bases.
Curses filled the silence, some murmured, others spoken quite out loud. Such was the monumental delicacy, the profusion of figure and detail, that the forms seemed more revealed than rendered, as though the sheeted cliffs were naught but mud rinsed from the stone of ossified souls. Even half-ruined, there was too much, too much beauty, too much detail, and certainly too much toil, a grandeur made wicked by the demands it exacted on simpler souls. It was a place that begged to be challenged, overthrown.
For the first time, Achamian thought he understood the crude bronze of Nostol's betrayal.
'What are we doing?' Mimara whispered from his side.
'Recalling ourselves… I think.'
'Look,' Xonghis said in his deadpan accent. 'The other companies…' He nodded to the left serpentine pillar: Various symbols had been scratched into the lower coils, childish white slashes across weathered scales. 'Their signs.'
The Skin Eaters gathered round, careful to heed the invisible line that marked the entrance side of the pillar. Xonghis knelt between two of the rattle tails, which rose like roots, each thicker than a man. He ran his outstretched fingers and palm over each mark, as though testing extinguished fires for heat. Different Skin Eaters called out the names of the companies they recognized as he did so. He lingered over the sign of a weeping eye. 'This one,' he said, looking back significantly, 'was marked the most recently.'
'The Bloody Picks,' Galian said, frowning. 'They left, when?'
'More than a fortnight ago,' Pokwas replied.
The following silence persisted longer than it should. There was heartbreak in these furtive marks, a childishness that made the ancient works rising about them seem iron heavy, nigh invincible. Scratches. Caricatures with buffoonish themes. They were so obviously the residue of a lesser race, one whose triumph lay not in the nobility of arms and intellect, but in treachery and the perversities of fortune.
'See,' Achamian heard Kiampas mutter to Sarl. 'There…' He followed the direction of the man's finger, saw what looked like a Galeoth kite-shield chalked long and skinny across the lower coils of the serpents.
'The High Shields, as I said.'
'It can't be their sign,' Sarl snapped, as though assertion alone could make things true. 'Their bones lie on the Long Side.' Even as he said this he stooped to fetch a stone from his feet. Everyone watched as he began scratching the mark of the Skin Eaters across one of the serpent's backs: a mandible with gumless teeth.
'What I would like to know,' Sarl said, the gravel of his tone rendered thin and abrasive by the soaring works of glass and stone, 'is how we could have gone so long without coming here.'
His meaning was plain. The Skin Eaters were a legend, as was this place, and all legends were drawn together sooner or later-such was the song that decided all things. Such was the logic.
His face pinched into a cackle. 'This is the slog of slogs, boys!'
Cleric, meanwhile, had wandered forward, effortlessly crossing the incorporeal boundary that seemed to hold everyone else back, turning in a slow circle as he did so.
'Where are you?' he bellowed-so violently even the hardest of the Skin Eaters started. 'The Gate unguarded? And with the world grown so dark? This is an outrage! Outrage!'
Despite his stature, he seemed a mere sliver, frail and warm-blooded, before the great maw of black about him. Only the depth of his sorcerous Mark bespoke his might.
'Cыncari!' he boomed, growing frantic. 'Jiss! Cыncari!'
The Captain strode to him, clapped a hand on his shoulder.
'They're dead, you fool. Ancient dead.'
The cowled darkness that was his face turned to the Captain, held him in eyeless scrutiny, then lifted skyward, as though studying the lay of illumination across the hanging slopes. As the gathered company watched, he raised two hands and drew back, for the first time, his leather hood. The gesture seemed obscene, venal, a flouting of some aboriginal modesty.
He turned to regard his fellow scalpers, smiling as if taking heart in their astonishment. His fused teeth gleamed with spit. His skin was white and utterly hairless, so much so that he looked fungal, like something pulled from forest compost. His features were youthful, drawn with the same fine lines and flawless proportions as all his race.
The face of a Sranc.
'Yes,' he said, closing lashless eyelids. His pupils seemed as big as coins when he opened them, black with hooks of reflected silver. 'Yes,' he fairly cried, laughing now.
'They are dead.'
Night did not so much rise over the great fissure as the day was snatched away.
They had difficulty scrounging for fuel, so the entire company ended up crowding about a single fire, oppressed by the works hanging above them. Small desultory conversations marbled the silence, but no one took the stage and addressed the company as a whole, aside from Sarl of course, who had the habit of pitching his declarations in all directions. Most simply sat, knees hooked in the ring of their arms, and stared up at the thousand lozenge faces and figures above them, black-limned in flickering yellow-white. With the outer reliefs set like grillwork over the inner, the firelight seemed to animate the panels, to imbue them with the illusion of strain and motion. Several Skin Eaters swore that this or that scene had changed. Sarl, however, was always quick to make fools of them.
'See that one there, with the little one bending with the water urn before the row of tall ones? See it? Now, look away. Now look back. See? See! That big one popped his prick in the little one's arse, I swear it!'
Laughter, honest, yet rationed all the same. Dread encircled them, and Sarl kept careful watch, making sure it did not take hold in his Captain's men.
'Dirty Nonmen buggers, eh, Cleric? Cleric?'
The Nonman merely smiled, as pale as a ghoul in the firelight.
Time and again, Achamian found himself stealing glances in his direction. It was almost impossible not to ponder the connection of the two, the ruined Mansion, harrowed in the First Apocalypse, and the ruined Nonman, as old as languages and peoples. Cil-Aujas and Incariol.
Mimara leaned against him, and in some distracted corner of his soul he noted the difference, the way she leaned rather than clutched at his hand as her mother had. She was talking to Soma, who sat cross-legged next to her, staring at his palms like a shy poet. More out of the absence of alternatives than out of concern, Achamian listened, his gaze drifting from scene to engraved scene.
'You have the look and the manner of a Lady,' the Nilnameshi said.
'My mother was a whore.'
'Ah, but what is parentage, really? Me? I burned my ancestor lists long ago.'
A mock disapproving pause. 'Doesn't that frighten you?'
'Frighten?'
'Look around you. I would hazard that all these men, even the most vicious, bear some record of their forebears.'
'And why should that frighten me?'
'Because,' Mimara said, 'it means they're bound to the unbroken line of their fathers, back into the mists of yore. It means when they die, entire hosts will cast nets for their souls.' Achamian felt her shoulders hitch in a pity- for-the-doomed shrug. 'But you… you merely wander between oblivions, from the nothingness of your birth to the nothingness of your death.'
'Between oblivions?'
'Like flotsam.'
'Like flotsam?'
'Yes. Doesn't that frighten you?'
Achamian found himself scowling at the shadowy pageants chiselled above. An improbable number of faces stared out and down from the graven dramas, their eyes gouged into blank pits, their noses worn to points over mouthless chins. The priest to the right of the butchered stag. The child at the knee of the nursing mother. The warrior with the broken shield. Among the thousands of figures that vaulted the blackness above their fire, hundreds watched those who would watch them, as though the moments that framed them could not isolate their
