In life, your soul is but the extension of your body, which reaches inward until it finds its centre in spirit. In death, your body is but the extension of your soul, which reaches outward until it finds it circumference in flesh. In both instances, all things appear the same. Thus are the dead and the living confused.
Yet the soul lingers like a second smell.
A sailor wrecked at sea, it clings, lest it sink and drown in Hell.
Late Summer, 20 New Imperial Year (4132 Year-of-the-Tusk), The Ruins of Sauglish
Suffocation. Blindness and bewilderment.
At first Achamian thought the gag choked him, but his mouth was clear. Had they put a sack over his head? He thrashed his limbs, realizing he was unbound-but he could not move more than the span of a hand.
Sarcophagus. Coffin. He was in some kind of…
Dream.
The old Wizard's panic dwindled, even as the panic of the ancient soul he had become flared into outrage. He was Anasurimbor Nau-Cayuti, Scourge of the Consult, Prince of the High Norsirai-Dragonslayer! He beat at his stone prison with righteous fury, howled. He cursed the name of his miscreant wife.
But the enclosed chute grew hot with his exertions, and the air began failing him. Soon he was heaving, making a bellows out of his barrel chest, gasping. Soon he could do no more than scratch at his prison, and his thoughts unwound in shame and disorientation…
To think a man such as he would die scratching.
Then he was tipping and tumbling, as though his prison had been cast into a cataract. Stone cracked-a concussion that snapped his teeth. Air washed about him, so chill as to feel wet. He sucked cold, breathed against a ponderous fragment pinning him. He blinked at the night darkness, saw the moon low, glaring pale through rag- ripped clouds and thronging branches. He glimpsed broken forms strewn, sightless eyes shining in the twinkle of fallen torches. Dead Knights of Tryse. He saw his sword gleaming among rune-engraved fragments of stone, reached with nerveless fingers. But a shadow stilled him. Witless for lack of breath and confusion and horror, he gazed up at his monstrous assailant…
Phallus, greased and pendulous. Wings, scabrous and veined, folded into two horns rising high above the thing's shoulders. Window skin, revealing sheaths of raw muscle and a compound head: one skull a great oval, the second human, fused into the jaws of the former.
Aurang, the old Wizard realized with Nau-Cayuti's horror. The Horde-General. The Angel of Deceit.
The Inchoroi kicked away his blade, arched over him like a defecating dog. It wrapped fish-cold fingers about his throat. It raised him until he dangled helpless in its baleful gaze. Needles probed his breath-starved extremities.
The thing grinned-sheets of mucus pinned to its lesser skull.
Laughter like pain blown through broken flutes.
'None,' the Inchoroi gasped through leprous throats. 'None escape Golgottera-'
Shouting. Someone was shouting.
The Wizard bolted from the forest floor, blinking and peering in the stupefied manner of those just awoken. He coughed, convulsed as his throat warred against the gag. The world was predawn grey, the eastern sky a golding slate through skeins of branches.
The Captain. The Captain ranted at them to awaken.
'The Coffers, boys!' he cried in a macabre parody of Sarl's exclamation. The mad Sergeant chortled in delight, cried, 'The Slog of Slogs!' in answer, before a realization of some kind yanked his breath short. Afterward, he watched with the wariness of a dog long-beaten.
'Today is the day we turn around!'
Achamian glimpsed Mimara rising slight and slender from a depression in the ground, her lips hanging open as she beat at the leafy detritus pasted across her arm and shoulder. Suddenly Lord Kosoter was looming over him, the twin voids tingling as always beneath his splint hauberk. He grabbed the Wizard by the shoulders, heaved him to his feet as though he were a child.
'Galian!' he shouted to the former Columnary. 'Make ready.'
The Captain seized the rope about the Wizard's wrists and, accompanied by Cleric, led him like a votive lamb away from the others. He had a practised hand, shoving and catching so that it seemed the Wizard continually tripped forward. Eventually, he let him fall onto his face.
The Wizard writhed like a fish, kicked himself onto his back only to crush and scrape his fingers against a branch. Lord Kosoter towered over him, more shadow than man with the brightening east behind him. His two Chorae glowered with nothingness, like the empty sockets of a skull hanging about his heart. The Wizard watched him reach beneath his hauberk and tug one free.
'Our expedition has come to a head,' Lord Kosoter said, dandling the thing before him.
The old Wizard's thoughts raced. There was a path through this. There was a path through everything…
Yet one more lesson learned at Kellhus's punishing hand.
The Captain knelt beside him, leaned so low his beard brushed Achamian's own. His rough fingers worked the leather straps that held the gag in place. The Chorae was a coal that scorched the air with absence-burning oblivion…
'The time has come, Wizard. Xonghis says the solstice is several days away.'
The old Wizard shrank from the Trinket, writhed as if searching for a hatch through the forest floor. The Captain pulled the gag free.
'Speak with care.'
His tongue was cankered and swollen. Talking was onerous. 'Wha-?' He trailed in a coughing fit. 'Sol- solstice?'
The Captain's face betrayed no passion. His eyes gleamed dead within their rim of tattooed black. The ferocity of his suspicion lay compressed in the pause he took before replying.
'You claimed the Coffers were protected by powerful Wards,' he fairly growled. 'Curses that could only be unlocked during the solstice…'
Achamian glared, blinking. It seemed a lifetime had passed since he had said as much. Lies. Where facts were like embroidery, each one stitched across the whole cloth of others, lies were like chips of ice in water, always slipping one past the other, always melting…
'Our expedition has come to a head…'
And it came upon the Wizard as a kind of falling horror, the profundity of his ignorance.
Were the Coffers still sealed after all this time? Were they buried? Were they gutted, long emptied of their riches?
For all he knew, the Map to Ishual might lie in Golgotterath…
Even still, he heard his voice rasp, spill even more ice into the water of expediency-and with more than enough hate to sound convincing. 'Th-the Wards… They yoke the movement of the planets-that is the source of their never-ending power. F-four sorcerous keys were given, one for each transition of the seasons. Summer to autumn is the only key I know.'
The Captain regarded him for a flint-hearted moment.
'You lie.'
'Yes,' Achamian replied in a cold voice. 'I lie.'
Lord Kosoter turned to Cleric, who stood looming behind. His Chorae drifted a fraction nearer as he did so,
