But the fascination wilted as quickly as it had sparked. Achamian found himself swaying on his feet, light-headed, as if he had leapt too quickly from a slumber. Mimara also stumbled, brought both hands to her forehead, held them like a tent over her brows. Several mules spooked, stamped and jerked against their ropes. There was more than the ache of ages in the air. There was… something else, a lack of some kind, running perpendicular to the geometry of the real, bowing its lines with its cavernous suck. Something that whispered from the blackness between the graven beasts.
Something abyssal.
The gate swam in the Wizard's eyes, not so much a portal as a hole.
Without warning, Cleric's light waxed, bleached the heights of stone. Shadows crawled from the great wolf snouts hanging above. The Nonman turned before the entrance, blasted by illumination. Several raised their hands against the glare.
His voice seemed to boom into the surrounding darkness.
"Kneel…"
The Skin Eaters stared at him dumbstruck, watched as he slumped to his knees. For a heartbeat his eyes glared without focus, then he looked to the Men standing about him, his expression slowly tightening. Pained lines climbed his scalp.
"Kneel!" he shrieked.
Sarl cackled, though the smile that broke his barbed goatee seemed far from amused. "Cleric. Come now…"
"This was the war that broke our back!" the Nonman thundered. "This… This! All the Last Born, sires and sons, gathered beneath the copper banners of Siol and her flint-hearted King. Silverteeth! Our Tyrant-Saviour…" He rolled his head back and laughed. Two lines of white marked the tears that scored his cheeks. "This is our…" The flash of fused teeth. "Our triumph."
He shrunk, seemed to huddle into his cupped palms. Great silent sobs wracked him.
Looks were exchanged, short-lived with embarrassment. There was something eerie about the light, apart from the way it hung sourceless above them, something that rendered each of them in a distinct cast of brilliance. Perhaps it was the black walls, or the curls of white refracted across the polish of innumerable figures, but none of the shadows seemed to match up. It was as if everyone stood in the unique light of some different morning, noon, or twilight. Perhaps it was his race, or maybe it was his pose, but only Cleric seemed to belong.
Lord Kosoter crouched at his side, placed a hand on his broad back, began muttering something inaudible. Kiampas stared at the floor. Sarl looked about, eyes darting, apparently more unnerved by this act of intimacy than by the substance of Cleric's words.
"Yessss!" the Nonman hissed, as though grasping something essential and overlooked.
"This is just a fucking place," Sarl growled. "Just another fucking place…"
All of them could feel it, Achamian realized, looking from face to stricken face. Some kind of dolour, like the smoke of some hidden, panicked fire, pinching them, drawing their thoughts tight… But there was no glamour he could sense. Even the finest sorceries carried some residue of their artifice, the stain of the Mark. But there was nothing here, save the odour of ancient magicks, long dead.
Then, with a bolt of horror, he understood: The tragedy that had ruined these halls stalked them still. Cil-Aujas was a topos. A place where hell leaned heavy against the world.
He turned to Mimara, surprised to find himself gripping her hand. "Haunted," he murmured in reply to her wondering eyes. "This place-"
"Listen," Kiampas called, apparently in the grip of some abrupt resolution. "Stow your tongues-all of you! You saw the marks at the gate, all the companies that have vanished into this place. Granted, they didn't have Cleric, they didn't have a guide, but the fact remains they vanished. Maybe they lost their way, or maybe the skinnies got them. Either way, this is a slog, boys, as deadly as any other. From here on in, we march at the ready, you understand?"
"He's right," Xonghis called from the gloom to their rear. He was crouched near the wall, his Jekki pack high on his shoulders, his mailed forearms pressed against his knees. He reached to the ground before him, raised a long bone from the dust, something that could have belonged to a dog. "Dead skinny," he said. He held it to the light, then peered through it like a tube: The knobs at either end had been snapped off. He turned to the rest of the company, shrugged. "Something was hungry."
The scalpers looked around, cursed at the sight of bones scattered everywhere, like the remains of some forgotten flood, sticks beneath silt. Lord Kosoter continued to mutter in Cleric's ear, a grinding discourse, full of hate. The words "miserable wretch" climbed into clarity. Achamian found himself staring into the black portal between the towering wolves, expecting, any moment now, something…
When he blinked, he saw yammering figures from his Dreams.
"Sranc?" one of the Galeoth scalpers cried-Hoat. "What eats Sranc?" He had to be the youngest of the Skin Eaters, his body still hooked by an adolescent ranginess.
Every one of them, Achamian realized, every company that had dared these halls. All of them had paused before this broken gate and suffered the very same premonition. And still they marched onward, carrying their war, whatever it was, deeper, deeper…
Never to be seen again.
"Where are the doors?" Galian blurted. He looked around in the quarrelsome manner that some use to conceal their fright. "What does it mean? Gates without doors?"
But questions always came too late. Events had to be pushed passed the point of denial; only then could the pain of asking begin.
They spent their first night in the grand chamber beyond the Wolf Gate. Achamian hung his sorcerous light high in the air, an abstract point of brilliance that illuminated the ceiling and the finned capitals of the pillars ascending about them. The light seemed to creep down, dim enough to be shut out by closed eyes, expansive enough to provide the illusion of security. Alien images glared from on high, their recesses inked in utter black.
True to his word, Kiampas organized shifts and posted sentries along their perimeter of light. Cleric sat alone on the dust and stone, gazing into the passageway they would take upon waking. Lord Kosoter stretched across his mat and seemed to fall instantly asleep, even though Sarl sat cross-legged at his side, muttering inanity after inanity, pausing only to cackle at the turns of his own wit. The rest of the company formed sullen clots across the floor, tossing on their mats or sitting and talking in low tones. Their crowd of mules stood in the nearby shadows, looking absurd against the surrounding grandeur.
The air remained chill enough to fog deep exhalations.
Achamian sat next to Mimara with his back against one of the columns. For the longest time she seemed transfixed by the light, staring endlessly at its silver flare.
"The script," she said, her voice thick from disuse. "Can you read it?"
"No."
An inaudible snort. "The all-knowing Wizard…"
"No one can read it."
"Ah… I was worried I had misjudged you."
He looked at her prepared to scowl, but the mischief in her eyes demanded he chuckle. A great weight seemed to fall through him.
"Remember this, Mimara."
"Remember what?"
"This place."
"Why?"
"Because it's old. Older than old."
"Older than him?" she asked, nodding toward the figure of Cleric sitting in the pillared gloom.
His momentary sense of generosity drained away. "Far older."
A moment passed, suffused by the low tingle of repose in perilous circumstances-a dripping sense of doom. Mimara continued her furtive examination of Cleric.
"What's wrong with him?" she eventually whispered.
He did not want to think of the Nonman, Achamian realized, let alone speak of him. Travelling with an Erratic was every bit as perilous as traveling these halls, if not more so. A fact that begged the forbidden question: How much would Achamian risk to see his obsession through? How many souls would he doom?