The Great Ordeal (Aspect-Emperor #3)(122)

The light etched the nude white colossus that was his father, raving above him.

“Weeeak!” thundered across the Mere.

The Son of Harweel stood transfixed.

“How could I not love something as weak and beautiful!”

The luminous tip of Holol had slipped behind the Siqu’s leg; its first warble pinned his heart nonetheless.

“How could a father not love such a son as should be slain!”

It flickered in a series of low pulses, each outlining the Siqu with the wrack of deeper regions, each depicting the Lord of the Watch, hairless and pendulous, across stages of murderous outrage.

“Such a son—!”

Sudden blackness always surprised, whether anticipated or not. Distant obscurity became near, blackness leapt, and the white-skinned furor of Oir?nas raging over his dying son died with his son.

Holol had not slipped Oinaral’s grasp—he had slipped from it. Somehow the Son of Harweel knew this with granitic certainty.

The Haul’s fierce peering yet burned behind, but he stood upon its extinction, in a twilight underworld heaped with the skulls of pig. A greater portion of him, everything human, gibbered for terror, clamoured to flee, but some other fraction had resolved he would stand his ground.

He would not leave Oinaral Lastborn to moulder with swine. This he knew with an assurance as deep as life.

He would not abandon his Siqu.

The groan of a monstrous elk huffed from the black before him, followed by a voice like cracking timbers.

“My-my … My son …”

Silence.

Sorweel strained for some glimpse, anything, but all he could see was the luminance that fell from his false face, a spectral pool of surfaces braised with faint detail.

A sob burst upon the dark, raw, plucked with mucous, so near as to make the youth retreat a step.

“My sonnnn!” the great lungs screamed.

The peering flickered as before, and in a moment of madness it seemed the entirety of existence hung upon the black as lights upon smoke. Then he found himself nowhere … stranded in a vast nothing.

The World had shrunk to that swatch illuminated by his accursed face.

The silence rumbled as a tempest, one that could blow through ground.

The youth found himself whirling about, searching for the direction of the Haul. A heartbeat merely, and he was completely disoriented. The prospect of being marooned down here, lost in the Holy Deep, came as a chattering panic. He fell to his knees scanning for footprints by the light of his arcane communion, but the sand was too trampled, the porcine debris too copious.

A titanic howl sent him skittering backward across the sand on all fours.

“Aiaaaaaaaaaaaaa!”

He was lost down here, he realized. He had come to the one place the Mother of Birth could not follow. For that was why Imimor?l had hidden his children in rock and mountains: to conceal them from the Gods!

The ground whumped in the black—concussions so powerful that the grains shivered about him. He scrambled back from the sound, turned to stand and run. He was lost …

He was lost!

The obstruction loomed like a great black tortoise, knocked his shins and thighs—Oir?nas’s arms and armour. His momentum pitched him to the bones and grit.

Another titanic yowl.

“I … have … mur-murdered him, Brother … Murdered mine own son!”

The blackness roared in its wake, thrummed with intimations of hovering, hanging doom. The light of the Amiolas, he realized, scrambling across dimpled sand to find refuge behind the Nonman Hero’s great, empty helm. The Amiolas was what would kill him! Across the Mere’s every shore, the ghastly visage of Immiriccas was the only thing visible! He was the lone silver lure in the deep—jigged and dandled by his own frantic efforts no less!

Sorweel cringed behind the helm, found his eye drawn to the sullen hint of polish beneath the dust. In spite of himself he drew a sleeve across the obese curve … and saw the luminous apparition that was his own aspect staring from the shining frame of the Amiolas. He gawked at the reflection, dumbfounded.

Mother. He saw his mother, the wane beauty she possessed in his most sunlit memories.

He recoiled, scrambled back until blackness had obliterated it, and found himself marooned nowhere once again, his heart hammering, his thoughts grasping thoughts grasping thoughts, like a children’s finger game.

“What happens, Brother?” boomed hoarse from the dark.

From across the desolate, underworld strand, the Boatman’s voice scrawled the guttural intonations of a new song:

They did hoist Anarl?’s head high,

and poured down its blood as fire.

And the ground gave forth many sons,

Ninety-nine who were as Gods,

and so bid their fathers

be as sons …



Sorweel dared stand. He whirled about, aching to hear, to locate the direction, but the Amiolas baffled the sound the way it baffled his other senses …

Great Oir?nas, Lord of the Watch, leaned from blackness into materiality immediately before him. Sorweel tripped backward to the sand and bones—and the gargantuan form followed. Massive fists pummelled the strand to either side of his head, elephantine arms pumping, pounding. “Nooo!” cracked the smothered deep. The colossal face blotted the blackness, a pallid aspect as broad as a Columnary shield, wrought with anguish, nostrils flaring, alien teeth clenched as a shipwright’s vice, eyes thick with what seemed dreamlike exhaustion, the pulping dismay of knowing it could not be undone. The horror he had just authored, the crime, the unthinkable …