The Great Ordeal (Aspect-Emperor #3)(120)
“From the King-under-the-Summit,” he growled. “He asked that I drive down your price.”
She glared at him, left eye fluttering for tears.
He raised a hand to her throat, scratched the ensorcelled metal about her neck instead. Her Agonic Collar.
“Emilidis himself wrought this,” he said. “No one who has tested it has survived.” His glittering black look faded for a heartbeat, straying into thoughts both awful and inscrutable. “You would die were you to shed the least light of Meaning … Certainly! To suppose otherwise would be to blaspheme the Artisan.”
He swallowed, his gaze roaming down to the points of her breasts and beyond.
The great pupils once again locked upon her own.
“But then I know that you are D?nyain … I know that every blunted edge you bare conceals a poison pin.”
He sighed in mockery.
“I was a fool for thinking that knowledge would make me your master … So now I’m suspicious beyond all reason. I obsess, wondering where I might find the poisoned pin. And I ask, What will my King do when he at last lays eyes on you? What would any soul do when presented a famed songbird as a gift?”
He sneered.
“Of course, he would bid it sing.”
He seized the back of her head, jammed the silken sack deep into her mouth and throat. She gagged and convulsed as someone human might. His eyes gleamed for satisfaction.
“No voice,” he said. “No poison pin.”
The Gods were wolves baying beyond the ageless gates of death, gluttonous and all-powerful. The Nonmen, the progeny of Imimor?l, would deny them the leathery meat of their souls, such was their pride. So where Men asked how they might live so as to become prized pets in Heaven, they asked how they might live so as to die invisible, to plummet beyond the Outside and vanish into the Deepest Deep.
“That is why your father came down here,” the youth asked, “to find Oblivion?”
They followed the black path of their shadows into regions of dwindling light, toward the heap Sorweel had spied earlier.
“All seek it,” Oinaral replied softly. “He came here because he is Tall, and all the Tall come to the Mere when they Succumb.”
“Why?”
“The Dolour affects them differently: their confusion is less profound, but their violent humours rule them more completely. They come here because only the Tall can hope to survive the mad humours of the Tall.”
They crossed into a debris field on the verge of the Haul’s failing light, an accumulation of thousands upon thousands of bones strewn and piled across the sands. Sorweel initially assumed they all belonged to pigs, but the sight of two black sockets staring up from the sand informed him otherwise. A skull the size of his torso …
“Then how do you know your father yet lives?” he murmured to his Siqu.
For the first time the youth noticed the pale luminance upon the ground before him and him alone. The Amiolas, he realized.
“Because only Ciogli the Mountain could throw him from his feet.”
The Nonman strode ahead to scrutinize the heap. The great skull Sorweel had noticed earlier sparked a second bolt of terror as the Lastborn stepped around it: the pate climbed as high as his nimil-gowned knee!
Sorweel shrugged against rising hackles, threw glances across what little he could see.
The Nonman stepped around the heap the way one might a corpse found in a field. Obscurities resolved into crisp features as Sorweel hastened to follow. The Cauldron’s funereal light waxed more horrific with every step. A great hauberk comprised the body of the heap, laying folded across the curve of a shield immense enough to deck half the Haul. A helm large as a Saglander barrel crowned the bulk, intricacies dimpling a hide of dust. A sword as long as he was tall—a full Si?lan cubit—jutted from the sand immediately behind it, as though it were a cairn or grave. The youth gave the whole a wide berth, thinking this was how a hero’s discarded armour might seem to a toddler or a cat.
He glanced back to the Haul beneath the radiant peering, saw the Boatman casting swine, his existence a tireless sliver in the angle he occupied relative to the light. He watched a carcass slap onto the heap, glimpsed the snout jiggle in the bright. He noted the parallel bird tracks he and Oinaral had inked walking from the shore … Suddenly the monstrous gait that had trampled the strand surrounding became plain. Everywhere, pits had been stamped like fuzzy memories in the sand, elephantine impressions.
The blackness about them throbbed with hazard.
“What now?” he asked Oinaral on a tremulous voice.
He knew what awaited them. With his own eyes he had witnessed Oir?nas at Pir Minginnial, bellowing shouts that swatted the ear, casting ruined Sranc above the mobs with each colossal blow—crushing the throat of a Bashrag with a single hand!
The Lord of the Watch—he had seen him thus! With his own feet he had followed his rampage beneath the golden enormity of the Horns!
“He is here,” the Siqu said, still scanning the black. “Those are his arms.”
Many were out there, the youth realized. Monstrous souls in the dark, watching, waiting. This was where the Boatman came—where he delivered his ministry of swine and sustenance.
So this was where Oir?nas had carved his empire.
“So what now?” the youth repeated.
Oinaral stood rigid in the manner of those who cling to standing.