ground-strumming shriek, and they saw Wutteat, the dread Father of Dragons, flailing backward, smoke pluming from its eye socket.
'The head!' Achamian screamed. 'Attack the head!'
They assailed the beast, Man and Nonman, as in days of old. They threaded the air with arrays of wicked, dazzling illumination. And it screamed, squealed even, like a pig doused in burning oil.
They stepped into the cavernous air and pursued him. Wutteat's wings kicked the ground with gusts, swept up sheets of ash and dust. Yet they could see him.
Geometries of incandescence. Geometries of destruction.
Like a moth in a jar, Wutteat smashed its shoulders into the cragged ceiling, tried to bring stone down upon them. Deaf and blind, it spat fire across hanging cliffs…
The Gnostic sorcerer hung above one of the two remaining pillars, striking the thing with scissions and concussions. The Quyan Mage sailed an arc about the beast, uttering Cants that burned. They struck and struck until the iron of its bone glowed, until Wutteat's head was smashed ruin, a charred stump possessing jaws.
The beast dropped, and Achamian rushed to jubilation, thinking they had felled it. But it crashed into a lurch that became a run, its claws kicking up stone middens. It raised its blasted snout, snuffing against a piteous growl. Unerringly it charged toward the remnants of the entrance.
'No!' the Nonman King cried.
Coursing like a snake, it bolted through the punishing gauntlet of their sorcery, smashed through the entrance into the pale-glowing hollows beyond.
They pursued it into the breach, climbed as if up the throat of a toppled tower. But the dragon was too quick: they could already hear its shriek score the faraway sky. Climbing. Coughing. Breathless, they found themselves within the ring of the Turret, squinting up at the jagged circle of afternoon brilliance. His heart hammering with mortal violence, the old Wizard finally gained the summit.
Wutteat thrashed in the light of day, throwing up trees and gouts of dirt. It caromed against the Library walls, crashed like a thing thrown into the forest beyond. Trunks and limbs cracked. Over the wall's dusty halo, the crowns of a dozen trees convulsed and vanished. The beast spat wild gouts of fire, uttered shrieks that drove nails into their ears.
And then, suddenly, the dread beast was flying, white and black and golden, its ravaged wings buffeting the forest as though it were wheat. Scales shining, the Father of Dragons soared heavenward, spiralling and smoking like a bird afire. Astounded, the man and the Nonman watched, until finally, moth-small with distance, it vanished into the slow-tumbling flanks of a cloud.
Cleric stood atop the heights of a shattered inner wall, gazing high after the thing. Brush fires raged beyond him, throwing lines of orange across his jaw and cheek. His nimil chain glistened in the dry sunlight, and for the first time the old Wizard saw the faint lines of filigree worked across its innumerable links.
Herons. Herons and lions.
'Triumph!' Achamian cried out in relief and exaltation. 'A victory worthy The Sagas!'
He hesitated in sudden realization. What did glory mean, when none could remember it?
And what was life, without glory to illuminate it?
The Nonman turned his profile to him, said nothing.
'You won't remember, will you?'
'Shadow,' Nil'giccas replied, resuming his study of the distant sky. 'I will remember the shadow it casts…' He turned to regard the Wizard. 'Across the grief that follows.'
The grief that follows.
The old Wizard matched the Nonman King's gaze for what seemed a hundred heartbeats. Finally, he nodded in slow resignation, scratched his chin beneath what remained of his beard.
'Yes,' Achamian said. 'Seswatha loved you as well.'
Galian makes a noise, a grunt or a sob-she is not sure.
One moment he's an iron shadow grinding flaccid against her. Then he is gone.
She bolts upright, sees him arched across the forest floor, kicking his left foot, desperately clutching at his back. Koll stands above him, hunched and famine-frail, his hands clenching and unclenching. Galian flops onto his stomach, gags and screams. She sees a pommel jutting from below his left shoulder blade, a flower of crimson and black blooming through the links of his hauberk.
A breathless heartbeat passes. Xonghis rushes to assist Galian while Pokwas draws his great tulwar from his waist, sweeps it through the air before falling into his Sword-dancer stance.
'Fucking Stone Hag!' he cries. 'I knew I should have cut your throat!'
Still clutching Lord Kosoter's head, Sarl sits rocking on the Captain's inert back, begins cackling. Light sparkles through the screens of foliage beyond him-from the direction of the Holy Library. A roaring whoosh follows…
Pokwas falls upon Koll in sweeping fury. His blade seems like silver ink, sketching sigils through open air. Koll effortlessly threads the gauntlet, ducking, leaping…
The Zeumi Sword-dancer pauses, eyes round in disbelief.
Koll dives to his right, cartwheels across the ground like a crab, toward Sarl and his Captain's draining corpse. The Sergeant scrambles backward.
Koll flits past him, rolls past the Captain's forgotten pack, then comes to his feet brandishing Squirrel. His stance low, his look darts from Pokwas to Xonghis, who has taken up a flanking position, his bow drawn.
More explosions rock the near distance. A titanic roar shivers the sky.
The starved Stone Hag begins laughing, a sound that begins human but ends like screaming wolves. Xonghis releases his shaft. Koll swats with Squirrel but misses. The arrow thuds into his neck.
Koll falls backward but somehow rolls back onto his feet. With his free hand he clutches the shaft. Pulls.
Screams.
The fingers of his face break apart, then fly open.
Mimara lurches to her feet, stumbles to Galian, who lies dying.
Crying out in Zeumi, Pokwas rushes the thing called Koll, his tulwar cutting poetry into the air. Steel rings against steel. Squirrel is nicked but does not shatter. Xonghis lets fly two more arrows. The thing lunges clear the first, but the second catches it high in the thigh. It barely survives the black giant's hollering assault.
Mimara stands breathless. Qirri pulses through her, makes a war-drum of her heart.
Xonghis whirls at the sound of her approach, releases. His arrow whistles past her left ear-a sound like a rip. She plunges Galian's sword into the Imperial Tracker's exposed armpit. She feels his death, the inside of him, communicated through blade and grip.
Beyond their clearing, the forest burns about the silhouette of stumped ruins. Sarl has resumed his phlegmatic howl, his expression crushed into a thousand laughing lines.
The whooshing tulwar catches the thing called Koll mid-leap. It careens through the air, tries to land on its remaining leg, tumbles backward. Closing for the kill, the Zeumi howls in triumph…
Fails to hear her naked approach.
Smoke piled over the derelict fortifications, drawn twisting into the high blue sky. Within the ruined Library, several smaller fires fanned bright in the gusting wind, sending showers of sparks and ash over the old Wizard and the Nonman King.
'You don't have to do this!' Achamian cried.
Still standing upon the wall he had climbed to peer after the dragon, Cleric tore his runed purse from its leather cord. He stared at it meditatively, hefted it in his palm. Achamian felt his heart clutch at his breast, seeing it dandled so near open flame. He realized he has worshipped this thing. The shrivelled folds pinched into creases about its drawstring. The faint impression of weight bulging within, as though it contained a mouse. It seemed absurd that such a low object could become the talisman, the fetish from which the whole expedition had come to hang. A pouch filled with soot.
'No!' Achamian cried.
But it was too late. Cleric bent his head sideways, as if to itch his ear against his shoulder, then swung the pouch upside down. The ashes of Cu'jara Cinmoi poured out in a dun stream. The wind fanned it into ghostly nothingness.
