turn.

Mimara gazes at him, thinking she should at least call out. But even from a distance she can see the blood painting the creases of his face. And the Captain's mood looks exceedingly foul.

"A real chopper!"

By some miracle an oak leaf falls before her, swinging to and fro through the air. She picks it out of emptiness. Purple lines vein the lobes of waxy green. Yielding to an unaccountable impulse, she takes Cleric's pouch and taps a small pile of ash into the bowl of the leaf, which she then folds around it. Gazing at Sarl, she sets the small packet upon a low marble stump jutting from the earth before her-an armless shoulder.

"What are you doing?" Achamian asks.

"I don't know."

The scalper watches them, as taut and intent as any other starving animal. They hear a low-clucking gurgle…

Then horns, Sranc horns, pitch doom across the horizon. Mimara clutches her belly through her armour.

"Come," she says to the old Wizard. "I tire of Sauglish."