This was a kind of final knell for the Skin Eaters, a tipping point of comprehension. At last they understood the abyssal gap that had always existed between them, scalpers and Wizard. Achamian could see it in their sidelong glances. With the exception of their Captain, they began looking at him with an awe and reverence they had once reserved for Cleric.

And he felt an itch, something small and sharp against the buzz of his utter exhaustion … Some time passed before he recognized it: the creeping return of his guilt. These men, these strangers he would kill, now seemed his brothers.

It was no small thing to crawl out of the abyss, to rise from Hell to the very roof of the World. Though their eyes had long adjusted, they still stood blinking, scattered atop the snow-encrusted debris that ringed the opening to the Great Screw. It made Achamian, who stood arm in arm with Mimara, think of the first Men, savages of the plains, rubbing their eyes at what they could only comprehend as a blessing.

With light comes life. With sky comes freedom.

The Halls of Cil-Aujas, the dread Black Halls, had at last relinquished them.

Achamian looked to the remnants of their company, knowing they had reached a moment of decision. Aside from Lord Kosoter, only Soma, blessed with the luck of the daft, seemed unscathed. Sarl appeared intact in body but continued to betray a disordered soul—even now he grinned and rocked from heel to heel. Pokwas had gained strength on the climb, despite continuously bleeding from his scalp. The other veteran Skin Eaters, Xonghis, Sutadra, and Galian, wore septic bandages on their arms and thighs but seemed able enough. Of those the Bitten had called the Herd, all three survivors were Galeoth—Conger, Wonard, and Hameron—men Achamian had not known until the arduous climb up the Screw. Wonard was already showing signs of infection, and Conger seemed to hop more than walk. Hameron wept whenever Lord Kosoter’s distraction afforded.

Their hair whipping in the wind, bereft of everything save their hauberks and their swords, the company stood, blank before the vista extending about them. Their trials had stained and stamped them: the purplish smear of Sranc blood, the rusty blots of their own, innumerable little cuts across their shins and knuckles, the mottling of sweat-and-dustsoaked skin. Though their stares were dead for fatigue, there was a madness in the quick twitches with which they cast them across the panorama.

They stood in the heart of Aenaratiol’s extinct crater, on an island heaped with broken columns and gutted walls. A frozen lake surrounded them, gleaming black where not covered with dunes of snow. More ruins climbed the crater walls, a veritable city of them, walls stacked upon walls. Vacant windows gazed out from them, as black as the labyrinth below, melancholy. Above, beyond the crater rim, taller peaks rose bright and white against the blue, trailing chalk streamers of snow.

The sun gleamed cold and white.