His voice had grown wan as he spoke; how paling before the ferocity of what.
“Everyone knows of the Great Ruiner,” Sorweel retorted. “The question is how could you know he returns? Or that the Anasûrimbor alone can forestall him?”
“It has been prophe—”
“I have been prophecied!”
A vague apprehension slackened the inhuman gaze.
“These are difficult matters for any Man … let alone one so young as you.”
“You forget. My soul is neither young nor human so long I wear this accursed thing on my head.”
Oinaral strolled in silent meditation, looking, for all his warlike accoutrements, the meticulous sage his brothers had condemned him to be. Sorweel understood then how much he could trust the Son of Oirûnas. Ever is manner the oracle of the man. Ever does our carriage betray our souls. The Lastborn did not steer or cozen, he assayed tragic alternatives, grappled with uncertainties entirely his own. Different ignorances.
What Sorweel felt was too numb to count as hope. Oinaral was not steeped in the ancients—he was one. His questions stood upon floors planked in countless answers.
This, the youth realized, was what the Nonmen had always been to Men … Guides …
Fathers.
“Emilidis abhorred all his miraculous works,” the Nonman finally said, “but none so much as the Amiolas. He made certain that no one could forget its nature.”
“But why?” Sorweel cried. “Why should I believe your myth over the living decree of Yatwer? Why should I doubt the Almighty Goddess that stalks me daily, raises me up, shelters me from evil? You heard my confession: her spit has baffled his eye, allowed me to sow lies where all other men stand exposed! And yet you claim that he, my father’s murderer has the truer vision?”
Oinaral held him in his sour regard. “If I were tell you,” he began, “that your mother had taken a lover before your birth, and that this lover was your true father, what would you te—?”
“Impossible!” Sorweel coughed in disbelief. “Outrageous!”
“Exactly,” Oinaral said, speaking with the intensity of insight. “The possibility is unthinkable.”
“I ask for explanations, and you besmirch my paternity?”
“I say this because the No-God is just such a possibility for your Goddess, your Mother of Birth. The No-God is a prospect She cannot think, cannot know, cannot discern, no matter how violently it remakes the World. To exist across all times is to be oblivious to the Eschaton, the limit of those times, and Mog-Pharau is that limit. The Eschaton.”
He glanced at the frowning youth, then gestured to one panel among the many that fretted the walls, to a scene where Ishroi threw down Bashrag and Sranc before the Horns of Golgotterath—but was it Pir Pahal or Pir Minginnial?
“The No-God stands outside inside and outside,” Oinaral continued. “The Gods of your idols could not foresee its coming two thousand years ago. When It walked the World in actuality they saw only the ruin that was its shadow—ruin they blamed on other things! The priests of Men cried out and out and out, for naught. The masses huddled in the Temples wailing, and their Gods—your Gods!—heard only madness or mockery …”
Sorweel gaped faceless. The Amiolas, which had been an insufferable burden, seemed the only thing holding him upright.
“What are you saying? That Yatwer is deceived?”
“More. I’m saying that given Her nature, She cannot but be deceived.”
“Impossible!”
Oinaral merely shrugged. “Necessity always seems such to the ignorant.”
Sorweel reeled, suppressed an urge to bellow his exasperation. How? How could a boy simply awaken one morning and find himself beset by such perversities? Prophets who were not prophets, but were saviours all the same? Gods who ruled as blindly as Kings?
At every turn! Whenever he found some kernel of resolve, whenever he thought he had glimpsed the truth of his straits, the World said otherwise … How? How had he become such a lodestone for madness and contradiction?
“You wear the Amiolas, Son of Harweel. The knowledge dwells within you, as certain as suffering itself. The Unholy Consult seeks the destruction of the World …”
He need not reflect to know the canny Nonman had spoken true. The memories were there, mountainous with portent and implication, heartbreak and hatred, but like gears belonging to a different mill they remained inert, immovable, like something that could only be scratched, never seized.
“You bear the Weal, the same as us …”
And he simply knew … knew that Oinaral Lastborn spoke true … The Incû-Holionas had come to exterminate all souls … and the Gods could not see it at all …
The Dread Mother was blind.
