The Judging Eye (67 page)

The Emwama scream, thousands
upon thousands of them, forever buried, forever sealed from their native sun.
An age of torment compressed into a single wail...

Mimara screams with them.

***

Cleric drifts toward the abject
scalpers, floating in a vertical pool of black, like tar spilled across unseen
waters, his lace submerged, his limbs drowned, beneath the hoary aspect of the
Nonman King.

But a hunger,
a
voice groans through the mountain's foundations.
A hunger runs through
me... splits me like rotted stone.

***

Achamian is hollering so hard
that spittle flecks his matted beard. Even though Mimara stands next to him,
she can hear nothing save the million-throated wail.

Despite his weakened state, the
Wizard is yanking her backward, away from the looming visage.

How,
the
voice creaks through the roots of the world,
could a God hunger?

***

Plumes of molten stone erupt
from the ground about them, spitting jets of orange, gold, and baleful crimson.
One of the scalpers simply vanishes. A limb falls next to Mimara, an
unblistered hand attached to a forearm burnt to a charcoal nub. Lord Kosoter,
who had stood his ground before the hellish approach, at last turns to run.

The whole company, or what
remains of it, is running.

***

Nonman laughter. She has heard
it enough to recognize its peculiarities by now, the deep warbling at its pith,
the way its intonations hook into cruelties beyond the range of human
comprehension.

Nonman laughter, booming with
the lungs of a mountain.

***

They run, through the bones of
the dragon, into the concentrating wind, and it seems a miracle they can battle
through it, that they aren't blown skidding like rags into the horror rising
behind them.

They scramble crawling into the
opposite corridor, and the cold shoots through them, aches bones from end to
end. They climb against the wind, whose howl they cannot hear.

The damned call out to them,
wailing with the hunger that knots and strangles and sustains all misery...

Yearning to see itself visited
upon others.

***

It has entered the corridor
behind them. He has entered...

The Wight-in-the-Mountain. The
Nonman King.

She is an earthen jug, and her
innards slosh like curdled milk. A single crack and she will clatter open,
spill across the floor. She is failing. She feels it in her flagging attempts
to haul the Wizard with her. The others have climbed ahead, almost beyond the
light of the Surillic Point.

Even Soma.

Her soul gropes for strength, a
kind of inward prayer, Mimara begging Mimara, and suddenly, she feels it, the
qirri that Cleric had given them, like stones beneath paddling feet.

"Come! On!"
she
cries at the Wizard.

But the wind whips the words
like autumn leaves from her mouth.

The hellish wail stamps them
into ash.

***

They cross the bourne, from the
lobed rock, the drowning ground of the slave chamber, the overflown
foundations, onto the hewn floor. But it does not matter. The wind has all but
defeated Achamian. She is fairly dragging him. And she can see
it
,
boiling up through the blackness toward them, the infernal pit.

The old man is shouting. She
cannot hear him, but she knows what he cries...

Leave me.

Leave me. Daughter, please...

But she refuses. This old
stranger... What is it?

Why should she dare hell?

***

She heaves, bawling at his arm.
Achamian is on his back now, and she scratches him forward, heave after heave
after heave, knowing that it does not matter.

She doesn't hear the sorcerous
cry until after, only the thunderous crack, the concussion that slaps back the
wind, knocks her forward to her knees. She hears it through the
all-encompassing clap and rumble...

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.

The others hear it only as
horror, inborn and sourceless, as buried within them as they are buried in
Cil-Aujas. Mimara turns to their sudden silence. In a moment of madness it
seems that she can see their hearts through their caged breasts, that she can
see the eyes open...

Achamian falls to his knees,
clutching his chest. He looks to her in pleading horror. Lord Kosoter stumbles
backward into the corridor. Some clutch their faces; others begin to shriek and
scream. Soma stands riven. Sarl cackles and bawls, his eyes pinched into lines
between red wrinkles.