"The sorcery here is very old, very weak," the Nonman said.
Did he remember Lord Kosoter's earlier charge? Could he?
Was he accusing him of lying?
"The Coffers lie beneath these ruins," Achamian replied. "The Wards protecting it are buried deep… and quite ageless, I assure you."
Perhaps now was the time to strike.
No. Not until he knew for sure he wouldn't need the Nonman's strength.
The Turret's original gate was lost beneath ramped debris. They fought their way through a mass of scrub, then began climbing.
Of all his memories of the Holy Library, the final days lived most fiercely in Achamian's memory. Always the No-God was there… like a nagging sense, a direction steeped in dread, as if one point on the compass had been honed sharp enough to draw a gasp from his lungs. He would walk the walls and verandas and feel it… there… sometimes stationary for days on end, but always moving sooner or later-always coming closer.
And when the wind was right, he would hear the wailing of bereaved mothers from the city below.
Stillborn… Every infant stillborn.
The old Wizard stopped mid-ascent, leaned against pitted stone to recover his wind. Many years had passed since he last felt the horror that was Mog-Pharau while awake. The gaping sense of futility and loss, of things crashing, not here or there, but everywhere. The immobility of heart as much as limb or will. The horizon itself had become a revelation, taking you out of yourself and binding you to a world of dying things.
It dogged the old Wizard as he continued climbing, a great shadow lurking in his periphery, a sky-staining malevolence that leapt into existence whenever he glanced away. And the conviction that all Mankind shared the very same premonition.
Cleric stood atop the summit. The ruined walls reached to either side of him, thick enough to house pockets of grasses and shrub along their summit, climbing and dropping according to the logic of things wrecked for the passage of years.
"Something is amiss," he called down to the huffing Wizard.
He extended a hand in assistance as Achamian clambered near. There was a surprising reassurance in his grip, as if their bodies recognized a kinship too primitive not to be overlooked by their souls.
Leaning against his knees to catch his breath, the old Wizard surveyed the Turret's vacant interior. He suffered the same knee-wobbling sense of vertigo he always suffered when he found himself standing high upon fallen works. Swallows battled about the curve of the inner walls. The ages had entirely gutted the citadel, leaving only what resembled an absurdly immense granary. But he had expected as much.
What he had not expected was the great pit yawning below…
Rubble heaped about the inner foundations, making a funnel of the ground. The cracked rim of floors broken, exposing wasp-nest hollows, each a level of the Turret's cellars. Then obdurate blackness at the bottom.
"Do you smell that?" Achamian asked, frowning in disbelief.
"Yes," the Nonman King replied. "Sulphur."
She is not sure when she resumes breathing. The remaining Skin Eaters-the sane ones, anyway-immediately fall to arguing.
Galian instructs Sarl to watch her, which he does with a kind of crazed reluctance. She and the mad Sergeant take turns gazing at the Captain in disbelief. At one point, Sarl grasps the very branch that Lord Kosoter had tried to snap in his final moment. Crouching a pace away, he uses it to poke at his dead Captain's face. He presses the tip against the waxen forehead, rolls the face skyward, then jumps when it slips and rocks back to face him.
He turns to Mimara and cackles.
"He's not dead," he says like a drunk keen to slur some fact that others thought obvious. "Not the Captain, no…"
Shouts climb from the near distance. Pokwas is jabbing Galian's shoulder with a long finger.
"He's too hard for Hell."
It was like climbing down a monstrous rabbit hole.
A strange anxiousness dogged the old Wizard as the brightness climbed in stages above him. The pit fell at an angle instead of dropping vertically, opening about a ramp of packed debris and earth, like a burrow that was at once a road into the underworld. The Turret's cellars formed a kind of pitched roof above them, three distinct levels of corridors halved and chambers cracked open like eggs.
The depths opened before them, steeped in sulphurous mystery.
"Look…" Cleric said, motioning toward the side of the tunnel.
But Achamian had already glimpsed them in the grey light. Three gashes hooked like scythes: the centre one the longest, the innermost curving within its compass, while the outermost arced away at an angle.
Achamian immediately recognized the mark: any Man in the Three Seas would have. The Three Sickles had been a common heraldic device since Far Antiquity-the symbol adopted by Triamis the Great.
The scoring of long-curved claws…
The spoor of Dragons.
A profound ache climbs out from her back, roots itself in her knees and neck. But still she sits hugging her shins. She cannot move.
Galian returns, leading the others. Sarl scampers from his path, his Captain's head clutched tight to his chest.
"So what are you going to do?" she asks the Columnary.
"We're going to wait for Cleric to return. Then we're going to relieve him of that pretty pouch."
Xonghis has already yanked the two Chorae from beneath Lord Kosoter's hauberk.
Galian smiles at her in the leering manner she knows all too well. "In the meantime," he says, "we are going to feast on the banquet the gods have delivered to us."
Her look is so sour, it seems a miracle that he can grin.
"Feast… On what?"
The day is dry and bright-beautiful. Wind falls through the lazy tree-tops, shushing the bestiary that is the world. Blood clots across the leaves.
"Peaches, my sweet. Peaches."
Skidding on their rumps, the old Wizard and the Nonman King followed the burrow into airy darkness-the antechamber to the Coffers. The Upper Pausal had been reduced to balconies hanging amputated in the black. Debris choked the floors of the Pausal proper, heaped toward the sides by the passage of some monstrous bulk. Achamian shuddered, glimpsing what was left of the Nonman friezes that adorned its walls-memories of Cil-Aujas, he supposed. The Great Gate of Wheels had been obliterated; he could see its ensorcelled remains scattered through the ruin: the marmoreal white of broken incantation wheels, the chapped green of bronze cams and fittings.
Raw blackness gaped before him.
So, a dull and long-suffering portion of his soul murmured, the Coffers have been looted.
He stood motionless, gazing in abject dismay.
So much suffered… So many dead…
For nothing.
The great refrain of his miserable life.
The madness, when he pondered it, was that he had believed it could be otherwise, that he would trek all this distance- survive this far — and actually find the Coffers intact, the map to Ishual waiting for him like a low-hanging plum. He almost laughed aloud for thinking it, the thought that Fate might be kind.
This, he realized-this was what his fate had been all along. Snared in the machinations of his enemy, who had known his mission even before he had tripped across it. Confronted with the preposterous issue of his preposterous hopes. He had sought truth and had been delivered to madmen and a Dragon instead-a Dragon!