'The beast is dead,' Cleric murmured. 'Dead and blind.'
The old Wizard struggled to peer through his terror, to study the great head beyond the jaws, to see more than the predatory malevolence in its lines. It differed from the ancient Dragons of his Dreams-no surprise given the florid diversity characteristic of the species. Its head was more aquiline, as if built to root out prey hidden in burrows. And a mane of black iron tusks flared from its brows, bloomed into chattering skirts along the back of the beast's skull. But where smaller horns serrated the line of the beast's left brow, only stumps and savaged tissue adorned the right. The eye beneath, he could see, had rotted away long, long ago…
'What do you mean?' the old Wizard muttered in reply. 'It breathes …'
But Men's eyes, once attuned to a possibility, scavenge evidence of their own volition: suddenly the old Wizard saw the bronze hide sagging like a hauberk, as if detached from the greased flesh beneath. The shrunken gums. The second eye socket, rotted as hollow as the first…
'
The Dragon was dead-or almost so…
'
Madness. Madness and more madness.
But there was always more world than explanation. To come so far… so close… There was no turning from this place.
'May I beg but one dispensation?' Achamian cried.
A hissing pause. '
'I search for a map,' the old Wizard said.
Cleric regarded him.
'
'But what use could you have of trinkets and baubles?'
'To lure fools such as you!
'I will not!' the old Wizard cried, casting his frail voice against the Dragon's booming echo. Thought and passion raced panicked through his soul. All at once, he found himself marvelling at his own stubborn courage, weighing the mad consequences of his baiting, and wondering-wondering most of all-that a Dragon could be dead, yet speak and breath still…
'I cannot!'
The Wracu laughed, a sound like a thousand hacking lungs.
'
'No… No! Necessity alone drives me!'
'
The old Wizard grappled with his anger, the urge to retort. The Coffers! he reminded himself, hearing Sarl's crazed voice as he did so. The Coffers!
'
In a blink, it seemed, he saw through the fog of the intervening weeks and the lies that accumulated in his veins. In a heartbeat, the confusion that was Qirri vanished, leaving windswept fact in its wake. He had murdered men with his fictions, imperilled the woman he loved-he had marched across the desolate bosom of Earwa- for this moment, this very encounter.
It happens…
He breathed deep, held the foul air against his hammering heart.
'A bargain then!' he cried in sudden inspiration. 'I would strike a bargain with you!'
The grating of coiled limbs. The heaving of air through rotting windpipes.
'
The old Wizard clawed his scalp.
'Truth… Truth is all I have.'
The Wracu raised its bulk from the heap's summit, wagged its enormous crown in the air.
'
As deep as graves, the eyeless sockets fixed on the old Wizard.
'
It creaked forward, loosing tiny landslides of debris and treasure.
'
It descended its miserly summit, then more than two elephants tall at the shoulder stalked the blackness beyond the immediate pillars, dragging ruin in its wake.
'
Achamian retreated, fairly stumbled doing so. 'I–I'm not sure how to begin.'
He glimpsed its dead-grinning maw between columns.
'Whatis this map you seek?'
The will to lie leaned hard against the old Wizard's thought, but he resisted, understanding that the beast before him was as much spirit as flesh… Who can say what the dead hear, when their ears are pricked to the voices of the living?
So he began describing his Dreams, the way Anasurimbor Celmomas had charged Seswatha with the map to Ishual, the final refuge of the ancient Kuniuric High-Kings. But he quickly became tangled in words. Every name he mentioned, required more names to be explained-names piled upon names, all begging explanation.
The eyeless creature yawned, revealing the furnace that smouldered within the dead hull of its frame. '
The old Wizard blinked at the monstrous spectre, chewed his bottom lip…
'Vengeance,' he said.
'And whom do you seek to murder?'
'Anasurimbor Kellhus, the Aspect-Emperor.'
'
Instead of glimpsing Esmenet, the old Wizard saw Mimara in his soul's eye, pregnant and derelict, a prisoner of the Captain. If he failed here… If he stumbled…
'Enough!' he cried. 'You have your truth!'
'
Mucus snapping like bowstrings.
'Yes, bu-'
'
The great bulk stamped forward one step, fissuring stone…
'
The iron-horned chin dropped, as a wolf…
'
Fire wicked from carcass nostrils…
'
The pillared landscape hummed with reverberations. Sulphur and rot settled as a mist through the black. The old Wizard fairly cried out for sudden weight of Cleric's hand on his shoulder.
'He plays you,' the Nonman said, his face white and serene. 'There is no separating him from his hoard. He is too wicked, and he has slumbered here too long…'
The Last Nonman King turned back toward the scaled abomination.
'He?' Achamian asked witless.