justice, want for writ. They turned to the tangled strings of their scriptures and pulled out the threads that spoke to their fell ends.'
'Betrayal,' Mimara murmured from his side.
'Refuge,' Achamian said. He then narrated the three versions of the tale as he knew them. In the first, Nostol instructed his chieftains and thanes to woo the Emwama concubines, the slaves the Nonmen used as substitutes for their long-dead wives. Nostol, he explained, hoped to incite the Nonmen to some act of violence, something he could use as a pretext to rally his people behind his planned atrocities. Apparently the Meцri were zealous in the prosecution of his orders, impregnating no less than sixty-three different concubines.
'Talk about farting in the queen's bedchamber!' Pokwas exclaimed.
'Indeed,' Achamian said, adding to the chorus of laughter with the mock gravity of his tone. 'And there are no windows in the deeps of Cil-Aujas…'
In the second, Nostol himself seduced Weyukat, whom the Nonman King prized above all his other concubines, since she had twice carried his seed to pregnancy, if not to term-among few human women ever to do so. In this version, the Nonmen of Cil-Aujas had rejoiced, thinking that the resulting child, if female, could herald the resurrection of their dying race-only to discover that the infant boy was wholly human. The child, named Swanostol in the legends, was subsequently put to the sword, providing the outrage Nostol required to incite his Meцri kin.
In the third, Nostol commanded his chieftains and thanes to seduce not the Emwama, but the highest among the Nonmen nobility, the Ishroi, knowing that the resulting passions would be certain to create the friction he required. This, Achamian had always thought, was far and away the most likely tale, since most contemporary chroniclers placed the Fall of Cil-Aujas within a year of the Battle of Kathol Pass-scarcely enough time for plots involving seduction, pregnancy, and birth to unfold. And it seemed to accord with the scraps he could remember from Seswatha's Dreams.
Nevertheless, each of the versions had its own poetic virtues, and they all came to the same: war between Men and Nonmen.
He described the glare of riot lighting the deeps. He told them about fury hunting grief, about bared blades raised to low ceilings and naked skin falling to chiseled floors. He spoke of corridors blocked by spears, of underworld houses soaked in flame. He described wild and desperate Men, Chorae bound against their throats, howling through the trackless deeps. He explained the blind stands of the Ishroi, their sorceries cracking through labyrinthine halls. He told them how Nostol, his beard all filth, his hair blood-matted, struck down the Nonman King as he wept and laughed upon his throne. How he murdered Gin'yursis, ancient and renowned.
'With courage and fell cunning,' Achamian said, his face hot in the firelight, 'Men made themselves masters of Cil-Aujas. Some Nonmen hid, only to be found in the course of time, by hunger or iron, it mattered not. Others escaped through chutes no mortal man has ever known. Perhaps even now they wander like Cleric, derelict, cursed with the only memories that will not fade, doomed to relive the Fall of Cil-Aujas until the end of days.'
The mountain shadows had ascended to the arch of heaven, revealing a sky so deep with stars it tugged at the heart simply to glance at them. A chill crept through the old Wizard.
'I've heard this story,' Galian ventured as the windy silence grew leaden, his palms held out to the flames. 'This is why the Galeoth are cursed with fractiousness, is it not? The fugitives you describe were their forefathers.'
Several of the Galeoth scalpers howled in complaint.
Achamian pursed his lips, shook his head in a way that made him feel campfire wise and mountain sad. 'The King of Cil-Aujas was not so discriminate in his dying,' he said, staring into the pulsing coals. 'According to the legends, all Men bears this curse.
'We are all Sons of Nostol. We all bear the stamp of his frailty.'
The following morning revealed cloudless skies, the clarity measured in the concave spine of the mountains fading to purple as they reached into the horizon, the cold measured in the white that capped their ragged heights. Sunlight glared nascent from hanging fields of snow, flashed gold and silver. It sharpened the breath, simply staring.
