R. Bakker - The Judging eye

And it weakened the knees, as all true spectacle should.

The Ziggurat had become as much argument as mountain, posed not in claims or premises, but in immensities, in features that encompassed experience, saying, murmuring, You are small… So very small.

And they walked, willingly, between the cracks of its hoary fingers.

The sky was pinched into a shining slot. The air became dry and still, like the gap in a dead man's mouth.

The Kianene, Sutadra, was the first to notice they walked the ruins of some ancient road. It almost seemed a trick of the eyes, for once they noticed the telltale signs, it seemed impossible they could have seen otherwise. Something, snowmelts perhaps, had sawed a long winding gully across and over its course, gutting the broad planes of what once must have been a grand processional avenue. There was little enthusiasm in the discovery. It seemed to trouble the Skin Eaters somehow, knowing they walked in the footsteps of gold-clad kings and shining armies, rather than those of wayfarers such as themselves. There was comfort in a simple track, Achamian supposed, an assurance that the world they walked did not laugh at them.

Several hours passed before they rounded the final bend and saw it before them. The fissured wall climbed high, straining the neck with its gouged dimensions. It loomed as only natural works could loom. The random line of fracture and millennial erosion, of rock sculpted in mystery and accident. Black outcroppings with mossed bellies. Long cracks dangling anemic weeds. And set in its heart, like some shrine to intellect and intention, the enormous Obsidian Gate, looming over the ruins of an ancient fortress.

The company gathered on the platform beneath it, loose clots of men drifting to a halt, mouths open. The Skin Eaters had expected many things, daydreams of a storied destination, but they were quite unprepared for what they beheld. Achamian could see it in the way they craned and peered, like emissaries of a backward yet imperious people trying to see past their awe. The entrance was unbarred, an ovoid of impenetrable black set in an immense arched recess, which was panelled with reliefs that formed a skein over yet deeper narratives, so that the scenes depicted possessed a startling depth. Nonmen figures twined across every surface, weathered to the point where you could scarcely distinguish the armoured from the naked, frozen in antique postures of triumph or ceremonial tedium. Shepherds with lambs about their shoulders. Warriors fending lions and jackals. Captives baring necks to the swords of princes. On and on, the lives of the dead in miniature. Four pillars flanked the threshold, the outermost pair soaring tall as netia pine, yet hollow, great cylinders of interlocking figures and faces; the innermost solid, three snakes intercoiling, their heads lost in the vaulted gloom, their rattled tails forming three-pronged bases.

Curses filled the silence, some murmured, others spoken quite out loud. Such was the monumental delicacy, the profusion of figure and detail, that the forms seemed more revealed than rendered, as though the sheeted cliffs were naught but mud rinsed from the stone of ossified souls. Even half-ruined, there was too much, too much beauty, too much detail, and certainly too much toil, a grandeur made wicked by the demands it exacted on simpler souls. It was a place that begged to be challenged, overthrown.

For the first time, Achamian thought he understood the crude bronze of Nostol's betrayal.

"What are we doing?" Mimara whispered from his side.

"Recalling ourselves… I think."

"Look," Xonghis said in his deadpan accent. "The other companies…" He nodded to the left serpentine pillar: Various symbols had been scratched into the lower coils, childish white slashes across weathered scales. "Their signs."

The Skin Eaters gathered round, careful to heed the invisible line that marked the entrance side of the pillar. Xonghis knelt between two of the rattle tails, which rose like roots, each thicker than a man. He ran his outstretched fingers and palm over each mark, as though testing extinguished fires for heat. Different Skin Eaters called out the names of the companies they recognized as he did so. He lingered over the sign of a weeping eye. "This one," he said, looking back significantly, "was marked the most recently."

"The Bloody Picks," Galian said, frowning. "They left, when?"

"More than a fortnight ago," Pokwas replied.

The following silence persisted longer than it should. There was heartbreak in these furtive marks, a childishness that made the ancient works rising about them seem iron heavy, nigh invincible. Scratches. Caricatures with buffoonish themes. They were so obviously the residue of a lesser race, one whose triumph lay not in the nobility of arms and intellect, but in treachery and the perversities of fortune.

"See," Achamian heard Kiampas mutter to Sarl. "There…" He followed the direction of the man's finger, saw what looked like a Galeoth kite-shield chalked long and skinny across the lower coils of the serpents.

"The High Shields, as I said."

"It can't be their sign," Sarl snapped, as though assertion alone could make things true. "Their bones lie on the Long Side." Even as he said this he stooped to fetch a stone from his feet. Everyone watched as he began scratching the mark of the Skin Eaters across one of the serpent's backs: a mandible with gumless teeth.

"What I would like to know," Sarl said, the gravel of his tone rendered thin and abrasive by the soaring works of glass and stone, "is how we could have gone so long without coming here."

His meaning was plain. The Skin Eaters were a legend, as was this place, and all legends were drawn together sooner or later-such was the song that decided all things. Such was the logic.

His face pinched into a cackle. "This is the slog of slogs, boys!"

Cleric, meanwhile, had wandered forward, effortlessly crossing the incorporeal boundary that seemed to hold everyone else back, turning in a slow circle as he did so.

"Where are you?" he bellowed-so violently even the hardest of the Skin Eaters started. "The Gate unguarded? And with the world grown so dark? This is an outrage! Outrage!"

Despite his stature, he seemed a mere sliver, frail and warm-blooded, before the great maw of black about him. Only the depth of his sorcerous Mark bespoke his might.

"Cыncari!" he boomed, growing frantic. "Jiss! Cыncari!"

The Captain strode to him, clapped a hand on his shoulder.

"They're dead, you fool. Ancient dead."

The cowled darkness that was his face turned to the Captain, held him in eyeless scrutiny, then lifted skyward, as though studying the lay of illumination across the hanging slopes. As the gathered company watched, he raised two hands and drew back, for the first time, his leather hood. The gesture seemed obscene, venal, a flouting of some aboriginal modesty.

He turned to regard his fellow scalpers, smiling as if taking heart in their astonishment. His fused teeth gleamed with spit. His skin was white and utterly hairless, so much so that he looked fungal, like something pulled from forest compost. His features were youthful, drawn with the same fine lines and flawless proportions as all his race.

The face of a Sranc.

"Yes," he said, closing lashless eyelids. His pupils seemed as big as coins when he opened them, black with hooks of reflected silver. "Yes," he fairly cried, laughing now.

"They are dead."

Night did not so much rise over the great fissure as the day was snatched away.

They had difficulty scrounging for fuel, so the entire company ended up crowding about a single fire, oppressed by the works hanging above them. Small desultory conversations marbled the silence, but no one took the stage and addressed the company as a whole, aside from Sarl of course, who had the habit of pitching his declarations in all directions. Most simply sat, knees hooked in the ring of their arms, and stared up at the thousand lozenge faces and figures above them, black-limned in flickering yellow-white. With the outer reliefs set like grillwork over the inner, the firelight seemed to animate the panels, to imbue them with the illusion of strain and motion. Several Skin Eaters swore that this or that scene had changed. Sarl, however, was always quick to make fools of them.