Raw blackness gaped before him.
So, a dull and long-suffering portion of his soul murmured, the Coffers have been looted.
He stood motionless, gazing in abject dismay.
So much suffered … So many dead …
For nothing.
The great refrain of his miserable life.
The madness, when he pondered it, was that he had believed it could be otherwise, that he would trek all this distance—survive this far—and actually find the Coffers intact, the map to Ishuäl waiting for him like a low-hanging plum. He almost laughed aloud for thinking it, the thought that Fate might be kind.
This, he realized—this was what his fate had been all along. Snared in the machinations of his enemy, who had known his mission even before he had tripped across it. Confronted with the preposterous issue of his preposterous hopes. He had sought truth and had been delivered to madmen and a Dragon instead—a Dragon!
A Wracu of old.
He could almost hear the skies laugh.
Sparing neither word nor glance, the old Wizard and the Nonman King stepped across the cracked threshold and at long last passed into the Coffers.
The reek watered his eyes, mingled with his terror so that it seemed he wept for fear. Sulphur. The smoke of predatory life. And rot, profound and gangrenous. The putrefaction that ties a string to your stomach and pulls hard whenever breath is drawn too deep.
Achamian could feel as much as hear the thing breathing in the blackness, the whoosh of enormous furnace bellows. He could scarce see the debris beneath his feet, yet the sound grew into a kind of vision, such is the mischief of imagination. Great lungs betokened great limbs. The deep reptilian creak conjured images of scaled hides, of lipless jaws and grinning teeth …
A mighty horror awaited them, and a portion of the old Wizard did not want to see. A portion of him preferred the hysterics of his soul’s eye.
They came to a slope of heaped ruin, picked their way to the summit. The blackness yawned out about them, a motionless vacuum. Cleric uttered a sorcerous phrase; his eyes and mouth flared with meaning. The pale brilliance of a Surillic Point appeared above them, and the blackness fled to far places, leaving a globe of empty, illuminated air …
Dragon. Wracu.
According to legend, the first Sohonc discovered a vast cavern when laying the Library’s foundations. They dredged the depths, squared the walls, pillared the open spaces, creating a secret, subterranean citadel. It was Noshainrau, whose sorcerous research had cast such long shadows across the future, who would make it his School’s treasury, a vault for the world’s greatest glories and darkest terrors.
The famed Coffers.
Perhaps the ancient architects had feared the ceiling the earth had provided them. Perhaps the chaotic weave of natural lines offended their sense of beauty and proportion. Either way, they constructed a roof with the post and lintel principles they used to raise their temples. This second ceiling had long since collapsed in its centre, littering the floor with the ruin of giant stone beams and the cracked drums of toppled pillars. Peering between the remaining columns, the old Wizard had the impression of a black lake hanging above all that could be seen, as if the very world had been turned on its head.
Gone were the ponderous lantern wheels. Gone were the narrow aisles. Gone were the racks and shelves that had organized a thousand years of sorcerous hoarding. Treasure and debris matted the floors, a ragged landscape of contradictions that piled higher toward the chamber’s heart. Coins gravelling the wrack of shattered frescoes. A tripod capsized in a swell of mounded powder. A crown staved beneath a jutting beam of granite. A chest of cracked bronze, spilling rivulets of jewels between horns of broken stone.
Because of age-old accumulations of dust and tarnish, nothing glittered, nothing gleamed.
Apart from the Dragon.
The shadows cast by intervening columns were absolute, so only fragments of the beast could be seen. Horned ridges. Wings folded into scarred curtains. Scales like overlapping shields, pale with filth and bronze. A single nostril weeping smoke.
The beast was old, Achamian realized. Exceedingly old. Wracu never stopped growing, so it stood to reason that any dragon he encountered in his waking life would dwarf the ancient monstrosities from his Dreams …
But this.
Wings that could have tarped the Shilla Amphitheatre in faraway Aöknyssus. A torso broad enough to hull the largest Cironji carrack, yet long enough to coil about the small mountain of treasure and ruin. Were it to rear onto its hind legs, the beast would stand as tall as any of the Mop’s unnatural trees.
The bellow lungs continued to roar and croak in the deeps of Achamian’s hearing. The sulphur pinched his own breath, quick and shallow and warm-blooded. Nausea rooted through his innards.
