The Great Ordeal (Aspect-Emperor #3)(111)

But your Sons had known—your Sons had seen. If not Men, what other vessel might bear the nectar of their learning, the Song of their doomed race?

“Teach them,” the Blessed Siqu called.

“Or consign our Sum to Oblivion.”



“Mu’miorn!” the in-between soul that had once been Sorweel cried.

Clack … Clack … Clack …

Gloom hooded the Great Entresol, and Mu’miorn vanished among tangled shadows. Holol had been sheathed. Luminance filtered down from above. Pallid bodies roiled in the black.

Oinaral lunged toward him, resplendent before the horrid surge. He leapt into him, tackled him about the breast … The youth glimpsed the Haul, bulbous black framed by ceilings stark with illumination. They sailed past the floor, and emptiness pulled them down and away.

They plummeted, weightless.

Oinaral’s arm yanked him gallows-hard, held him dangling as they somehow swung out over the cavernous void.

The Holy Deep.

He choked for want of wind. He made to cry out, but for which madness he did not know. Oinaral had somehow managed to wrap his free arm about one of the fallow nimil chains. Now they swung on a giddy ellipse.

The lunatic depths of the Great Entresol howled about them.

Clack … Clack … Clack …

Mu’miorn …



O’ Ishori?l, would a different doom have followed? Would the World have turned otherwise had the Mansions of your kin listened?

For the Vile had come unto Men in the wilds of E?nna, delivered the very ministry your Sons had so urgently argued. The Vile had sat upon the earth to carve joints with the absurd Prophets of Men, whispered deceit in the guise of secrets, wove the thread of their wicked design into the fabric of their custom and belief. The Vile, not the Exalted, had shown them how to make inscription of speech, and so had chiselled alien malice upon the heart of an entire Race.

The Vile had armed them with the Apories that were so wasted upon Sranc.

What had they thought, the remaining Sons of Si?l, as the Mannish vermin rampaged through the glorious halls of the House Primordial? What had they thought, the remaining Sons of Cil-Aujas, when they retired from the fields of Mir’joril, and barred the Gates of their Mansion?

What had they thought of this last great insult, this final atrocity inflicted by their conquered foe?

Had they seen error … or just more injustice?

And so the Lust to Teach was rekindled among your Sons—O’ Ishori?l, a second folly! “A Tutelage of the Bright to undo the Tutelage of the Vile!” the first Siqu declared to your great King. And Cet’ingira Deepseer more than any other made glister of his treachery, saying unto Nil’giccas, “Let me make a ministry of the wisdom we have purchased with our doom. For among them are souls as wise as our own.”

Aye. As foolish.

And as terrified of damnation.



Oblivion on a swing.

Clack … Clack … Clack …

Sorweel hung limp, the rim of the Cauldron biting his breastbone, shuddering only to weep for his lover and his Race. All was black below. The Haul lowered in surreal stages above, a shadow that took the illuminated depths of the Great Entresol as its halo. It floated down to the shrieking rim of the Pier Floor then below. Without warning, Oinaral’s frame flexed against his own, and they began to sway as a pendulum, Man and Nonman.

Vertigo clawed his gut, scratched a greater awareness from the mud of his grief. The light emerged from obscurity, chased the Haul’s shade down their forms, and Sorweel glimpsed his own shadow crisp and confounded across the walls of the Ingressus, swinging coupled across sewage-clotted imagery. The peering affixed above the vessel was an explosion of radiant hair for tears he could not feel. He glimpsed only battered gunwales, soiled decks, the heaped carcasses of pigs …

And a hooded figure, standing immobile directly beneath the light.

Clack … Clack … Clack …

The Haul sank. Oinaral’s exertions became more violent, savage even, and their gyrations pulled them out on a fatter arc. He could feel the Nonman’s strength failing; he knew that if all else were silent, he would hear the ghoul heaving and spitting air like a bull. He sagged to Oinaral’s abdomen, and he knew that he need only do nothing, and the Siqu’s arm would yield him to the gaping below, make of him a gift to the Holy Deep …

And the knowing suffused him with far more hope than horror.

Release me …

His breast slipped from Oinaral’s clasp.

Return me to your bosom, Mother.

But the Siqu managed to catch his left arm. He swung out limp on the chain’s arc.

The way is too hard.

He felt, rather than heard the Nonman scream above him.

Your son is too weak.

And he could feel what was about to happen, feel himself cartwheeling through blackness, clipping the sides as a doll cast down a well. He could feel the fatal plummet that was release— A bird blasted up out of the blackness, its great white wings thrashing, the yellow knife of its beak aimed at heaven. The peering etched it in clean light above, a stork, a miraculous vision of life— Sorweel seized Oinaral’s wrist—out of brute reflex more than resolution. He swung wide and kicking over the void. The Great Entresol resonated with bottled screams.

The iron band of the Nonman’s grip vanished. He toppled, flew into the peering as though into the sun, missed it by the breadth of an arm, crashed into the stacked carcasses. He rolled to planks of sodden wood, looked about wildly.