R. Bakker: The Judging eye

"Yes. The treachery… The betrayal that led to its fall…"

"No. That's not it. It's this place. This very room! It's what they did-the Nonmen of Cil-Aujas… It's what they did to their human slaves!"

Generations bred for the sunless mines. Used up. Cast away like moaning rubbish. Ten thousand years of sightless torment.

She knows this… But how?

"What? What do you mean?" He grimaces in pain and irritation.

Rather than speak, she turns aside so that he can see Cleric still kneeling, listening to the soundless lips of the Nonman King… "No!" Cleric calls. "Cousin, please!"

The milk in the Wizard's eyes clears. "What?" He fairly uses her body as a ladder, stumbles swaying to his feet. For several heartbeats he simply gapes at the underworld apparition.

"Run!" he cries to the others. "Follow the wind! Courage will be your death here!"

"Stand your ground!" the Captain roars.

The Surillic Point hangs immune to the wind, bathing the chapped walls and uneven floor in pale white. Despite their dread Captain's cry, the scalpers back away from the two Nonmen. Black has begun bleeding from the bolt of fabric wrapped about the spectre's back and shoulders, rolling up and out like dark wine in water, as impervious to the blowing as the light above.

Lord Kosoter stands rigid, the point of his sword held to the ground beside him, his hair flailing in steel-grey ribbons. "He has this," he grates, his eyes fixed on Cleric where he kneels beneath the mad apparition.

"Captain," Achamian says, fingers locked so that he hangs from Mimara's shoulder. He's already pressing her backward with staggering steps. "Listen…"

The Holy Veteran turns his bearded profile to them, nothing more. "He has this!"

But Cleric has lowered his head. Lines of reflected white hook across the contours of his skull. Trailing tendrils of smoke-darkness, the Nonman King steps around him, strides with sandals that do not quite touch ground, then turns so that he stands above Cleric's armoured back.

"Captain," the Wizard cries. Now it is Mimara who is drawing him backward, toward the hymn of the dragon bones. Soma grabs the ailing Wizard's other arm.

Where Cleric holds his head bowed, the spectre raises his dead face to the ceiling, as though seeing sky rather the crushing miles of earth. The mouth works in unheard benediction. The rigid arms lift and rotate forward. The elbows fold. The hands, with fingers and thumbs held tight as though in some ritual pose, close about Cleric's shoulders. The scalpers watch their companion raised, a silvery figure framed by a corona of black…

Even the Captain is stumbling backward now.

Holding Pokwas between them, Xonghis and Galian retreat with Mimara and the Wizard. Sarl laughs like a child at a puppet show, his yellow teeth gleaming. Conger pulls him in jerking steps.

The Nonman King holds Cleric like a doll before him, like a cup he can spill. He steps forward-into…

A violent spasm, like drawing first breath. Limbs fling outward, snap rigid, like ropes weighted with lead. Cleric's whole body arches backward, as if bound across the curves of drawn bows. And both Nonmen can be seen, as though each were solid and the other were glass, naked limbs within armour, nimil plates beneath a gown of chained gold. The Nonman King's face pulls forward, twists in bewildered delirium. Wrath.

For an instant, the company glimpses a floating seal, a savage emblem of hell…

The Surillic Point flickers out.

" I dream," Cleric's voice booms through the wind howling black, " that I am a God."

The Skin Eaters are shouting. Mimara hears herself sob.

Achamian mutters in arcane panic. The light shed from his eyes and mouth paints Soma's blank face against the greater dark.

A new light. It flickers like a star for long hanging heartbeat, then flares with eye-averting brilliance. A new chamber. The tiered walls rise into shadow about them, the bronze-barred cages lined like pupae across them-as before. But each encases a mad thrashing, arms reaching, hands clutching, mouths shrieking, a thousand moments of anguish, a thousand souls, condensed into a mad, smoking blur. Eyes stacked upon eyes, drawn across eyes. The arcs of teeth, a shining multitude. Swatches of welted skin.

The Emwama scream, thousands upon thousands of them, forever buried, forever sealed from their native sun. An age of torment compressed into a single wail…

Mimara screams with them.

Cleric drifts toward the abject scalpers, floating in a vertical pool of black, like tar spilled across unseen waters, his lace submerged, his limbs drowned, beneath the hoary aspect of the Nonman King.

But a hunger, a voice groans through the mountain's foundations. A hunger runs through me… splits me like rotted stone.

Achamian is hollering so hard that spittle flecks his matted beard. Even though Mimara stands next to him, she can hear nothing save the million-throated wail.

Despite his weakened state, the Wizard is yanking her backward, away from the looming visage.

How, the voice creaks through the roots of the world, could a God hunger?

Plumes of molten stone erupt from the ground about them, spitting jets of orange, gold, and baleful crimson. One of the scalpers simply vanishes. A limb falls next to Mimara, an unblistered hand attached to a forearm burnt to a charcoal nub. Lord Kosoter, who had stood his ground before the hellish approach, at last turns to run.

The whole company, or what remains of it, is running.

Nonman laughter. She has heard it enough to recognize its peculiarities by now, the deep warbling at its pith, the way its intonations hook into cruelties beyond the range of human comprehension.

Nonman laughter, booming with the lungs of a mountain.

They run, through the bones of the dragon, into the concentrating wind, and it seems a miracle they can battle through it, that they aren't blown skidding like rags into the horror rising behind them.

They scramble crawling into the opposite corridor, and the cold shoots through them, aches bones from end to end. They climb against the wind, whose howl they cannot hear.

The damned call out to them, wailing with the hunger that knots and strangles and sustains all misery…

Yearning to see itself visited upon others.

It has entered the corridor behind them. He has entered…

The Wight-in-the-Mountain. The Nonman King.

She is an earthen jug, and her innards slosh like curdled milk. A single crack and she will clatter open, spill across the floor. She is failing. She feels it in her flagging attempts to haul the Wizard with her. The others have climbed ahead, almost beyond the light of the Surillic Point.

Even Soma.

Her soul gropes for strength, a kind of inward prayer, Mimara begging Mimara, and suddenly, she feels it, the qirri that Cleric had given them, like stones beneath paddling feet.

"Come! On!" she cries at the Wizard.

But the wind whips the words like autumn leaves from her mouth.

The hellish wail stamps them into ash.

They cross the bourne, from the lobed rock, the drowning ground of the slave chamber, the overflown foundations, onto the hewn floor. But it does not matter. The wind has all but defeated Achamian. She is fairly dragging him. And she can see it, boiling up through the blackness toward them, the infernal pit.

The old man is shouting. She cannot hear him, but she knows what he cries…

Leave me.

Leave me. Daughter, please…

But she refuses. This old stranger… What is it?

Why should she dare hell?

She heaves, bawling at his arm. Achamian is on his back now, and she scratches him forward, heave after heave after heave, knowing that it does not matter.

She doesn't hear the sorcerous cry until after, only the thunderous crack, the concussion that slaps back the wind, knocks her forward to her knees. She hears it through the all-encompassing clap and rumble…