creases. 'A thousand gold Kellics at least!'
Madness, is all she can think.
She runs, heedless of her bearings or her nakedness.
Away. She must get away from all the madness.
The whole World burns.
And so they battled, the Gnostic Wizard uttering no Cants, the Quyan Mage speaking no Wards. Broken walls encircled them, surrounded in turn by the oily tumble of smoke and trees wrapped in shining flame.
Hanging high before the Turret, the inhuman Mage blazed with arcane meaning, unleashed a logic raised to killing light.
His feet braced against the earth, the human Wizard sang his unholy counterargument, wrapping himself in glowing spheres, long-winded pyramidal forms, planes arrayed to deflect dread energies outward.
The First Quyan Fold. The Ribs of Gotagga.
Burning cables. Sparks so brilliant they blinded. Concussions so immense they blew sheets of debris from the crests of the surrounding walls. Blisters of warding light cracked, slumped before sheering into nothingness.
And the dread voices droned on, unravelling into echoes too cavernous to be called sound, ringing from Heaven's vault as if it loomed as low as a cellar ceiling.
Achamian shouted between gasps of fiery air. He raised Ward after Ward, only to see them smashed, swept away.
The Third Concentric. The ever-risky Cross of Arches.
But the Quya Master was like a sun above him, glaring with destruction, cracking his defences with wicked and relentless incandescence. Beating. Hammering. Scissoring. A rain of cataclysms. Until Achamian was breathless and stammering, able to cough out only the lowest and quickest Wards.
For the briefest of instants, the underworld angel above him paused.
'Madness!' the Wizard cried out in sobbing frustration. 'This is not you!'
Fire crackled and hissed, filling the heartbeat of silence between them.
'Can't you see!' the Nonman King cried. 'Your appeals only incite me! You will die and I will remember! Because all you do is reach for the love I bear you!'
'No! I will not strike you!'
The face of Nil'giccas resolved from the dwindling glare. The setting sun rimmed his scalp with sickles of gold. 'I remember… I remember your name…'
Light filled his howling mouth-blasphemous meaning…
At long last the Wizard struck.
An Odaini Concussion Cant. Simple and low, meant only to stun-to knock back into reason perhaps. But Nil'giccas had floated above sharp ruin…
He plummeted from on high, broke about a low spine of stone. The ground fires caught and consumed him.
The old Wizard puffed out the flames with a sorcerous cry. He hobbled around blocks and between flanged foundations, swallowing at the sobs that wracked him. Streamers of smoke twisted and dissolved about his passage.
He found the Nonman King prostrate across a shoulder-high segment of wall, bent as though he had half fallen from bed. Black scored his milk-white skin. Blisters puckered his cheek and scalp. Blood sopped the heron and lion links of his nimil harness. He seemed that much more broken, given the perfection of his form.
'What just happened?' Nil'giccas gasped, hacking gouts of blood with the words. His lips worked about the glistening arc of his fused teeth. 'Wh-what just…'
'You found glory,' the old Wizard croaked. He coughed as if at some fact too acrid to be breathed. He reached out to clutch the Nonman's cheek, saw Death swirl up in the eyes of his ancient friend. He watched the spark of sight dull into sightlessness. Cleric's body heaved, then settled, as if finally coming to peace with its own anguished corporeality.
Blood pooled in the mortises.
Burned, battered, the old Wizard looked about, from the wreckage of the Library out to the blazing forests of Sauglish. This was how it would end, he realized… The was how all of it would end.
Heartbreak and fire.
She runs.
Twigs and branches pinch and cut her feet, but it seems proper that she should suffer. The breeze brushes like silk across her body, but it seems proper that she should find succour for her grievances. Leaves lash her arms and outer thighs.
Horror animates her. Horror that runs with her legs. Horror that tingles throughout her body, heat rimmed with cold, as if she bleeds from a thousand internal wounds.
She clutches her belly. She assumed she would feel it hang from her as she ran, the life she carried. But it is at one with her, the centring counterweight, the ligament that binds her to future and fate.
She climbs a low rise, a place away from the eye-stabbing smoke. She turns, glimpses the flicker of sorcery. She climbs higher, searching for a break in the canopy. She sees it once again, luminescent white lines twisting like language from the Library. She sees a form hanging, a dark figure silvered about the waist and shoulders, suspended over the walled depths adjacent to a destroyed citadel-what looks like a broken amphorae jutting from the ground.
Cleric, she thinks. Ishroi…
She turns, and begins walking back the way she came.
– | The Skin Eaters lay strewn like castaway clothes. The Wizard stumbled to his knees at the sight of the carnage.
'Where is she?' he cried at the last man living-Sarl, looking like something out of a child's nightmare.
'The Coffers!' the mad scalper croaked. He raised his hands in crazed gesticulation. Something bloody flapped in the right. 'Make ready, boys! Plunder them like a whore! Shake them like your purple pommel!'
'What happened here?' Achamian cried. He looked from dead man to dead man. Galian. Pokwas. Xonghis.
The Captain…
The very World pitched beneath his feet.
Suddenly the thing swinging in Sarl's hand became clear, the digits knuckled with fragments of expression…
A skin-spy's face.
'Speak up, fool! What happened? '
'Ahhh,' Sarl crooned to him. 'The World will be our wicked little peach! We'll be princes! Princes! '
The old Wizard seized him about the shoulders. 'Where's Mimara… Where's my daughter?'
The madman nodded and gazed the way he had that second night in the Cocked Leg's common room, after smashing his wine bowl. A knowing gaze, the Wizard suddenly realized, one brimming with the intuition of the insane…
That Fate is madder still.
Achamian turned to the demand of some instinct, peered… glimpsed something slight passing through screens of smoke. He fairly doubled over for relief when she stepped naked from a fire-curtained world.
She ran to him, clutched his shoulders as he grinned and keened.
'You live!' he cried like a fool.
'As do you.'
'You're naked!'
Her look of reproach made him want to cry out for joy.
'And they're dead,' she said. ' All of them,' she added, with a glance at Sarl. 'Come… We must flee this fire.'
They moved with the quickness of looters racing dawn. She retrieved Squirrel, then paused at Xonghis to relieve him of the stolen Chorae, the one loose, the other affixed to a fletched shaft. Achamian gathered her
