Masses of stone pummelled the Nonman's Wards, a rain of godlike fists.
The last shreds of light were pinched to utter black.
Ringing ears. The taste of dust.
"It has buried us," the Nonman King said in the clacking aftermath. "Shut us in."
– | She kicks off her boots.
She unties the laces of her jacket, pulls it back from her bare shoulders, lets it slide of its own weight down her arms. She shakes it from her wrists. It slumps across the humus.
She clasps her shift, winces at the reek of it as she draws it over her head. The swathes of down in her armpits tingle. Open air finds her breasts. Her nipples rise to the kissing breeze.
She unlaces her leather breeches. Wriggling, she pushes them below her knees. She steps from them. Open air finds her thighs… her sex.
She grabs the wire Circumfix-the one she found on the battlefield-hanging between her breasts. But she releases it, loathe to forsake the protection of symbols-even false ones.
Motionless, the scalpers gaze. Sarl gropes his crotch with his free hand. The Captain's head continues to glare from the crook of his arm. Even Koll, wasted to the very lip of death, watches with licentious hunger. They are but five, yet countless others seem to crowd them, making pews of the forested ruins, all gazing with lidless eyes, some in outrage, others with pity and hope, and still more with lust and crass desire.
She thought the Qirri would ease her passage, that it might have delivered her to the place where she had always hidden-for this was nothing new. But she was wrong. You have to be more than your motions to hide behind them, and she is not.
The Qirri has whittled her down to the bone of what happens.
She shudders with something deeper than shame, as if garments more profound than leather and fabric have been shed. The cloth of hope and flattery, perhaps-all the things she has called herself in the pursuit of her pain-numbing vanities. Sorceress. Princess. Warrior. All the lies she has conjured to hide the fact of her slavery.
For the first time, it seems, she is wholly what scripture has made of her-and nothing more. The quiver on the hip of the bowman. The pillow beneath the head of the king. She is chattel. She is sustenance. She is pleasure and progeny…
She is naked.
The two crouched for what seemed a hundred heartbeats after the clamour had settled, probing the cavernous black with pricked ears. They heard nothing, save the groan and clatter of settling debris.
Wielding ethereal geometries, the old Wizard and the Nonman King began heaving aside masses of rock and masonry. Throughout history, kings and princes had sought to bend the Few to menial tasks, to works that only the sweat and misery of thousands could otherwise accomplish. Roads. Fortifications. Temples. Wars had been fought to resist them. For men who could manipulate the very frame of existence, sorcerers, demanding such mean labour was nothing less than an outrage, akin to asking lords to wash the feet of beggars. As Tsotekara, the Grandmaster of the extinct Surartu, famously declared to Triamis the Great: to do as slaves was to be as slaves.
Even still, caprice demands all men, no matter how exalted their station, play the menial from time to time. Every sorcerer living knew some Cant adapted to the moving of earth.
The darkness clacked and roared with their excavations. The devastation of the Coffers stretched out behind them, easily outrunning their paltry light, a twilight world the old Wizard was loathe to consider, lest he recall the hopeless task of finding a single golden map-case amid such wrack and ruin. Only two columns stood that they could see; the others lay heaped and toppled like a felled forest. Shelves of rock continued to fall from the inverted cliffs and valleys hanging above, sporadically showering the blasted landscape with debris.
Huffing with effort, Achamian sank pinions into the mounded wreckage, raked it away with the flash of miracle lights. More debris would tumble into the gap he had cleared but never quite so much as he had removed. Braced on ever-uncertain footing-spilled gravel, canted lintels, or the curve of pillar drums-they thundered forward, dredging the entrance clear. When light at last rimmed the uppermost rocks before them, they paused to collect their breath and courage.
"The beast awaits us," Cleric said.
Achamian nodded. He could see fell Wutteat in his soul's eye, poised to flush the waiting passage with coiling fire. Ambush was a notorious tactic of the Wracu. For all their savage might, they were exceedingly intelligent and devious creatures-far more so than Sranc. They had no choice but to rush the burrow, somehow survive the sum of its power…
"One of us must shield," he said, "while the other casts into the fire."
The Nonman King began to nod, then whirled toward the darkness behind them.
Frowning, Achamian followed his gaze into the high void, peered squinting. He raised a thumb to scratch away a fleck of grit…
It breached the light-smoke that became a ghost that became shining, bestial reality-its claws outstretched, its wings hooked about emptiness, its horn-crowned head vanishing behind gaping jaws…
The ancient dragon dropped out of the blackness. Achamian threw up futile arms.
Conflagration.
The men stare at her, speechless.
"What do you see?" she asks.
Her voice seems to jar them. Galian's face darkens in unaccountable rage.
"See?" he cries, his face twitching about a compulsive blink. "I see a world of plunder. You… The Coffers yonder… And when we return, every delicacy, every peach, and every silk pillow in the Three Seas! I see a tasty world, my little Whore-Imperial, and I intend to feast!"
Whore. The word stirs something within her, a habit long forgotten. She knows this, knows how to bridle and ride the crazed passions of men…
"And your soul?" she asks without passion. "What of your soul?"
"Will be no worse for pillaging a witch, I assure you."
"And pillaging," Pokwas laughs from his side. There is something lecherous and angular in the Zeumi Sword-dancer's bearing, as if he leans over legs already prised open. She can even see the curve of his phallus through his breeches. "And pillaging… and pillaging…"
Galian strides toward her.
She wracks her soul, searching for the hate that has always been the engine of her strength, but she can only summon moments of tenderness and love. She smiles, blinking tears. She draws the curve of her belly into warm palms. This is the first time, it seems, that she dares clutch, dares the making real that comes with grasping.
Hello, little one…
He grabs her throat, turns her head from side to side.
"Sweet Sejenus…" he murmurs with an almost tender breath. "You are a true beauty… A pity about the maggot."
"Maggot?" she gasps.
"The grub you carry in your womb."
Tears spill from her eyes. "What about it?" she asks about a sob.
The Columnary leans close enough to lick her face. "I fear it will not survive me."
"No! Plea-!"
"No indeed!" he cries with renewed cruelty. "No worms in our peaches, eh, boys?"
Once again Pokwas and Xonghis laugh, this time like nervous adolescents. They have been led and they have been drawn. They have stumbled across obsessed-over boundaries, only to find themselves thinking unthinkable things.
Yatwer… Dear Goddess, please…