R. Bakker - The Judging eye

Its wings threshing the air, Skafra bared corroded teeth, shrieked out to the horizon, to the whirlwind roping black across the distant plains. A rumble deeper than a final heartbeat.

And Achamian hung unseen, an insubstantial witness… Alone.

Where? Where was Seswatha?

They found the mummified corpse of a boy no more than a hundred paces down the passageway Cleric had chosen for them. He was curled as though about a kitten, his back to the wall. He had been at most thirteen or fourteen summers old, Xonghis estimated. The Imperial Tracker had no idea how long he had lain there, but he pointed to the propitiatory coins that had been set on his hip and thigh: three full coppers, two grey with dust, one still bright-gifts for the Ur-Mother-not the coins, but the acts of surrendering them. Apparently others had passed this way as well. With the rest of the company clustered about him, Soma fell to one knee and added a fourth, whispering a prayer in his native tongue. His eyes sought out Mimara afterwards, as though seeking confirmation of his gallantry.

"You need to watch that one," Achamian murmured to her as they continued down the corridor. They had not spoken since waking, and he found himself regretting the way he had cut short their conversation the previous night. It seemed absurd, offering words like coins in the bowels of a mountain, but the small things never went away, no matter how tremendous the circumstance. Not for him, anyway.

"Not really," she said with a weariness Achamian found vaguely alarming. Their was peril in feminine exhaustion-men understood this instinctively. "It's usually the quiet ones you need to watch. The ones waiting for the door to clap behind them…"

The sound of other voices welled into her silence. A debate had broken out regarding the fate and provenance of the dead child. Strangely enough, the boy and the mystery of his end had inspired a return to normalcy of sorts.

"Ainon taught me that," she added with reassuring bitterness. "You know… where they took me."

The expedition marched on, a collection of pale faces in the long murk. The conversation, quite inexplicably, turned to which trades were the hardest on the hands. Galian insisted that fishermen had the worst of it, what with all the knots and nets. Xonghis described the cane fields of High Ainon, endless miles of them along the upper Secharib Plains, and how the field slaves always had bleeding fingers. Everyone agreed that if you included feet, fullers were the sorriest lot.

"Imagine marching in piss day in and day out-and without moving a cubit!"

Then they started on beggars, trading tales of this or that wretch. Soma's claim to have seen a beggar without arms or legs was met with general derision. Soma was always claiming things. "So how did he pick up his coins?" one of the younger wits asked. "With his pecker?" In the spirit of mockery, Galian went one better, saying he saw a headless beggar when he was in the Imperial Army. "For the longest time we thought he was a sack of ripe turnips, until he began begging, that is…"

"And what did he beg for?" Oxwora asked. The giant's voice always seemed to boom, no matter how low he pitched it.

"To be turned right side up, what else?"

Laughter crashed through the abandoned halls. Only Soma remained unimpressed.

"How could he speak without a head?"

"You seem to manage well enough!"

A cackling swell. The crew always enjoyed a good joke at Soma's expense.

"In Zeьm-" Pokwas began.

"The beggars give you money," Galian interrupted. "We know."

"Not at all." The Sword-Dancer laughed. "They trek into the Wilds to skin skinnies…"

A general cry of outrage and laughter.

"Which explains all the silver you owe me," Oxwora exclaimed.

And on it went.

Judging by her expressions, Mimara found the banter terribly amusing, a fact not lost on the scalpers-Somandutta in particular. Achamian, however, found it difficult to concede more than a smile here and there, usually at turns that escaped the others. He could not stop pondering the blackness about them, about how garish and exposed they must sound to those listening in the deeps. A gaggle of children.

Someone listened. Of that much he was certain.

Someone or something.

With Lord Kosoter at his side, Cleric led them through a veritable labyrinth. Corridors. Halls. Galleries. Some struck as straight as a rule, others wound in the random pose of worms suspended in water, or like the writing of weevils beneath the bark of dead trees. All of them hummed with the enormity of the mountain they plumbed: the walls seemed to bow, the floors buckle, the ceilings tingled with crushing weight. At some point, their entombment had become palpable. Cil-Aujas became a world of wedged things, of great collapses, immense torsions, all held in check by stone and ancient cunning. More than once, Achamian found himself gasping, as though breathing against some irresistible grip. The air tasted of tombs-stone joists and age-long motionlessness-but it was plentiful enough. Even still, something animal within him cried suffocation.

It was the lack of sky, he decided. He tried not to think of his earlier premonitions.

The banter dwindled into silence, leaving the arrhythmic percussion of footfalls and the sonorous complaints of this or that mule in its wake.

The sound of water rose so gradually out of the silence that it seemed sudden when they finally noticed it. The walls and ceiling of the passage they followed flared outward, like the mouth of an intricately carved horn, becoming ever more dim in the twin points of sorcerous light. After several steps, the walls fell away altogether, and they stepped into booming space. Through membranes of mist, the lights reached out, paling, revealing hanging scarps and cavernous spaces-a great chasm of some kind. The floor became a kind of stone catwalk, slicked with rust-coloured moulds. Water tumbled beneath, a rush of diamonds, broken only by the shadow of the catwalk, leaping and wheeling into void. Achamian found himself looking away, dizzied by how its sheeting plunge made his footing drift. He heard the mules kick and scream in the train immediately behind him. Near the head of their long file, he could see Cleric's light gather against the cavern's far heights, then fold into the tubular hollows of another corridor.

Except that it wasn't another corridor, but the entrance to some kind of shrine. The room was neither large nor small-about the size of a temple prayer floor-with a low circular ceiling spoked like a wheel. Friezes panelled the walls-were-animals with multiple heads and limbs-but not to the convoluted depths found elsewhere. The scalpers, Achamian could tell, thought them representations of devils: More than a few whispered homespun charms. But he knew better, recognizing in the figures a sensibility kindred to that of the Wolf Gate. It wasn't monsters that glared from the walls, he knew, but rather the many poses of natural beasts compressed into one image. Before they began forgetting, the Nonmen had been obsessed with the mysteries of time, particularly with the way the present seemed to bear the past and the future within it.

Long-lived, they had worshipped Becoming… the bane of Men.

While the company milled beneath the low ceilings, Sarl and Kiampas organized the replenishment of their water supply. The leather buckets they normally used to scoop water from gorges were unpacked. A relay was set up, and soon armed men were squatting all across the chamber filling skins. Achamian paced the walls in the meantime, studying the graven images with Mimara in tow. He showed her where innumerable ancient penitents had worn indentations into the walls-with their foreheads, he explained.

When she asked him whom they prayed to, he cast about looking for Cleric, once again loath to say anything the Erratic might overhear. He found him standing at the far end of the chamber, his bald head bowed and gleaming. A great statue loomed before him, a magisterial Nonman hewn from the walls, at once hanging with arms and legs outstretched-a pose curiously reminiscent of the Circumfix-and sitting rigid upon a throne, his knees pressed together beneath flattened hands. Mould had stained the stone black and crimson, but otherwise the figure seemed untouched, blank eyes staring out. Rather than answer Mimara's query, Achamian simply motioned for her to follow, pressing past the crowded scalpers toward Cleric.