They run, through the bones of the dragon, into the concentrating wind, and it seems a miracle they can battle through it, that they aren’t blown skidding like rags into the horror rising behind them.

They scramble crawling into the opposite corridor, and the cold shoots through them, aches bones from end to end. They climb against the wind, whose howl they cannot hear.

The damned call out to them, wailing with the hunger that knots and strangles and sustains all misery …

Yearning to see itself visited upon others.

It has entered the corridor behind them. He has entered …

The Wight-in-the-Mountain. The Nonman King.

She is an earthen jug, and her innards slosh like curdled milk. A single crack and she will clatter open, spill across the floor. She is failing. She feels it in her flagging attempts to haul the Wizard with her. The others have climbed ahead, almost beyond the light of the Surillic Point.

Even Soma.

Her soul gropes for strength, a kind of inward prayer, Mimara begging Mimara, and suddenly, she feels it, the qirri that Cleric had given them, like stones beneath paddling feet.

“Come! On!” she cries at the Wizard.

But the wind whips the words like autumn leaves from her mouth.

The hellish wail stamps them into ash.

They cross the bourne, from the lobed rock, the drowning ground of the slave chamber, the overflown foundations, onto the hewn floor. But it does not matter. The wind has all but defeated Achamian. She is fairly dragging him. And she can see it, boiling up through the blackness toward them, the infernal pit.

The old man is shouting. She cannot hear him, but she knows what he cries …

Leave me.

Leave me. Daughter, please …

But she refuses. This old stranger … What is it?

Why should she dare hell?

She heaves, bawling at his arm. Achamian is on his back now, and she scratches him forward, heave after heave after heave, knowing that it does not matter.

She doesn’t hear the sorcerous cry until after, only the thunderous crack, the concussion that slaps back the wind, knocks her forward to her knees. She hears it through the all-encompassing clap and rumble …

A collapse. Earth hammering ground. A mountain shrugging in and down.

The wind is gone.

A light hangs in a fog.

A ringing like blood in the ears. A sound surfacing …

Coughing. An old man coughing. She sees his silhouette resolving through the dust, a tattered old shadow.

“We need to keep moving,” a hack-pinched voice says. “I’m not sure this will stop him.”

Her eyes burn and blink. Her voice fails her.

“We need to keep moving,” the Wizard continues, his tone rueful and encouraging. “If anything he can follow the mile-long streak of shit I dragged across the floor.”

Somehow she was holding him, laughing, sobbing “Akka … Akka!”

“So far so good,” he says gently. A hand strokes her hair, and instantly, she is a child clinging. “Mimara …”