The Great Ordeal (Aspect-Emperor #3)(116)
And upon a single forgotten breath, the ancient grudges of the Amiolas and the perplexing facts of the Great Ordeal came together. He had a sense of being taken up, of being aimed anew, turned toward a reality as gritty and as grim as truth. There was no deception here. Oinaral did not dissemble. Ishterebinth was not some absurd pantomime. The End was not some daring fancy, a way to pass impiety off as courage.
It was simply inevitable.
And so it came to pass that the Son of Harweel apprehended the horizon of a new and terrifying world from the very bowel of the Mansion, one where the Unholy Consult was real, the extinction of Men was nigh, and Anas?rimbor Kellhus was the only hope—the one true Saviour of Men! A world where the fraction that the Dread Mother could see had blinded Her to the fraction She could not …
A world where he could love Anas?rimbor Serwa.
He need only survive and escape this mad and vicious place … Flee!
For all hope had fled the Weeping Mountain.
Other than Lord Harapior, she did not know any of the nimil-armoured Nonmen who came for her. But she knew from their looks that they had heard of her, who she was, and what she had done. There was lust in their darkling gazes, but curiosity and apprehension too.
They placed a sack over her head, one woven of Injori silk as soft as rose petals across her cheeks and forehead. Her body they left uncovered, save for shackles of iron about her ankles and wrists—and the Quyan variant of the Agonic Collar welded about her neck.
They did not speak, and she did not resist.
But the hatred she had incited in the Lord Torturer was too profound to be ruled.
“Sing for us!” Harapior growled. “Sing for us, witch! Score our hearts with your foul impersonations!”
She did not oblige him—but not out of spite, for she cared nothing for the ghoul. She did not sing simply because the watch she had sung for had come and gone.
Her next song would command fire and ruin.
The Nonmen threaded a pole between the crotch of her elbows and her spine and bore her thus from the Thresholds.
“Noooooooo!” she heard her eldest brother, long broken, snuffle and cry. “Leave her!” he roared with sudden, bestial ferocity. “Let her be! Let! Her! Beeeeeeee!”
And it cut her far more than any indignity she had so far suffered that he might yet cry out his devotion thus, despite all the degradations, all the mutilations. Finding her body useless, the Lord Torturer had sought to make Mo?nghus an implement of her torture. And she had sang songs of blessing in Ihrims? as they cut him … as they brutalized the dark boy who had worshipped her for as long as she could remember.
She had sung in celebration while watching him sob and shriek for torture …
And still he loved—the same as Sorweel.
Anas?rimbor Serwa pondered this as the company of ghouls bore her blind into the heights of the Weeping Mountain … the love of troubled brothers and orphaned kings.
And the cruelty demanded by the future.
Sorweel watched as the Boatman, still singing, began gripping the carcasses about the ankles, then whirled about on quick steps to pitch them out over the gunwale.
The clacking drew them like larva from holes in the rotted walls. They groused and gesticulated, perched upon precarious ledges or iron gang-stages, rooting the air like blind pups. As wretched as those above had been, these were far worse: emaciated, ulcerated, adorned with scabs, clad in nothing but raiments of filth, their knees and palms as black as Zsoronga’s shoulders, their scalps as jaundiced as human bone. The pallor of each had been scuffed from blackened skin in a manner peculiar to each, lending ornamental distinction to what misery had ground to meal otherwise. For eccentricities in motion aside, they all leaned out to the Haul with the same compulsive sway, and they all ate with identical frenzy.
These Mines had been the glory of Ishterebinth, what brought embassies from all other Mansions to reside within their mountain. For nimil—the famed silver of the Nonmen, more doughty than steel, as soft and warm as cotton against the skin—had ever been the great obsession of their Race. Once the Vast Ingressus had thronged with Hauls laden with ore bound for the furnaces and smithies of the Chthonic above. Peerings had burned. Emwama had teemed about iron walks and platforms, cringing beneath the harsh cries and cracking whips of their immortal overseers.
And now this … this …
Perversity.
“These are the Reduced,” Oinaral said. “In a thousand years hence, this is what will become of those who yet survive in the Chthonic above.”
The youth bit back on abhorrence, said only, “They do not weep.”
“What we call the Gloom has fallen upon them. Centuries of reliving memories wear them to dust. The clarity of the horror endured is leached, until nothing but a dark fog remains—an obscurity that is their souls …” He paused as though struck by some novel implication.
“Yet another living Hell!” Sorweel cried in incredulous retort. “Your Boatman performs no mercy, casting swine to them. It-it’s obscene allowing such misery to persist! A Man would just let them die!”
The Siqu stiffened at the rail. He turned from the congregation wagging across the pitched stone to regard the apparition where Sorweel’s face should lie.
“And what of the Hells?” he asked.
The question surprised the youth. “What of them?”