The Great Ordeal (Aspect-Emperor #3)(114)
The Nonmen.
The lions fled, and there they rested content,
And they placed yokes upon the groaning Emwama,
Who placed yokes upon the braying beasts,
And brought forth abundance for the Sons of Si?l
Judgment ever belongs to the greater. He saw himself the way the Injori Ishroi saw Men in days of ancient old, as strutting beasts, by turns devious and absurd, rotting even as they lived, shouting boasts from atop their barrow-graves. Weed or flower, it did not matter, for their time was too short to count anything but the dregs of glory. Henceforth, his would always be a miscreant life.
And so the last of the boy left to the Son of Harweel died in the Weeping Mountain.
The walls of the Umbilicus had been dyed black to make stark the gilded halos about his head and hands. Perhaps no soul in the Empire aside from herself and her elder brothers knew this.
“And if I should fail? What then, Father?”
His presence had dwarfed for intensity more than dimension. His look passed through her the way it always had, twin cables strung taut across the interval that was her soul.
“Spend your final breath on prayer.”
She became real, kneeling before him like this, just as she had as a little girl. Always.
“For me?”
“For everything.”
Clack … Clack … Clack …
The Lament gradually faded into the boom of waters. They continued sinking, a vacant bulb of illumination dropping into viscous black. Sorweel abandoned his position, sat upon the deck opposite the stacked carcasses, his head—or the Cauldron, rather—bent against the glare. If Oinaral wondered at his silence, he made no sign. The Nonman stood leaning from the stern as before, a pale shadow decked in armour lurid with scintillant light. Perhaps he too grappled with misgiving and unwelcome insight. Perhaps he too sounded waters the intellect could only muddy.
The youth lay slack, hung in incredulity. An image of Serwa floated beneath his soul’s eye, and his blood ran cold.
The Boatman began a different dirge, another song the Amiolas remembered, an epic lay of love in the shadow of extinction. Sorweel turned to him. He was scarcely more than a silhouette for the radiance above, an apparition of smoke rising into sunlight.
She stripped and she clothed him,
but she fed him not,
and with her brother,
they became runners beneath the Starving,
fleeing into the wilds of Ti,
where the rivers vanish,
in the cruel shadow of the House Primordial.
Sorweel lay drowsing as he listened, his body a thing forgotten, at once bound upon the rack and entombed in clay. Watching the Boatman, he saw a scuttling of shadows about his feet … He thought it a cat, at first, for he had seen innumerable cats upon the river barges of his home. Then the first of the figures strode from the Boatman’s shadow and into horrific reality.
Clack … Clack … Clack …
There, less than two lengths from where he lay against the deck, a living stone statue stood no more than a cubit in height …
It was one of the countless Ishroi chiselled from the walls, dressed much as Oinaral, rendered in exquisite detail, save where scabbed by ancient happenstance. The little face held him in its chipped regard.
Sorweel could not call out, could not move, whether for the want of limbs or volition he would never know.
A second graven doll joined the first, this one naked and missing the top third of its head.
And then a third joined them. And more, appearing along the summit of the pig carcasses immediately before him, miniature stone ghouls glaring down eyeless. He could hear even more, their march like a thousand little hammers tapping across the deck.
The peering flared soundless and white, cast a garland of crisp little shadows from their stone feet.
Clack … Clack … Clack …
He could not scream out any warning.
But someone had seized his shoulders—someone was shouting his father’s name! The Siqu—Oinaral …
“Awaken! On your feet, Son of Harweel!”
Sorweel clawed his way up, casting wildly about for any sign of the stone effigies. He looked to the Lastborn in confusion, glimpsed a pale, naked figure drop wheeling and kicking into the abyss a mere toss from the Haul. He turned to the Siqu in astonishment, to confirm that he had seen what he had seen. But Oinaral was already squinting upward, his hand held so as to cast a shadow across his eyes. Sorweel joined him, found himself dazzled by the peering. Another pallid figure materialized, plummeting from visibility into obscurity within a heartbeat—close enough for the youth to start. It seemed he had locked gazes with the hurtling wretch, glimpsed the mien of someone awakening …
He stood blinking against his own disordered soul.
Clack … Clack … Clack …
“What happens?” he gulped as much as called.
“I do not kno—”
Another flash of battling white. Sorweel glimpsed a form streak toward the far side of the Haul, catch it with its face, then carom, flipping. The entire bark kicked and swayed upon the chain. Oinaral fell to one knee. Sorweel clasped at the swine carcasses, caught one of the legs above the cloven feet; it was stiff as wood for rigour. The Boatman merely swayed counter to his vessel the way an ancient mariner might, and continued singing.