The Judging Eye (64 page)

Here the Skin Eaters stand.

"We all knew it would come
to this!" Sarl cries and cackles. The cut on his cheek bleeds and grins.
"Hell and skinnies, boys! Hell and
Sranc
!"

Achamian is dumped across the
steps immediately below the landing. Those who haven't cast away their shields
form a new line, five abreast, from the cavern wall to the landing's rotted
edge. The Sranc plunge headlong toward them, their faces twisted in fury and
licentious hunger. She sees several tumble off the stairs edge, kick screaming
into the sheets of fire below.

Lord Kosoter seizes her shoulder
with his free hand. "Rouse him, girl!" he shouts, his eyes fixed on
the wild-limbed deluge about to descend upon them. He need not utter the sum of
his intent:
Rouse the Wizard or we're dead.

She squats next to Achamian. A
scab of salt has fallen away, and blood wells across his flayed cheek, but he
has slumped back into unconsciousness. The heat buffets her, and for a dizzied
moment she almost topples, would have slipped were it not for
Achamian's
sudden
grip.

She stares at him. A clutched
joy sparks through her, only to be pinched into oblivion by his crazed look.

His lips work in palsied
twitches.
"Esmi?"
he cries.

"Akka! Sranc come... Only
you can save us!"

"Don't you see, woman? He's
Dûnyain
! He awakens us to drive us deeper into sleep!
He makes us
love!
"

"Akka! Please!"

"Origins! Origins are the
truth of us!" A fury screws his face, so poisonous she feels the shame of
it even through her panic.
"I will show you!"
he snarls.

A numbness sops through her, a
recognition...

"Akka."

Inhuman baying. Her body whips
her face around of its own accord.

"Move!"
Pokwas
booms, pressing between his brothers to stand at the fore of the line. The
rising stair has become a rope of wagging blades and caterwauling faces. The
creatures scramble down the steps like famished apes. Those at the fore
literally launch themselves from several steps up, come hacking down on the
black-skinned scalper. The great tulwar swoops around and out and the grim
dance begins, body and sword swinging in flawless counterpoise. Pitted blades
shatter. Crude shields are cloven. Limbs are struck spinning. The Sword-Dancer
does not so much kill as harvest, keening in his strange Zeümi tongue. Blood
slaps the chapped walls, greases the stair, sails in rags and strings over the
plummet.

Mimara stands above the Wizard,
one foot planted on the landing, the other two steps down. She yanks Squirrel
from its sheath, holds the Seleukaran steel high, so that it seems to boil with
the hellish light.

She is Anasûrimbor Mimara,
child-whore and Princess-Imperial. She will die spitting and brawling, be it at
Cil-Aujas or the Gates of Hell.

"My dreams show me the
way!" the unhinged Wizard bellows from her feet. He fumbles trying to
press himself from the stone. "I will
track
him, Esmi! Pursue him
to the very womb!"

For eleven miraculous heartbeats
Pokwas stems the descending tide. The foremost Sranc begin panicking, try to
claw back in terror, but the mobs above drive them skidding down the gored
steps, into the arc of the Zeümi blade. The corpses heap before the
Sword-Dancer, sluice outward like piled fish.

Then the black javelins begin
falling...

One of the surviving Galeoth
scalpers is killed outright, caught above the clavicle and punched backward. He
trips over the Wizard and topples downward, spinning across a dozen steps before
scudding over the stair's edge. Mimara merely stands dumbfounded as two
javelins lance the open spaces to either side of her, ripping the air like
gauze. Pokwas literally bats one with his sword, sends it darting over the
edge. But a second rings off his battle cap. He crashes in a tangle at the feet
of his fellow Skin Eaters.

The Sranc fall upon them.

