clothing, threw a rotted cloak about her shoulders. Then together they stumbled and ran through the smoking galleries.
The mad Sergeant stayed, cradling the Captain's hoary head, rocking on his rump with laughter and congratulating his dead fellows.
'Kiampas! Eh? Kiampas! '
– | Night swallows the earth. Only the light of stubborn fires twinkles through the courtyards of the ruined Library.
Sitting on scorched earth, knee pressed against knee, they take Cleric's pouch and slowly press the inside out. They wet their fingers, run them along the residue. The black gathers into a thin crescent against the pad of their fingers. Out of some communal understanding, they reach across the meagre space between them, place their fingers upon the other's tongue.
Relief crashes through them as a tingling wave, leaving dizziness and nausea in its wake.
Qirri. Blessed Qirri.
They build a bier of charred wood and scrub, pile it as high as their shoulders. The corpse of the Nonman King they place upon it. They set it alight, watch the flame climb in shingles, until the illustrious form is engulfed in rushing fire. Then they climb into the starlit ruin of the Turret and descend into the absolute blackness of the Coffers. Achamian utters a Bar of Heaven, and the door of creation cracks open, revealing subterranean wrack and ruin.
'Should have used this earlier,' he mutters as the light fades from his eyes and mouth.
Mimara looks to him, clutching her shoulders against memories of Cil-Aujas.
'I could have saved more of my beard!' he explains with a rueful smile.
They labour by sorcerous light, wracked by a thirst and a hunger they do not feel. Deep into the night.
They find a shirt of ensorcelled mail, golden, as light as silk and as hard as nimil. Sheara, the Wizard calls it, 'Sun-skin,' a far antique gift from the School of Mihtrul. Mimara sheds her rags and dons it against her naked skin. Cinched about the waist it falls to her thighs, humming with a warmth all its own. She stows her Chorae in her boot to avoid killing the ancient magic. They find a bronze knife engraved with runes that glower in certain angles of light. This too Mimara takes, as a complement to poor Squirrel.
At last they find it, the golden map-case from Achamian's Dreams.
'It's broken,' he murmurs with something resembling horror.
She watches the Wizard pry apart the tubing, then gingerly draw out the vellum sheet curled within.
They emerge from the Turret looking like wraiths for the dust and filth that powders them. Dawn has broken. The walls loom dark and chill against the gold of the eastern sky. Tailings of smoke rise from random clutches of ash and charcoal. Silence rings through the waking chorus of birdsong.
The bier has burned down to a smoking heap. All that remains of Nil'giccas is his nimil hauberk, which lies unscathed save for black scorching. With wary fingers, the Wizard pulls it open, revealing the chalk of a different ash. Mimara gathers it along the edge of her new knife, spoons it with breathless care into the Nonman King's rune-stamped pouch…
'Look,' the Wizard says in a cracked voice.
She turns, sees a figure watching them from a cleft in the great outer wall. Sarl, she realizes after a heartbeat of ocular confusion, for hanging below the Sergeant's scrambled grin another face smiles. The Captain, she realizes with more numbness than horror. Sarl has braided the severed head's hair into his beard, so that the face swings about his groin, lips tented about an arrow shaft. A maniacal grimace.
'Sometimes the dead bounce!' she remembers the mad Sergeant crying on the ashen plains. 'Sometimes old men awaken behind the eyes of babes! Sometimes wolves…'
Sarl. The last surviving Skin Eater.
She finishes gathering the ash, and the Wizard pulls the nimil shirt from the heap. It smokes as he shakes it. He drapes it over the singed pelts that clad him. Too large, and without hooks or clasps, it hangs as a kind of cloak from his shoulders, black belied by a low, silvery glimmer.
Still propped between stone jaws, Sarl watches them from a distance. Sunlight warms the world beyond him.
Once again they sit knee to knee, as father and daughter. Once again they taste the other's finger. But this time the ash is more white than black, and the strength that shivers through them has a more melancholy tenor. The Captain and the mad Sergeant are still watching them when they turn.
Mimara gazes at him, thinking she should at least call out. But even from a distance she can see the blood painting the creases of his face. And the Captain's mood looks exceedingly foul.
'A real chopper!'
By some miracle an oak leaf falls before her, swinging to and fro through the air. She picks it out of emptiness. Purple lines vein the lobes of waxy green. Yielding to an unaccountable impulse, she takes Cleric's pouch and taps a small pile of ash into the bowl of the leaf, which she then folds around it. Gazing at Sarl, she sets the small packet upon a low marble stump jutting from the earth before her-an armless shoulder.
'What are you doing?' Achamian asks.
'I don't know.'
The scalper watches them, as taut and intent as any other starving animal. They hear a low-clucking gurgle…
Then horns, Sranc horns, pitch doom across the horizon. Mimara clutches her belly through her armour.
'Come,' she says to the old Wizard. 'I tire of Sauglish.'
INTERLUDE
The heroes among us, they are the true slaves. Thrust against the limits of mortality, they alone feel the bite of their shackles. So they rage. So they fight.
We only have as much freedom as we have slack in our chains. Only those who dare nothing are truly free.
Late Summer, 20 New Imperial Year (4132 Year-of-the-Tusk), Kuniuri
They flee through the forests and valleys of what was once Kuniuri, more exposed, more fugitive, than at any time in their tumultuous lives. A week passes before the skinnies find them.
Nights of madness follow.
She finds it strange the way they simply appear out of otherwise idyllic forests. Sranc. Famished mobs of them. They are like a nocturnal cancer, poisonous for not belonging. The Wizard explains their manufacture, how in ages lost the Inchoroi used the Tekne to pervert the Bios of the Nonmen. 'They coveted the world,' he says, 'so they fashioned a race that would spare it, creatures that would hunt their foes only, consuming the low things of the earth otherwise.'
The fugitive couple cleaves to the sun as much as possible during the days, but they are often attacked regardless. The old Wizard wants to walk above the mayhem, but she refuses to abandon her two Chorae. So each night they search for high places where they can huddle behind his Wards.
It is always the same. The old Wizard bids her to crouch at his side, to take care that she not let her Chorae stray too close to the circuit of his sorcerous defences. And he sings his mad-muttering song, assails their howling rush with wicked lights. They do not stop. They never stop, not even when the smoke of their burning bodies pillars the sky. They throw themselves at the glowing curves, shrieking and wheezing and hacking. Crude axes, hammers, and swords. Loose strips of iron for armour. Gibbering chieftains decked in what totems and heirlooms the brutes
