Madness. Madness and more madness.
But there was always more world than explanation. To come so far… so close… There was no turning from this place.
"May I beg but one dispensation?" Achamian cried.
A hissing pause. "Grasping," the dead beast said, shadowy and mountainous. "Men are forever grasping."
"I search for a map," the old Wizard said.
Cleric regarded him.
"Turn from this place, mortal. I will not part with the merest fraction of my hoard."
"But what use could you have of trinkets and baubles?"
"To lure fools such as you! Turn from this place- turn! Come to me when the world has truly ended."
"I will not!" the old Wizard cried, casting his frail voice against the Dragon's booming echo. Thought and passion raced panicked through his soul. All at once, he found himself marvelling at his own stubborn courage, weighing the mad consequences of his baiting, and wondering-wondering most of all-that a Dragon could be dead, yet speak and breath still…
"I cannot!"
The Wracu laughed, a sound like a thousand hacking lungs.
"Avarice and necessity are ever confused in the souls of men."
"No… No! Necessity alone drives me!"
"So does fancy become scripture…"
The old Wizard grappled with his anger, the urge to retort. The Coffers! he reminded himself, hearing Sarl's crazed voice as he did so. The Coffers!
"So does greed become God."
In a blink, it seemed, he saw through the fog of the intervening weeks and the lies that accumulated in his veins. In a heartbeat, the confusion that was Qirri vanished, leaving windswept fact in its wake. He had murdered men with his fictions, imperilled the woman he loved-he had marched across the desolate bosom of Earwa- for this moment, this very encounter.
It happens…
He breathed deep, held the foul air against his hammering heart.
"A bargain then!" he cried in sudden inspiration. "I would strike a bargain with you!"
The grating of coiled limbs. The heaving of air through rotting windpipes.
"What could you have that I might desire, mortal?"
The old Wizard clawed his scalp.
"Truth… Truth is all I have."
The Wracu raised its bulk from the heap's summit, wagged its enormous crown in the air.
"Yessss… you reek of suffering…"
As deep as graves, the eyeless sockets fixed on the old Wizard.
"I smell deeds long dead, and fears- immortal fears. Perhaps you possess riches after all…"
It creaked forward, loosing tiny landslides of debris and treasure.
"Truth it is, manling."
It descended its miserly summit, then more than two elephants tall at the shoulder stalked the blackness beyond the immediate pillars, dragging ruin in its wake.
"Show me one truth, and you shall have your merest fraction."
Achamian retreated, fairly stumbled doing so. "I–I'm not sure how to begin."
He glimpsed its dead-grinning maw between columns.
"Whatis this map you seek?"
The will to lie leaned hard against the old Wizard's thought, but he resisted, understanding that the beast before him was as much spirit as flesh… Who can say what the dead hear, when their ears are pricked to the voices of the living?
So he began describing his Dreams, the way Anasurimbor Celmomas had charged Seswatha with the map to Ishual, the final refuge of the ancient Kuniuric High-Kings. But he quickly became tangled in words. Every name he mentioned, required more names to be explained-names piled upon names, all begging explanation.
The eyeless creature yawned, revealing the furnace that smouldered within the dead hull of its frame. " Truth is our bargain," it rumbled, croaking out of the blackness. The head, cadaverous and crocodilian, leaned forward menacingly. "What is this map you seek?"
The old Wizard blinked at the monstrous spectre, chewed his bottom lip…
"Vengeance," he said.
"And whom do you seek to murder?"
"Anasurimbor Kellhus, the Aspect-Emperor."
"And his crime? What indignity did he inflict upon you?"
Instead of glimpsing Esmenet, the old Wizard saw Mimara in his soul's eye, pregnant and derelict, a prisoner of the Captain. If he failed here… If he stumbled…
"Enough!" he cried. "You have your truth!"
"Is not truth infinite?"
Mucus snapping like bowstrings.
"Yes, bu-"
"Is!"
The great bulk stamped forward one step, fissuring stone…
"Not!"
The iron-horned chin dropped, as a wolf…
"Truth!"
Fire wicked from carcass nostrils…
"Infinite?"
The pillared landscape hummed with reverberations. Sulphur and rot settled as a mist through the black. The old Wizard fairly cried out for sudden weight of Cleric's hand on his shoulder.
"He plays you," the Nonman said, his face white and serene. "There is no separating him from his hoard. He is too wicked, and he has slumbered here too long…"
The Last Nonman King turned back toward the scaled abomination.
"He?" Achamian asked witless.
"Wutteat."
Like some beast in nocturnal seas, the Wracu shrank into the darkness. Laughter like sloughing cliffsides crashed through the ancient hollows.
"He dies from the outside," Cleric said, "because Hell sustains him from within."
"Cunning…" the Wracu groaned out from the black.
"Cunning-cunning Ishroi!"
"I have seen this before," Nil'giccas said, peering after the thing. He turned to the old Wizard and smiled. "I remember."
Achamian gazed at the Nonman, found himself wondering who was more hoary, more impossible: the ancient, undead Dragon or the ancient, inhuman King.
"So what do we do?"
Something resembling dark humour flashed in the Nonman's eyes. Without explanation, he began picking his way toward the wheezing blackness.
"Run," he called to the old Wizard behind him. "Save them while you still can."
"Them?"
A passing glance over his nimil-armoured shoulder.
"Your wife and child."
Like most dwellings in the slums of Carythusal, the Worm, the brothel Mimara had lived in was walled against everything surrounding and open only within. Two mercenaries-little more than thugs, really-manned the entrance, festooned with ornamental menace. Every mouth needs fangs. But once past them, all was carpeted invitation. Gold paint. Garish tapestries representing battles that may or may not have happened. Incense and obscure liquors. Sunlight showered the courtyard gardens. Patrons reclined on embroidered settees in the reception hall, talking and laughing in low, shameless voices…
Their eyes flicking to and fro, as if counting the bare-chested children.
The bedding cells lined the eastward wall, as demanded by luck and tradition. Despite her price she would be chosen. She was always chosen. Leading him by a single, callus-horned finger, she would hear grunts and whimpers and moans, and sometimes shrieks and sobs. A kind of numbness would own her, and she would flatten against her motions as if against a wall in a slice of shadow. And she would be hidden, even as she scampered nude before the lecherous eyes of many.
Very similar to Qirri, when she thought about it, watching Galian's hanging grin.
Perhaps this would be easy… dying.
The old Wizard did not flee. He found himself chasing the Nonman King instead, muttering Wards as he tripped across the floors. With every step the Nonman King dragged his Surillic Point with him, illuminating the wasted interior of the Coffers.