Roaring, the scalpers lean into
their shields and hack and hammer. They exact a cleaving, puncturing toll.
Somehow, Pokwas is pulled clear. Lord Kosoter skewers the frenzied skinny drawn
with him, kicks its face to slush. Her boots skidding, Mimara throws her
shoulder to the press, even manages to spear two by poking Squirrel through the
thicket of straining limbs and locked weapons. But looking up, she sees the
savage multitudes that bear down upon them. The crush pitches one Sranc after
another over the stair's outer brink. Some even crawl across the bristling
surface of their brethren. The first of the Bashrag lumber near, one with a
Chorae gouging hollow its grotesque breast. And the crazed column piles higher
and higher, winding along the contour of the cavern wall, to the peak of the
stair, to the terrace...

She sees
Cleric
, stepping
out
over
the ruined amphitheatre, hanging, shimmed in white light
against the black-and-ruby ramparts. The Nonman turns toward them, striding
across empty air. His sorcerous song somehow rises through all noise and
clamour, like blood squeezed from the world's own marrow. Brilliant parabolas
hook across the open spaces, fall at intervals along the teeming stair. And
arcs beget arcs, jumping from Sranc to shrieking Sranc, multiplying to the
force and tenor of Cleric's arcane call. He comes to a halt, hangs motionless
over the burning lake, his eyes and mouth glittering like stars, his hands
outstretched. Incandescent scissions. Looms of light. The Skin Eaters cease
their backward skid, begin hewing their way forward. Above them, their foes are
thrashing and burning, caught in blinding webs, dazzling geometries.

Their inhuman screams sink
needles into their ears.

And she thinks,
Ishroi
...

Lord Kosoter is bellowing,
commanding them to run, but Mimara finds herself stumbling to a pause on the
second landing. Above, the stairs are pulped with smoking Sranc corpses. But
two Bashrag remain untouched—Chorae-bearers. She watches them heave blistered
corpses across the long fall between them and Cleric. Three fall short,
revolving like thrown axes as they arc into the cauldron below. A fourth slaps
across the Nonman's Quyan Ward, which had been all but invisible for the glare.
The carcass smokes, drawing a burning smear as it slides down and away, into
the incinerating brilliance below.

Laughing, Cleric calls out yet
another Cant, and lines like the glimmer along a razor parse the intervening
air. They slice into the base of the precarious stair, and the steps falls
away, immolated in streamers of black dust. The lower Bashrag slides on
malformed heels and plummets, shrieking with elephantine lungs. The other flees
back up the stair, stamping through the glistening dead.

But Soma has her by the arm,
pulls her running after the others. For the first time she catches the whiff of
cooler air twining through the blanketing convections. The force of it grows
and grows, until it numbs her face and dandles her hair, slides aching fingers
across her sweat-lathered scalp. Lobes of black stone submerge the base of the
stair, ridged and wrinkled like skin. She and Soma run across them with ginger
strides, hastening to catch the others. She sees them vanish into the mouth of
a partially buried corridor—the source of the frigid blast.

Hair and clothing whip out
behind them. A vacant howl overpowers all other sound. She leans against the
gust, which seems to pull her onto her toes. Her jerkin flattens against her,
as chill as dead skin. She glances back to the lake of fire and the wrecked
amphitheatre, but her eyes are too pinched with cold to see much more than
pitch blots and hairy explosions of crimson and gold.

The corridor descends at a
shallow gradient, so that the petrified flow presses them tighter beneath the
ceiling vaults. Soon they are crouching. Soma shouts something to her, but his
words are blown away like fluff. The wind is so cold it scalds their flushed
skin, drives nails down to the bone. The ceiling angles lower and lower, and it
seems all Aenaratiol's mountainous weight closes about them. They are on their
hands and knees, literally climbing against a tempest gale. Sting and blackness
blind them.

The wind abates. They tip
forward, as though thrown clear of white-water currents. Hands clutch them from
the dark.

***

Mouths screeching into light.
Shadows flitting across devious angles.

Run!
something cried
within him.
Sweet-sweet Sejenus! You must run!

And yet Achamian sat at his
ease, his alarm more coloured by curiosity than by panic. He wore the fine
cloth of a courtier, and the tang of incense mellowed the air. Jasmine.
Cinnamon-musk.

