The Great Ordeal (Aspect-Emperor #3)(118)

“Our pilgrimage is almost done?”

The Siqu nodded, his eyes likewise searching the dark.

“Aye. Pray to your Goddess, mortal, for peril is nearly upon us.”

“I am done praying,” he said, more vacant than alarmed. “The blind yield no favour.”

Oinaral regarded him, concerned rather than relieved. The Nonman had known he would capitulate all along, Sorweel realized, that the Weal would blot Harweel’s murder. Was it the degree that worried him?

“It is the Amiolas,” Oinaral said in explanation. “The soul you have become is resolving contradictions between your commingled beliefs.”

That word … contradiction … caught as ice in Sorweel’s breast.

“But if I no longer believe,” he exclaimed, “then what of Her Grace?

Oinaral made no reply.

“You said your only hope was to walk in my shadow,” Sorweel pressed, “to find shelter in Yatwer’s Grace! But if I no longer … believe …”

Oinaral hesitated, stared, the youth knew, upon the face of an imprisoned soul, a ghastly shred of the criminal his beloved King had so cruelly judged in days of yore.

“Fear not,” the Nonman said. “You need only remember why it is we are here.”

The youth scowled.

“So the Dolour renders one glib as well?”

Clack … Clack … Clack …

Where the stone had snapped as raw and immediate as a clamp about his nape in the Ingressus, it now sounded the void, each strike falling into the great cavern of the former. Their descent suddenly seemed a preposterous invasion, a deliverance that was at once anathema. They were naught but a speck in the aphotic black, a spark thrown by the sky, and yet they came promising conflagration.

Oinaral Lastborn had seized his throat and by the time the youth realized his fury, had already slammed him across the swine.

“Say it!” the Ishroi barked above his vicious grip. “Tell me why we are here!”

“Wha-what?”

“What outrage have we come to redress?”

“N-Nin’ciljiras,” the youth stammered on swelling ire. “He-he has allied the Mountain with Golgott—”

“With the Vile,” the Lastborn snapped. “He has surrendered Ishterebinth to the Vile. You must remember this!”

Clack … Clack … Clack …

Sorweel glared speechless.

Clack … Clack … Clack …

Oinaral released him, staggered back a step, horrified. Suddenly—almost madly—the Boatman ceased singing. The hammer cracked once more, and the Haul abruptly jerked short. Sorweel looked up, saw Morimhira clamber astride the peering’s blaze, his arms reaching to the wheels above …

“There is no speaking on the Mere,” Oinaral said, still reckoning what he had done. “If you speak on the Mere, Morimhira will kill you.”

A final crack of metal. The deck dropped from beneath Sorweel’s feet, then punched both his heels. They landed upon an airy whoosh. Sorweel tripped back onto the swine carcasses. The Haul rocked from side to side, buoyant.

The meat was cold, flabby about an unyielding core. He scrambled back to bare deck, found himself staring out appalled …

For all its intensity, the peering could reveal no more than a slick of water some few hundred cubits wide. A corpse lay no more than a length from the starboard gunwale, floating just beneath the water, its pallor testifying to the rust-foulness of the water—water that had once been lucid as mountain air! Debris clotted the surface elsewhere, ropes and braids of putrefaction still undulating for the Haul’s intrusion. He glimpsed another corpse farther to the stern, bloated as a dead steer, its face a murky scribble.

The part of him that had once been Immiriccas lay numb … or dead.

The Mere become a cesspit! The Deep was holy no more.

When he looked to Oinaral, the Siqu raised three fingers to his lips beneath a stern glare: the Nonman gesture for silence.

The Boatman had moved to the prow, where he drew a beaten oar from beyond the carcasses forward. Bracing himself with a foot on the rail and one knee to his chest, he swung the oar out and down, then heaved back and about on the oar. Almost immediately the chain clattered free of the mechanism above. The Haul barged forward. Sorweel was forced to duck the kicking tip as the vessel slipped beneath. He glanced up, watched the chain needle the upper void as they drew away.

Then he looked to the ruined water, as black as pitch save where gagged with scum. He stepped to the rail.

He leaned over to stare into the brackish water.

They moved slowly enough that the reflection was bowed without real distortion. The brilliance of the peering rendered him in silhouette: he saw the Amiolas rise as a tapered square from his shoulders, its interior blessedly black. But a glimmer wavered in the void, one that kindled as he leaned closer. He watched stupefied as it waxed moon-bright, then terrified as it wobbled into the charnel visage he had only glimpsed before …

A white face indistinguishable for Oinaral’s—or a Sranc’s—staring back up at what looked down.

And it horrified, for nowhere could the King of Sakarpus perceive himself—who he was!—in that unholy circuit of reflected and reflecting. What was human in him whimpered, begged for this mad nightmare to end. What was Immiriccas, however, recoiled in disgust and monolithic contempt— The peering flickered out.