The Nonman's laughter rose clear as sunlight from the booming echoes.
'And now look at you! Blind! Hidden in the dirt! Curled about the shit of dead ages!'
A cry like the blast of many waters. '
Teetering above the monstrosity, Achamian shouted his Cant, a skinny old man hollering in a skinny old voice. The Noviratic Spike, a Gnostic War-Cant contrived to batter through great city gates.
'
Light balled in Achamian's outstretched palms. The mighty Wracu lashed its head from side to panicked side, raised its smoking snout at the instant of the Cant's completion. Lines of light snapped in and out, deflecting and intersecting, forming a flying sheet of triangles, reproducing tip to tip, base to base, flashing down as swift as any bolt or arrow…
A noise that struck blood from the skin.
The Spike exploded against the creature's left shoulder, hammered it squealing down the side of its mound. Thrashing, Wutteat howled fire into the air. A brilliant geyser jetted up through the ceiling pit, a rooster's tail of brilliance washed across the cavern roof. Cascades of raw stone came crashing down.
Achamian crouched low on the lintel, muttered Ward after Ward.
A thunderclap from below.
And he heard it through the dragon's mewling shriek: the sound of a Nonman Quya singing his world-breaking song. The sound of a famed Ishroi, a hero of dead ages, closing with his ancient foe.
The old Wizard stood firm on his perch, cried out another Noviratic Cant. Below him, the Father of Dragons coiled in defence, spewed fire into looms of Quyan incandescence. Light flared from the Wizard's palms, made crimson glass of his hands…
But the dragon had coiled to leap, not to shield. The Wizard's Spike gouged slopes of treasure and rubble. Mouldered and wretched, the dragon vaulted into the underworld attic, stretched forth its diseased wings. For a crazed heartbeat, Achamian found himself standing frail and astonished beneath the plated monstrosity. Light from the conflagration below illuminated its undersides, gleamed across horns and scaled flanges. Wings scooped dark air…
It knew, Achamian realized. The beast drew back its battered skull, yanked open its maw in a feline hiss.
It knew precisely where he stood.
Fire.
Wards dissolving like egg whites in a stream. Concussions. Blistering skin. The triggering of incipient Wards…
The pier of stone collapsed beneath his feet.
'
The old Wizard fell, cartwheeled down the beast's heap of treasure and debris. Blinking. Coughing. He tried to claw his way upright, too stunned to orchestrate the counterpoise of voices, inner and outer, required for sorcery. He beat at his burning hair and beard. He felt an arm draw him up, saw Cleric peering down at him, the porcelain lines of worry and relief. He heard the whoosh of conflagration, the clack and thunder of enormous collapses. Ancient pillars toppled. Sheets of masonry dropped. The world itself seemed to shrug, then crash upon them.
Masses of stone pummelled the Nonman's Wards, a rain of godlike fists.
The last shreds of light were pinched to utter black.
Ringing ears. The taste of dust.
'It has buried us,' the Nonman King said in the clacking aftermath. 'Shut us in.'
– | She kicks off her boots.
She unties the laces of her jacket, pulls it back from her bare shoulders, lets it slide of its own weight down her arms. She shakes it from her wrists. It slumps across the humus.
She clasps her shift, winces at the reek of it as she draws it over her head. The swathes of down in her armpits tingle. Open air finds her breasts. Her nipples rise to the kissing breeze.
She unlaces her leather breeches. Wriggling, she pushes them below her knees. She steps from them. Open air finds her thighs… her sex.
She grabs the wire Circumfix-the one she found on the battlefield-hanging between her breasts. But she releases it, loathe to forsake the protection of symbols-even false ones.
Motionless, the scalpers gaze. Sarl gropes his crotch with his free hand. The Captain's head continues to glare from the crook of his arm. Even Koll, wasted to the very lip of death, watches with licentious hunger. They are but five, yet countless others seem to crowd them, making pews of the forested ruins, all gazing with lidless eyes, some in outrage, others with pity and hope, and still more with lust and crass desire.
She thought the Qirri would ease her passage, that it might have delivered her to the place where she had always hidden-for this was nothing new. But she was wrong. You have to be more than your motions to hide behind them, and she is not.
The Qirri has whittled her down to the bone of what happens.
She shudders with something deeper than shame, as if garments more profound than leather and fabric have been shed. The cloth of hope and flattery, perhaps-all the things she has called herself in the pursuit of her pain- numbing vanities. Sorceress. Princess. Warrior. All the lies she has conjured to hide the fact of her slavery.
For the first time, it seems, she is wholly what scripture has made of her-and nothing more. The quiver on the hip of the bowman. The pillow beneath the head of the king. She is chattel. She is sustenance. She is pleasure and progeny…
She is naked.
The two crouched for what seemed a hundred heartbeats after the clamour had settled, probing the cavernous black with pricked ears. They heard nothing, save the groan and clatter of settling debris.
Wielding ethereal geometries, the old Wizard and the Nonman King began heaving aside masses of rock and masonry. Throughout history, kings and princes had sought to bend the Few to menial tasks, to works that only the sweat and misery of thousands could otherwise accomplish. Roads. Fortifications. Temples. Wars had been fought to resist them. For men who could manipulate the very frame of existence, sorcerers, demanding such mean labour was nothing less than an outrage, akin to asking lords to wash the feet of beggars. As Tsotekara, the Grandmaster of the extinct Surartu, famously declared to Triamis the Great: to do as slaves was to be as slaves.
Even still, caprice demands all men, no matter how exalted their station, play the menial from time to time. Every sorcerer living knew some Cant adapted to the moving of earth.
The darkness clacked and roared with their excavations. The devastation of the Coffers stretched out behind them, easily outrunning their paltry light, a twilight world the old Wizard was loathe to consider, lest he recall the hopeless task of finding a single golden map-case amid such wrack and ruin. Only two columns stood that they could see; the others lay heaped and toppled like a felled forest. Shelves of rock continued to fall from the inverted cliffs and valleys hanging above, sporadically showering the blasted landscape with debris.
Huffing with effort, Achamian sank pinions into the mounded wreckage, raked it away with the flash of miracle lights. More debris would tumble into the gap he had cleared but never quite so much as he had removed. Braced on ever-uncertain footing-spilled gravel, canted lintels, or the curve of pillar drums-they thundered forward, dredging the entrance clear. When light at last rimmed the uppermost rocks before them, they paused to collect their breath and courage.
'The beast awaits us,' Cleric said.
Achamian nodded. He could see fell Wutteat in his soul's eye, poised to flush the waiting passage with coiling fire. Ambush was a notorious tactic of the Wracu. For all their savage might, they were exceedingly intelligent and devious creatures-far more so than Sranc. They had no choice but to rush the burrow, somehow survive the sum of its power…
'One of us must shield,' he said, 'while the other casts into the fire.'
The Nonman King began to nod, then whirled toward the darkness behind them.
Frowning, Achamian followed his gaze into the high void, peered squinting. He raised a thumb to scratch
