R. Bakker - The Judging eye

The choked one has turned to Mimara. It grimaces at her trembling blade, its face bunched into a crazed sneer, as though its skin were merely wrapped about, not anchored to, the slick bone beneath. Its loincloth has twisted into a rope, and its phallus arches against its corselet, quivering. Rape floats through its glittering black eyes.

Her body becomes thick with the blood it aches to spill.

Then it's gone, swatted into the gloom as if struck by some immense and invisible club. Over the Bashrag's humped corpse, she glimpses Achamian on his knees, his mouth and eyes incandescent.

She looks wildly about, sensing the onrush of more Chorae. All is screaming panic among the mules and shouting disorder among the scalpers. She sees Pokwas dancing with his great tulwar, cutting against a cat-shrieking tide of Sranc: Lord Kosoter braced, stabbing around his shield, puncturing necks and faces and armpits. She glimpses Cleric riding the shoulders of another Bashrag down, his greatsword buried in the monstrosity's eye.

And she thinks, Ishroi…

"Hold to!" Kiampas cries. "Hold to!" The javelin that takes him in the mouth doesn't seem to move so much as appear, a black skewer through his head. He falls backward, nailed to the other wet shadows in the periphery of her panicked attention.

One of the mules has caught fire… Gold light washes across what was wicked and dark.

"Mimara!"

Achamian has her by the arm. He jerks her back, unguessed iron in his old man grip. She sees one of the young Galeoth crouched, teeth gritted as he tries to wrench a javelin from his thigh. She sees another Bashrag stomping into the scalpers, hammering them aside like effigies of straw. It begins hacking into the mules, whips of blood arcing. The beasts fly apart in scrambling disorder, as though scattering from the plunge of something on high. She sees Bastion, his haunches rent, hoof-skidding beneath the lurching monstrosity. The axe catches the hump of his neck. She sees his head fold back on a glistening flank, vanish beneath the body as he crumples forward.

"We've lost this battle!" the old Wizard is crying. Blood flecks his beard, little rubies caught between coarse strands. Only now does she notice the Ward about them, an unearthly curvature.

"Toe to the line!" Sarl is screaming. Does any line remain?

Sranc throw themselves against the spectral screens, thrashing, shields smoking, skin blistering, blades scraping sparks. She clutches the old Wizard, stares in something too numb to be fear or terror. Starved and hairless. Draped in flayed skins laced with iron rings. They are hunger. They are horror. They are the quick that renders hatred vicious in Men.

She hears the Wizard's sorcerous call through his chest-the birth of his words. Incandescent lines flare from his palms, strike along the Emwama Wall, begin scissoring to his gesticulations.

White light carves the darkness deep. The Sranc jerk and scream and burn.

Then one of them simply steps through the Ward, swinging a sword of rotted iron. For mere heartbeats the Chorae have floated out there, little abyssal holes, long enough for her to have forgotten. She raises Squirrel in time, though her arm numbs at the concussion. The rabid creature howls, punches Achamian with its free hand, the one cramped about the Trinket…

The Wizard falls backward, rolling along her slack arm. The Sranc swings its blade up and about…

Her sword and her lunge are a single being. The point catches the obscenity in the windpipe. It gags, throws clawed fingers to its throat. The Chorae drops to the floor.

She does not see the Sranc fall kicking through the fading Ward.

Chorae. Tear of God. Trinket…

It wrenches the eyes even to glance at it, to see both the plain iron ball tacked in Sranc blood and the pit that scries into oblivion. She clutches it, she who is not yet cursed, presses it against her breast and bodice. Nausea wrings her like a wineskin. The vomit surprises her mouth, her teeth.

Something strikes her and she blinks, suddenly on her hands and knees, coughing, retching. Darkness swirls, as though it were a liquid chasing cracks in the light. And she understands with graven finality… No one recognizes their own death. It comes inevitable and absolute.

It comes as a stranger.

Achamian grimaced, blinked at the sting that was the only thing he could feel. Tears or blood or sweat, it did not matter. He knew he was sprawled across the floor, the back of his head caught in a crook in the engravings across the Emwama Wall. He knew his life was over. He knew these things, but in the manner of whims or idle reveries. What was hard had become detached, ghostly. The world had lost its needling grit, and all substance had fled to abstractions.

He could see the regions about him greased in dingy torchlight: his legs as immovable as the mountain, the slump of the girl, the verges of the inhuman killing floor. But beyond…

His eyes climbed into blackness.

"Seju! Kellah! Fuck!"

Eyes wincing at blood. Head rolling. Her heart fluttering against the bourne of oblivion. Glances of a nightmare existence.

"Did you see Cleric? Did you see him?"

"Sweet Kellah, would you just fucking grab her?"

"Come, boys. Quickly. Quickly."

"What's wrong with his face?"

"Just salt. From the Tears of Go-"

"Enough with the fucking questions! Move-move!"

Shadows consult. Pain presses the first of its many pins into her skull. Arms hoist her like a basket against a scale-armoured chest. Tears and torchlight make gold and water of her bearer's face. But she recognizes the smell: myrrh through the reek of entrails…

Soma.

He is a landmark, and the lay of her circumstances comes crashing back to her. "Akka!" she croaks. They are running with wounded haste, a meagre party of nine or ten or maybe more. Soma tells her to clutch his neck, raises her chin to his shoulder. Between ragged breaths, he tells her the Wizard lives but that they know no more. She can feel the Chorae between their two hearts. He explains how she's lucky to be alive, how a Sranc javelin had capped her. He begins naming the fallen.

But she's no longer listening. A lick of hair has dropped past her brow, threading the blood from her eyes to her cheek and lips. They are running along the Emwama Wall, and she can see their lost position in the light of a single remaining torch, the wreckage of Men and Sranc and mules. She sees one of their number limp-running, becoming slower and more precarious with every step. She sees him wobble, skid to his knees. She sees the Captain farther back, sprinting alone, a shimmering silhouette against the torchlight. She sees him raise his sword to strike the laggard down.

And beyond, in the distance, as though peering into a well without walls, she sees Cleric shining, afire in sorcerous light. Javelins explode like birds against the curve of his Wards. Sranc throng and heave before him, cut and rent by the glittering fury of his song. Three Bashrag close with him, stump-haired obscenities that lurch untouched through weaving geometries of incandescence, each bearing echoes of the absence that pockets her left breast. The Nonman leaps out of their monstrous reach, sails into the midst of more Sranc, his sword falling in an oblique arc. Sorcerous lines mirror his every stroke, and smoke spits from everything they trace. The very air seems to shriek. White light etches the pillared hollows of the gallery, the graven vaults, the panelled surfaces, revealing a floor clotted with hosts of Sranc, aisle after aisle, packed as thick as wind-tossed wheat…

And Cleric laughs and sings and exacts his dread toll, the last heir to Cil-Aujas.

The Emwama Wall comes to an end. Soma turns with the fugitive party into the dark. Stonework draws across the mad scene, blotting the horror and the glory with the desperate practicalities of flight.