vignettes fall away, as though over inverted cliffs. They have come to another great chamber, not as vast as the Repositorium, but great enough. The air seems cold and graceful.
They rope from the narrow hall, gather in milling clots, gawking at this latest wonder. Their mules bray and tremble for exhaustion. One collapses amid echoing curses.
The columns are square, panelled in more animal manifolds, and even though she can see only the lower and outer limits of them, she knows they form great aisles across the darkness, that the company stands in some underworld forum or agora. Achamian is leaning against his knees next to her, staring into his shadow, mustering the spit to swallow. His teeth bared in exhaustion, he bends his head back, looks to the looming gallery.
'The High Halls,' he gasps. 'The High Halls of Mы-'
Haroo oooooooooooom!
Men twist and whirl about. The dust shivers. The sound seems to filter, to rise, as though they can only hear what mounts the surface of their ears. Sranc horns.
They feel it in their teeth-not so much an ache as a taste.
Never before has she heard them, and now she understands their antique power, the madness that saw mothers strangle their own children in besieged cities of yore. Their depth is tidal in its compass, yet riddled with thin and piercing notes, like a shriek unbraided into wincing threads, each towed wide across the unnameable. A portent hangs within them, a promise of what is other and impenetrable, of things that would glory in her lament. They remind her of her humanity the way burnt edges speak of fire.
Temple silence rises in their wake. There is a distant sound-like leaves skidding over marble flagstones. It seems to tighten her skin to the prick of moments passing.
Cleric calls, and they follow. They leave the fallen mule where it lays grunting.
They run, but the slow succession of pillars seems to diminish their pace. Their arcane lights throw shadows that swing and sweep out with monumental elegance. The greater blackness hangs from them, shrouding the hollows beyond the adjacent aisles.
The horns have a swelling nearness to them now, a cracking blare. Only the stone forest of columns divides them from their pursuers-she knows this with a herd animal's certainty. For the first time a part of her dares believe that she's about to die. Her bowels loosen to the jolt of her steps. Her stomach tightens to a burn. She throws her gaze wildly about, desperate to find something that she doesn't recognize. For it seems to her that she has known this place all along, that her soul, like an old knot undone, bears the kink and imprint of her future… The pillars braced against cataclysmic burdens. The bestial totems, their many limbs flattened into the dark. The stink of her exertions. The sense of loss and mortal misdirection. The gnashing of teeth and iron in the arching maze of black behind her…
They are coming. Out of the pit they are coming. The flutter of reverberations in her chest seems to confirm it. This is where she dies.
The outer reaches of their lights flatten against a wall, roll back the vertical murk with twin rings of illumination, the one wider and brighter because of Cleric's position out in front of Achamian. Mimara stumps to a stop with the others. The dust rolls forward, makes skirts about their waists. She cranes her neck, absently rubbing a stitch in her side-despite her terror she is relieved to simply breathe. Narrative reliefs band the wall, stacking high into the darkness, but the graven figures are not carved nearly so deep or so realistically as so the others. A heartbeat passes before she sees the hair and beards and chains that mark the forms as Men.
All at once, her earlier sense of recognition drains away. Only the premonition remains.
She has read enough to know these are not just any Men. They are the original Men of Eдrwa, the Emwama, the slaves exterminated by her ancestors in the earliest days of the Tusk. She can even see a woman bound to a train of naked captives-a woman that could be her. And for some reason, this point of connection strikes a nauseating note through the whole of Cil-Aujas, renders it alien to the point of revulsion, as though all of it had been smeared with reek and contagion…
They are coming. And she is just a child-a child! Everything everywhere chatters with dread and threat. Angles become knives. Inaction becomes blood. A mad part of her kicks and bucks and screams. Her shriek bunches like a fist at the base of her throat. She must get out. She has to…
Out-out-out!
