to his right. Their Marks remind her of their power, and their company's hope.
Still holding the torch, she draws her sword: a Gift from her mother, forged of the finest Seleukaran steel. The disparate lights slip like liquid across its sheen. Squirrel, she calls it, because of the way it always seemed to tremble in her hand. It trembles now. She tries to remember all the years she spent training with her half-brothers, but the glow of the Andiamine Heights cannot penetrate this deep place… Nothing can.
'They come,' the Nonman says, his black eyes as inscrutable as the darkness they plumb.
Mimara expects to feel the Chorae weaving out in the black. Instead she hears something, a nail-against- stone scratching that spreads like flood-water across the unseen spaces, reaching wider and higher until it seems the company stands in the piped centre of a gnawed bone…
Louder. Louder. A reek steams into the air, like the rot of inhuman mouths.
Her hand burns for squeezing her sword's pommel.
'Just as the Captain said,' Sarl rasps. 'Skinnies.' He shoots a pointed look at Kiampas, every wrinkle grinning with his greasy lips.
'Remind me how much I hate this,' Galian says to no one in particular.
'Like a knife up the bung?' Xonghis asks.
'No. Worse.'
'I thought it was the knife too,' Soma says.
'No,' Pokwas replies. 'It was beating your scrotum with, ah… thistles, right?'
'Exactly,' Galian says, nodding sagely. 'Like beating my pouch with thistles. My poor pretty pouch.'
'Yes-yes,' Xonghis snorts. He bangs his helm with the flat of his sword.
'Just think of all the gold,' Somandutta replies-always the lackwit. Poor Soma.
'Pfah!' Pokwas cries, scowling. 'Hard to spend it when the whores are busy laughing at his flayed hard- boileds, now isn't it?'
She feels a tick of sweat every time they utter that word. Whore.
Galian nods once again, this time as if at some tragic human truth. 'The sluts laugh enough as it is.'
They speak more to their terror than to one another, she realizes. Ever do men play the mummer, strutting on the stage of themselves to avoid the parts the world has assigned them. Women would speak of their fear.
'My ass itches,' the giant Oxwora suddenly announces. 'Does anyone have an itchy ass?'
'Just aim it the other way,' Galian calls back. 'I'm sure the skinnies will oblige you.'
A wave of snorts and guffaws passes through the line.
'Aye. But then my ass would stink!'
An almost crazed outburst of laughter, one that catches fear as fuel, blotting the sounds of the scabrous onrush…
'Soma!' the giant cries. 'You pare your nails! Lend me your pretty finger, would you?'
And the laughter is doubled.
Old Sarl calls through it in a gravelly voice. 'May I remind you boys that our lives are in mortal danger!' His grin, however, belies his approval.
Lord Kosoter stands motionless.
Distracted, Mimara doesn't see Achamian stepping to the fore of the line. When she glimpses him, her heart opens into something that clutches, that claws. She opens her mouth to call him back, but her breath has fallen through the bottom of her. She fears she might swoon, so frail he looks beneath the towering blackness, so exposed!
But he's already speaking, and in a voice that slaps the remaining laughter from the scalpers' mouths. Even the nearing roar seems to falter. A Ward cups the spaces immediately before him, a lens of bluish light. A cerulean glare limns his white hair and wolf-skin cloak; he suddenly looks the Gnostic Wizard he is.
One of the Surillic Points goes dark, and an increment of grimness shadows everything. Kiampas cries for a torch. Numb to the fingertips, she wades through the mules, hands him the one she carries, then returns to fetch another, which she lights by touching to the centre-most torch on the wall. She turns in time to see the sergeant heave the torch down the aisle in front of the Wizard. It pockets the dark with a ring of stark gold…
She glimpses something crouch in and out of the blackness, something white and snarling and shiny-thin. She wraps her sword arm around the nearest mule's neck, hugs the beast tight. 'Bastion,' she calls him, without knowing the why or the where of the name. 'Bastion…' She cares not who thinks her a fool!
