attention.
Proof of souls.
Skin prickling, Achamian glanced back toward Cleric, who stared as before into the pit of the entrance. Several heartbeats passed before the immaculate face turned-inevitably, it seemed-to answer his scrutiny. A kind of blank intensity leapt between them, born more of exhaustion than affinity, flattening the dozen or so Skin Eaters who leaned in and out of their line of sight.
They watched each other, Wizard and Nonman, for one heartbeat, two, three… Then, without rancour or acknowledgment, they looked away.
'I suppose it does,' Achamian heard Soma admit after a long silence. The man invariably erred, Achamian had noticed, when it came to honesty. He was always revealing too much.
'Frighten you?' Mimara replied. 'Of course it does.'
Soon the talk sputtered out altogether, and the scalpers unrolled their mats and bedding across the pitted stone of the platform. Men kicked stones clicking into the night. The moon hung over the fissure for a time, disclosing the scarps and ravines in a curious light, one that argued stillness, uncompromising, absolute, like mice in the panning eyes of owls.
Few slept well. The black mouth of the Obsidian Gate seemed to inhale endlessly.
The ruins revealed in the morning light were more melancholy than malevolent. Hands eroded into paws. Heads worn into eggs. The layered panels appeared more riddled with fractures, more pocked with gaps. For the first time, it seemed, they noticed the little appendages scattered like gravel across the platform. Nocturnal fears had become sunlit fragments.
Even still, the company ate in comparative silence, punctuated by the low comments and laughs typically reserved for recollections of hard drinking. Forced normalcy as a remedy for uncertain nerves. Their small fire burned through what little fuel remained before Achamian had a chance to boil water for his tea, forcing him to mutter a furtive Cant. This filled him with dread for some reason.
They paused to watch Xonghis confer in low tones with Lord Kosoter. Then they entered the Black Halls of Cil-Aujas with nary a commemorating word, let alone the fanfare Men typically attach to fatal endeavours. They simply assembled, leading their mules, then followed Cleric and their Captain in a file some thirty-five souls long. With Mimara at his side, Achamian glanced skyward one final time before joining the string of vanishing figures. In the slot of a hanging ravine, the Nail of Heaven twinkled alone in the endless blue, a beacon of all things high and open…
A final call to those who would dare the nethers of the earth.
CHAPTER TWELVE
Little snake, what poison in your bite!
Little snake, what fear you should strike!
But they don't know, little snake-oh no!
They can't see the tiny places you go…
Early Spring, 19 New Imperial Year (4132 Year-ofthe-Tusk), Momemn
Kelmomas had known his father had returned almost immediately. He saw it in a host of subtle cues that he didn't even know he could read: an imperceptible contraction in the Guards' posture, an alertness of pose and look in the Apparati, and a long-jog breathlessness in the slaves. Even the air assumed a careful taste, as though the drafts themselves had grown wary. Nevertheless, Kelmomas didn't realize he knew until he overheard one of the choir slaves gossiping about the Yatwerian Matriarch pissing herself beneath the Holy Mantle.
He's come to console Mother, the secret voice said.
Alone in the playroom, Kelmomas continued working on his model of Momemn, carving meticulous little obelisks out of balsa, long after darkness draped the Enclosure. A kind of childish indecision had overcome him, a listless need to continue poking at whatever he happened to be doing, to simply exist for a petulant time, thinking and acting stubbornly counter to fact.
It had always been like this with his father. Not fear, just a kind of canny reluctance, rootless and long- winded.
Eventually he had to relent-that too was part of the game-so he made his way to his mother's private apartments. He could hear his older brother, Inrilatas, ranting about the Gods in his locked room. His brother had broken his voice bludgeoning the walls years ago, yet still he croaked, on and on and on, as though flooding his room in some lunatic search for leaks. He never stopped raving, which was why he was always kept locked in his room. Kelmomas had not seen him for more than three years.
His mother's apartments were located down the hallway. He padded across the rug-strewn floor as silently as he could, his ears keen to the sound of his parents' voices filtering through innumerable wheezing cracks and surfaces. He paused outside the iron door, his breath as thin as a cat's.
'I know it pains you,' Father was saying, 'but you must have Theliopa with you in all your dealings.'
'You fear skin-spies?' his mother replied.
Their voices possessed the weary burnish of a long and impassioned conversation. But the roots of his father's exhaustion stopped short of the deeper intonations that warbled in and out of his discourse. A heart-easing hum, and a kind of ursine growl, far too low to be consciously heard by Mother. These spoke from something as unwinded as it was inscrutable, an occluded soul, entirely hidden from lesser ears.
He manages her, the voice said. He sees through her face the way you do, only with far more clarity, and he shapes his voice accordingly.
How do you know? Kelmomas asked angrily, stung by the thought that anyone, even Father, could see further than him. Further into her.
'The nearer the Great Ordeal comes,' Father said, 'the more desperate the Consult grows, the more likely they will unleash what agents remain. Keep Theliopa with you at all times. Aside from my brother, she's the only one who can reliably see their true faces.'
Kelmomas smiled at the thought of the skin-spies. Agents of the Apocalypse. He loved hearing the stories about their wicked depredations during the First Holy War. And he had gurgled with delight watching the black one being flayed-carefully, so that Mother wouldn't see, of course. Somehow, he just knew he would be one of the few who could see past their faces, just as he could see past his father's voice. If he found one, he decided, he would keep it secret, he would simply watch it, spy on it-he so dearly loved spying. What a game it would make!
He wondered who was faster…
'You fear they'll attack the Andiamine Heights?' Real horror shivered through Mother's voice as she said this, the horror of events scarcely survived.
All the more reason to trap it like a bug, Kelmomas decided. He would say things, cryptic things, that would make it wonder. He needed something to tease now that Samarmas was gone.
'What better way to distract me than by striking at my hearth?'
'But nothing distracts you,' Mother said, her tone so desolate that only silence could follow. Kelmomas found himself leaning toward the door, such was the ache that emanated from the quiet beyond. It seemed he could hear them breathing, each following their own tangled string of thoughts. It seemed he could smell the absence of contact between them. Tears welled in his eyes.
She knows, the voice said. Someone has told her the truth about Father.
'When must you leave?' Mother asked.
