Cnaiür towered over the two Ketyai, greased for sweat, surreal for the white grill of scars shining in firelight.
“Bah! My ends are my own, and my trust has long rotted to dust and bone. My prize belongs to me in ways you cannot know! But what of you? What of your prize, pick?” He even spat the slur with a Tydonni chirrup, an evil little memento of the First Holy War. “How can you seize what you cannot even see?”
“So you propose to outwit the Consult?” Achamian cried, appalled as much as alarmed. “Is that what yo—?”
“I outwitted a D?nyain!” the mad Scylvendi roared. “I murdered one! No soul is so devious with hate, so mazed with furies as me!”
The old Wizard and the pregnant woman shrank from his slicked aspect, the titanic sum of his rage and hulking frame.
“Twenty summers!” he boomed. “Twenty summers have passed since I stole into your tent, and told you, as I dandled your life between my thumb and finger, the Truth—the Truth of him! Twenty winters have thawed, and now you find yourself in my tent, sorcerer, every bit as lost, as baffled and dismayed!”
The mad Scylvendi’s voice cracked like flint, roared of a piece with the fire.
“Every bit as blind to the darkness that comes before!”
He ran, sketched impossible figures through the air, twisting like a snake thrown between swatting swords. More and more he heard the thrum of bows, the zip of archery criss-crossing the emptiness. The whole host seemed to descend upon the regions about him, until all was erratic torchlight and roiling commotion. But he could hear the nearing limit, the infinite well of the wilderness, plunging off in all directions, the promise of solitary flight …
A single turn was all it took.
He would have paused, so certain was he of this newfound invulnerability. He would have fashioned impenetrable armour out of their ignorance, returned to find his companions …
Were it not for the woman—the thing—flying like a silk scrap on a tempest behind him, gaining …
He resumed sprinting across the forest floor. The ground became cramped. Elms and walnuts thinning. Stone breaching. Still she gained, and he pressed harder, sacrificing endurance for flight. The canopy became leprous, scum across the crystalline deep. Beneath, the nocturnal terrain bobbed like chips of wood upon the flood, trees and ground rising, rushing, sweeping into the oblivion of what once was …
And still she gained.
He had fled like this before. Eleven times.
And though the blindness of the Thousand Thousand Halls had been absolute, his memories were of silver, screeching and grunting, silver twining like fish through the deep, dividing rather than deciding, and so halved by each and every forking passage, until they became a fog of pathetic individuals. He had clung to the Survivor’s back the first seven occasions, monkey-clinging, whooping to a glee he could never quite feel, buoyant, air whistling through his ears, snapping his robes, blood … exploding …
The fact of the Survivor’s power had been something unquestioned—unthought. Things lifted, dropped. The Survivor conquered—always and everything. He had never supposed they could be defeated, that they could succumb to the bestial frenzy. But then he had never supposed the Shriekers would dwindle and vanish, the last of their silver screams eaten by the labyrinthine black. He had never supposed there could be such a thing as sun.
The Survivor survived—always …
The Survivor protected. Made safe.
The madness worsens?
The forest whipped about his running, a weave of nocturnal complexities falling into oblivion.
She was faster, the blond-haired thing. Hers was the deeper wind. He need only attend to the blank behind him to know, to the chitinous cadence of her strides, the advancing tick …
He was not sure when the weeping began. He never was. He was not sure what the feeling was, though he had seen it innumerable times on the faces of the old man and his pregnant woman.
Never on that of the Survivor.
“I hear your blubbering!” it screeched in the tongue of the D?nyain, baiting a pride he did not possess.
The rushing of things near, ground like flying moss; the ominous creep of scarps along his flank. The thing commanded Phusis—there could be no question. Logos was his only refuge …
The Logos was his now.
Things were simple … or could be.
“I smell your terror!”
The boy struck for the cliffs. Terror? a fraction asked.
No. Not terror.
Fury?
The thing-called-Serw? limped back to the White Yaksh, which remained standing despite the white brilliance of dawn.
Cnaiür urs Ski?tha, King-of-Tribes, most violent of all Men, awaited within.
They regarded each other for a time, the Man and his monstrous lover.
“You let them go free,” the thing-called-Serw? said, dripping blood.
The aging Scylvendi warrior stood, revealed the strapped and scarred glory of his near-naked form.
It licked swollen lips. “What did the Wizard say?”