He turned to Cleric. Bleached in his own light, the Nonman King stood rapt, his left boot braced against a headless statue. The Surillic Point made polished marble of his skin, a diamond weave of his nimil hauberk. He looked more thoughtful than afraid or astounded.
“This …” Cleric murmured, his gaze fixed on the slumbering beast. “This is where I am meant to die.”
“You and my loincloth,” Achamian replied.
The Nonman turned to him, his face blank and wondering. A vagrant pain seemed to seize his expression. Then Nil’giccas, King of the Last Mansion, laughed. The sound boomed through the hollows, a cackle that rolled like thunder, deep and earthen and utterly—insanely—unafraid.
Achamian grimaced more than smiled.
“Ah … Seswatha,” Cleric said, swallowing his mirth. “How I cherish your wi—”
“OLD,” the very ground seemed to croak. “SO VERY OLD …”
Rasping through roped mucus, sheathed in a bottomless wheeze. The voice was more than loud, more than deep; it was great in the sense of absurd disproportions, words cast across faraway orders of strength and immensity. Achamian suddenly felt like a fly in the presence of a Sempis crocodile.
The scrape and scuff of shifting debris. The tinkle of little things falling. The Dragon stirred upon its heap, raised its armoured chest on limbs crooked and knotted like hoary old treetrunks. Riven with horror, Achamian watched the head wag across a lane of pale light, the crest battered and majestic …
The saurian skull long-jawed and wicked …
“WE HAVE FLOWN AND FLOWN, SEEKING YOUR CITIES … BUT RUIN WAS ALL WE COULD FIND. RUIN AND VERMIN SRANC …”
Dust rained from the crotches of every hanging seam, every granite joist. The ancient Wracu hoisted its head, exposed its segmented throat in absolute confidence of its invulnerability. In an absurd instant, Achamian grasped the reason why the ancient Kûniüri called them Sûthaugi …
“TELL ME … HAS THE WORLD ENDED?”
Worms.
“The world yet lives,” Cleric called into the gloom. “In the South, where snow falls as rain.”
Wisps of fire. Exhalations mighty enough to throw ships from their courses. The thing’s head lowered in their direction, at last fully revealed in Cleric’s light.
“THE WORLD LIVES …”
Achamian did not so much will himself to move as will himself to will. So much is forgotten in the flush of abject terror—from a man’s bowel to his breathing.
“The beast is dead,” Cleric murmured. “Dead and blind.”
The old Wizard struggled to peer through his terror, to study the great head beyond the jaws, to see more than the predatory malevolence in its lines. It differed from the ancient Dragons of his Dreams—no surprise given the florid diversity characteristic of the species. Its head was more aquiline, as if built to root out prey hidden in burrows. And a mane of black iron tusks flared from its brows, bloomed into chattering skirts along the back of the beast’s skull. But where smaller horns serrated the line of the beast’s left brow, only stumps and savaged tissue adorned the right. The eye beneath, he could see, had rotted away long, long ago …
“What do you mean?” the old
Wizard muttered in reply. “It breathes …”
But Men’s eyes, once attuned to a possibility, scavenge evidence of their own volition: suddenly the old Wizard saw the bronze hide sagging like a hauberk, as if detached from the greased flesh beneath. The shrunken gums. The second eye socket, rotted as hollow as the first …
“I BREATHE …” the yawing, croaking voice boomed through the underworld spaces. “IT IS MY CURSE TO BREATHE, SO LONG AS THE WORLD LIVES.”
The Dragon was dead—or almost so …
“TURN FROM THIS PLACE,” the bronze-shelled corpse said. “FLEE TO YOUR HEARTHS, AND TELL THOSE WHO WOULD LISTEN HOW YOU SURVIVED FOR TELLING THE FIRST, THE FATHER, THE WORLD YET LIVED.”
Madness. Madness and more madness.
But there was always more world than explanation. To come so far … so close … There was no turning from this place.
“May I beg but one dispensation?” Achamian cried.
A hissing pause. “GRASPING,” the dead beast said, shadowy and mountainous. “MEN ARE FOREVER GRASPING.”