They descended to the Fourth Observance, one of the more ancient halls of Ishterebinth. Sorweel glimpsed yet another panel depicting Min-Uroikas—Golgotterath—this one hewn from stone grained like violent waters. The Mountain loomed obdurate about them, a crushing forever caught in suspension. His thoughts bobbed and twitched like butterflies, absurd for being so insubstantial in a crypt so massive.
Ishterebinth.
“They plot our extinction …” the youth said.
“Yes,” Oinaral Lastborn replied, his voice timbered in too many passions.
“But why? Why would anyone war for such an insane outcome?”
They crossed another baroque junction. The sound of nearby weeping momentarily scraped the walls.
“Salvation,” the Nonman said. “There is no reprieve from such sins as they have committed.”
An implacable fury swelled through Sorweel’s limbs, an urge to throttle—to strike! But it was cracked for the absence of foes, broken into aimless urgency.
“They seek …” he said, using calm words to force calm into his demeanour. “They seek to save themselves from … from damnation?”
“You know this as well,” Oinaral said. “You only balk because of its implication …”
“Implication? What implication?”
He could scream, such was the absurdity of it all.
“Because it means the Anasûrimbor is almost certainly your Saviour.”
And there it was. The Amiolas need not blot his sense of breathing.
The Mother-of-Birth had doomed him to assassinate a Living Prophet, the true Saviour.
Effigies of her father often came to her in the blind watches, glimpses, episodes. She would dwell upon them so as to stop her ears against her brother’s odd shrieks, reliving her own past as she relived Seswatha’s in her sleep. And sometimes, when the rigours of her captivity waxed ascendant, she found herself rehearsing conversations that did not exist. Her father would come to her bearing bread, water. He would rinse skin she could not feel, ask her how she was now captive in a place so pitiless, so dark.
“Hate had not come easy,” she would tell him. “His love for me was … was …”
“So is this the end, little Witch? Are you so ready to forget?”
“Forget … What do you mean?”
“That you are my daughter.”
A Nonman huddled naked on the corner of the next intersecting hall, his face buried in tangled arms and knees. The nearest peering illuminated the bulb of the wretch’s head, rendered him a thing of white wax and motionless shadow. He seemed a part of the Mountain. Were it not for the pulse of a lone vein, Sorweel would have sworn the ghoul dead.
Oinaral took no notice.
“A Man once told me that hope dwindles with age,” the Siqu said after a handful of paces. “That was why, he said, the ancients were happy.”
Sorweel could only reply out of numb habit. “And what did you say?”
“That there was hope, and there was hope for, and that this was what made the ancients happy … hoping for.”
Deafening silence.
Sorweel simply continued walking, blank for being overmatched by this latest revelation.
“You do understand, do you not, Son of Harweel?”
“I can scarce understand my burden. What am I supposed to make of yours?”
Oinaral nodded.
“Those of us who became Siqu so long ago did so because we knew this day would come … this, the day of our Dissolution. We did what we did so that we might finally relieve ourselves of hope’s burden, and let it pass into our children …”
A wonder had accompanied these words, one demanding scrutiny as much as reverence. Such a world Sorweel had stumbled into, filled with so much darkness and sorrow and truth.
“Children …You mean Men.”
Halls branched through the blackness, untrod, Sorweel somehow knew, for thousands of years.
“I will tell you what Immiriccas could not know,” the ancient Siqu said, staring into the depths of the Observance. “There comes a point where all the old ways of making sense just slough away. You persist in your daily ablutions, your ritual discourse and habitual labour, but an irritation claims you, the suspicion that others conspire to mock and confuse. This is all that you feel …”
Massacres lined their passage, the toil of making dead.
“The Dolour itself is invisible … all you ever see are cracks of fear and incomprehension where before all was seamless … thoughtless … certain. Soon you dwell in perpetual outrage, but are too fearful to voice it, because even though you know everything is the same, you no longer trust those you have loved to agree, so spiteful they have become! Their concern becomes condescension. Their wariness becomes conspiracy.
