Even the Captain is stumbling backward now.

Holding Pokwas between them, Xonghis and Galian retreat with Mimara and the Wizard. Sarl laughs like a child at a puppet show, his yellow teeth gleaming. Conger pulls him in jerking steps.

The Nonman King holds Cleric like a doll before him, like a cup he can spill. He steps forward—into …

A violent spasm, like drawing first breath. Limbs fling outward, snap rigid, like ropes weighted with lead. Cleric’s whole body arches backward, as if bound across the curves of drawn bows. And both Nonmen can be seen, as though each were solid and the other were glass, naked limbs within armour, nimil plates beneath a gown of chained gold. The Nonman King’s face pulls forward, twists in bewildered delirium. Wrath.

For an instant, the company glimpses a floating seal, a savage emblem of hell …

The Surillic Point flickers out.

“I dream,” Cleric’s voice booms through the wind howling black, “that I am a God.”

The Skin Eaters are shouting. Mimara hears herself sob.

Achamian mutters in arcane panic. The light shed from his eyes and mouth paints Soma’s blank face against the greater dark.

A new light. It flickers like a star for long hanging heartbeat, then flares with eye-averting brilliance. A new chamber. The tiered walls rise into shadow about them, the bronze-barred cages lined like pupae across them—as before. But each encases a mad thrashing, arms reaching, hands clutching, mouths shrieking, a thousand moments of anguish, a thousand souls, condensed into a mad, smoking blur. Eyes stacked upon eyes, drawn across eyes. The arcs of teeth, a shining multitude. Swatches of welted skin.

The Emwama scream, thousands upon thousands of them, forever buried, forever sealed from their native sun. An age of torment compressed into a single wail …

Mimara screams with them.

Cleric drifts toward the abject scalpers, floating in a vertical pool of black, like tar spilled across unseen waters, his face submerged, his limbs drowned, beneath the hoary aspect of the Nonman King.

But a hunger, a voice groans through the mountain’s foundations. A hunger runs through me … splits me like rotted stone.

Achamian is hollering so hard that spittle flecks his matted beard. Even though Mimara stands next to him, she can hear nothing save the million-throated wail.

Despite his weakened state, the Wizard is yanking her backward, away from the looming visage.

How, the voice creaks through the roots of the world, could a God hunger?

Plumes of molten stone erupt from the ground about them, spitting jets of orange, gold, and baleful crimson. One of the scalpers simply vanishes. A limb falls next to Mimara, an unblistered hand attached to a forearm burnt to a charcoal nub. Lord Kosoter, who had stood his ground before the hellish approach, at last turns to run.

The whole company, or what remains of it, is running.