R. Bakker - The Judging eye

"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 Zeьmi 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 Anasыrimbor 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 Zeьmi 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-Cayыti 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, Cayы. To a strong place. A hidden place."

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

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

"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.