The low ceilings of the Annexes
hung about him, the groaning post-and-lintel architecture of an age before
arches. He smiled at the image of his High-King across the benjuka plate, then
looked down to the little boy leaning into his lap, Nau-Cayûti bearing a gilded
scroll-case too heavy for his tender arms. Father and son laughed as he hefted
the golden tube.

The shouts of the dying scraped
across stone... but in some other place.

"What is it, Da?" the
young Prince called to his father.

"A
map
, Cayû. To a
strong place. A hidden place."

"Ishuäl," Seswatha
said, mussing the child's hair with his free hand.

"I
love
maps, Da!
Can I see it? Please? What's Ishuäl?"

"Come..." Celmomas
said, his smile at once dark and indulgent—the smile of a father bent on
hardening his son to a vicious world. The boy obediently darted back to his
father's side. Achamian studied the golden vines twining along the case's length,
the Umeri script stamped into concentric rings at either end. It seemed
implausibly heavy—enough to make wrists wobble.

"A king," Celmomas was
saying, "stands before his people in all things, Cayû. A king rides at the
fore. This is why he must always make ready, always prepare. For his foe is
ever the future. Condic marauders on our eastern frontier. Assassins in an
embassy of Shir. Sranc. Pestilence... Calamity
awaits us all
, even you,
my son.

"Some petition astrologers,
soothsayers, false prophets in all their guises. Low men, mean men, who
exchange words of comfort for gold. Me, I put my faith in stone, in iron, in
blood, and in secrecy—secrecy above all!—for these things serve in all times.
All times! The day words conquer the future is the day the dead begin to
speak."

He turned to Seswatha. The
wolf's head braided into his beard flashed in the glowering light.

"This, my friend—this is
why I built Ishuäl. For Kûniüri. For House Anasûrimbor. It is our final bulwark
against catastrophe... Against the darkest future."

Achamian placed the scroll-case
on the table before him, so that it seemed the prize of the pieces arrayed on
the benjuka plate beyond it. He looked up to meet his chieftain's pensive gaze,
found himself pondering the archaic script.
"Doom,"
it read,
"should
you find me broken."

"The inscription... What
does it mean?"

"Keep it, old friend. Make
it your deepest secret."

"These dreams you have been
having... You must tell me more!"

The ages seemed to lie like a
mountain above them, centuries compressed into stone, hope suffocated beneath
the heaping of generations. Strangers warred and screamed... Somewhere, in the
catacombs with them.

Toe! Toe to the line!

"Keep it," Anasûrimbor
Celmomas said. "Bury it in the Coffers."

***

There is music in the wind. A
whistling smeared into a discordant call, a song played to the rhythms of
blowing rags and floating dead.

Even after her eyes adjust, she
can scarce credit what has happened. She simply lies, her back and limbs
pressed against the heat radiating from the clumped stone, her skin shrinking
from the chill that courses over her. She breathes. Her clothing grips like
moss. Cramps gnaw at the vast numbness that floats through her. She is rooted,
immovable, barely alive.

The entrance is little more than
a horizontal slot, the petrified stone runs so high. It glows a baleful orange,
their only source of light.

The company lies scattered about
her in the gloom. Galian has collapsed on his shield, breathing in spasms.
Pokwas is on his stomach where he was dropped, his cheek pressed into a
black-glistening pool of blood. His back rises and falls to the rhythm of slow
life. Achamian lies unconscious as well, or near-unconscious. His head
periodically jerks to the pluck of some unseen tendon. Soma sits in the posture
of a mystic, his head lolling against the wall. Sarl is curled on his side,
heaving spittle. The others, Xonghis, Sutadra, Conger, and three whose names
she cannot remember, are likewise sprawled across the stone.

The last of the Skin Eaters.

Only Lord Kosoter stands. His
head hangs like a stone from his shoulders. His helm lost, his grey and black
hair ropes down, twines outward in the wind, obscuring his face and terrible
gaze. Somehow his shadow, thrown from the pale entrance light, seems to fall
across them all.