R. Bakker - The Judging eye

The passage dips and twists in a dog-tail bend, ending, miraculously, in a maw of pumpkin orange, waxing as bright as a horizon-scorching sun. The sight of it stiffens her neck, and for a time she simply stares, watching the shadows of the company wander across its luminous expanse.

"Light," she murmurs. "Wh-what?"

"Light," Soma croaks in affirmation. "We don't know."

"Cleric?"

"Lost. Behind us."

Suddenly she feels the heat felting the air, making ash out of emptiness. It seems she has always sensed it, only as a shadow through the slick-skin chill of unconsciousness.

The world sets its hooks deep, ever drawing souls tight across its infinite contours. Circumstances are reborn, and hearts are renewed. A spark throbs through her gutted muscles, returns slack extremities to her will. She glances at the man bearing her-Soma, stripped of his earnest foolery-and it seems she is a child in a swing.

She knows that he loves her.

Light, luxuriant and smoking. The tunnel opens like the mouth of a battered horn. A hiss that had escaped their hearing crashes into a gasping roar. An all-burning stench lies in the air like a sting in the skin. They stumble down slopes of fiery gravel-the bowl of a ruined amphitheatre, she realizes-staring agog at the ravines that hang in the distances above them, cliffs piled upon cliffs, their bellies braised in smouldering crimson. Below them, at the base of the amphitheatre's ruined tiers, a hemisphere of pillars, roofless cripples, enclose a terrace covered in wrack. Light rims the brink, blackens heaped foundations. Sulphur crabs the backs of their throats. The air undulates with heat.

No one speaks as they stagger toward the edge. In the open, the fact of their losses seem to condemn them. Wounded, culled of friends and shorn of provisions, the Skin Eaters are little more than a remnant of what they were.

They squint. They purse their lips against grins of exhaustion. The heat pricks their teeth. Many fall to their knees between the pillars, stare across the vista in dismay and horror. A lake of fire, sparking like iron beneath the smith's hammer. A vast sheet, as mottled as an old crone's skin, only with skittering fire and belligerent light.

Soma sets Mimara down and falls onto all fours, staring into the grit, his back heaving. She crawls to where Pokwas has dumped Achamian in unceremonious exhaustion. He breathes. He seems intact. She rolls him onto his back, draws his slack head onto her lap. Her shoulders yank to her breathing, and she wonders whether she weeps.

"Mimara," the Wizard whispers. She bites her lower lip in joy, blinks tears.

But he thrusts her back, weakly kicks a heel through the debris. "Chorae," he rasps, his head pulled back in anguish.

Somehow she has forgotten it, though it pulls like a fatal fall against her breast. As if attention makes real, the sudden nothingness of it sucks the voice from her throat.

"Hell!" Pokwas cries in shrill panic, like a man deciding he is in fact awake. On one knee, he leans against his tulwar. He lowers his forehead to its pommel. "We've fled too far-too deep!"

Sarl raises his fists to either side of his skull, claws at his grease-grey hair. There is an infant in his face, bawling out through skin so wrinkled it seems made of cord and twine. He cackles through gum-rimmed teeth, weeps.

"It's true!" Xonghis shouts, eyes round and darting. Only he and Lord Kosoter remain standing. The wavering air flushes the substance from their figures, makes them wicker thin. They are writ with filth and Sranc blood.

"This isn't Hell," the Captain says.

"But it is!" Sarl cackles and screams, rocking like a widow beneath her husband's pyre. "Look! Look!" He raises crooked fingers to the spectacle before them.

Somehow the Captain's sword has leapt shining from its sheath. Its point tongues the pubis hollow beneath the sergeant's chin, probes wiry hair. For a moment, Sarl continues rocking, drawing the shining blade to and fro with his throat. Then he falls very still.

"This," the Captain grates, "isn't Hell."

"How do you know?" Galian cries.

"Because," the Holy Veteran says, his voice so cold it seems the sound should fog or frost. "I would remember."

With a reptilian twitch, he scores his sergeant's rutted cheek, then turns from his company. He picks his way across the ruin to the far corner of the terrace, begins descending a stair cut into the soaring crevasse walls.

For several heartbeats the scalpers stare after their Captain. No one speaks or moves. Then a bark peals through the ambient roar, and all eyes jerk to the tunnel above.

Screeching and howling, the Sranc come, like lice spilling from a dead man's ear. Cleric has fallen, she realizes with plummeting horror.

Cil-Aujas has slain her last remaining son.

Mimara finds herself racing on legs woven out of terror, following close behind Galian and Soma, who hold the semiconscious Wizard between them. They run like the lost, like those whose hearts rail more against fate than foes. Their peril is fatal and immediate, yet she stumbles and gasps, stricken with a reeling vertigo. The fall wheels out to her left, beckoning, staggering…

The lake of fire shimmers across the distances, a brilliant plate across the bottom of a vast cavern, rutted like the hollow of a long-dead tree. Soaring basalt faces steep in the heat, black rimmed in ox-blood crimson. Where the stone leans close to the glowering surface, across the grottos that hive the farther reaches, fire falls in curtains and streams. Burning gases blow in skirts across the wavering expanses. Eruptions spew radiance the height of Momemn's greatest towers.

They have fled too far, too deep. They have passed beyond the rind of the World into the outer precincts of Hell. There can be no other explanation…

Not lost. Damned.

Lord Kosoter awaits them on the first landing, his sword still drawn. She follows his gaze to the bend of the stair above them. Masses of Sranc stream across the terrace they had occupied mere moments before, literally hacking at one another to funnel onto the steps. Around the looming abdomens of stone, she can see hundreds more pouring from the tunnel's horn-mouth entrance, their white faces pinked by the hellish glow. The first of the Bashrag wade through them. The cavern roar seems to meld with their shrieks, to add thunder to their cacophony.

Their Captain's pose says it all. Away is lost to them. Only death and bitter vengeance remain.

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 Dыnyain! He awakens us to drive us deeper into sleep! He makes us love!"