The look of a man, a murderous man, finding the shadowy centre of his enemy's web.
"Are you such a fool, Galian?" Mimara blurts aloud. The tension is too much.
But the former Columnary has eyes only for his Captain.
"You made your decision, just then," he says with a lolling smile. "Didn't you? You decided to kill me."
Lord Kosoter glares, a hoary king leaning from his stone chair. A dark, tyrannical figure, passing judgment on the fool capering before him.
"Before the slit called out," Galian presses. "That moment of silence… You thought to yourself, Kill the fool! "
There is a sudden viciousness to his intonation, and enough mimicry of the Captain's growling voice to send Pokwas laughing. Even Xonghis, who is working on his bow, grins in his enigmatic Jekki manner.
Horror bolts through her. She has just glimpsed the savage shape of what is about to happen. Conspiracy and conspirators both.
"But then you thought it before, haven't you, Captain? Every time you glimpsed me leaning with the others, something cried, 'Kill him!' in that cramp you call a soul."
The Captain remains utterly motionless, watching the Columnary's approach from his impromptu throne.
"As it turns out," Galian continues with bright humour, "we were leaning together in sedition…"
The Columnary comes to stop immediately before Lord Kosoter, easily within reach of his broadsword. A kind of boredom seems to glint in the Captain's eyes-as if mutiny were an old and tedious friend.
"And you should know that every time I glimpsed you…" Galian throws out his arms and, as if daring him to strike, leans forward in vindictive contempt. "I also heard something whisper, 'Kill him!' "
The arrow catches the Captain in the mouth. He jerks to his side as if slapped, staggers back two steps. He hangs there for a moment, spitting cracked teeth.
A cloud occludes the sun.
The Captain of the Skin Eaters, the man called Ironsoul, raises his face, not to the bowman, Xonghis, but to the bowman's maker, Galian. The shaft is visible. It skewers the lower half of his face, draws bearded skin tight. Blood spills from the ream of his bottom lip. His laughter sputters through it.
A sardonic glee, malevolent for its intensity, shines like sorcery in his eyes.
The second arrow thumps into his neck. He whirls to the side and around, as if a rope about his waist holds him staked in place. He hangs for an instant, like a thing made of wax. Then he slumps face first across the humus. A convulsive moment passes. He begins shaking, his limbs tossing with bonfire violence. A crazed, bestial scramble follows, as if an elemental wildness or disordered spirit has lain dormant within him, hidden, and only now could thrash free of human constraints.
His expression loose with horror, Galian draws his sword.
The Captain claws the leafy humus at the Columnary's feet, seizes a branch no thicker than two thumbs. His spine arches against his blooded hauberk. His head pulls back. He grimaces about his tented mouth, blows rage and spittle and blood. His eyes gleam like pearl. Snorting with effort and fury, he begins twisting and wrenching at the branch, as if it were the world's own spine-the one thing to be broken.
He roars.
Then his head is gone, bouncing about the tail of its caste-noble braid.
Silence-this time of visible things.
Mimara watches, breathless. Mortal, something cold whispers within her.
Mortal after all.
Strange, the way Qirri made hash of momentous things.
Omens of the world's end. The death of races… Standing in bare sunlight, it all seemed little more than beautiful paint, a kind of ornamentation.
The northern tower of the Muraw, the Library's forward gate, was scarce more than a mound. Wandering stretches of vertical blocks broke the slopes here and there, but otherwise it had ceased to exist. Inexplicably, the southern tower stood almost entirely intact, a cyclopean square that soared against the bald sky. Even the obsidian that had plated its base had survived. Turf and shrubs mounded its distant crown, and several tenacious trees hung rooted from its sides. Despite everything, a sudden, boyish urge to scale the tower struck the old Wizard, followed by a sense of exhausted longing.
There had been a time when he had spent days loafing among ruins far less significant than these. A time when his worries had been small enough to ignore.
Side by side, the old Wizard and the Nonman King strode into the Library's ruined precincts. The walls, or what remained of them, possessed the monumental feel of the Ziggurats in Shigek. In many cases trees, full grown yet bent and windswept, grew along their crests. Achamian could still recognize the Ursilaral, the central promenade where the One Thousand Gift-Shields had once hung, garish and beautiful, symbolizing the truce between the Sohonc and almost all the known tribes of White and High Norsirai. In Seswatha's day, the Library was often called the Citadel of Citadels because of its importance, certainly, but also because of its design: fortresses within fortresses, as if the outside were a kind of ocean, a flood to be fought chamber by grudging chamber. It possessed no fewer than nineteen courtyards, often call "pits" because of the height of the surrounding walls, with the Ursilaral, its length jawed by numerous gates, connecting most of them.
The morning sun had climbed high enough only to bathe portions of their overgrown floors so that Achamian and Cleric found themselves walking through dry shadow. The growth was mostly restricted to thickets and clutches of shrubs, forcing Achamian to follow Cleric as he hacked his way forward with his sword. Plumes of fluff swirled in dry-wind eddies. Clouds drifted across the oblong squares of blue sky above them. Bees tracked spiral courses through the air, becoming white dots when they passed into sunlight. The Wizard even glimpsed a hare bolting through the grasses.
The experience became increasingly surreal. At times the Wizard found himself staring at Cleric's labouring back, broad beneath its sheath of shining mail, wondering whether he should just attack the Nonman and be done with the suspense. At other times he played a kind of game guessing what was the ruin of what. Mounds became fountains. Rectangular breaks in walls became windows onto barracks, apartments, and scriptoriums.
And twice he caught himself squinting across the northeastern heights, looking for thunderheads massing black and terrible…
For the Whirlwind.
It was like walking through two worlds beyond the actuaclass="underline" the one the issue of his reading, the other the product of his Dreams. He was Achamian, exile and pariah, wearer of rotted pelts. And he was Seswatha, hero, Grandmaster of this place, both during the time when its fall was preposterous, laughable, and during the days of encroaching destruction.
"I saw these towers burn," he said in an old voice. "I saw these walls tumble."
The Nonman King paused, scanned his surroundings as if seeing the ruins about him for the very first time. Achamian wondered what it would be like, outliving great works of stone. When nations possessed the span of flowers, wouldn't everything seem but stages of ruin?
"All Ishterebinth lamented when word arrived," Cleric eventually said. "We knew then the World was doomed."
Achamian gazed at the Nonman King, pinned by an immovable melancholy.
"Why?" he asked. "Why would you lament our death when it was Men, not the Inchoroi, who destroyed all your great mansions?"
"Because we have always known we would not survive Men."
The Wizard smiled in recollection.
"Yes… Because our dooms are one."
At last, walking bent through a gate almost buried by the rising ground, they came to the Turret, the mighty citadel raised by Noshainrau the White. It was naught but an enormous ring of stone, broad enough to encase any of the great amphitheatres of Invishi or Carythusal. Pitted with bird-holes, the sloped walls rose some thirty or so cubits before cresting, a line of ragged ruin against blue sky. The shining bronze sheets were gone-the Skutiri. In Seswatha's day they had ringed the Turret's base, nine thousand, nine-hundred and ninety-nine of them, each taller than a man, and each scored with innumerable lines of sorcerous script. The sun shone imperturbable, drawing shadows across hanging nubs of stone. Wind whisked through leaves and grasses. Never, it seemed to the old Wizard, had the world seemed so lonely.