He advanced on the thing, reached out and seized it by the hair, bent its face back beneath his wrath.
“That I must fathom your loyalties …”
His crazed visage floated above white-rolling eyes. It began trembling.
“What happened to the Anas?rimbor?” the King-of-Tribes asked.
It went limp against his cruel grip. “He cast a stone”—tongue testing teeth—“struck me from the cliffs.”
“How …” A sneer that was a sob twisted his expression. “How can I trust you?”
It hooked a lithe leg about his thigh, pressed the arch of its lust against him.
Cnaiür urs Ski?tha groaned, raised a great hand to her throat.
“Drink from my cup,” it cooed. “Taste … Fathom …”
The hand closed upon its windpipe. The White Yaksh creaked about the force of his rage and anguish.
“Ishu?l has fallen!” the King-of-Tribes screamed, heaving his slack-limbed lover from its feet, shaking it against the light.
“Fallen!”
He tossed it to earth …
Tugged loose the cloth about his inflamed loins.
The caw, rumble, and holler of the barbarian host receded behind accumulating tracts of night and forest. Achamian and Mimara fled without pause, trotting as much as striding across the heaved and cracked forest floors. Their expression, when they weren’t grimacing, was one of winded incredulity—disbelief.
“But the boy!” Mimara at last dared cry.
“Is better off …” the old Wizard huffed without breaking stride, “without us!” He subsequently cursed, realizing she had jogged to a halt behind him—out of concern for the boy, he knew, and not for being quick.
They had snorted enough Qirri to assure that neither wind nor weariness would impede them.
“But—”
“But we go to Golgotterath, girl!”
His skin prickled for how well he could see in the dark, how impossibly untouched and utterly ravaged she looked, her expression finally falling abreast her lesser years. The Prophetess had vanished, and she stood blinking tears, a runaway Princess-Imperial once more.
Achamian raised a scuffed and blackened hand, squinted against the swelling that was inexorably closing his right eye. “Come …” he said, knowing the very name of their destination blotted any need for further reasons. They spared the boy nothing, lashing him to a doom so mad as Golgotterath.
She clasped his fingers, not so much smiling as setting her jaw. Revulsion flicked through her like a lash through the whip—because of his Mark, he knew.
“But the boy—”
“Is D?nyain, Mimara.”
They stood thus in the dark, panting. Scylvendi horns rolled like otters at the surface of hearing—to the south.
Mimara licked her lips.
“So then what?” she asked lamely. “After everything that’s happened, we-we just flee into the night!”
“Pray-tell … what else does one do after everything that’s happened?”
She looked at him, imploring, he realized, for what she did not know. The old Wizard stamped his feet, overcome by a sudden, wild frustration. He knew full well what such looks portended.
“Sweet Seju, girl!” he erupted. “How could you be so consistent! When I need the prophetess, I get the runaway, and when I need the runaway I get the prophetess—every blasted time!”
Anger hardened her teary eyes, hostility flashing through sorrow. “What? Because I-I care?”
He blundered on, determined to see his stupidity through.
“You cared nothing about sending his father over a cliff!”
She flinched at that, blinked tears. Her eyes fell to the empty ground between them.
“That was not my invitation,” she said in a low, even voice.
“I watched you give him the Qirri … and I know you knew what was going to happen. You made it pretty clear that you want—”
“He jumped the cliff!” she cried. “He accepted the invitation!”
“Invit—what invitation? You mean to snort the Qi—”
“The invitation to leap!”
Now it was Achamian’s turn to stare speechless.
“To join the Absolute,” she spat before stalking off.
He stood upon the saddle of level ground they had taken as their stage, motionless for the horror plunging through him, the one he had borne since first fleeing the White Yaksh and kept afloat by refusing to stop, refusing to think.
His skin prickled, flushed where exposed to the chill. Cnaiür urs Ski?tha boiled as a vapour before him.
“And now you find yourself in my tent, sorcerer …”
The Dreams fell hard upon what little opportunity he had to sleep, dreams drawn from the sheath. One moment the ground beneath him was slowly revolving, pricking like thistles and humming, so much he despaired of ever falling asleep. Then he was lurching, thinking blood-clotted thoughts, climbing the throat of a moaning horn. Golden walls leaned upon warring angles, surfaces betraying different sigils on different angles, elongated etchings, each as fine as an infant’s hair.