The Great Ordeal (Aspect-Emperor #3)(121)
“Tell me, Manling …” he said, his voice curious. “Tell me … if you were you to find your father’s shade rotting in this desolate place, what passion would own you? If you found Harweel lingering here, would terror squeeze away your breath? Numb your limbs to lead?”
Sorweel gazed upon the Nonman’s profile.
“The very same.”
“And what,” the darkling figure asked, “would be your reason?”
It seemed he could taste something sour and despairing.
“For shame,” the youth replied. “For failing to be what his glory demanded.”
Oinaral pondered these words for what seemed a very long time.
Deep, my sons, delve deep,
Fortify the very bones,
Wed hope to what is solid,
Trust to space made,
Not emptiness stolen …
The Nonman drew Holol at last, waved it as a glowing revelation across the bleak regions before them. Pins of light carved the strand sterile white, uncovered bones and more bones, cracked and splintered, tossed through the pale sand.
Holding the arcane blade before him, the Nonman set off into the black. Silver shimmered along his chain-mail rim as he dwindled.
Sorweel hastened to follow on legs that seemed braided from straw. What would he do, were it his father hidden in the black before them? Would he rush forward, cast himself sobbing at his feet, beg for an undeserved forgiveness? Or would he flee as fast as his legs could carry, flee the truth of the Holy Deep?
Would he even still love Harweel, the wise and strong King of the Lonely City? Or would he hate him for having suffered so long the curse of his example? For abandoning his little boy to days so hard, a Fate so perverse and cruel.
Could Harweel still love him?
These questions precluded breathing.
Man and Nonman wandered across the wrack of bone and sand, into zones where the sand shallowed, pooled in great scallops of arid rock. Holol’s light whisked without sound over increasingly mangled terrain: gravel skirts heaped and bowled, stone shelves terraced the deepening darkness, climbing as a stair might. The visible limit brushed what seemed some kind of vast pier hanging above, detached from any other visible stone.
Oinaral Lastborn halted him with a restraining hand. After a moment of peering hesitation, the Siqu continued forward alone, his pace ginger, stalking the ascending clutter with the reverence of desperate souls at Temple. Just what he stalked eluded the youth for thirty heartbeats or more. A joint of stone reared from the foot of the shelves, angled so as to conceal the line dividing what breathed from what did not. Thus did the famed Lord of the Second Watch seem to be an extension of these, the deepest roots of the Weeping Mountain.
The ancient Hero lay naked with his head bowed to his chest. He seemed to slumber, but his posture—reclined with his wain-wide shoulders bent upright against unseen rock—warned otherwise.
Oinaral came about a mound of gravel, then followed a low rock defilade toward the hulking form. Ten thousand shadows swung on the whim of Holol’s pinpoint light, some as small as palms, others as long as night. The sum of existence swung upon his every step.
The stony string of the Boatman’s voice fell silent.
Oinaral paused just beyond the defilade, a scintillant beacon amid the dreck and gnawed desolation. Silence smothered all inkling of distance. His father lay some thirty paces before him on the second of the scalloped shelves, wreathed in shadow, his enormous frame motionless against his horn of rock, his face inscrutable.
Fear scorched Sorweel’s breast.
The Siqu dared call out: “Mighty Oir?nas, Lord of the Watch …”
The massive outline did not move. For the first time Sorweel noticed stacked skulls—walls of them, arrayed like macabre fortifications along each of the ascending shelves of stone. Pig skulls in their thousands, snouts drawn out ragged, as if belonging to a creature far more fearsome.
When had fathers become Dragons?
“It is me, Oinaral Lastborn … Your son by fair ?liqara.”
He swayed Holol back and forth, causing the surrounding horde of shadows to kneel and stand and then kneel once again. Sorweel fairly lost his balance, feared he might swoon.
“I know …” the hulking form rumbled. “I know who you are.”
Oinaral stood rigid.
“You are lucid?”
Silence, so utter as to make wet skin of souls and razors of the least sound.
“My disorder,” the profile growled in a tone so deep as to knock heartbeats, “springs from but a single question …” The silhouette shifted. Stone cracked in unseen sockets. A face as broad as shoulders bobbed into Holol’s light, its lines twisted like ship’s rigging for wrath.
“Why do you soil my gaze now!”
Sorweel retreated a step, then another as the Hero leapt onto the stone stage below. His countenance was wroth, broad in the manner of the Holca. Gore made a pit of his mouth, so that he looked a creature whose jaws lay outside its flesh. His musculature was clawed in veins, striate for hunger. His stature was so great as to make a statuette of his son.
“Nil’giccas!” Oinaral Lastborn cried beneath the looming presence. “Nil’giccas ha—!”
The blow was swift, the force absurd. Oinaral was swatted more than ten cubits, his body bouncing like a withered tuber from the rock face back across the slope of the gravel mound. Somehow, impossible as it seemed, he had managed to hold onto Holol, the famed Breathtaker. Sorweel could see its radiant point bobbing just over the Siqu’s right thigh, blackening his twitching profile.