Seblik na Lareon could no longer turn back.

The mob bore him onward like a tide that had no ebb, just flow. Thousands had gone ahead safely during the night. Now the first flames sprang up behind them, the first glass shattered, the first doors splintered under spiked boots.

Understanding had come to the king. He had set his soldiers on them.

Seblik was not of them, he bore no mark, but stragglers would be killed without a second look -- or with a second look, given too late, and then perhaps a shrug of thin remorse as the bloody mistake was lost underfoot. Seblik na Lareon was a modest scribe, a translator, nothing more. The vision of himself as that trampled body fueled the imperative to flee.

Too late, too late. He must keep on, he must go faster -- he was a sheep with mad dogs at his heels, the cries of the mob sounded like the blatting of ewes. But where? Run where?

A woman near him staggered, went to her knees. He dragged himself back against the flow, helped her regain her feet. She clutched to her breast a mangled hand, fresh crushed by a blind boot. "Too late," she moaned, the voice of his own despair. Soot streaked her mutilated cheek, embossed the old, scarred mark. Despite his urge to help, Seblik nearly left her then; his body recoiled as from contagion. He reminded himself that he knew better. He put his arm around her. His leather satchel, heavy with codices, battered their lower backs as he helped her onward, shoved this way and that by people desperate to get past.

The last of them, the dregs, the forsaken, those who had tarried. Only at dawn had the cry been raised in the vacant, squalid quarters, only by midmorning had the scale of the thing become evident. They had been leaving, in small, unobtrusive groups, for weeks before. The city had filled with them, then drained, and until today no one had been the wiser. Now the westering sun gilded their doom.

Seblik would not have been in their quarter at all, were it not for his own cursed studies. He risked his position, he risked being damned by association, but he could not resist their lore, their skills, their fluency in the old tongues. Now he would pay for his thirst for knowledge. Too late he had tried to slip back to the palace. The streets were already full of soldiers; he was forced into alleys, forced into a roundabout route, forced ever outward toward the city's edge, and beyond it; and then the fleeing crowds had engulfed him and there was no way back, there was no choice.

And wouldn't he prefer this? Whatever the cost, wouldn't he prefer their learned company to that of their enemies?

Up, up they went, Seblik and the stumbling woman, up the rocky way, scales rippling over the Serpentback, ascending the sea-bordered ridge as the hours ground past and the relentless sun sank under its own weight into black, whitecapped waves. Through the night they pushed on -- no choice, as the way grew narrow and so many pushed on behind them. Hour after hour they heard the screams as the slow, the weak were cut down; hour after hour, there were fewer between the two of them and the end of the ragged column. Why cut them down, what disastrous cruelty was this, to kill those you would be rid of when they were ridding you of themselves?

There was nowhere for them to go. They could march for weeks and in the end there would be only rock and more sea. The Serpentback led to wasteland. There was nothing for anyone there but slow death.

Behind them, the stifled shrieks came closer. Behind that, the laughter of murderers. Toying with them, now; knowing, as they did, that their headlong rush was hopeless. They would have ample time to scythe this wearying field of wheat, whose slow, short roots could not carry them fast enough to land too barren to sustain them should they reach it.

I am not one of them! his useless mind cried. See me, all unmarked! I am translator to princes! I will be missed in the merchant quarters, they will pay coin to see me spared! But there was no coin here on the wind-scoured Serpentback, there were no powerful patrons, and they would spare neither his life nor the time to ascertain his innocence before taking it from him.

"I hurt," the woman said. Seblik had been supporting her for almost a mile. His arms ached, his legs burned. Terror was no longer enough to mask exhaustion.

"I cannot carry you," he said.

"Leave the sack."

"I cannot."

Still they walked; and then he chanced to raise his head.

"Look," he said. "Look."

Dawn was behind them, the blood of the dead seeping into the sky; perhaps a mile ahead, the rocky outcroppings of the Waste spread to either side like wings -- even seemed to rise, an illusion created by moonset. Seblik's mind was beginning to go. There had been no water, no crumb of food, on this mad flight. But the cliffs were there, the land was there, asserting itself against the sea. The cliffs were crenellated by people. The main group had not dispersed into the Waste to buy their futile weeks of life. They were standing firm -- unarmed, facing the pursuit.

Soldiers on horseback would follow the soldiers afoot. Ships would launch, must already be rowing toward the serpent's sides.

The fools awaited death.

The sight gave the woman renewed strength, and she walked for a while under her own power. No need, now, to cast her off, or cast off the bag of precious codices. The weight of that decision lifted from him, Seblik too found strength to go on.

