Judging by her expressions, Mimara found the banter terribly amusing, a fact not lost on the scalpers- Somandutta in particular. Achamian, however, found it difficult to concede more than a smile here and there, usually at turns that escaped the others. He could not stop pondering the blackness about them, about how garish and exposed they must sound to those listening in the deeps. A gaggle of children.
Someone listened. Of that much he was certain.
Someone or something.
With Lord Kosoter at his side, Cleric led them through a veritable labyrinth. Corridors. Halls. Galleries. Some struck as straight as a rule, others wound in the random pose of worms suspended in water, or like the writing of weevils beneath the bark of dead trees. All of them hummed with the enormity of the mountain they plumbed: the walls seemed to bow, the floors buckle, the ceilings tingled with crushing weight. At some point, their entombment had become palpable. Cil-Aujas became a world of wedged things, of great collapses, immense torsions, all held in check by stone and ancient cunning. More than once, Achamian found himself gasping, as though breathing against some irresistible grip. The air tasted of tombs-stone joists and age-long motionlessness-but it was plentiful enough. Even still, something animal within him cried suffocation.
It was the lack of sky, he decided. He tried not to think of his earlier premonitions.
The banter dwindled into silence, leaving the arrhythmic percussion of footfalls and the sonorous complaints of this or that mule in its wake.
The sound of water rose so gradually out of the silence that it seemed sudden when they finally noticed it. The walls and ceiling of the passage they followed flared outward, like the mouth of an intricately carved horn, becoming ever more dim in the twin points of sorcerous light. After several steps, the walls fell away altogether, and they stepped into booming space. Through membranes of mist, the lights reached out, paling, revealing hanging scarps and cavernous spaces-a great chasm of some kind. The floor became a kind of stone catwalk, slicked with rust-coloured moulds. Water tumbled beneath, a rush of diamonds, broken only by the shadow of the catwalk, leaping and wheeling into void. Achamian found himself looking away, dizzied by how its sheeting plunge made his footing drift. He heard the mules kick and scream in the train immediately behind him. Near the head of their long file, he could see Cleric's light gather against the cavern's far heights, then fold into the tubular hollows of another corridor.
Except that it wasn't another corridor, but the entrance to some kind of shrine. The room was neither large nor small-about the size of a temple prayer floor-with a low circular ceiling spoked like a wheel. Friezes panelled the walls-were-animals with multiple heads and limbs-but not to the convoluted depths found elsewhere. The scalpers, Achamian could tell, thought them representations of devils: More than a few whispered homespun charms. But he knew better, recognizing in the figures a sensibility kindred to that of the Wolf Gate. It wasn't monsters that glared from the walls, he knew, but rather the many poses of natural beasts compressed into one image. Before they began forgetting, the Nonmen had been obsessed with the mysteries of time, particularly with the way the present seemed to bear the past and the future within it.
Long-lived, they had worshipped Becoming… the bane of Men.
While the company milled beneath the low ceilings, Sarl and Kiampas organized the replenishment of their water supply. The leather buckets they normally used to scoop water from gorges were unpacked. A relay was set up, and soon armed men were squatting all across the chamber filling skins. Achamian paced the walls in the meantime, studying the graven images with Mimara in tow. He showed her where innumerable ancient penitents had worn indentations into the walls-with their foreheads, he explained.
When she asked him whom they prayed to, he cast about looking for Cleric, once again loath to say anything the Erratic might overhear. He found him standing at the far end of the chamber, his bald head bowed and gleaming. A great statue loomed before him, a magisterial Nonman hewn from the walls, at once hanging with arms and legs outstretched-a pose curiously reminiscent of the Circumfix-and sitting rigid upon a throne, his knees pressed together beneath flattened hands. Mould had stained the stone black and crimson, but otherwise the figure seemed untouched, blank eyes staring out. Rather than answer Mimara's query, Achamian simply motioned for her to follow, pressing past the crowded scalpers toward Cleric.
'Tir hoila ishrahoi,' the Erratic was saying, his eyes and forehead covered by a long-fingered hand-the Nonman gesture of homage. There could be no doubt he spoke to the statue, rather than prayed to something beyond.
'Coi ri pirith mutoi'on…'
Achamian paused and, for reasons he did not understand, started translating, speaking in a low murmur. Compared to the harmonic resonances of Cleric, his voice sounded as coarse as yarn.
'You, soul of splendour, whose arm hath slain thousands…'
'Tir miyil oitossi, kun ri mursal arilil hi… Tir…'
'You, eye of wrath, whose words hath cracked mountains… You…'
'Tirsa hir'gingall vo'is?'
'Where is your judgment now?'
The Nonman began laughing in his mad, chin-to-breast way. He looked to Achamian, smiled his inscrutable white-lipped smile. He leaned his head as though against some swinging weight. 'Where is it, eh, Wizard?' he said in the mocking way he often replied to Sarl's jokes. His features gleamed like hand-worn soapstone.
'Where does all the judgment go?'
Then without warning, Cleric turned to forge alone into the black, drawing his spectral light like a wall- brushing gown. Achamian gazed after him, more astounded than mystified. For the first time, it seemed, he had seen Cleric for what he was… Not simply a survivor of this ruin, but of a piece with it.
A second labyrinth.
Mimara stepped into the Nonman's place, apparently to better peer at the statue. Their water-skins filled, the scalpers had begun filing past them, their looks unreadable. Mimara seemed so small and beautiful in the shadow of their warlike statue that Achamian found himself standing as though to shield her.
'Who is it?' she asked.
The underworld cataract thundered up through the surrounding stone.
'The greatest of the Nonman Kings,' Achamian replied, reaching out two fingers to touch the cold stone face. It was strange, the heedless way that statues stared and stared, their eyes bound to the panoply of dead ages. 'Cu'jara Cinmoi… the Lord of Siцl, who led the Nine Mansions against the Inchoroi.'
'How can you tell?' she asked, cocking her head the same as her mother. 'They all look the same… Exactly the same.'
'Not to each other…' He sketched a line through the mould across the Nonman King's polished cheek.
'But how can you tell?'
'Because it's written, carved into the rim of the throne…'
He drew back his fingers, pinched the silken residue between them.
'Come,' the Wizard said, deliberately cutting off her next question. When she persisted, he snapped, 'Leave an old man to think!'
They had palmed their lives, as the Conriyans were fond of saying. They had palmed them and given them to a Nonman-to an Erratic… To someone who was not only insane, but literally addicted to trauma and suffering. Incariol… Who was he? And more importantly, what would he do to remember?
Kuss voti lura gaial, the High Norsirai would say of their Nonmen allies during the First Apocalypse. 'Trust only the thieves among them.' The more honourable the Nonman, the more likely he was to betray-such was the perversity of their curse. Achamian had read accounts of Nonmen murdering their brothers, their sons, not out of spite, but because their love was so great. In a world of smoke, where the years tumbled into oblivion, acts of betrayal were like anchors; only anguish could return their life to them.
The present, the now that Men understood, the one firmly fixed at the fore of what was remembered, no longer existed for the Nonmen. They could find its semblance only in the blood and screams of loved ones.
Beyond the Cujaran Shrine they descended into a maze of desolate habitations. The darkness became liquid, it seemed so deep, and their light became the only air. Walls reared into visibility as though squeezed of ink. Doorway after doorway gaped to either side of them, revealing lanes of interior floor, featureless for the dust, swinging in counterpoise to their sorcerous lights. Stairwells climbed into rubble. Stone faces watched with callous