“And so the Weal becomes the Dolour, so the Intact become the Erratic. Think on it, mortal King, the way melancholy is prone to make you cruel, impatient of weaknesses. Your soul slowly disassembles, fragments into disconnected traumas, losses, pains. A cowardly word. A lover’s betrayal. An infant’s last, laboured breath. And for the heroes among us, the heartbreak commensurate with their breathtaking glory …”
Oinaral lowered his head as if at last conceding to some relentless weight.
“This is how you know that you stand before the least of my Race,” he voice raw. “The fact that I stand lucid and Intact before you.”
Their boots sent echoes muttering into the excavations buried about them.
“And that is why Nil’giccas is dead and gone …” Oinaral said on cracking passion. “He warred valiantly—I know this because for long centuries I was his Book. It was he who contrived the Bark and the Concavity, who made the Seal-of-the-Mountain a floating jewel. None toiled against the Dolour so mightily—or piteously—as he. The more he came apart, the more he demanded that his surroundings bind him together. But nothing could remedy his dissolution …
“Depravity, Son of Harweel. Only depravity retrieves the Wayward soul. No one knows why, but only horrors can render it whole, the commission of atrocities. You recover yourself for a slender interval, and you despair, crack for shame at the dishevelled beast you have become, and you rejoice. You live! The hunger for life burns far stronger in us than in Men, Son of Harweel. The suicides among us are miraculous, rare names in the Great Pit of Years …
“And so Nil’giccas—the most Illumined of our ancient Heros—took to depravity …”
Oinaral fell silent. His gait even slowed, as if he dragged his ruminations across the floors behind him.
“What did he do?” Sorweel asked.
A momentary glance to the littered floors—detritus leached from the porous walls.
“He took to the Emwama—a practice that Nin’ciljiras continues. That oil he pours upon his face and head is distilled from the fat of his victims. Atrocity! Simply to warrant his claim to be Intact!”
The Siqu cast his right arm down in the Injori gesture of disgust and symbolic ablution. “But this is to be expected from a Son of Viri, the line of Nin’janjin. But from Nil’giccas? The Blessed Man-Tutor?”
“So what did you do?” the youth asked, understanding that Oinaral gave him a confession in lieu of explanation.
“I feared. I mourned. I cautioned. Finally I threatened. When he persisted, I abandoned him.”
The Siqu walked riven now, his fists clenched, his neck finned above the folds of his nimil coif.
“And this would be all that he would remember … My betrayal …”
The youth could feel his own heart swell.
“Second Father!” Oinaral boomed, his voice crashing through the black tunnels, ripping through the film of shadows. “Lover! Sharer of Secrets! I abandoned thee!”
The Nonman collapsed to his knees, and Sorweel glimpsed his own image slip across Oinaral’s nimil shield as he pitched forward in kneeling anguish—
The reflection seized him about the throat.
Head sealed within the eldritch helm, a cauldron pitted with inscription …
And a face where there should be no face, as if shining across the skein of nimil sigils …
A Nonman face.
“He would have died a thousand deaths for me!” the Siqu cried. “And in his darkest watch, I abandoned him!”
Sorweel gazed hapless. “But he had succumbed to depravity … What else was there to be done?”
“The ancient learn no lessons!” Oinaral roared. In a blink he was back upon his feet, looming martial over the stunned youth. “A mortal should know as much! You do not punish the aged as you would children! Doing such simply salves your own conceit! Indulges your own malice!”
His eyes rolled ceiling-ward. His face clenched into something indistinguishable from a Sranc, and in a heartbeat Sorweel understood that the skinnies had been cut directly from them, that they were but the most horrific fragment of the ancient being before him—a demented mockery!
Such a blight the Inchoroi had been.
“I was weak!” Oinaral cried. “I punished him for failing to be what he had always been! I punished him for wronging me!” He seized Sorweel by his stained tunic, wrenched him into his spittle. “Don’t you see, Man-ling? All of this is my fault! I was the last rope remaining, his only tether!”
Confusion clouded the Siqu’s fury. He let slip Sorweel’s tunic, looked to the ground, blinking, shaking.
“What happened to him?” the youth asked. “What did he do?”
