“Mimara,” a voice calls. “What’s the matter, girl?” It’s Somandutta, the one man here that she trusts, and only then because he is no man.

“You have no call to fear us …”

A chorus of shouts greets the abrupt arrival of Sarl and Achamian. In a heartbeat she is forgotten by all save Somandutta, who comes to her side, saying, “The light … How did you do that?”

She bites her lower lip, curses down the urge to lean her head against the armour scaling his chest. Of Achamian she can see nothing but the congregated backs of the scalpers with their packs and their slung shields. But she hears his voice between the figures, speaking to the Captain with quarrelsome urgency, something about Chorae moving through the halls immediately below them. Someone, Kiampas, immediately suggests the Bloody Picks, but the Wizard is dubious, asking why anyone wealthy enough to own a Chorae would be fool enough to hunt Sranc for money. Mimara wonders if their Chorae-bearing Captain will take offence.

Then Cleric says, “He’s right.” The inhuman voice doesn’t so much reach farther as it reaches deeper, carried through the stone of the floor into her bones. “I sense them too.”

The Skin Eaters open, back away, each staring at the company of prone shadows splayed across the dust scuffed about their feet. She knows they think they can feel the Chorae too …

Then suddenly she feels them. Her limbs jolt, and she sways, for her body had thought the ground solid, and now she senses open space, breaths and plummets between leagues of stone. Chorae, bottomless punctures in being, traverse them, a necklace of little voids carried by something that runs in a lumbering file … something.

“They travel in the direction I lead us,” Cleric says, “toward the Fifth Anterograde Gate …”

“You think they mean to cut us off?” Kiampas asks.

No one speaks.

She sees Sarl, gazing with his pond-scum eyes, his manic face rutted and pale. But when she looks at the other old man, Achamian, she finds that her Judging Eye has opened … She has read her stepfather’s writing on sorcery, his Novum Arcanum. She knows that the God peers through all eyes, and that the Few—sorcerer or witch, it did not matter—were simply those whose sight recollected something of His all-seeing gaze and so could speak with the dread timbre of His all-creating voice.

She sees Achamian as others do, stooped in his mad hermit robes, his beard stiff against his breast, his complexion the dark of long-used skins. She sees the Mark, soiling his colours, blasting his edges.

And though her eyes blink and roll against it, she sees the Judgment …

He is carrion. He is horror. His skin is burned to paste.

Drusas Achamian is damned.