The Great Ordeal (Aspect-Emperor #3)(115)
And he heard her say unto her brother,
“Lay with me, tend to my fallow plot,
make my barrens bloom, sweet Cet’moiol!
Let our Line suffer no iniquity, no alien earth or seed.
Let us aim our children as spears!”
Sorweel and Oinaral each stood on the rear portion of the deck gazing upward, hands against the peering light. The youth saw the last ring of engravings climb into the murk, a band consisting entirely of heads massed upon hairless heads, all of them watching. Raw stone ruled beneath, scarps jumbled and hanging. He glimpsed an iron catwalk rising from the obscurity below, a brace of scaffold across the wall, a pillared recess— A nude figure flickered past the prow.
Clack … Clack … Clack …
Oinaral cried out. Sorweel looked up, saw at least seven forms plummet from shadow into stark light, limbs flailing, bodies somersaulting, eyes glittering for the peering light, incredulous. The nearest slammed into the stern directly behind the Siqu. The Haul kicked up, tossed Sorweel against the stacked carcasses. He glimpsed a flashing miss, then another ghoul sheared across one of the iron braces, torso exploding into violet haze behind the Boatman. Another hurtled into the stacked pigs almost immediately before Sorweel. The impact slapped him backward. The Haul rocked and danced, swung on a ragged arc. Others slipped past without sound. Sorweel teetered on the gunwale as the bark wagged about, felt his stomach pitch. Any instant, it seemed, the lacquered bark would snap the chain and they would drop into the black.
But Oinaral was up, seizing his shoulder, even as the Haul’s motion rounded into a pendulous swing, one heaved slower and slower by the torsion of the Fathoming chain. He stared in horror at the pulverized pit where the wretch had landed upon the pigs. A hand lay miraculously intact on the floor at his feet, laying palm up as though holding a stylus.
All this time the Boatman had simply grasped the length of chain hanging beside him, swinging so as to seem motionless while the deck rolled and bucked beneath his shod feet. And for all the dangling violence of his bark, he did not once falter in his song …
Thence to the cruel House they fled,
the bastion that turns aside seasons—
“What happens?” Sorweel cried out. “Are they leaping?”
“No,” Oinaral replied, keen on the void above them once again. “They were not suicides.”
“How do you know?”
“Because they were Nonmen.”
“What? Nonmen can surrender dignity, but not life?”
“All dignity and more!” the ghoul cried, his face twisted into something nearly frantic with grief. “We would all be dead—Ishterebinth would be naught but a mouldering tomb!—were suicide something our nature permitted!”
Clack … Clack … Clack …
Sorweel stood glaring, his limbs stuffed with straw, his heart still hammering. To think he had bemoaned the madness of his quest with Serwa and Mo?nghus!
“So if they didn’t leap—then what?” He paused, realizing the dread alternative. “Were they thrown?”
Oinaral glanced at him sharply, then resumed staring upward, the swales of his face shining for the radiance of the peering.
“Were they thrown?” Sorweel pressed. “Could Nin’ciljiras somehow know what we attempt?”
Oinaral remained silent, avoiding his gaze as ever.
“We have reached the Q?lnimil,” he finally said in semblance of resolution. “The great Mine of Ishori?l …” A grimace marred his chiselled mien. “We shall reach the Mere soon.”
The false Believer-King turned from him in dismay. Grace, the Siqu had said. He would save himself by stalking his blessed shadow, by following the path that Yatwer had marked for the Son of Harweel, the boy doomed to murder the Aspect-Emperor. But what grace could be found in a pit so deep, amid horrors so sordid and appalling? If anything, he owed his life to Oinaral—not otherwise!
The Haul-hammer resounded through the black, its crack ragged for echoing across the fractured surfaces now soaring about them, counting out the unrelenting beat of the Boatman’s ancient song.
And far from the Starving,
in the deepest of the Deep,
they brought forth their accursed spear.
Cu’jara Cinmoi, a soul ever aimed
at this, our desolation,
for they had lain together, brother and sister,
in mockery of Tsonos and Olissis.
The Incest Song of Linqiru, Sorweel realized. A version he—or the soul he had become—had never heard, one bearing the warp of the future … of doom come true.
The Nonman Apocalypse. A whole race locked in the lightless depths, wailing for losses, raging against bargains sealed in bygone ages, souls drifting from defeat to folly to tragedy, ever more at sea, ever more removed from the shores of the now. Soon the last of the Intact would Succumb to the Dolour, the Emwama would abandon them, the last of the peerings would wink out, and silence and blackness would rule the vacant heart of Ishterebinth.
The Mountain would cease weeping.
And Sorweel understood, seized the fact that outran most all Men until ruin at last ran them down. The End will have out. The Nonmen, for all their staggering age, were no more immortal than their engravings. Despite all their pious might and ingenuity, the ages had laid waste to their dominion, had made smoke of their breathtaking splendour. They were the stronger race, the wiser, and yet doom and degradation had claimed them. The wolves had fallen. What hope was there for mongrel dogs such as Men?