R. Bakker - The Judging eye

They are coming. And she is just a child-a child! Everything everywhere chatters with dread and threat. Angles become knives. Inaction becomes blood. A mad part of her kicks and bucks and screams. Her shriek bunches like a fist at the base of her throat. She must get out. She has to…

Out-out-out!

But the old Wizard is holding her by the shoulders, telling her not to fear, not to fret, but to trust in his heart and his power. "You want me to teach?" he cries. "I will give you such a lesson!" His laugh is almost genuine.

No sobbers, his eyes warn her. Remember!

Her breathing becomes both easier and more difficult after that, and she finds herself wary of the Captain. The mere thought of him has scared the panic from her-this, she realizes, is his warlike Gift. All about her the Skin Eaters assemble, shield to shield, shoulder to shoulder, forming a single rank around her and the mules. They look motley with their different heights and scavenged armour… Motley and fierce.

"Toe to the line!" Sarl cries across the horn's thundering back. "Come now, boys, toe to the line!"

Suddenly all the reasons she feared these barbaric men become reasons to prize them. Those hoary trophies. Those deep-chested bodies, girt with chain, leather, stink, and soiled cloth. That bullying saunter. Those wide-swinging arms, with hands that could break her wrists. And for some strange reason, their fingernails, each as broad as two of her own, rimmed in black crescents. Everything she had scoffed at or despised she now sees with thin-lipped understanding. The glib cruelty. The vulgar posturing. Even the glares that nicked her when she was careless with the cast of her eyes.

These are Skin Eaters, and their slogs are the stuff of legend. They would eat her if they could-but only because they walk so near the world's teeth.

She hears Achamian arguing with Kiampas on the far side of two stamping mules. "We should have stayed in the Repositorium…"

"But here we can choke them in the aisles."

"And those with the Chorae?"

The Nansur's grin is haphazard, as though hooked by a hard-to-see scar. His jaw, normally clean-shaven, is spackled grey. "Trifles, Wizard. Believe you me, we know how to stack skinnies…"

The man trails, cocks his head to the sudden quiet.

The horns have stopped.

The silence, she knows, is the silence they have marched through since entering the Obsidian Gate, the silence of their shutting in, the silence of corpses in their tombs. The ageless roar of Cil-Aujas.

Her limbs seem buoyant for the thickness of it.

All this time she has simply stood witless amid the mules. Now Kiampas is before her, issuing instructions-stay with the animals, keep the torches, staunch wounds by pressing like this-and asking questions-Do you know how to bind a tourniquet? Can you use that pretty sword? He peers into her eyes with calming seriousness, speaks only to the point. He is a handsome father. She answers him as honestly as she can. In her periphery she sees Achamian conferring with Cleric and the Captain. Sarl continues barking at his line, his gravelly voice recalling slogs gone by. "Oh, yes, boys, this is going to be a chopper. A classic chopper!"

She unpacks the torches and wedges five of them at intervals along the wall using chiselled hollows in the friezes. She strikes a sixth and it flares with curious transparency-violet wrapping into yellow-in the arcane light, but burns and smokes all the same. She lights all five, and the engraved Emwama seem to glow with the colours of their long-lost life. She walks among the restless mules, running her hands across the bristle of their necks, scratching their jaws and ears, and it seems that she mourns them.

Their small army falls motionless. The twin Surillic Points lean white against the engraved planes of the nearest columns, dwindle in grey stages the farther they reach down the lanes. Though soundless, the light seems to hiss with suspense.

The Skin Eaters have formed a bristling shell some thirty men strong, reaching from the wall, about their beasts of burden, back to the wall. Lord Kosoter stands just behind the apex, rigid with solitary concentration. With his plaited beard and tattered finery he almost looks as ancient as Cil-Aujas. His round shield, which she has seen many times hanging from a mule pack, is dented and scored. Barely legible across its centre are the enamel remains of an Ainoni pictogram: the word "umra," which in Ainoni means both duty and discipline. He holds his sword pointed down to his side. She sees he has drawn a quarter arc through the dust across the stone. Because he wears his Chorae over his heart, she cannot shake the sense that he's not quite alive.

Achamian stands with Kiampas at his side several paces to the Captain's left. Cleric stands likewise with Sarl to his right. Their Marks remind her of their power, and their company's hope.

Still holding the torch, she draws her sword: a Gift from her mother, forged of the finest Seleukaran steel. The disparate lights slip like liquid across its sheen. Squirrel, she calls it, because of the way it always seemed to tremble in her hand. It trembles now. She tries to remember all the years she spent training with her half-brothers, but the glow of the Andiamine Heights cannot penetrate this deep place… Nothing can.

"They come," the Nonman says, his black eyes as inscrutable as the darkness they plumb.

Mimara expects to feel the Chorae weaving out in the black. Instead she hears something, a nail-against-stone scratching that spreads like flood-water across the unseen spaces, reaching wider and higher until it seems the company stands in the piped centre of a gnawed bone…

Louder. Louder. A reek steams into the air, like the rot of inhuman mouths.

Her hand burns for squeezing her sword's pommel.

"Just as the Captain said," Sarl rasps. "Skinnies." He shoots a pointed look at Kiampas, every wrinkle grinning with his greasy lips.

"Remind me how much I hate this," Galian says to no one in particular.

"Like a knife up the bung?" Xonghis asks.

"No. Worse."

"I thought it was the knife too," Soma says.

"No," Pokwas replies. "It was beating your scrotum with, ah… thistles, right?"

"Exactly," Galian says, nodding sagely. "Like beating my pouch with thistles. My poor pretty pouch."

"Yes-yes," Xonghis snorts. He bangs his helm with the flat of his sword.

"Just think of all the gold," Somandutta replies-always the lackwit. Poor Soma.

"Pfah!" Pokwas cries, scowling. "Hard to spend it when the whores are busy laughing at his flayed hard-boileds, now isn't it?"

She feels a tick of sweat every time they utter that word. Whore.

Galian nods once again, this time as if at some tragic human truth. "The sluts laugh enough as it is."

They speak more to their terror than to one another, she realizes. Ever do men play the mummer, strutting on the stage of themselves to avoid the parts the world has assigned them. Women would speak of their fear.

"My ass itches," the giant Oxwora suddenly announces. "Does anyone have an itchy ass?"

"Just aim it the other way," Galian calls back. "I'm sure the skinnies will oblige you."

A wave of snorts and guffaws passes through the line.

"Aye. But then my ass would stink!"

An almost crazed outburst of laughter, one that catches fear as fuel, blotting the sounds of the scabrous onrush…

"Soma!" the giant cries. "You pare your nails! Lend me your pretty finger, would you?"

And the laughter is doubled.

Old Sarl calls through it in a gravelly voice. "May I remind you boys that our lives are in mortal danger!" His grin, however, belies his approval.

Lord Kosoter stands motionless.

Distracted, Mimara doesn't see Achamian stepping to the fore of the line. When she glimpses him, her heart opens into something that clutches, that claws. She opens her mouth to call him back, but her breath has fallen through the bottom of her. She fears she might swoon, so frail he looks beneath the towering blackness, so exposed!