The serpent writhed beneath them.

Just a shudder at first, easily dismissed as a spasm of weariness in his own flesh. Then another, and a third.

Seblik turned, and took in:

Perhaps a hundred foot soldiers backlit by dawn, silhouettes bulked by spiked greaves and breastplates; the lightening sky made shades of them, as if the damned souls of soldiers dead long past had escaped some crack in the netherworld's ceiling and rushed out to harry the marked ones. Swords catching the sunrise on tempered steel and flinging it in all directions like so many blades of light; the soldiers had let their weapons sag, milling in confusion as the Serpentback bucked again and trembled. No more than a handful of marked ones between himself, the woman, and the blades. Leagues upon miles distant, the burning city, a vicious ember under nacreous sky.

The serpent twisted, rumbled its rocky agony. They broke into a run.

He lost the woman; fell, himself; scrabbled back for her along the stony path, found her tumbled into thorn and gorse, the serpent's shale-scaled side rounding precipitously to the sea a yard beyond her. He pulled her free, thought she was sobbing -- it was he who was sobbing. The other marked ones had gone past them. No buffer now. Armored death loomed over them; a sword tore free a swatch of dawnlight and dragged it toward them in an endless, sweeping arc.

Seblik hurled himself flat at death's feet. The woman half-rose to flee. The sword, aimed for where their heads had been, bit deep; her fending forearm shattered. The serpent pulled itself from the water and dropped abruptly back. Seblik, lying flat, clung like a mite to the scaly hide. The soldier, standing, was flung off. His razored armor rasped down the slope, sword clattering before it.

A liquid calm washed through Seblik then. He got to his knees, found the woman lying on the path ahead. He knotted her tunic's sash around her upper arm to stop the blood; the sword had ruined all below the elbow. Grunting, he hauled her onto his shoulders. He staggered to his feet, lost them in the next rockquake, got up again. He ran headlong for the cliffs. They were too far. He ran anyway.

With churning feet, with momentum, he rode the writhing serpent. He flew; it cast him up into the air and forward, the woman's weight counterbalanced by the bulging satchel. He came down still running, boot soles finding miraculous purchase, propelling him on until the next spasm sent him airborne.

He gained the stepped cliffside. Hands reached down, bore the woman up and away. A quake sent him reeling out of their grasp. He clawed at the bucking rock, looked up, and saw a thing he'd expected never to see again in his lifetime: marked ones plying their banned craft.

A red-haired woman, a fair man, a dark man. Six others, in a triangle around them, two to a side. Seated on rocks, passing their instruments among them, making arcane the commonplace tools of his own craft. Under the crash of the sea, the hiss of spume, the groaning rock, the shouts and cries, a low hum resonated in his bones: their chanting. The three in the center of the triangle -- red woman, light man, dark man -- rose to their feet with the fluidity and patience of ritual. Oblivious of the madness below, they clasped wrists with their arms crossed. They wove themselves into a tight ring. It grew tighter and then tighter still, until Seblik couldn't see where one left off and the next began -- until they merged into one being, a creature of light so intense it made him squint.

They were breaking the serpent.

Fatigued rock parted. Seawater rushed into jagged fissures. Segments big as houses shifted. Straggling soldiers slid screaming into the sea. The sea itself began to boil.

A segment cracked off, scant yards from him, but the rock he clung to with torn fingers remained attached to the cliffs. He crawled toward those rescuing hands -- in moments he would be safe, safe as anyone could be in the Waste, better to face hunger and thirst for a week or a year than fall to a cruel death on the hungry, tortured stone--

The strap of his satchel snapped. The bag of codices tumbled away. He cried out, turned; it was lodged in a cleft, just past arm's reach. Above him voices shouted, begging him to grab hold, climb up. He felt the reaching hands.

He dove for the satchel. With the last strength in his spent limbs, he hurled it up and over the cliff, into the arms that waited for him.

The serpent released a deafening roar and crumbled into the roiling waters. The sky cracked open. The dim stars twisted on their fabric of night; the fabric folded, swallowing the sunrise. For a moment, all was twilit silence. Then a great wind swept through, flattening all life. Seblik clung to the bucking rock, and screamed back at the earsplitting tumult, and it subsided.

He had survived the shattering of the Serpentback.

Like an afterthought, Seblik's granite perch crumbled too, stressed past enduring. The ocean reached for him. The waters were black, but they opened on a depthless sea of light.

Seblik fell, and fell, into the ages.