He did not so much see those below as he remembered them. Refugees packing the rooftops, watching the slow advance of doom. Fathers casting their own babes to the hard cobble of the streets. Mothers cutting their children's throats-anything to save them from the fury of the Sranc. Slaves and chieftains howling, crying out to heavens shut against them. The broken staring into the dread west, numb to everything save the whirlwind's roping approach…
Their High-King was dead. The wombs of their wives and their daughters had become graves. The greatest of their thanes and chieftain-knights, the flower of their armed might, had been struck down. Pillars of smoke scored the distance across the earth's very curve.
The world was ending.
Like choking. Like drowning. Like a weight without substance, sinking cold through him, a knife drawn from the snow, even as he fell slack into its bottomless regions. Friends, brothers, shaken apart in grinning jaws. Strangers flailing in fiery blooms. Towers leaning like drunks before crashing. Sranc encrusting distant walls, like ants on slices of apple, loping into the maze of streets. The cries, shrieks, screams-thousands of them rising like steam from burning stones. Sauglish dying.
Hopelessness… Futility.
Never, it seemed, had he dreamed a passion with such vehemence.
Undone, the surviving Sohonc fled the skies, took shelter in the Library with its net of great square towers. Batteries of ballistae covered their retreat, and several of the younger Wracu foundered, harpooned. Achamian stood abandoned in the sky, gazing at mighty Skafra, scars like capstan rope, limbs like sinuous timbers, and leprous wings beating, obscuring the distant No-God with every laborious whump-whump. The ancient Wracu grinned its lipless dragon grin, scanned the near distances with eyes of bloody pearl…
And somehow, miraculously, looked through him.
Skafra, near enough for his bulk to trigger bodily terror. Achamian stared helplessly at the creature, watched the bright crimson of its rage drain from its scales and the rising blooms of black that signified dark contemplation. The conflagration below glittered across its chitinous lines, and Achamian's eyes were drawn downward, to the plummet beneath his feet.
The sight of the Holy Library burning stuck pins into his eyes. Beloved stone! The great walls sheathed in obsidian along their sloped foundations, rising high and white above. The copper roofs, stacked like massive skirts. And the deep courtyards, so that from the sky the structure resembled the halved heart of some vast and intricate beast. Sunbright sputum washed across ensorcelled stone, knifed through seams and cracks. Dragonfire rained across the circuit, a spray of thunderous eruptions.
But where? Where was Seswatha? How could he dream without-
The old Wizard awoke crying out thoughts from the end of a different world. Sauglish! We have lost Sauglish!
But as his eyes sorted the darkness of his room from the afterimages, and his ears dredged the roar of the falls from the death-throe thunder, it seemed he could hear the madwoman… Mimara.
"You have become a prophet…" Was that not what she had said?
"A prophet of the past."
The next day Sarl collected Achamian and brought him to what must have been one of the Cocked Leg's largest rooms. Though he moved with the same spry impatience, the old cutthroat seemed surprisingly quiet. Whether this was due to the previous night's drink or discussion, Achamian could not readily tell.
Another man awaited them in addition to Kosoter and Cleric: a middle-aged Nansur named Kiampas. If Sarl was the Captain's mouth, then Kiampas, Achamian realized, was his hand. Clean-shaven and elegantly featured, he looked somewhat younger than the fifty or so years Achamian eventually credited to him. He was definitely more soldier than warrior. He had a wry, methodical air that suggested melancholy as much as competence. Because of this, Achamian found himself almost instantly trusting both his instincts and his acumen. As a former Imperial Officer, Kiampas was a devotee of plans and the resources required to bring them to fruition. Such men usually left the issue of overarching goals to their superiors, but after listening to Achamian explain the mission to come, his manner betrayed obvious doubt if not out-and-out dismay.
"So just when did you hope to reach these ruins?" His speech had a well-practised insistence-a first-things-first air-that spoke of many long campaigns.
