become the Lady’s Mortal-Aspect, and then witnessed her death a few days later.
When Legana mentioned Aracnan, and the one whose orders he must have been following - the shadow, Azaer - Ardela flinched, and her own story began to pour out of her. She cried, ashamed for her employment by Cardinal Certinse, whose entire family had served a daemon-prince, and sorrowed by the savagery and depravity of her life during those years. In the darkness the women held each other and wept for what they had lost. Long before dawn broke they knew they shared an enemy.
He fell through a silent storm, tossed carelessly like a discarded plaything. Tumbling and turning, he dropped too quickly even to scream. Unable to see, unable to speak, he tried to curl into a ball and protect his face from the thrashing storm, but the effort proved too much. There was no energy in his limbs to fight the wild tumult, nor breath in his lungs to give him strength. But as he fell deeper into darkness, the panic began to recede and some measure of clarity started to return to his thoughts.
The storm, he realised eventually, was chaotic, assailing him from all directions, and though every part of his body told him he was falling, as the blind terror began to fade he realised he was in a void, a place where up and down held no meaning. He was apart from the Land, tumbling through chaos itself - until Death reached out to claim him.
All of a sudden the air changed. Mihn felt himself arrive somewhere with a jolt that wrenched him right around. His toes brushed a surface beneath him and gravity suddenly reasserted itself. He collapsed in a heap on a cold stone floor, a sharp pain running through his elbows and knees as they took the impact. Instinctively he rolled sideways, curling up, his hands covering his face.
Once his mind stopped spinning Mihn took a tentative breath and opened his eyes. For a moment his vision swam and he moaned with pain. Then his surroundings came into focus. A high vaulted ceiling loomed somewhere in the distance, so vast, so impossibly far that his mind rebelled against the sight. Before Mihn could understand where he was he had rolled over again and was vomiting on the stone floor.
Almost instantly he felt a change within himself as sight of something mundane became a lodestone for his thoughts. Underneath him were flagstones, as grey as thunderclouds, pitted with age. He struggled to his feet and lurched for a few drunken steps before regaining his balance. Once he had done so he looked at his surroundings - and Mihn found himself falling to his knees again.
He was in the Halls of Death - the Herald’s Hall itself. All the stories he had told, all the accounts he had read: none of them could do justice to the sight before him. The human mind could barely comprehend a place of magic where allegory was alive enough to kill. The hall stretched for miles in all directions, and was so high he felt a wave of dizziness as soon as he looked up. Gigantic pillars stood all around him, miles apart and higher than mountains, all made of the same ancient granite as the roof and floor.
There was no one else there, Mihn realised. He was quite alone, and the silence was profound. The vastness of the hall stupefied him. Mihn found himself unable to fully comprehend so unreal a space, made more unworldly by the silence, and the stillness in the air. Only when that stillness was broken - by a distant flutter from above - did he find himself able to move again. He turned, trying to follow the sound, only to yelp with shock as he saw a figure behind him where there had been no one before.
He retreated a few steps, but the figure didn’t move. Mihn didn’t need the accounts he’d heard about the last days of Scree to recognise the figure: with skin as black as midnight, robes of scarlet and a silver standard, it could only be the Herald of Death, the gatekeeper of His throne room and marshal of these halls.
The Herald was far taller than Mihn, bigger even than the tallest of white-eyes. Prominent ears were the only feature of the hairless black head. Eyes, nose and mouth were indentations only, token shapes to hint at humanity which served only to make the Herald more