“I search for a map,” the old Wizard said.
Cleric regarded him.
“TURN FROM THIS PLACE, MORTAL. I WILL NOT PART WITH THE MEREST FRACTION OF MY HOARD.”
“But what use could you have of trinkets and baubles?”
“TO LURE FOOLS SUCH AS YOU! TURN FROM THIS PLACE—TURN! COME TO ME WHEN THE WORLD HAS TRULY ENDED.”
“I will not!” the old Wizard cried, casting his frail voice against the Dragon’s booming echo. Thought and passion raced panicked through his soul. All at once, he found himself marvelling at his own stubborn courage, weighing the mad consequences of his baiting, and wondering—wondering most of all—that a Dragon could be dead, yet speak and breath still …
“I cannot!”
The Wracu laughed, a sound like a thousand hacking lungs.
“AVARICE AND NECESSITY ARE EVER CONFUSED IN THE SOULS OF MEN.”
“No … No! Necessity alone drives me!”
“SO DOES FANCY BECOME SCRIPTURE …”
The old Wizard grappled with his anger, the urge to retort. The Coffers! he reminded himself, hearing Sarl’s crazed voice as he did so. The Coffers!
“SO DOES GREED BECOME GOD.”
In a blink, it seemed, he saw through the fog of the intervening weeks and the lies that accumulated in his veins. In a heartbeat, the confusion that was Qirri vanished, leaving windswept fact in its wake. He had murdered men with his fictions, imperilled the woman he loved—he had marched across the desolate bosom of Eärwa—for this moment, this very encounter.
It happens …
He breathed deep, held the foul air against his hammering heart.
“A bargain then!” he cried in sudden inspiration. “I would strike a bargain with you!”
The grating of coiled limbs. The heaving of air through rotting windpipes.
“WHAT COULD YOU HAVE THAT I MIGHT DESIRE, MORTAL?”
The old Wizard clawed his scalp.
“Truth … Truth is all I have.”
The Wracu raised its bulk from the heap’s summit, wagged its enormous crown in the air.
“YESSSS … YOU REEK OF SUFFERING …”
As deep as graves, the eyeless sockets fixed on the old Wizard.
“I SMELL DEEDS LONG DEAD, AND FEARS—IMMORTAL FEARS. PERHAPS YOU POSSESS RICHES AFTER ALL …”
It creaked forward, loosing tiny landslides of debris and treasure.
“TRUTH IT IS, MANLING.”
It descended its miserly summit, then more than two elephants tall at the shoulder stalked the blackness beyond the immediate pillars, dragging ruin in its wake.
“SHOW ME ONE TRUTH, AND YOU SHALL HAVE YOUR MEREST FRACTION.”
Achamian retreated, fairly stumbled doing so. “I-I’m not sure how to begin.”
He glimpsed its dead-grinning maw between columns.
“WHAT IS THIS MAP YOU SEEK?”
The will to lie leaned hard against the old Wizard’s thought, but he resisted, understanding that the beast before him was as much spirit as flesh … Who can say what the dead hear, when their ears are pricked to the voices of the living?
So he began describing his Dreams, the way Anasûrimbor Celmomas had charged Seswatha with the map to Ishuäl, the final refuge of the ancient Kûniüric High-Kings. But he quickly became tangled in words. Every name he mentioned, required more names to be explained—names piled upon names, all begging explanation.
The eyeless creature yawned, revealing the furnace that smouldered within the dead hull of its frame. “TRUTH IS OUR BARGAIN,” it rumbled, croaking out of the blackness. The head, cadaverous and crocodilian, leaned forward menacingly. “WHAT IS THIS MAP YOU SEEK?”
The old Wizard blinked at the monstrous spectre, chewed his bottom lip …
“Vengeance,” he said.
“AND WHOM DO YOU SEEK TO MURDER?”
“Anasûrimbor Kellhus, the Aspect-Emperor.”
“AND HIS CRIME? WHAT INDIGNITY DID HE INFLICT UPON YOU?”
Instead of glimpsing Esmenet, the old Wizard saw Mimara in his soul’s eye, pregnant and derelict, a prisoner of the Captain. If he failed here … If he stumbled …
“Enough!” he cried. “You have your truth!”
