R. Bakker - The Judging eye

And she thinks, Incariol…

Flee.

She has heard and read the word many times; she has even pretended to have lived it. Did she not flee her mother? Did she not flee the ingrown strife of the Andiamine Heights?

No.

Fleeing is when terror digs across you like a million ticks. Fleeing is when you run so hard the very air begins to strangle. Fleeing is when the howls of your pursuers cut the nerves from your skin. Fleeing is when you listen to the others balk at carrying the Wizard, and a slow heartbeat of doubt passes where you wonder whether the old man might stall your hunters, like silver kelics thrown to a mob of beggars.

Fleeing is when all the world's directions crash into one…

Away.

The mazed depths of Cil-Aujas humour them. No gates bar their way. No collapses pinch their path into a fatal cul-de-sac. Like a miracle, every black threshold opens onto yet another hallway.

Away! Away!

They have two torches between them. One quickly sputters into black. When the corridors tighten, she is so short that all she sees of their light is its stark tumble across the ceilings. All else is glint and innuendo. Blood-slicked shoulders. Notched blades. Soaked tourniquets. Now and again she glimpses profiles: Sarl chewing his lips, a kind of shock-senility blearing his eyes. Achamian lolling unconscious, his cheek and temple caked in a tree-cancer white. Pokwas swatting tears, his looks pinned to his periphery…

Only Lord Kosoter has carried his inscrutability away intact. He and Soma, who has not let go her hand since she began running on her own. Time and again her glances find him: She had not thought him the equal of this enormity. There is a wrath in his look, grim and unconquerable. His eyes have become beacons of his caste-nobility.

They run so fast with so little light that they see only the kick of the dust and nothing of the hanging haze. But they know the trail they leave is mortally obvious. They see nothing of their pursuers-they can scarce see themselves-but they can hear them baying through the halls: an infernal chorus of shrieks and shrill yapping, frothing up behind them, outrunning their panicked gait, filtering through the dark halls about and before them, so that every other moment echoes trick them into turning or spiralling down ancient stairs.

Once again the horns swell through the deeps, a yawing menace. The rumble fills them, thins them with terror, until they become rags blown on a dread wind. The halls and the vaults and the graven panels flash into sight and fall into oblivion. Men moan and cry.

They are all sobbers now. Doom creeps like lead into their limbs, so that they lurch against their own bulk. Doom ignites the air, so that they hack with furnace lungs. Doom shreds their thoughts, so that they become flying fragments, souls that break and crumble with every jerk and turn.

They don't even pause when the bronze door leaps into the torchlight, but throw themselves against it, wailing and cursing. It slaps them back. Pokwas drives a spear into the aperture, begins prying. Mimara stares without breath or thought at the shackled nudes stamped across it-more Emwama slaves. Galian, Xonghis, and the others turn to the curtains of blackness behind them, to the concentrating clamour. Lord Kosoter seizes her by the back of the neck, throws her at the unconscious Wizard. She needs no explanation. She clutches Achamian's cheeks, sobs at the rasp of salt against her right palm. "Akka!" she cries. "Akka! Akka! We need you!"

His eyes flutter.

The haft of the spear snaps. Pokwas shouts something in his native tongue, begins punching blood from his fists. The dust of their exertions clouds the torchlight, chalks their mouths.

"Akka! Akka, please!"

The roar is palpable, a pang shivering out from the graven walls. The Chorae leans like an ache against her heart.

"Here they come!" Galian cries.

"Akka! Akka! Wake up! Seju damn you! Wake up!"

Then, like a vision, a figure trots out of the blackness…

Cleric.

The scalpers stumble back, bewildered and horrified. Awash in Sranc blood, his skin and armour are filmed in soaked dust. Basalt dark, he looks like an apparition. Cil-Aujas made animate.

He laughs at the astounded Men, waves Pokwas from the door. His sorcerous murmur makes a deep-water pop in Mimara's ears. His eyes and mouth flare white, and something, a flickering wave of force, shimmers through the air. There is a deafening crack; the bronze doors fly ajar.

"Time to run," the Nonman says, his voice miraculously audible through the screeching roar.

With awe too brittle to be hope, the survivors scramble into the blackness beyond the bronze rim.

Down. Down. Down to more guttural stone.

Gone are the image-pitted walls, level floors, and barrelled ceilings. They race through rough-hewn tunnels, so deep, so near the mountain's root, even the air seems compressed. The chapped rock becomes hot to the touch, like stone just drawn from a fire's perimeter. And the air moves, always hot, always against them, as though they chase the source of some endless exhalation. A sulphurous tincture bitters their tongues.

They have entered the mines, she realizes, the toil of a thousand human generations, slaves begetting slaves, dredging holy nimil for their Nonman masters. And the Sranc host pours after them, lunging down straights, bursting from bottlenecks, somehow seeing by bark and scream. They are closing, so much the scalpers can hear the whisk of their claws, the clap and scrape of their weapons, the sputum boiling through their cries. The company is a skiff twirling and slipping on the edge of a breaking wave. And yet the sheer fury and numbers of their pursuers seem to slow them, to draw them out in wild ropes. Several times Cleric stops to face them, leaving the scalpers with the rush-ragged gloom of their only torch. They hear his laughter booming behind them, the whisper of his sorcery whirring through their bones, the clack and rumble of unimaginable weights. But the fear is that the Sranc will range out ahead through the worming of parallel tunnels. So the Captain veers left and down at every fork, hoping to scatter them in the mazed deeps.

And the world piles higher and higher above them.

Her throat leathers for gasping. The heat drugs her exhaustion, makes her fall as much as run, chasing stride after drunken stride with her boots. She has fallen behind herself. A sensation soaks through her, so warm, so consoling it seems sacred, a kind of revelatory horror, bodiless and floating and so heartbreakingly clear. She has thrown herself to the ends of terror and will, and nothing remains but to pirouette and plummet…

She has run to the very edge of Away.

Forgive me…

The hard things have become water; only the ground can break her. She falls, more sack than human. She even lacks the strength to raise her hands. Grit pummels her face. Dust burns her gums.

The Sranc will have her, and she will die, speared by their brutalities.

Forgive me, Mother.

She hears shouts, rage wrung into weeping. She smells myrrh…

She is thrown across a broad chest, hung like dripping cloth from arms.

"You will not perish for me!" She hears his voice rasp. "I'll carry you across the doors of hell! Do you hear me? Mimara! Do you hear me?"

She reaches for his cheek, but her hand is a stone swinging from a string.

She lets her head carry her eyes where it will. It jolts and rolls to the rhythm of his exertions-only the mailed crook of his arm, it seems, prevents it from spinning free. The fissures across the walls and ceiling scrawl and arc and cross and explode into pits and crags. The scalpers sprint and toil, their figures bent by tears and angles, paced by a gliding palm of light. The Wizard slumps between two of them, his toes scratching furrows through the sand, kicking up against butts of stone.