Achamian falls to his knees, clutching his chest. He looks to her in pleading horror. Lord Kosoter stumbles backward into the corridor. Some clutch their faces; others begin to shriek and scream. Soma stands riven. Sarl cackles and bawls, his eyes pinched into lines between red wrinkles.

“I can’t seeeeee!” the crease-faced sergeant gibbers. “I-look-I-look-I-look …”

The Unholy Seal rears glistening from the water, weeping strings of fire. It towers over them in leaning accusation. It roars, the sound so near, so ingrown that it seems they stand in the throat of a Demon-God. A voice claps through their souls, so loud it draws blood through the pores of their skin.

The Gates are no longer guarded.

Mimara is also on her knees, also shrieking, yet her fingers somehow find her purse, begin fumbling, pinching the Chorae that nearly killed the Wizard. She cringes beneath the looming aspect, a child beneath a collapsing city wall. She hugs her limbs against the piercing pleas of little mouths, the moaning masses of the damned …

And somehow lifts her Tear of God.

She knows not what she does. She knows only what she glimpsed in the slave chamber, that single slow heartbeat of light and revelation. She knows what she saw with the Judging Eye.

The Chorae burns as a sun in her fingers, making red wine of her hand and forearm, revealing the shadow of her bones, and yet drawing the eye instead of rebuking it, a light that does not blind.

“I guard them!” she weeps, standing frail beneath the white-bleached Seal. “I hold the Gates!”

Of all their ordeals, none would be so great as climbing the Great Medial Screw. Where the Sranc had taken their toll in blood and lives, and the Wight-in-the-Mountain, or whatever it was they had encountered in the closeted deeps, had taken its toll in terror and spirit, the endless stairs of the Screw took everything that remained: courage, strength, and endurance—endurance above all. Climbing. Climbing. Climbing. Clinging to seams as they picked their way over collapsed sections. Hurrying past the hundreds of gaping black portals. Bending back their faces to remind themselves of the sky they sought, to wonder at the way it waxed and grew.

The first time the high blue point they climbed toward began darkening they had despaired, fearing they had been shut in, until they realized that it was simply night. They had been buried so long they had forgotten the cycle of the days.