They climbed what stairs they could find, up through the remnants of ancient pleasure-palaces. They saw all the same motifs and architectural flourishes, the same crazed density of image, that had so awed them in the galleries below. But for some reason it seemed tragic, pathetic even, exposed as it was by cracked walls and vanished ceilings. The work of a race that had gone insane for staring inward.

When they reached the summit of the crater rim, the inversion was so utter, the contrast to the buried depths so severe, that several of them fell to clinging whatever the ice or stone afforded. The dishevelled enormity of the Osthwai Mountains unfolded before them, glaring in the crisp high-sky light, great snow-sheathed horns receding across the horizon. The giddy sweep and plunge of endless open spaces encircled them, fluttered in their bellies. For a time at least, it was too much for newly born men.

But there was no question of stopping long. No matter how hard they sucked they could not draw enough air. Despite the heat shed by the Huiritic Ring, their skin purpled and their lips turned blue.

And they were starving.

But as they were about to descend, one of them called out, Soma, pointing back the way they came, at the ruins heaped about the rim of the Great Medial Screw. Achamian crowded with the others, peering to look, but his old eyes could make out nothing more than a speck crossing the snow-swept iron of the frozen lake. A lone figure trudging in their wake …

And at long last Mimara broke her silence.

“Cleric,” she said.

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Interlude: Momemn

Interlude: Momemn

The sound of discord carried on the breeze. A riot in faraway streets.

Kelmomas stood with his chin on the balcony rail, staring out over the Enclosure at the stately passage of clouds crossing the light of a moon too low on the horizon to be seen. Woollen blue wisped across the starred firmament, condensing into bellies of black.

The Nail of Heaven flared white from a sailing summit. A distant chorus of shrieks and bellows signalled another brutal torch-lit incursion.

He had no name for his rapture. Calm and slow breathing. Stationary. Stationary amid the clash of all things. The repose of a soul peering out from the world’s shrouded centre. The unmoved mover.

The ruler unseen.

Across the sky he heard a many-throated song of defiance crumbling into cries of outrage, shouts of fear and dismay. The heave of hundreds breaking. The clash of arms.

You, the voice murmured. You made this.

“What are you doing out there?” his mother called out from the dark entrance to his room. She pulled aside the sheers to see him better.

“I’m scared, Mommy.”

Her smile was too fraught to be reassuring.

“Shush. You’re safe. They’re not that many.”