Mimara had said nothing in two days. When he tried coaxing words from her, she would simply gaze at him. Her lips would twitch, sometimes they would even part, but no words would come, and a kind of helpless remorse would dim her eyes. He spent quite some time trying to puzzle through what had happened, to make sense of the crazed image of her, holding nothing but a Chorae, the same existential pit she carried beneath her belt now, quailing beneath a horror that should have devoured her whole, from the flesh of her fingertips to the final spark of her soul.

He knew something of demons, Ciphrang, knew that when summoned, a Chorae could destroy their corporeal form. But what faced them had risen on a tide of unreality. Hell had come with him, the shade of Gin’yursis, the last Nonman King of Cil-Aujas, and he should have taken them all, Chorae or no Chorae.

But something had happened. She had happened.

Anasûrimbor Mimara, cursed with the Judging Eye.

Despite the pity that filled him, there was a reprieve in her misfortune. It could be no coincidence that she had come to him when she had. The wiles of the Whore were at work here, the treachery of Fate. The more he pondered it, the more it seemed she had been given. It was his doom to hunt down the origins of the Aspect-Emperor, to shed light on the darkness that came before him. Cil-Aujas had resolved that question.

There was a bad period when the last of the qirri drained from them, where the most they could do was lay gasping. Somehow they slept, and somehow they found themselves unharmed when they awoke. After that, the climb was sheer misery. Dizziness and nausea. Cramped limbs. Several fainted for the effort and were only saved by the wits of their fellows. Achamian paused several times to vomit spittle.

The downward wind grew as they climbed, so chill that Achamian added an air warming Huiritic Ring to the Surillic Point they needed to be sure of their footing—yet one more burden for his overtaxed soul. What had been a vast well above them became an endless pit below. Soon they could spy the source of the perpetual water that threaded the open spaces beyond the brink: ice and snow. It clotted the final tracts of the Screw, rising in shining humps against the cloudless plate of the sky.

After clambering across the first ice-sheathed steps and staring up across the angular slopes heaped across the stair, they realized their limbs could take them no farther. There was a look of grim confirmation in the dismay that deadened their eyes, as if they had known all along that Cil-Aujas would never relinquish them. Without explanation, Achamian bid them withdraw behind him. From behind glimmering Wards, he showed them what a Gnostic Wizard could do in the light of day. Ice and snow cracked and crashed, sloughed away in mountainous sheets, thundered so hard against his Wards that the stone of the stair even fractured beneath his feet. But he continued singing Abstractions, pure dispensations of force and light, and the geometries danced and twirled, striking and burning. And when he was done, bars of sunlight could be seen lancing through the mist, warming the bare black stone of Aenaratiol.