He holds her belt and she leans out over the edge, raises her face to the silver stream. It hurts, just as Pokwas has warned, a bite so cold it numbs. She rinses it across her face, a kind exquisite cruelty, feels it slip like daggers across her scalp. Then she opens her lips to the crystalline plummet, and chill life sluices into her. Her teeth ache unto cracking, but the taste is clean as a child’s love. She drinks. There is milk in water, when the body is in dire need. Through teary eyes she glimpses the blue star high above, and her heart leaps with the certainty of sky—sky! They have passed through Cil-Aujas, survived its underworld teeth. They have walked the outskirts of Hell. Now they stand on the long threshold of freedom … Sky!

Sky and water.

She pulls away, her face numbed to a mask, watches the rivulets fall from her, add their concentric ripples to those warring soundless across the black pool below. She glimpses her own reflection, a light-rimmed shadow.

She hears Achamian arguing behind her, explaining that sorcerers cannot fly, they can only walk the echoes of the ground in the sky. “If there is a pit in the ground below,” he croaks, “there is a pit in the sky as well!”

Then she feels it … Feels it?

Soma has pulled her back to the safety of the terrace, but she lingers at the edge, still gazing at the black waters below.

She feels it rising.

She sees a flicker in the deeps, like lightning through dark and distant clouds. “Akka?” she murmurs, but it is too late. She realizes that it is too late. In her soul’s eye she sees Xonghis on one knee before the Obsidian Gate, a lifetime ago it seems, scratching the sign of the Skin Eaters next to the signs of all the other lost companies.

It was always too late. No one leaves the Black Halls.

Through dark water, Hell rises in the guise of a great graven seal, like a shield stamped with packed skulls and living faces, winding in fractal rings about the long-dead Nonman King. It pauses beneath the surface, its limbs languorous and submerged. Veins of blackness pulse up across the walls. It stares across the bourne, pondering the unspeakable, then raises its lips to kiss the inverted surface, and exhales the shriek and torment that is its air.

The others hear it only as horror, inborn and sourceless, as buried within them as they are buried in Cil-Aujas. Mimara turns to their sudden silence. In a moment of madness it seems that she can see their hearts through their caged breasts, that she can see the eyes open …