The darkness itself seems to rasp and chip and clank and wheeze. Inhuman barks ring across the unseen ceilings.
She sees Cleric stride through the line to Achamian's right. His cloak cast away, he stands planked in silvery armour, plates skirted in impossibly fine chain, his greatsword swinging from his left hip. Ishroi, she thinks, recalling Achamian's word from earlier. The Nonman joins the smaller Wizard in his arcane chanting. Deep words well up out of the root of things, so indecipherable they seem to yank at her eyes.
Above her, the remaining Point fades like an errant thought, and the company is reduced to the roiling glitter of torchlight. The eternal dark of Cil-Aujas closes about them.
The glow of sorcery paints all their faces.
Mimara is already running to Kiampas when he calls her, the remaining torches hugged tight to her breast. One by one she lights them, tries to purse the tremor from her lips while he heaves them with athletic violence into the dark. They arc high enough to brush the vaults with fluttering visibility. Some fall and spark across vacant floor. Two roll to the brink of the shrouded horde, providing the merest of glimpses: swords of notched iron held dowsing low, wet eyes glittering, white limbs folding into the black. The last chips a graven visage, then twirls blue down into the hunched midst of them. She glimpses a clutch of white faces, Nonmen faces, only pinched into grotesque parodies of expression.
Canine shadows stamp the torch into oblivion.
She stumbles back to Bastion, pulls his head to her breast. The dull immovability of the beast heartens her for some reason, soothes the quaking from her limbs. She whispers in his ear, congratulates him for his idiot bravery. Before her stands Lord Kosoter, unmoved, unmoving, the knots of his caste-noble braid gleaming down the cleft of his splint-armoured back. The line of his Skin Eaters reaches out to either side, and over their shields, she glimpses fragments of Cleric and Achamian, little more than silhouettes against the curved planes of their Wards.
She feels the Chorae… pinpricks of nothingness fanning across the far dark.
The horns caw through the black. The underworld horde surges forward, overruns the torches and their pools of fallow light. She glimpses a tide of howling faces and septic swords and dog-ribbed torsos-
Living light glitters out to meet them.
The two magi shout into the gibbering thunder, the one high and human, the other low and booming. Blinding lines spoke the air, their precision too beautiful to be true. The aisles beneath the columns are writ with theorems and axioms, Quyan and Gnostic, and the frenzied onslaught breaks beneath them, collapses into slops and severings. Basalt planes burst. Blood gouts. Flame dazzles.
The two magi shout into the shrieking thunder… The nearest column crumbles at the ankle, at once implodes and topples, and the scalpers cry out in terror. Gravel and debris rain smoke across the Wards. The sorcerous lines hiss through rolling plumes of dust. They parse and measure the open expanses, dissect the heaving mass, Sranc packed as tight as worms, their Nonman faces screeching back, waving like festival palms, thrashing like dogs in the jaws of lions.
Another column collapses, and Mimara thinks she hears Achamian screaming, 'Nooooo!' through the mountainous clacking. Cleric's maniacal laugh rides the clamour.
A stench rains across them. Sranc blood, she realizes. Burning.
She sees only fractions through and over the scalpers, lightning glimpses. Baying mobs. Brilliant geometries sawing. Heaped tangles of dead. She feels the first Chorae bearer before she sees it, the forward plummet of absence and anathema… Several in the line cry out.
'Not one knee cracks!' Sarl screams in blood-raw tones. 'Do you hear me? Not one knee!'
The old Wizard scrambles back through the line, blunders into Kiampas. He's crying new Cants and Wards before he's even recovered his balance… ' yioh mihiljoi cuhewa aijiru… '
'Bashrag!' a scalper cries. 'Seju! Sweet Seju!'
Even as the word registers, she sees it, a shadow stamping through the smoking dead, towering over the
