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.
'I can't seeeeee!' the crease-faced sergeant gibbers. 'I-look-I-look-I-look…'
The Unholy Seal rears glistening from the water, weeping strings of fire. It towers over them in leaning accusation. It roars, the sound so near, so ingrown that it seems they stand in the throat of a Demon-God. A voice claps through their souls, so loud it draws blood through the pores of their skin.
The Gates are no longer guarded.
Mimara is also on her knees, also shrieking, yet her fingers somehow find her purse, begin fumbling, pinching the Chorae that nearly killed the Wizard. She cringes beneath the looming aspect, a child beneath a collapsing city wall. She hugs her limbs against the piercing pleas of little mouths, the moaning masses of the damned…
And somehow lifts her Tear of God.
She knows not what she does. She knows only what she glimpsed in the slave chamber, that single slow heartbeat of light and revelation. She knows what she saw with the Judging Eye.
The Chorae burns as a sun in her fingers, making red wine of her hand and forearm, revealing the shadow of her bones, and yet drawing the eye instead of rebuking it, a light that does not blind.
'I guard them!' she weeps, standing frail beneath the white-bleached Seal. 'I hold the Gates!'
Of all their ordeals, none would be so great as climbing the Great Medial Screw. Where the Sranc had taken their toll in blood and lives, and the Wight-in-the-Mountain, or whatever it was they had encountered in the closeted deeps, had taken its toll in terror and spirit, the endless stairs of the Screw took everything that remained: courage, strength, and endurance-endurance above all. Climbing. Climbing. Climbing. Clinging to seams as they picked their way over collapsed sections. Hurrying past the hundreds of gaping black portals. Bending back their faces to remind themselves of the sky they sought, to wonder at the way it waxed and grew.
The first time the high blue point they climbed toward began darkening they had despaired, fearing they had been shut in, until they realized that it was simply night. They had been buried so long they had forgotten the cycle of the days.
Sometimes, with the inscrutable ideograms struck into the curvature of the endlessly rising walls, it seemed they crawled through the curled inside of a scroll. Sometimes, given the way the Screw crossed the course of some natural shaft, here bricked, here hewn, Achamian was reminded of the canals of Momemn, where cut waterways linked natural estuaries. But always he was struck by the ambition, the marriage of patience and hubris that had made such a work possible. A stair as tall as a mountain. There was a kind of madness in the fact of the Screw, one that dwarfed even the famed Ziggurats of Shigek.
Mimara had said nothing in two days. When he tried coaxing words from her, she would simply gaze at him. Her lips would twitch, sometimes they would even part, but no words would come, and a kind of helpless remorse would dim her eyes. He spent quite some time trying to puzzle through what had happened, to make sense of the crazed image of her, holding nothing but a Chorae, the same existential pit she carried beneath her belt now, quailing beneath a horror that should have devoured her whole, from the flesh of her fingertips to the final spark of her soul.
He knew something of demons, Ciphrang, knew that when summoned, a Chorae could destroy their corporeal form. But what faced them had risen on a tide of unreality. Hell had come with him, the shade of Gin'yursis, the last Nonman King of Cil-Aujas, and he should have taken them all, Chorae or no Chorae.
But something had happened. She had happened.
Anasыrimbor Mimara, cursed with the Judging Eye.
Despite the pity that filled him, there was a reprieve in her misfortune. It could be no coincidence that she had come to him when she had. The wiles of the Whore were at work here, the treachery of Fate. The more he pondered it, the more it seemed she had been given. It was his doom to hunt down the origins of the Aspect- Emperor, to shed light on the darkness that came before him. Cil-Aujas had resolved that question.
There was a bad period when the last of the qirri drained from them, where the most they could do was lay gasping. Somehow they slept, and somehow they found themselves unharmed when they awoke. After that, the climb was sheer misery. Dizziness and nausea. Cramped limbs. Several fainted for the effort and were only saved by the wits of their fellows. Achamian paused several times to vomit spittle.
The downward wind grew as they climbed, so chill that Achamian added an air warming Huiritic Ring to the Surillic Point-they needed to be sure of their footing-yet one more burden for his overtaxed soul. What had been a vast well above them became an endless pit below. Soon they could spy the source of the perpetual water that threaded the open spaces beyond the brink: ice and snow. It clotted the final tracts of the Screw, rising in shining humps against the cloudless plate of the sky.
After clambering across the first ice-sheathed steps and staring up across the angular slopes heaped across the stair, they realized their limbs could take them no farther. There was a look of grim confirmation in the dismay that deadened their eyes, as if they had known all along that Cil-Aujas would never relinquish them. Without explanation, Achamian bid them withdraw behind him. From behind glimmering Wards, he showed them what a Gnostic Wizard could do in the light of day. Ice and snow cracked and crashed, sloughed away in mountainous sheets, thundered so hard against his Wards that the stone of the stair even fractured beneath his feet. But he continued singing Abstractions, pure dispensations of force and light, and the geometries danced and twirled, striking and burning. And when he was done, bars of sunlight could be seen lancing through the mist, warming the bare black stone of Aenaratiol.
This was a kind of final knell for the Skin Eaters, a tipping point of comprehension. At last they understood the abyssal gap that had always existed between them, scalpers and Wizard. Achamian could see it in their sidelong glances. With the exception of their Captain, they began looking at him with an awe and reverence they had once reserved for Cleric.
And he felt an itch, something small and sharp against the buzz of His utter exhaustion… Some time passed before he recognized it: the creeping return of his guilt. These men, these strangers he would kill, now seemed his brothers.
It was no small thing to crawl out of the abyss, to rise from Hell to the very roof of the World. Though their eyes had long adjusted, they still stood blinking, scattered atop the snow-encrusted debris that ringed the opening to the Great Screw. It made Achamian, who stood arm in arm with Mimara, think of the first Men, savages of the plains, rubbing their eyes at what they could only comprehend as a blessing.
With light comes life. With sky comes freedom.
The Halls of Cil-Aujas, the dread Black Halls, had at last relinquished them.
Achamian looked to the remnants of their company, knowing they had reached a moment of decision. Aside from Lord Kosoter, only Soma, blessed with the luck of the daft, seemed unscathed. Sarl appeared intact in body but continued to betray a disordered soul-even now he grinned and rocked from heel to heel. Pokwas had gained strength on the climb, despite continuously bleeding from his scalp. The other veteran Skin Eaters, Xonghis, Sutadra, and Galian, wore septic bandages on their arms and thighs but seemed able enough. Of those the Bitten had called the Herd, all three survivors were Galeoth-Conger, Wonard, and Hameron-men Achamian had not known until the arduous climb up the Screw. Wonard was already showing signs of infection, and Conger seemed to hop more than walk. Hameron wept whenever Lord Kosoter's distraction afforded.
Their hair whipping in the wind, bereft of everything save their hauberks and their swords, the company stood, blank before the vista extending about them. Their trials had stained and stamped them: the purplish smear
