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?".

"Anasurimbor 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.

"Wutteat."

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.

"Wutteat!" Cleric bellowed.

Cold pricked the Wizard's skin, for Wutteat was a name drawn from the most ancient days of the War, when Men were little more than slaves or vermin. Wutteat 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.

"I am Quya!" the Nonman King cried from places unseen. "I am Ishroi! Five of your sons and daughters have I slain!"

"YOU ARE BUT A SNAIL!" the impossible beast roared. "A SNAIL TORN FROM ITS SHELL!"

"I am Nil'giccas-I am Cleric! And you will hear my sermon!"

Even high and hidden, Achamian could tell the Nonman ran as he called out, sprinted over ruin.

"FOOL. I AM THE FIRST. MY HIDE IS BRONZE. MY BONES ARE IRON!".

Above the ceiling, the old Wizard floated through a second, more barren world, one roofed with hanging precipices and floored with racks of masonry, ancient and enormous.

"You are blind!" Cleric shouted, the resonance of his voice thinned by the thunder that it followed. "You are a beggar, a scavenger, a prisoner of your own spite! Your flesh is rotted. The stone of your strength cracked long ago!"

"AS THE AGES HAVE ROTTED YOUR SOUL, CuNUROI!".

The beast spit another cataract of roaring fire, illuminating all the chinks and breaches in the ceiling. Achamian walked across emptiness, toward the central pit, which given the darkness of the cavernous attic, glowed like an afterlife of fire. Robbed of their supporting columns, the granite lintels had sheered according to the caprice of load and fracture. He alighted on the longest of these ribs, strode down the length of its powdered back. Fires small and large burned throughout the pillared spaces below. He saw Cleric-the briefest of glimpses-flit between distant pillars and vanish into far shadows. He was running circles...

"If I perish a fool!" the Nonman cried, "then I perish my own fool! Not a slave like you, Wracu'jaroi!"

Achamian paused at the hanging precipice, gazed down upon the heaving beast. Coiled like a bloated serpent, the Father of Dragons turned and turned to the sound of Cleric's voice, like a leashed dog about its stake, only retching fire instead of barking, maelstroms that engulfed the scorched aisles.

"I EXCEED MY MAKERS," the scale-shining beast thundered. "NOT EVEN THE BLACK HEAVEN COMMANDS ME!"

The old Wizard swayed on his perch, squinted against the smoke and sparks that buffeted his Wards. Cleric distracted the creature, he knew. Using taunts to goad its pride, the Nonman King provoked it precisely so that Achamian could do what he was doing...

If only he knew what that was.

"Spinning in circles," Cleric cried laughing, "twisting hide against hide! So it has always been, Wracu'jaroi! Think! Think of the desolate ages!"

The blind beast stamped to and fro directly below. It swung its horn-crowned head in an attempt to anticipate the running Nonman, spewed torrents of braided fire. Achamian swayed, nearly retched for the reek of putrescence.

"DESOLATION IS MY BIRTHRIGHT!".

Think, old man! Think!

"SUCH THINGS THAT I REMEMBER, CuNUROI! TWISTING IN THE VOID FOR SAILING AGES! WATCHING MY MAKERS DESCEND AS LOCUSTS UPON WORLD AFTER WORLD, REDUCING EACH TO ONE HUNDRED AND FORTY-FOUR THOUSAND-AND WAILING TO FIND THEMSELVES STILL DAMNED!"

Dragons! Monstrosities literally bred to battle and destroy the ancient Quya. So much of the Gnostic armoury was devoted to sorcerous duals or the mass killing of mundane Men...

What did Seswatha use?

"Only to arrive here broken and exhausted!" Cleric cried.

"YES-YES! AT LAST, THE PROMISED WORLD! I WAS THE FIRST-THE FIRST! WITH DREAD SIL UPON MY SHOULDERS, I WAS THE FIRST TO STEP FROM OUR HALLOWED ARK, TO SET EYES UPON THE LAND OF OUR REDEMPTION!"

The Nonman's laughter rose clear as sunlight from the booming echoes.

"And now look at you! Blind! Hidden in the dirt! Curled about the shit of dead ages!"

A cry like the blast of many waters. "BECAUSE THIS WORLD YET LIVES!" the undead beast roared. "BECAUSE THIS WORLD REFUSES TO DIE!"

Teetering above the monstrosity, Achamian shouted his Cant, a skinny old man hollering in a skinny old voice. The Noviratic Spike, a Gnostic War-Cant contrived to batter through great city gates.

"MURDER! MURDER IS OUR SALVATION!".

Light balled in Achamian's outstretched palms. The mighty Wracu lashed its head from side to panicked side, raised its smoking snout at the instant of the Cant's completion. Lines of light snapped in and out, deflecting and intersecting, forming a flying sheet of triangles, reproducing tip to tip, base to base, flashing down as swift as any bolt or arrow...

A noise that struck blood from the skin.

The Spike exploded against the creature's left shoulder, hammered it squealing down the side of its mound. Thrashing, Wutteat howled fire into the air. A brilliant geyser jetted up through the ceiling pit, a rooster's tail of brilliance washed across the cavern roof. Cascades of raw stone came crashing down.

Achamian crouched low on the lintel, muttered Ward after Ward.

A thunderclap from below.

And he heard it through the dragon's mewling shriek: the sound of a Nonman Quya singing his world-breaking song. The sound of a famed Ishroi, a hero of dead ages, closing with his ancient foe.

The old Wizard stood firm on his perch, cried out another Noviratic Cant. Below him, the Father of Dragons coiled in defence, spewed fire into looms of Quyan incandescence. Light flared from the Wizard's palms, made crimson glass of his hands...

But the dragon had coiled to leap, not to shield. The Wizard's Spike gouged slopes of treasure and rubble. Mouldered and wretched, the dragon vaulted into the underworld attic, stretched forth its diseased wings. For a crazed heartbeat, Achamian found himself standing frail and astonished beneath the plated monstrosity. Light from the conflagration below illuminated its undersides, gleamed across horns and scaled flanges. Wings scooped dark air...

It knew, Achamian realized. The beast drew back its battered skull, yanked open its maw in a feline hiss.

It knew precisely where he stood.

Fire.

Wards dissolving like egg whites in a stream. Concussions. Blistering skin. The triggering of incipient Wards...

The pier of stone collapsed beneath his feet.

"YEARS UNCOUNTED!" it boomed from the cavern attic. "TEN THOUSAND SEASONS HAVE I LIVED WITHOUT EYES!"

The old Wizard fell, cartwheeled down the beast's heap of treasure and debris. Blinking. Coughing. He tried to claw his way upright, too stunned to orchestrate the counterpoise of voices, inner and outer, required for sorcery. He beat at his burning hair and beard. He felt an arm draw him up, saw Cleric peering down at him, the porcelain lines of worry and relief. He heard the whoosh of conflagration, the clack and thunder of enormous collapses. Ancient pillars toppled. Sheets of masonry dropped. The world itself seemed to shrug, then crash upon them.

Masses of stone pummelled the Nonman's Wards, a rain of godlike fists.

The last shreds of light were pinched to utter black.

Ringing ears. The taste of dust.

"It has buried us," the Nonman King said in the clacking aftermath. "Shut us in."

- - She kicks off her boots.

She unties the laces of her jacket, pulls it back from her bare shoulders, lets it slide of its own weight down her arms. She shakes it from her wrists. It slumps across the humus.