She pulled her fingertip from the pouch’s throat, held it in the light of the Nail. A woolen smudge of powder—ash, so fine as to dissolve in the least wind …
But the sky had forgotten how to breathe.
Not even an entire World of madmen could chart the infinite vagaries of belief and action. Thoughts, like legs, were joined at the hip. No matter how innumerable the tracks, no matter how crazed or inventive the soul, only what could be conceived could be seen. Logos, they had called it, the principle that bound step to step, that yoked what would be aimless to the scruple of some determinate destination. And this had been the greatest of the D?nyain’s follies, the slavish compliance to reason, for this was what had shackled them to the abject ignorance of their forefathers …
Logos.
“What is it?” the boy asked.
“Not for you,” the old Wizard snapped—with more vehemence than he intended, a fraction noted.
Reason was a skulking beggar, too timid to wander, to leap, and so doomed to scavenge the midden-heap of what had come before. Logos … They had called it light, only to find themselves blinded. They had made it their ancient, generational toil, confusing its infirmities for their own …
Thinking the human was the obscuring shroud.
She reached toward him, her palm down and her finger out so that he might take the tip of her finger between his lips. A fraction surprised her by clasping her wrist and guiding the powder to his nostril …
The inhalation was quick, sharp enough to make the old Wizard flinch. Anas?rimbor Mimara pulled her finger back, frowned in marvelling surprise.
“Ingestion delays onset,” a fraction explained. “This way …”
A lesser fraction blinked.
The Legion-within groaned, reeled, fumbled the World they bore as burdens upon their backs.
“This … This way …”
This way, boy … Follow me!
Cuts and cuts and cuts. Teeth cracking in the black, gnashing, chewing. A demonic chorus bubbles down through the corridors, filters through the descending levels, viscous with lust and fury—savage with desperation. What the darkness obscures, the darkness welds together as one. So they seemed a singular thing, the Shriekers, more insect than human.
Don’t leave me.
The child was defective, as the Assessor had predicted. A fraction gloated for the fact of Ishu?l’s undoing, knowing that the child had been saved … for … for …
For what?
Bestial and inhuman, grunting as they loped through the black, lost and starving, endless thousands of them, snorting the air, shrieking for the scent of vulnerability. In the early days, the surviving Brethren had set out pots of their own blood and excrement as lures, and the creatures swarmed to their own destruction—though the toll proved too high: one D?nyain for a thousand Shriekers. Scent hooked one, perhaps two, and the caterwauling seized the rest, the legions scattered through the chambered deep …
So it was always easy at first, fending them off, raising barricades of carcasses. Easy at first, impossible after. The Brethren abandoned the strategy, elected to flee, following the parse of fork and junction, using their intellect as their eyes, dividing their pursuers again and again—until the beasts were fractured into meagre bands. The boy had been suckled on such sounds, hearing his kind hunted to extinction beneath the very roots of the earth.
They would have cracked open his skull, had Ishu?l not fallen. The boy would have been pinned as all other Defectives were pinned to the subtlety of some forbidden affect, strapped for the scrutiny of others, nailed as if a drying hide to the outer expression of some inner frailty.
It was always easy at first.
I cannot breathe …
He danced through pitch blindness, climbed through the threshing of cleavers, climbed until he could climb no more.
Is this fear?
Sometimes he would pause and make a place, raise twitching ramparts. And sometimes he would run … not so much from as with the creatures, for he had learned to mimic them, the cadence of their galloping stride, the labial quaver of their snorts, their peeling screeches—everything save their stench. And it would drive them to the very pitch of frenzy, the scent of something almost human in their roiling midst, set them hacking the vacant black, killing one another …
Yes. Tell me what you feel.
Even then he had understood.
I shake. I cannot breathe.
Even then he had known that Cause had never been the D?nyain’s First Principle.
And what else?
And Logos even less.
My eyes weep … weep for want of light!
They had settled upon these things simply because they could be seen. Even then he had understood this.
Yes … This is fear.
Darkness was their ground, their foe and foundation.
What is it?
The shrieking black.
The most simple rule.
Cuts …
And cuts …
And cuts …