The Great Ordeal (Aspect-Emperor #3)(164)

“Bah!” Psatma Nannaferi barked with a contemptuous sneer. “We are already dead.”

Words thrown like palace trash to beggars.

Both Men froze upon a bolt of premonition, so horrifying was her tone. She had uttered what she said as though it no longer mattered …

Because they were already dead?

Malowebi spared one heartbeat to savage that treacherous wretch, Likaro. Then he swallowed and carefully asked, “What do you mean?”

The Yatwerian witch regarded him with a serene expression and glistening eyes. “You will marvel at your blindness, Zeum,” she said. “How you will rail and regret.”

The Mbimayu Schoolman felt it then, the Mother’s pity, the love for a gentle soul that had wandered violently astray. And he saw how all this time what he had taken as evil (even if he had never dared think as much) had only been Her dread fury … and the terror that was her Retribution.

And then Malowebi suddenly sensed it … the true Evil.

It stepped into their presence from nowhere … the stain of a soul damned by its own hand, the Mark of a sorcerer …

One more powerful, more damned, than any he had sensed before.

“She’s right!” the Mbimayu Schoolman cried out to his tormented host. “My Lord! Your Chorae! Qui—!”

A word was spoken from inside his ear canals …

And the back quarter of the pavilion—where Malowebi could feel the Chorae in its chest—exploded. Plunder blew outward as trash. The whump knocked both Fanayal and Nannaferi to their knees—the woman rolled in paroxysms of joyous laughter. The pavilion wagged and clattered. The presence continued keening its impossible song, concealed from mundane eyes.

Malowebi thoughtlessly seized the iron cup fetish in his Erz? gown. Cold terror clawed his innards.

“Fanayal!” he cried out. “Run to me!”

Then his thoughts convolved and he was chanting and thinking against his chanting, the sacred-and-accursed Song of Iswa. He saw the Padirajah dash toward him, only to trip as Nannaferi scissored her legs across his line of flight. He fell hard across orchards stitched gold against crimson. Malowebi was too well-trained to hesitate: the Muzz? Chalice fell as a luminous bastion about him, a spectral Analogy of the fetish clenched in his left hand …

For he had guessed who had come upon them!

Nannaferi had leapt to her feet and began kicking the prone Padirajah’s head, screeching, “Pig! Pig!” even as the sorcerous voice began tearing the pavilion on an arc, slow at first, but spinning like a chariot-wheel within heartbeats, until they stood within a whirlwind swinging with debris—a shield against Chorae, Malowebi dimly realized. The sky keened. The felt-panelled ceiling whipped into the cyclone, and daylight flooded the crazed tableaux, spattered it with darting shadows …

And Malowebi finally saw him …

The Holy Aspect-Emperor of the Three Seas.

His Mark wrenched, sickened. The nimil links of his hauberk seethed white and silver in the chaotic light. Otherwise his appearance bore the signs of arduous travel, the tangled mane of gold, the untended beard, the mudded boots and soil-blackened fingers. He wore a sable cloak that lashed and flapped from his arms, his shoulders. And from his war-girdle hung the famed Decapitants, miens like floating nightmares swinging about his left thigh.

Showing no concern for Malowebi, Anas?rimbor Kellhus strode toward the Padirajah and the Mother-Supreme, a vision out of the most severe of the Sagas, his eyes reflecting wind-scoured ice. And as they said, haloes framed his head and hands, the ghosts of golden plates … markless.

The Mbimayu Schoolman stood, thoughts and innards roiling.

Curse Likaro!

The Aspect-Emperor swatted Psatma Nannaferi to the ground, hoisted the ailing Padirajah by his throat—held him as if he were no more than a child!

The two old foes regarded each other thus, seeming to fall forward for the sheets of detritus whipping behind. The air howled, a sound like sheets tearing, or wildcats screaming. Smaller gyres of dust had nested within the greater, transforming what had been the Harem into a dun bowl, one kicked into clouds by the phantom shell of the Muzz? Chalice. Fanayal lolled semi-conscious in the fluttering sunlight.

The Aspect-Emperor peered at him, as though willing the man to recognize who had conquered him.

Such a breathtaking demonstration of power! To stand in the heart of his enemy’s host and dictate life and death with impunity …

The Padirajah became conscious on a seizure, an unmanly paroxysm of terror.

“Who conceived this!” the Aspect-Emperor thundered.

Malowebi saw the Padirajah move his lips—

Then drop like rope to the earth. Malowebi swayed for the absolute finality of it, caught himself on a step. Fanayal ab Kascamandri was dead …

Dead!

The Holy Aspect-Emperor of the Three Seas had turned to the laughing Mother-Supreme, who lay limbs lolling upon the embroidered earth. He yanked her to feet, spared her the indignity he had extended Fanayal.

She stood uncowed, cackled in the shadow of his looming, wind-whipped aspect.

“Mother!” she cried to the skies over his shoulder. The gale tore her costume like dogs growling on towels. “Prepare for me my place! For I come as one who gives—gives without memory! One who dies for tending what is Yours!”

“My sister,” Anas?rimbor Kellhus said, “can no longer save you.”