'The False Man is mad!' Pokwas calls out.
The Captain lowers his face, pinches his lower lip in contemplation. 'Yes,' he says in grim admission. 'But think. A year given. Our every greed slaked.' He seeks each of his men with his gaze, as if knowing he must cow them one by one. 'He's delivered us to these riches.'
Galian smiles like someone with arguments too devious to be refuted.
'Then why suffer him any longer?'
For the first time Mimara glimpses the fury sparking in the Captain's eyes.
'Who will deliver us back, fool?'
More silence.
A nightmarish intensity engulfs the two men.
Galian peers at the Ainoni caste-noble in mock reverence, his manner so feckless, so bold, that it raises an audible murmur from Mimara's lungs.
'I want a fire,' he says.
'We march on the dark.'
Galian looks to the forested deeps about them, then back to his Captain. 'Yes… Skinny country, is it?' There is nothing sly about his antagonism now. 'Where are the skinnies then?'
The Captain regards him for several heartbeats, his eye shadowed beneath heavy brows, his nose and cheeks like chipped flint above the brushed wire of his moustache and beard. There is something breathless, absolute about his composure. Grim deliberation glints from his eyes…
The look of a man, a murderous man, finding the shadowy centre of his enemy's web.
'Are you such a fool, Galian?' Mimara blurts aloud. The tension is too much.
But the former Columnary has eyes only for his Captain.
'You made your decision, just then,' he says with a lolling smile. 'Didn't you? You decided to kill me.'
Lord Kosoter glares, a hoary king leaning from his stone chair. A dark, tyrannical figure, passing judgment on the fool capering before him.
'Before the slit called out,' Galian presses. 'That moment of silence… You thought to yourself, Kill the fool! '
There is a sudden viciousness to his intonation, and enough mimicry of the Captain's growling voice to send Pokwas laughing. Even Xonghis, who is working on his bow, grins in his enigmatic Jekki manner.
Horror bolts through her. She has just glimpsed the savage shape of what is about to happen. Conspiracy and conspirators both.
'But then you thought it before, haven't you, Captain? Every time you glimpsed me leaning with the others, something cried, 'Kill him!' in that cramp you call a soul.'
The Captain remains utterly motionless, watching the Columnary's approach from his impromptu throne.
'As it turns out,' Galian continues with bright humour, 'we were leaning together in sedition…'
The Columnary comes to stop immediately before Lord Kosoter, easily within reach of his broadsword. A kind of boredom seems to glint in the Captain's eyes-as if mutiny were an old and tedious friend.
'And you should know that every time I glimpsed you…' Galian throws out his arms and, as if daring him to strike, leans forward in vindictive contempt. 'I also heard something whisper, 'Kill him!' '
The arrow catches the Captain in the mouth. He jerks to his side as if slapped, staggers back two steps. He hangs there for a moment, spitting cracked teeth.
A cloud occludes the sun.
The Captain of the Skin Eaters, the man called Ironsoul, raises his face, not to the bowman, Xonghis, but to the bowman's maker, Galian. The shaft is visible. It skewers the lower half of his face, draws bearded skin tight. Blood spills from the ream of his bottom lip. His laughter sputters through it.
A sardonic glee, malevolent for its intensity, shines like sorcery in his eyes.
The second arrow thumps into his neck. He whirls to the side and around, as if a rope about his waist holds him staked in place. He hangs for an instant, like a thing made of wax. Then he slumps face first across the humus. A convulsive moment passes. He begins shaking, his limbs tossing with bonfire violence. A crazed, bestial scramble follows, as if an elemental wildness or disordered spirit has lain dormant within him, hidden, and only now could thrash free of human constraints.
His expression loose with horror, Galian draws his sword.
The Captain claws the leafy humus at the Columnary's feet, seizes a branch no thicker than two thumbs. His spine arches against his blooded hauberk. His head pulls back. He grimaces about his tented mouth, blows rage and spittle and blood. His eyes gleam like pearl. Snorting with effort and fury, he begins twisting and wrenching at the branch, as if it were the world's own spine-the one thing to be broken.
He roars.
Then his head is gone, bouncing about the tail of its caste-noble braid.
Silence-this time of visible things.
Mimara watches, breathless. Mortal, something cold whispers within her.
Mortal after all.
Strange, the way Qirri made hash of momentous things.
Omens of the world's end. The death of races… Standing in bare sunlight, it all seemed little more than beautiful paint, a kind of ornamentation.
The northern tower of the Muraw, the Library's forward gate, was scarce more than a mound. Wandering stretches of vertical blocks broke the slopes here and there, but otherwise it had ceased to exist. Inexplicably, the southern tower stood almost entirely intact, a cyclopean square that soared against the bald sky. Even the obsidian that had plated its base had survived. Turf and shrubs mounded its distant crown, and several tenacious trees hung rooted from its sides. Despite everything, a sudden, boyish urge to scale the tower struck the old Wizard, followed by a sense of exhausted longing.
There had been a time when he had spent days loafing among ruins far less significant than these. A time when his worries had been small enough to ignore.
Side by side, the old Wizard and the Nonman King strode into the Library's ruined precincts. The walls, or what remained of them, possessed the monumental feel of the Ziggurats in Shigek. In many cases trees, full grown yet bent and windswept, grew along their crests. Achamian could still recognize the Ursilaral, the central promenade where the One Thousand Gift-Shields had once hung, garish and beautiful, symbolizing the truce between the Sohonc and almost all the known tribes of White and High Norsirai. In Seswatha's day, the Library was often called the Citadel of Citadels because of its importance, certainly, but also because of its design: fortresses within fortresses, as if the outside were a kind of ocean, a flood to be fought chamber by grudging chamber. It possessed no fewer than nineteen courtyards, often call 'pits' because of the height of the surrounding walls, with the Ursilaral, its length jawed by numerous gates, connecting most of them.
The morning sun had climbed high enough only to bathe portions of their overgrown floors so that Achamian and Cleric found themselves walking through dry shadow. The growth was mostly restricted to thickets and clutches of shrubs, forcing Achamian to follow Cleric as he hacked his way forward with his sword. Plumes of fluff swirled in dry-wind eddies. Clouds drifted across the oblong squares of blue sky above them. Bees tracked spiral courses through the air, becoming white dots when they passed into sunlight. The Wizard even glimpsed a hare bolting through the grasses.
The experience became increasingly surreal. At times the Wizard found himself staring at Cleric's labouring back, broad beneath its sheath of shining mail, wondering whether he should just attack the Nonman and be done with the suspense. At other times he played a kind of game guessing what was the ruin of what. Mounds became fountains. Rectangular breaks in walls became windows onto barracks, apartments, and scriptoriums.
And twice he caught himself squinting across the northeastern heights, looking for thunderheads massing black and terrible…
For the Whirlwind.
It was like walking through two worlds beyond the actual: the one the issue of his reading, the other the product of his Dreams. He was Achamian, exile and pariah, wearer of rotted pelts. And he was Seswatha, hero, Grandmaster of this place, both during the time when its fall was preposterous, laughable, and during the days of encroaching destruction.
