The Great Ordeal (Aspect-Emperor #3)(123)
“Nooo!”
It could not be undone.
Sorweel cringed, arms crossed before his face. Anvil fists struck smoke from the ground. The Cauldron’s harrowing visage gleamed as foil in the ink of each appalling eye. “Why?” the hole of its mouth boomed.
“Why!”
The sand whumped.
“Why!”
The voice beat as wings across his tripping heart.
“Why!”
And then the mammoth fury was gone … swallowed by the blackness.
The void hummed for absence of echoes.
Somewhere in the black the Boatman sang, his voice sawing yet more ancient wood, another song of Imimor?l and the oldest of the old.
“Nil’giccas has abandoned th-the Mountain!” Sorweel coughed into the dark.
Oinaral lay sprawled as clothing over bones, the only kind of suicide a Nonman could be.
“Nin’ciljiras! Nin’janjin’s accursed seed, he rules …”
He was never a charm for Oinaral! He was surety that truth would be heard, so that terrible consequences might follow.
“He has surrendered Ishterebinth to Min-Uroikas—to the Vile!”
The Vile—only now could he taste the violation that name tokened.
He looked down to the spectral illumination his face cast upon his hands. Dust and grit bearded both palms. The left one bled black in the light.
“All hope and honour have fled the Mountain!”
The giant swooped into the small light, clapped him in monstrous digits. The Lord of the Watch, who had ceded all sanity to the Dolour so long ago, hoisted the Son of Harweel slack, and then wrenched him in two.
The Sky-Beneath-the-Mountain.
As Seswatha, she had supped with Nil’giccas upon this, the pinnacle stage. She had clutched his breast for terror at hearing the Nonman King’s dark tale.
But Nil’giccas no longer ruled. At Harapior’s command they strapped her head to the iron-grille floor with a leather belt.
She would not bow otherwise.
The air nipped with the chill of malice. The gilded and graven facades of the Hanging Citadels sloped overhead and down across her right periphery, while to her left the tumbling void of the Ilculc? Rift pulled her against the pinching floor. Nin’ciljiras she recognized by his armour of golden scales—which glistered for being wetted. She could see him conversing with Harapior, casting avid glances in her direction. They had pinned her for display on an annex to the higher stage, so that she could see both the Nonman King’s chair and the broader, petitioning floor below, all of it miraculously hooked over the Rift’s dizzy plummet. Some hundred or more Ishroi and Quya stood congregated on the lower platform, each gowned in splendour, each an effete image of manly perfection.
She felt rather than saw them bringing Mo?nghus out to join her. She had heard him bull-shouting what Ihrims? curses he knew in the corridors earlier, so she wasn’t surprised to see him also gagged when they thrust him to his knees mere paces away, naked and bound as she was.
What surprised—even appalled—was his condition … that he could still draw breath, let alone wrench and war against his restraints. The ravaged face turned to her, rising and falling on heaving breaths, black locks pasted to wounds. The glacial eyes seemed mad, overbright.
Was this what had she had wagered on her mad throw? A brother?
What Father had wagered.
And it descended as lightning, the realization the she had failed.
Harapior had guessed her gambit. Very soon, they would become the plaything of some decrepit and inhuman will, something to sin against and so purchase some brief term of sanity.
His gored arms wrenched back, Mo?nghus swayed upon his great and macabre frame, staring as if she were something he should remember.
It rose from the darkness, then, clawed her face from the inside. It kicked each of her lungs … shame for what was … terror of what would be …
Her mother’s inheritance.
For the first time in her brief life, Anas?rimbor Serwa grimaced for darkness, not artifice.
A sob kicked through her. And it was as if she had spilled grain in times of famine. On a heartbeat, the sonorous thrum of Nonman voices fell silent, leaving her gagged cry stranded in the void of Ilculc?, a hitching note more profound than any she had yet to sing, if not more beautiful. The sound of feminine despair …
And it seized their black hearts, compelled their senescent fascination.
“The black-haired brother!” a crimson-armoured Si?lan Ishroi cried, hooking her from her grief. S?jara-nin, a detached fraction of her realized. “I would hear him weep as w—!”
The hanging iron frame shuddered.
To a soul the assembled ghouls whirled about. Nin’ciljiras bolted golden from his kingly seat …
Serwa peered across the congregation, blinked for the hairs of light obscuring her gaze …
And saw one the Tall stride from a crouch to his full, gargantuan height as the slope of image-pitted stone above permitted. His steps resounded through the iron platform, sent dust raining from the iron anchors above. The assembly shrank from his titanic approach. The giant should have gleamed with the same lustre as his fellows. He was decked in full battle armour, wearing a great slit-faced helm and a monstrous hauberk of stamped plates set in mail—accoutrements that had not seen the field ere Far Antiquity. But all of it was skinned in rotted pelts of dust …