"The Wards protecting the Coffers are peculiar," Achamian lied, "geared to the heavenly spheres. We must reach Sauglish before the autumn solstice."
All eyes raked him, searching, it seemed, for the telltale glow of deceit in the blank coals of his face.
"Sweet Sejenus!" Kiampas cried in disbelief. "The end of summer?"
"It's imperative."
"Impossible. It can't be done!"
"Yes," the Captain grated, "it can."
Kiampas paled, seemed to glance down in unconscious apology. Though he was cut of different cloth entirely, Achamian wasn't surprised to see him sharing Sarl's reaction to the chest-tightening rarity of their Captain's voice.
"Well then," the Nansur continued, apparently searching for his equilibrium in the matter at hand. "The choice of routes is straightforward then. We should travel through Galeoth, up through-"
"That cannot be done," Achamian interrupted.
The studied lack of expression on Kiampas's face would be Achamian's first glimpse of the man's escalating disdain.
"And what route do you suggest?"
"Along the back of the Osthwai."
"The back of the…" The man possessed a sneering side, but then, so did most ironic souls. "Are you fucking mad? Do you realize-"
"I cannot travel anywhere in the New Empire," Achamian said, genuinely penitent. Of all the Skin Eaters he had met thus far, Kiampas was the only one he was prepared to trust, if only at a procedural level. "Ask Lord Kosoter. He knows who I am."
Apparently the lack of contradiction in the Captain's glare was confirmation enough.
"So you wish to avoid the Aspect-Emperor," Kiampas continued. Achamian did not like the way his eyes drifted to the Captain as he said this.
"What of it?"
His impertinent smile was rendered all the more injurious by the dignity of his features. "Rumour has it Sakarpus has fallen, that the Great Ordeal even now marches northward."
He was saying they would have to cross the New Empire no matter what. Achamian bowed his face to the jnanic degree that acknowledged a point taken. He knew how absurd he must look, an old, wild-haired hermit dressed in a beggar's tunic, aping the etiquette of a faraway caste-nobility. Even still, this was a courtesy he had yet to extend to any of the others; he wanted Kiampas to know that he respected both him and his misgivings.
Something told him he would need allies in the weeks and months to come.
"Look," Achamian replied. "Were it not for the Great Ordeal, an expedition such as this would be madness. This is perhaps the one time, the only time, that something like this can be attempted! But just because the Aspect-Emperor clears our way, doesn't mean we must cross his path. He shall be far ahead of us, mark me."
Kiampas was having none of it. "The Captain tells me you're a fellow Veteran, that you belonged to the First Holy War. That means you know full well the sluggish and capricious ways of great hosts on the march."
"Sauglish lies out of their way," Achamian said evenly. "The chances of encountering any Men of the Circumfix are exceedingly slim."
Kiampas nodded with slow skepticism, then leaned back, as if retreating from some disagreeable scent.
The smell of futility, perhaps.
After that second meeting, the watches of the day and the days of the week passed quickly. Lord Kosoter commanded a muster of the full company the following morning. The Skin Eaters assembled among the posts of old Marrow, far enough from the mists for their jerkins to harden in the sun. They were a motley group, some sixty or so strong, sporting all manner of armour and weaponry. Some were fastidious, obviously intent on reclaiming as much civilization as they could during their brief tenure in Marrow. One was even decked in the crisp white gowns of a Nilnameshi caste-noble and seemed almost comically concerned with the mud staining his crimson-threaded hems. Others were savage-slovenly, bearing the stamp of their inhuman quarry, to the point of almost resembling Sranc in the case of some. A great many seemed to have adopted the Thunyeri custom of wearing shrunken heads as adornment, either about their girdles or sewn into the lacquered faces of their shields. Otherwise, the only thing they seemed to share in common was a kind of deep spiritual fatigue and, of course, an abiding, almost reverential fear of their Captain.