“IS NOT TRUTH INFINITE?”
Mucus snapping like bowstrings.
“Yes, bu—
“IS!”
The great bulk stamped forward one step, fissuring stone …
“NOT!”
The iron-horned chin dropped, as a wolf …
“TRUTH!”
Fire wicked from carcass nostrils …
“INFINITE?”
The pillared landscape hummed with reverberations. Sulphur and rot settled as a mist through the black. The old Wizard fairly cried out for sudden weight of Cleric’s hand on his shoulder.
“He plays you,” the Nonman said, his face white and serene. “There is no separating him from his hoard. He is too wicked, and he has slumbered here too long …”
The Last Nonman King turned back toward the scaled abomination.
“He?” Achamian asked witless.
“Wutteät.”
Like some beast in nocturnal seas, the Wracu shrank into the darkness. Laughter like sloughing cliffsides crashed through the ancient hollows.
“He dies from the outside,” Cleric said, “because Hell sustains him from within.”
“CUNNING …” the Wracu groaned out from the black. “CUNNING-CUNNING ISHROI!”
“I have seen this before,” Nil’giccas said, peering after the thing. He turned to the old Wizard and smiled. “I remember.”
Achamian gazed at the Nonman, found himself wondering who was more hoary, more impossible: the ancient, undead Dragon or the ancient, inhuman King.
“So what do we do?”
Something resembling dark humour flashed in the Nonman’s eyes. Without explanation, he began picking his way toward the wheezing blackness.
“Run,” he called to the old Wizard behind him. “Save them while you still can.”
“Them?”
A passing glance over his nimil-armoured shoulder.
“Your wife and child.”
Like most dwellings in the slums of Carythusal, the Worm, the brothel Mimara had lived in was walled against everything surrounding and open only within. Two mercenaries—little more than thugs, really—manned the entrance, festooned with ornamental menace. Every mouth needs fangs. But once past them, all was carpeted invitation. Gold paint. Garish tapestries representing battles that may or may not have happened. Incense and obscure liquors. Sunlight showered the courtyard gardens. Patrons reclined on embroidered settees in the reception hall, talking and laughing in low, shameless voices …
Their eyes flicking to and fro, as if counting the bare-chested children.
The bedding cells lined the eastward wall, as demanded by luck and tradition. Despite her price she would be chosen. She was always chosen. Leading him by a single, callus-horned
finger, she would hear grunts and whimpers and moans, and sometimes shrieks and sobs. A kind of numbness would own her, and she would flatten against her motions as if against a wall in a slice of shadow. And she would be hidden, even as she scampered nude before the lecherous eyes of many.
Very similar to Qirri, when she thought about it, watching Galian’s hanging grin.
Perhaps this would be easy … dying.
The old Wizard did not flee. He found himself chasing the Nonman King instead, muttering Wards as he tripped across the floors. With every step the Nonman King dragged his Surillic Point with him, illuminating the wasted interior of the Coffers.
Rather than retreat, the great Wracu watched eyeless.
“Wutteät!” Cleric bellowed.
Cold pricked the Wizard’s skin, for Wutteät was a name drawn from the most ancient days of the War, when Men were little more than slaves or vermin. Wutteät the Terrible. The Black-and-Golden …
The Father of Dragons.
Revealed in all his decayed glory, the Wracu reared with chitinous grace, its neck hooking like a swan’s, its mammoth head poised low. Blinding vomit cracked its lizard grin.
Fire.
Stone blasting. Gold melting. Unlike anything Achamian had ever dreamed. The world vanished, and all became white blindness, roaring, sparking. His outermost Wards simply blew away. His innermost buckled about cracks like incandescent veins.
“Cleric!” he cried, feeling a tongue of flame lap his arm and cheek.
There was no time. Blinking, he stepped into the air, into utter blackness—the Nonman’s Surillic Point had winked into nonexistence.
Everyone was blind.
The wheezing grate of furnace bellows. Then a second geyser of fiery gold, this one roiling beneath his feet. Thunder and clacking stone. The light of it painted the ceiling and high pillars in pulsing tan and yellow. Crying out new Wards, Achamian climbed into the gap of a collapsed lintel, stepped through the grand chamber’s false ceiling high into the dark.