R. Bakker: The Judging eye

"A king," Celmomas was saying, "stands before his people in all things, Cayы. 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 Ishuдl. For Kыniьri. For House Anasыrimbor. 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," Anasыrimbor 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.

They lie in a chamber of some kind, the dimensions of which escape the feeble light, gathered in a corner where the cycling gusts are broken by the confluence of walls. The air is too fleet and too cold to possess smell. She first notices the graffiti while watching Soma. Strings of white-scratched characters score the wall all about him, the lines so dense where the hardened flow meets the wall as to almost seem like decoration, but thinning out into lone scribbles about his shoulders and neck-according, she realizes, to the original floor and the limited reach of its ancient authors.

The wind flutes in the dark, eerie and disharmonious.

She ponders the scratches with the clarity of concentration that comes only with absolute exhaustion. Her soul, which so often seemed to be petalled like a flower, a thing of frail confusion, has become as simple as a stone, a lamp that can shine upon one thing and one thing only. The signs themselves mean nothing to her, nor, she imagines, to anyone living. But the character of their scratching almost shouts too loud. These are human signs, she realizes, scraped in the throes of human anguish. Names. Curses. Pleas.

And somehow she just knows: This was once a place of great suffering.

A shadow blots the entrance glow, and alarm beats hot blood into the clay of her body. She sits up, as do several others. She sees a silhouette crawl through the slender orange maw, then stand.

Cleric steps into their midst, the gore on his face and nimil armour blown into crazed patterns by the wind. She sees the same white chapping across his forehead and scalp as Achamian, though not nearly so severe: Skin salted from Choric near misses, she realizes. Unwinded, he stares with spent curiosity at the spent Men, trades a long look with the Captain before turning to scan the shrouded spaces. There is a clarity and a command in his dark eyes that she has never seen before-one that both heartens and frightens her. He seems to ponder something only his eyes can descry.

"We're safe," he eventually says to Lord Kosoter. "For a time."

Finally able to move, she crawls across the uneven stone-tongues laid across tongues-to Achamian. The panic receding, she at last has room to worry, perhaps even to mourn.

"The wind," Xonghis croaks. "It's cold. High mountain cold…"

The Nonman lowers his chin in assent. "The Great Medial Screw runs near here… An immense stair that runs the entire height of the Aenaratiol."

"Can we use it to escape?" Galian blurts. He hugs his knees, slowly rocking. She glimpses a tremor fluttering through one of his hanging thumbs.

"I think so… If it is still as I… remember."

The relief is soundless and palpable. This entire time, the scalpers have had breath enough-heart enough-only for what was essential. Safety. Escape. The possibility of these secured, their souls once more slacken, their thoughts fork down paths less urgent. They look about them and wonder.

"What is this place?" Xonghis asks.

Cleric's black eyes hold Mimara for an appraising instant. "A kind of barracks… I think. For ancient captives."

"A slave pit," Mimara croaks, so softly that several of the others turn to her frowning. But she knows the Nonman has heard.

A serpentine blink. His grin reveals the arc of his fused teeth-the same as the Sranc, only not fanged and serrated. He speaks, and for a heartbeat, his face becomes a mask before the sun…

A Surillic Point sparks to life in the air above him; white light blows out and across the darkness.

The chamber is massive. Terraces climb about their lonely corner. How high or how far none can tell, since the height and breadth quickly outrun the light. But they can clearly see the chap-bronze cages that pack each of the terrace walls-cruel confinements no larger than a single man-enough for hundreds, even thousands, standing hollow save for shadows, their wretched prisoners having rotted free long, long ago.

Even though Mimara can imagine how the room once looked, the tiers of piteous faces and clutching hands, it is the graffiti, scratched out along the lowermost wall as far as the light can reach, that most afflicts her heart. The Emwama, and their proof of misery, she realizes. She can almost see their shades, massed in hopeless clots, looks averted from the horrors hanging above, ears aching…

A shudder passes through her, so deep her eyes and limbs seem to rattle in their sockets.

And she thinks, Cil-Aujas…

Some moments pass before she realizes that no one, not even Soma, shares any inkling of her dread. Instead, they are all staring into the gloom toward the corner opposite. Even Lord Kosoter.