The company loaded their mules with little or no conversation, then set out toward the Ziggurat. What Lord Kosoter had called the Low Road seemed anything but. Not only was it little more than a track, it climbed far more than otherwise, following the course of various ridges, before dropping into some gullied interval to scale higher courses. But always, however circuitous its route, it stalked the great fissure that hoofed the Ziggurat's knuckled base. No matter what earth-and-rock enormity the Low Road placed before them, the fissure inevitably climbed back into view, larger, darker, more sinister for the concentration of detail.
The mighty oaks and elms of previous days had yielded altogether, giving way to scrawny poplars and twisted screw pine where trees could be found at all. Most of the time the company scuffed and clopped across expanses of bare stone, surrounded by the wind-combed remains of the previous year's bracken. Everything seemed to shiver. Everything that had once lived.
It was long past noon before they descended into the delta of gorges at the base of the great fissure. The Ziggurat, by this time, occupied the whole of the sky before them, cowing them into consensual silence. They tramped onward in a kind of stupor. The Coffers were forgotten, as was the distraction of Mimara's hips. Perhaps it was the humility of seeing fundamentals upended, the very ground wracked and beaten, hauled into scarps and slopes, heaved to heights that could defeat sun and clouds let alone the aspirations of mere men. Perhaps it was the weight of the inexpressible, the hard bone of the world rearing into horns that hooked the skirts of heaven. The titanic precipices, the pulverizing leaps, the distances ramping into the clouds. The Skin Eaters, each in their own way, seemed to understand that this was the prototype, what tyrants aped with their God-mocking works, mountains into monument, migrations into pageant and parade. This was the most primordial rule-the world itself- too vast, too elemental, to be called sacred or holy.
And it weakened the knees, as all true spectacle should.
The Ziggurat had become as much argument as mountain, posed not in claims or premises, but in immensities, in features that encompassed experience, saying, murmuring, You are small… So very small.
And they walked, willingly, between the cracks of its hoary fingers.
The sky was pinched into a shining slot. The air became dry and still, like the gap in a dead man's mouth.
The Kianene, Sutadra, was the first to notice they walked the ruins of some ancient road. It almost seemed a trick of the eyes, for once they noticed the telltale signs, it seemed impossible they could have seen otherwise. Something, snowmelts perhaps, had sawed a long winding gully across and over its course, gutting the broad planes of what once must have been a grand processional avenue. There was little enthusiasm in the discovery. It seemed to trouble the Skin Eaters somehow, knowing they walked in the footsteps of gold-clad kings and shining armies, rather than those of wayfarers such as themselves. There was comfort in a simple track, Achamian supposed, an assurance that the world they walked did not laugh at them.
Several hours passed before they rounded the final bend and saw it before them. The fissured wall climbed high, straining the neck with its gouged dimensions. It loomed as only natural works could loom. The random line of fracture and millennial erosion, of rock sculpted in mystery and accident. Black outcroppings with mossed bellies. Long cracks dangling anemic weeds. And set in its heart, like some shrine to intellect and intention, the enormous Obsidian Gate, looming over the ruins of an ancient fortress.
The company gathered on the platform beneath it, loose clots of men drifting to a halt, mouths open. The Skin Eaters had expected many things, daydreams of a storied destination, but they were quite unprepared for what they beheld. Achamian could see it in the way they craned and peered, like emissaries of a backward yet imperious people trying to see past their awe. The entrance was unbarred, an ovoid of impenetrable black set in an immense arched recess, which was panelled with reliefs that formed a skein over yet deeper narratives, so that the scenes depicted possessed a startling depth. Nonmen figures twined across every surface, weathered to the point where you could scarcely distinguish the armoured from the naked, frozen in antique postures of triumph or ceremonial tedium. Shepherds with lambs about their shoulders. Warriors fending lions and jackals. Captives baring necks to the swords of princes. On and on, the lives of the dead in miniature. Four pillars flanked the threshold, the outermost pair soaring tall as netia pine, yet hollow, great cylinders of interlocking figures and faces; the innermost solid, three snakes intercoiling, their heads lost in the vaulted gloom, their rattled tails forming three-pronged
