R. Bakker: The Judging eye

A collapse. Earth hammering ground. A mountain shrugging in and down.

The wind is gone.

A light hangs in a fog.

A ringing like blood in the ears. A sound surfacing…

Coughing. An old man coughing. She sees his silhouette resolving through the dust, a tattered old shadow.

"We need to keep moving," a hack-pinched voice says. "I'm not sure this will stop him."

Her eyes burn and blink. Her voice fails her.

"We need to keep moving," the Wizard continues, his tone rueful and encouraging. "If anything he can follow the mile-long streak of shit I dragged across the floor."

Somehow she was holding him, laughing, sobbing "Akka… Akka!"

"So far so good," he says gently. A hand strokes her hair, and instantly, she is a child clinging. "Mimara…"

"I thuh-thought… I thought… y-you…"

"Shush. We need to keep moving."

Arm in arm, they pass through a ruined network of corridors, following the trail kicked by the others across the dust-limned floor. After so many terrors, further fear seems ludicrous, and yet Mimara finds herself breathing against yet another clammy premonition. "How?" she finally asks. "We had the light… How could they run so far without us?"

"Because they saw that," Achamian replies, nodding at the darkness before her.

She sees it: the outline of an arched entranceway washed in the palest of blue. Even from this distance, a deep sense of recognition suffuses her, a wave of depleted exultation. She knows this light, in ways that run deeper than her waking soul. It was the light her sires were born to, all the way back to the beginning…

The light of sky.

Slim shadows move across the entrance. She hears a voice calling her name-Soma. A sudden fury burns against her exhaustion, in the way of wood soaked in mud.

As though reading her thoughts, the Wizard says, "All men are traitors in a place such as this…" When she glances at him, he adds, "Now isn't the time for judgment."

His face is beyond haggard in the arcane glare. Its network of ruts and wrinkles are inked black with dust, as are his cheek and temple-across all the flesh rawed by the salting. Even still, intellect and resolution glitter in his eyes, with the merest hint of gallows humour. The old Achamian is back, she realizes, even if he's propped up by the qirri like her. Returned from the paths of the dead.

The surviving Skin Eaters are animated as well, so much so that for an absurd moment Mimara has the sense that she stands with a troupe of players dressed and painted to play a shattered company of scalpers. But it is as much the turn in their fortunes as it is Cleric's nostrums that has heartened them.

They have found their way out of Cil-Aujas.

"I know this place," the Wizard rasps. "Even among the Nonmen, it was a wonder."

"Cleric called it the Screw," Galian says hoarsely, staring up like all the others. He looks different with days of growth across his jaw and chin, less like the cynical wit and more like his brothers. "The Great Medial Screw."

The must of soaked masonry. The ring of voices across stone and water. They stand on a terrace set in curved walls that wrap out through the vagaries of Achamian's light to form a perfect cylinder, one that soars as far as any of them can see, terminating in a point of shining white. Elongated glyphs band the surface, some as tall as a man, others engraved in panels no larger than a hand. A stair ascends from the terrace, as broad as a Galeoth wain, winding in helical loops into the obscurity above. Glittering water threads the open air, falling from unguessed heights into the pool that forms a mirror-black plate three or four lengths below the terrace. For a vertiginous moment, Mimara has the impression of staring up from the bottom of an inconceivable well, as though she were no more than a mite, waiting for gods to draw water. It seems impossible that this shaft runs the entire height of the mountain, that a single work can link the heavens to the hell at their feet.

"It'll take days," she murmurs.

"At least we have water," Pokwas says. He leans out, still precarious on his feet, so that Xonghis and Soma reach out to catch hold his steel-plated girdle. Eyes closed, the Sword-Dancer lists into the nearest of the silver threads and wincing, begins pawing the grime and the blood from his face. He takes a long drink before retreating from the unrailed edge. He warns the others to be wary of the water's bite-"It falls fast enough to crack teeth!" — but he swears that it is clean and good. Godsent.

They begin taking turns, the man behind holding the belt or hauberk of the man before.

Agitated, Achamian continually stares into the black depths of the hallway they had just fled from. "We don't have time for this," he warns Lord Kosoter.

A wordless stare is his only reply, and Mimara finds herself relieved.

Suddenly water is the only thing she can think about. How long has it been since their last drink? Never in her life, not even on the slave ship that still haunts her nightmares, has she suffered such deprivations. The qirri is there, a kind of inner hand holding her upright, assisting cramped limbs, but the body it braces teeters on the brink of collapse. When the qirri wears away…

She must have water.

Perhaps seeing the thirst in her eyes, Soma surrenders his place in the small crowd. She thanks him grudgingly, unable to forgive the image of his fleeing back as she hauled Achamian alone through the corridor mere moments before. What was it about such circumstances, hidden so fat from the sun, that they could incite courage one moment and plunder it the next? Was she so different from Somandutta?

He holds her belt and she leans out over the edge, raises her face to the silver stream. It hurts, just as Pokwas has warned, a bite so cold it numbs. She rinses it across her face, a kind exquisite cruelty, feels it slip like daggers across her scalp. Then she opens her lips to the crystalline plummet, and chill life sluices into her. Her teeth ache unto cracking, but the taste is clean as a child's love. She drinks. There is milk in water, when the body is in dire need. Through teary eyes she glimpses the blue star high above, and her heart leaps with the certainty of sky-sky! They have passed through Cil-Aujas, survived its underworld teeth. They have walked the outskirts of Hell. Now they stand on the long threshold of freedom… Sky!

Sky and water.

She pulls away, her face numbed to a mask, watches the rivulets fall from her, add their concentric ripples to those warring soundless across the black pool below. She glimpses her own reflection, a light-rimmed shadow.

She hears Achamian arguing behind her, explaining that sorcerers cannot fly, they can only walk the echoes of the ground in the sky. "If there is a pit in the ground below," he croaks, "there is a pit in the sky as well!"

Then she feels it… Feels it?

Soma has pulled her back to the safety of the terrace, but she lingers at the edge, still gazing at the black waters below.

She feels it rising.

She sees a flicker in the deeps, like lightning through dark and distant clouds. "Akka?" she murmurs, but it is too late. She realizes that it is too late. In her soul's eye she sees Xonghis on one knee before the Obsidian Gate, a lifetime ago it seems, scratching the sign of the Skin Eaters next to the signs of all the other lost companies.

It was always too late. No one leaves the Black Halls.

Through dark water, Hell rises in the guise of a great graven seal, like a shield stamped with packed skulls and living faces, winding in fractal rings about the long-dead Nonman King. It pauses beneath the surface, its limbs languorous and submerged. Veins of blackness pulse up across the walls. It stares across the bourne, pondering the unspeakable, then raises its lips to kiss the inverted surface, and exhales the shriek and torment that is its air.