She tries to blink away the Eye—to no avail. She finds herself fumbling with her own urgency, so long has it been since anything abstract has pierced the Qirri’s numbing swaddle.
The Wizard was right. The very World … The World already hangs from the gibbet …
One final swing and its neck is broken.
“Wha-what?” the damned soul before her stammers. “What are you saying?”
Then the Eye closes, and the judgment of things is rinsed into the outlines of vision, into nonexistence. The facts of Drusas Achamian blot the value, and she sees him bewildered, bent with age, cracked by a life of sorcerous insurrection. He holds her by the shoulders, close despite the proximity of her Chorae to his breast. Tears glaze his rutted cheeks.
“The Eye …” she gasps.
“Yes? Yes?”
Then she glimpses it over his frayed shoulder.
A shadow flitting between stacked debris. Pale. Small.
A Sranc?
She hisses in alarm. The old Wizard looks about frowning, his eyebrows pulled into a shaggy stoop above his gaze.
“There …” she whispers, pointing toward a slot between the bone-laden sarcophagi.
The old Wizard peers into the anxious gloom. With a flourish of his fingers he throws his Surillic Point into the chamber’s deeper regions. She leans against the vertigo of sweeping shadows.
They both glimpse the figure, their hearts pounding to the same terror. They see the eyes glitter, the face squint with blank wonder.
Not a Sranc.
A boy … A boy with his head shaved in mockery of Nil’giccas.
“Hiera?” he calls, as if utterly unperturbed by his discovery. “Slaus ta heira’as?”
It torqued the old Wizard’s ears, so long had it been since he last heard the tongue outside his Dreams.
“Where?” the boy had asked. “Where is your lantern?”
Achamian even recognized the peculiar intonation—though from twenty, as opposed to two thousand, years past. The child spoke K?niüric … but not in the ancient way, the way Anas?rimbor Kellhus had spoken it so long ago.
The child was D?nyain.
Achamian swallowed. “C-come out,” he called, straining to speak about the bolt of horror and confusion in his throat. “You have nothing to fear from us.”
The child stood from his feckless crouch, stepped from behind the sarcophagus that obscured him. He wore a man’s woolen tunic, the grey fabric belted and cinched to fit. He was slender, and from the look of him, tall beyond his years. He gazed avidly at the Surillic Point above, held out his hands as though testing the light for raindrops. Three fingers had been lopped from his right hand, making a crab’s claw of his thumb and forefinger.
He turned to appraise the two interlopers.
“You speak our tongue,” he said mildly.
Achamian stood rigid, unblinking.
“No, child. You speak my tongue.”
Sit. This is the imperative of old men when the World besieges them. Retire from the confusion, consider it in dribs and drabs rather than grapple with it whole. Sit. Recover your wind while pondering.
Mimara had found his dread answer. In the space of heartbeats she had confirmed a lifetime of fears. But witless incomprehension seemed the most he could summon by way of reply. Stammering indecision where horror and dismay should have ruled.
This boy represented a different kind of confirmation—and conundrum.
So while Mimara remained rooted to where she stood, Achamian took a seat on a block of ruin, a perch that set his face a hand’s span below that of the standing child.
“You are D?nyain?”
The boy seemed to search his gaze. “Yes.”
“How many of you remain?”
“Just me and one other. The Survivor.”
“And where is he?”
“Somewhere in the Halls beneath us.”
The floor now tingled beneath the old Wizard’s boots.
“Tell me … What happened here?”
Achamian asked this even though he knew what had happened here, even though he could reconstruct its stages in his soul’s eye. But for the nonce he was old and he was terrified, and there was courage in the asking of questions—or at least the semblance of it.
“The Shriekers came,” the boy replied, his manner mild unto blank. “I was too young to remember … much …”
“So how do you know?”
“The Survivor told me.”
The old Wizard pursed his lips. “Tell us what he told you.”
There is always a dare in the eye of bold children, an arrogance that comes with lacking the weakness of more worried elders. The crab-handed boy’s fearlessness, however, was devoid of demonstration.
“They came and they came, until the whole valley seethed. The Shriekers threw themselves at our walls, and the slaughter was great. We heaped their corpses to the battlements. We threw them back!”
Mimara watched from his periphery, not comprehending, but from the keen cast of her gaze, understanding all the same. So little separates tales of woe.