But the old Wizard is holding her by the shoulders, telling her not to fear, not to fret, but to trust in his heart and his power. 'You want me to teach?' he cries. 'I will give you such a lesson!' His laugh is almost genuine.
No sobbers, his eyes warn her. Remember!
Her breathing becomes both easier and more difficult after that, and she finds herself wary of the Captain. The mere thought of him has scared the panic from her-this, she realizes, is his warlike Gift. All about her the Skin Eaters assemble, shield to shield, shoulder to shoulder, forming a single rank around her and the mules. They look motley with their different heights and scavenged armour… Motley and fierce.
'Toe to the line!' Sarl cries across the horn's thundering back. 'Come now, boys, toe to the line!'
Suddenly all the reasons she feared these barbaric men become reasons to prize them. Those hoary trophies. Those deep-chested bodies, girt with chain, leather, stink, and soiled cloth. That bullying saunter. Those wide- swinging arms, with hands that could break her wrists. And for some strange reason, their fingernails, each as broad as two of her own, rimmed in black crescents. Everything she had scoffed at or despised she now sees with thin-lipped understanding. The glib cruelty. The vulgar posturing. Even the glares that nicked her when she was careless with the cast of her eyes.
These are Skin Eaters, and their slogs are the stuff of legend. They would eat her if they could-but only because they walk so near the world's teeth.
She hears Achamian arguing with Kiampas on the far side of two stamping mules. 'We should have stayed in the Repositorium…'
'But here we can choke them in the aisles.'
'And those with the Chorae?'
The Nansur's grin is haphazard, as though hooked by a hard-to-see scar. His jaw, normally clean-shaven, is spackled grey. 'Trifles, Wizard. Believe you me, we know how to stack skinnies…'
The man trails, cocks his head to the sudden quiet.
The horns have stopped.
The silence, she knows, is the silence they have marched through since entering the Obsidian Gate, the silence of their shutting in, the silence of corpses in their tombs. The ageless roar of Cil-Aujas.
Her limbs seem buoyant for the thickness of it.
All this time she has simply stood witless amid the mules. Now Kiampas is before her, issuing instructions- stay with the animals, keep the torches, staunch wounds by pressing like this-and asking questions-Do you know how to bind a tourniquet? Can you use that pretty sword? He peers into her eyes with calming seriousness, speaks only to the point. He is a handsome father. She answers him as honestly as she can. In her periphery she sees Achamian conferring with Cleric and the Captain. Sarl continues barking at his line, his gravelly voice recalling slogs gone by. 'Oh, yes, boys, this is going to be a chopper. A classic chopper!'
She unpacks the torches and wedges five of them at intervals along the wall using chiselled hollows in the friezes. She strikes a sixth and it flares with curious transparency-violet wrapping into yellow-in the arcane light, but burns and smokes all the same. She lights all five, and the engraved Emwama seem to glow with the colours of their long-lost life. She walks among the restless mules, running her hands across the bristle of their necks, scratching their jaws and ears, and it seems that she mourns them.
Their small army falls motionless. The twin Surillic Points lean white against the engraved planes of the nearest columns, dwindle in grey stages the farther they reach down the lanes. Though soundless, the light seems to hiss with suspense.
The Skin Eaters have formed a bristling shell some thirty men strong, reaching from the wall, about their beasts of burden, back to the wall. Lord Kosoter stands just behind the apex, rigid with solitary concentration. With his plaited beard and tattered finery he almost looks as ancient as Cil-Aujas. His round shield, which she has seen many times hanging from a mule pack, is dented and scored. Barely legible across its centre are the enamel remains of an Ainoni pictogram: the word 'umra,' which in Ainoni means both duty and discipline. He holds his sword pointed down to his side. She sees he has drawn a quarter arc through the dust across the stone. Because he wears his Chorae over his heart, she cannot shake the sense that he's not quite alive.
Achamian stands with Kiampas at his side several paces to the Captain's left. Cleric stands likewise with Sarl
