away a fleck of grit…
It breached the light-smoke that became a ghost that became shining, bestial reality-its claws outstretched, its wings hooked about emptiness, its horn-crowned head vanishing behind gaping jaws…
The ancient dragon dropped out of the blackness. Achamian threw up futile arms.
Conflagration.
The men stare at her, speechless.
'What do you see?' she asks.
Her voice seems to jar them. Galian's face darkens in unaccountable rage.
'See?' he cries, his face twitching about a compulsive blink. 'I see a world of plunder. You… The Coffers yonder… And when we return, every delicacy, every peach, and every silk pillow in the Three Seas! I see a tasty world, my little Whore-Imperial, and I intend to feast!'
Whore. The word stirs something within her, a habit long forgotten. She knows this, knows how to bridle and ride the crazed passions of men…
'And your soul?' she asks without passion. 'What of your soul?'
'Will be no worse for pillaging a witch, I assure you.'
'And pillaging,' Pokwas laughs from his side. There is something lecherous and angular in the Zeumi Sword- dancer's bearing, as if he leans over legs already prised open. She can even see the curve of his phallus through his breeches. 'And pillaging… and pillaging…'
Galian strides toward her.
She wracks her soul, searching for the hate that has always been the engine of her strength, but she can only summon moments of tenderness and love. She smiles, blinking tears. She draws the curve of her belly into warm palms. This is the first time, it seems, that she dares clutch, dares the making real that comes with grasping.
Hello, little one…
He grabs her throat, turns her head from side to side.
'Sweet Sejenus…' he murmurs with an almost tender breath. 'You are a true beauty… A pity about the maggot.'
'Maggot?' she gasps.
'The grub you carry in your womb.'
Tears spill from her eyes. 'What about it?' she asks about a sob.
The Columnary leans close enough to lick her face. 'I fear it will not survive me.'
'No! Plea-!'
'No indeed!' he cries with renewed cruelty. 'No worms in our peaches, eh, boys?'
Once again Pokwas and Xonghis laugh, this time like nervous adolescents. They have been led and they have been drawn. They have stumbled across obsessed-over boundaries, only to find themselves thinking unthinkable things.
Yatwer… Dear Goddess, please…
Her head caught in the vise of his hands, she stares down the curve of her cheeks, and somehow her gaze finds his manic glare, latches…
The Judging Eye opens.
She finds herself peering into something… inexplicable.
Contradictory passions roil through her, as if she were the scalper's lifelong mistress, the one most punished, the one who understood. For there is no sin without weakness, no transgression without want or suffering. She sees the cracks through which his infant nature bleeds. The father's cane, the brother's fists. The starving marches, and the need, to be admired, to be respected, to steal what he covets…
She loves him, and she despises. But she finds herself fearing for him most of all.
Often has she wondered how she could describe it, seeing the morality of things let alone lives. Sometimes it seems more a matter of memory than vision, like sighting a familiar treatise in the house of a friend. The object itself stews with significance, but all the passages-cherished and offending-are indistinct. Only the sum can be seen, inchoate and confounding. This is what she most often sees: the abbreviated mash that is judgment passed, the balance of a soul, good and evil, writ in a stick-figure scrawl.
But sometimes, if she concentrates, the tome of a lived life flutters open beneath the Eye, and the crimes themselves become visible, the way carnal images flicker about the glimpse of a long-absent lover.
And sometimes, more rarely still, she sees the particulars of their coming damnation.
The Columnary stares, his eyes wide with panicked fury. She clutches his wrist.
'Galian…' she hears herself gasp. 'It's not too late. You can save yourself from… from…'
Something in her words or manner jars him from his intent-the trill of frantic sincerity, perhaps.
'Hell?' he laughs. 'There's too many of them.'
Such torment. Clenched and cringing, huddled in ways outside worldly dimensions. Prised and flayed, the innumerable petals of his soul peeled back in shrieks and sulphurous flame. Screams braided into screams, pains heaped upon agonies.
She sees it, his future, a gleam across his eyes, a fiery halo about his crown. His suffering disgorged like paint, smeared and stroked into obscene works of art. His soul passed from Ciphrang to feasting Ciphrang, dispensing anguish like milk through the endless ages.
She sees the truth of the Excruciata, the One Hundred-and-Eleven Hells depicted on the walls of the Junriuma in Sumna.
'Galian. Galian. You m-must listen. Please… You have no idea what awaits you!'
He tries to grin away his horror. He's strangling her as much as holding her now. 'Witch!' he spits. 'Witch!'
'Shhhhh…' she manages to whisper. 'It will b-'
He slams her to the raw earth. She cries out. He thrusts apart her knees, pins her while fumbling with his breeches. Belts pinch her inner thighs. Twigs bite at her shoulders, her buttocks. Dead leaves press cold against her back, like reptilian scales. His breathing is ragged, his look unfocused. He smells of shit and rotted teeth.
The world spins and roars about the fact of his damnation.
She cries into his ear, murmurs, 'I forgive you…'
Frees him of this final sin.
The beast had lain hidden, waiting for them to dig their way into the entrance antechamber, a dead end where they could not use the greater debris field to either flee or flank him. But it proved a treacherous trap. Had they not stood side by side, where the combined strength of their incipient defences purchased them the heartbeats they needed to reinforce their Wards, they would be dead.
Apparently Wutteat could not hear the distance between them…
Fire boiled over and around them, blinding them, ripping away the gossamer meanings they shouted against it. An inferno like no other, scorching some hard stone surfaces into liquid while exploding others.
Then the beast itself was on them, a crocodile falling upon sparrows. It clawed with feline savagery, tearing and rending, while the Gnostic sorcerer and the Quyan Mage sang in desperate tandem, slowing accumulating the glowing shells that preserved them.
The boom and crack of mountains breaking, and underneath, the rot of sorcery's unearthly murmur.
Roaring. Raging. Scales burnished, flashing as crimson as infant blood. Claws the size of wains swatting. The great saurian head ramming, snapping horns as thick as young trees.
Planes of spectral glass cracked and shattered, collapsed into aether. Rock rained down. Stone congealed like blood.
'It lives by its ears!' the old Wizard cried between thunders.
His eyes blazing, Nil'giccas nodded in immediate understanding.
The beast reared above them. Another incendiary eruption. The world beyond their defences became an amorphous glare. Wards cracked and burned…
But the Nonman King was attacking, howling in tongues as old as his race. Achamian could scarce see the light of his conjuring, just the faint blue of lines like parabolic wires, arcing into the heights…
The inferno lifted, streamed exploding across the scorched heaps to their right. The fire sputtered into a