Oinaral whirled away in what resembled—to human eyes—childish shame. Sorweel turned away, but more to avoid his own reflection across Oinaral’s shield than out of respect.
“He fled …” the Nonman moaned into the graven walls, hunched as though paring his fingernails. “Vanished the fortnight following. I abandoned our beloved King, and he abandoned his sacred Mansion, the last surviving Son of Tsonos … until Nin’ciljiras returned.”
“But he would have fled regardless …”
“Only a fraction flee the Mountain … Some retreat into the Holy Deep, where they dwell in the blankness of the black, with no meaning to pain them. And others, the thousands of wretches below us, simply dwell, wander the compass of their most primitive habits, circling hearths they cannot remember, endlessly crying out, endlessly gathering and dropping the smashed pottery of their souls …”
The youth could not but wonder whether this would be all that remained of him … or Serwa … ere this latest nightmare were through.
“I alone am to blame,” the ancient Siqu declared to the miniature glories.
“But you said as much yourself. One need not leave the Mountain to flee. What would it matter if Nil’giccas roamed the mines or the Mere? He had fled already, Cousin. Nin’ciljiras would have been acclaimed regardless.”
The Son of Oirûnas finally turned to him. His cheeks gleamed. Pink rimmed his black-glittering eyes. He was a wise soul, the youth knew, but one jealous of its madnesses.
“How many remain Intact?” Sorweel asked.
The Nonman hesitated for an instant, as if loathe to yield the topic of his heartbreak. Renewed resolution deadened his expression.
“Scarcely a dozen. Several hundred others dwell, like Nin’ciljiras, in the twilight between.”
“So few.”
Oinaral Lastb
orn nodded. “The wound the Vile struck was mortal, though it would take three Ages for the poison to prevail. Our very immortality was our extinction.” Something, the irony perhaps, hooked his lips into a sneer. “We have dwelt with Apocalypse since before Far Antiquity, Son of Harweel. I fear we have at last embraced it.”
The glare had been so bright as to make straw of everything that gleamed, and chalk of all that was indistinct. Ordealmen laboured across the plain, each soul bearing his shadow beneath him. Their dust conspired to create a second Shroud, dwarfish and insubstantial.
“And if Ishterebinth has fallen to the Consult? What then, Father?”
A grave look.
“You are my daughter, Serwa,” Anasûrimbor Kellhus replied. “Show them my portion.”
Nin’ciljiras had come without explanation, Oinaral explained, disgorged by the very horizon that had swallowed him an Age previous when he and the other Dispossessed Sons of Viri had fled the Judgment of the Seal. The son of Ninar had come in all due humility, invoking the Canon of Imimorûl, demanding a hearing before the Aged. Some had sought to kill him, to execute the sentence Nil’giccas had passed. But his return so soon after the disappearance of the King was no coincidence. Nin’ciljiras had found Ishterebinth in uproar, for never had a Mansion wanted for a Son of Tsonos! So the Aged, those upon the Dolour’s mad bourne, seized upon the cur, immediately declared him, fearing strife and rebellion otherwise—sorrows that would all but toss them to madness. What could any of the Younger do? They had no voice in matters of Canon. They remained Intact entirely because they had no honour, for honour was nothing but the summit of life, and they had lived not at all. Aside from sneers, what could they command in the presence of heroes?
“I was a child when the Second Watch was disbanded,” Oinaral explained. “I remember seeing him, Nin’janjin, the Most-Accursed Son, standing as a brother beside Cu’jara Cinmoi in the glory of the Siölan Mall. I alone recall the terms of our wicked capitulation!”
So Oinaral could only watch in horror as Nin’ciljiras, Scion of Nin’janjin, was bled as Nil’giccas was once bled upon the Holy Seal of Ishoriöl, and so became the King of the Exalted Stronghold. And he knew with a certainty that was a sickness in his gut what would follow, how Min-Uroikas would figure ever more in the usurper’s discourse and declaration, how possibilities mentioned would become, in the fullness of months and years, promises sworn.
The Great Ordeal: Book Three (The Aspect-Emperor Trilogy) Page 29