The Great Ordeal (Aspect-Emperor #3)(113)
“But not ageless.”
The Siqu glanced to the darkness below. “Aye.”
“But how could he …” The youth trailed in confusion. His knowledge seemed a book whose spine had unravelled—or worse, two books. All he had were sheaves scattered and heaped, facts and episodes. With his every knowing, it seemed, he became more disordered, not less, as if every page pulled open was another page torn.
“How has he escaped the Dolour?” Oinaral said, guessing his question. He shrugged his great shoulders. “None know. Some think he was the first to suffer it, that his acts had been so violent and his life so long that he was already Erratic ere the Second Watch was abandoned, and that this … natural derangement … has rendered him immune to the violence of what the others suffer. He does not speak, though he understands much of what is said. He does not grieve or weep—at least not outwardly.”
“And he cares for them now? The others? Feeds them?”
The bald head shook in negation beneath the motionless white point of the peering gleaming upon it.
“No. The Emwama tend to the Chthonic. The Boatman goes where they cannot. He ministers to those who wander the Holy Deep.”
Clack … Clack … Clack …
“Like your father, Oir?nas.”
Oinaral was several heartbeats in replying.
“He completes a Fathoming each day, every day …” he said. “What was once a holy pilgrimage before the Chthonic was abandoned. Some say he does penance for all those he killed before the coming of the Vile.”
“What do you say?”
The Siqu turned to him—daring the ethereal visage of Immiriccas, Sorweel now knew.
His visage.
“That a wild labyrinth lays about him,” the Lastborn said, glancing as if in gesture to the blackness, but in truth out of aversion to his aspect. “And he cleaves to the only path that recognizes his feet.”
The Haul descended to the cracking of hammers and the Boatman’s rust-iron voice.
Facing the sun, there Imimor?l dug a great well,
And bid his children enter.
In the bone of the world, there he conjured song and light,
And his children feared no more the starving Sky.
Here! Here Imimor?l drew down the face of the mountain,
Bid us seize the halls of the House Primordial—here!
Here lies a home that cleaves the tempest asunder,
A home that breaks the shining beak of the dawn.
So the Most Ancient Warrior sang. And Sorweel learned that the earth was mazed, the ground riddled with cavernous hollows. It seemed horrific somehow, that intervals should haunt the foundation of foundations. This was the ground, he realized in numb disbelief—the ground!—and they travelled through it, cranked into its black maw. The changes in the engravings seemed instant when he finally noticed them, but he somehow understood they had come about gradually, figure by sculpted figure. At some point in the descent, when the Lament yet resounded perhaps, the stone populace of the walls had begun to notice them. One by one the fist-sized faces turned, and the cubit-tall figures began to form ranks against the observing void. By the time Sorweel observed the change, the little sculptures had already barricaded the panels, standing, watching, face after indistinguishable face.
Clack … Clack … Clack …
The soul divided between Sorweel and Immiriccas gaped in horror.
“None know how or why the stone-eaters responsible carved them thus,” Oinaral said from his periphery, perhaps sensing his unease, perhaps not. “The stone-eaters themselves said they did it to honour the Fathoming, as a goad to self-examination and an accounting of sins. To apprehend memorials without, they said, was to neglect the testimony of what lies within.”
Sorweel shuddered, such was the effect of the thousands of motionless faces.
“And you do not believe them?”
“Their expressions …” the Siqu said, his voice as searching as his gaze. “There is too much hatred in them.”
But the youth could see no expression in any of them at all. They simply watched, great rings of miniature faces, band stacked upon murky band, their eyes so indifferent as to be dead, so numerous as to be one. The Lament yet lay clear upon the air, a morass of shouts and wails, a racket barbed so as to hook as burrs upon more lucid souls. And the contradiction raised his hackles, the sight of judgment given and the sound of judgment received …
And he realized the Fathoming had always been a thing of dread for Immiriccas, whose aversion to reflection approached loathing. Action should be enough!
But for him to stand in judgment of Immiriccas was at once for Immiriccas to stand in judgment of him. Who he had been the dismal months preceding came in a cringing flood, images churning as foam. Mewling when blood should have been spilled. Bemoaning what should have been avenged. Questions like sparrows battling in his breast, leaving him winded. Sorweel shrank from the ancient and inflamed gaze, the immovable eye of the Ishroi, even as he bowed before the thousands stacked in great rings about the walls of the Ingressus …
Clack … Clack … Clack …
The Haul descended, and Sorweel fell a second time, into deeps no less irrevocable. Humanity had been his ground, his implicit ordering frame, and like so very many things human, it could only command so long as it remained unseen. Thus are pride and courage so eager to example witless faith: only not knowing allows Men to be what they need to be. So long as Sorweel had remained ignorant of his countless mortal frailties, they could secure him thoughtless foundation. But now that he had fathomed himself from a greater vantage, a far mightier and more noble frame, he could only see himself as anxious and deceitful, craven and imbecilic, crooked and grotesque, an ape that lurched in mockery of the true rule.