The Great Ordeal (Aspect-Emperor #3)(165)

“And yet you have come!” she cried in exaltation. “Come to collect your doom!”

“The Hundred are blind to the No-God. None more than the Mother of Birth.”

“Then why,” she shrieked laughing, “do I remember this? The White-Luck will eat you ere this day is dead!”

The Holy Aspect-Emperor of the Three Seas betrayed nothing more than wind-lashed curiosity.

“You can be Everywhere and still be blind,” he said. “You can be Eternal and remember nothing.”

“So says the loosed Demon! So says filth and horror made manifest! Abyssal hunger!”

“Even the Infinite can be surprised.”

The Anas?rimbor seized her and spoke in a single motion, his right hand clamped about her forehead, his voice cracking Reality to the joist. Brilliance consumed the Yatwerian witch. Malowebi raised a hand to shield his eyes, but too late, and so he stood blinking as the tall shadow that was the Aspect-Emperor turned from the whipping mayhem to confront him.

One of the Decapitants upon his thigh mouthed fungal warnings. Psatma Nannaferi was nowhere to be seen.

“What do you think, Mbimayu?” the Aspect-Emperor called, his voice eerie for slipping through the roar. He spoke as if about a dinner table. “Do you think Yatwer allowed her to see this?”

The Mbimayu Schoolman stood paralytic in a manner he had never before known.

“Wh-wh-what?” he stammered.

Then he heard it as an eerie intrusion upon the ripping of winds. “Motherrrrrrrr!”

A faraway call … Nearing?

Malowebi frowned, looked skyward in a panic, saw Psatma Nannaferi pitching and kicking for the merest instant before her image exploded into pulp across the arch of his Muzz? Chalice.

“Her plummet,” the Thought-dancer said.

The Zeumi Emissary coughed, for something he knew not what, then staggered to his knees.



Esmenet had to pet the girl’s hair lightly, lest she make contact with the lack of substance beneath.

“No-no-no-no-no,” she blubbered and sobbed, rocking her daughter’s ruined head.

Her body trembled of its own accord, muscles dancing like coins across porcelain. She could no longer hear her beloved Capital. Her lament for had become wailing with.

“Mommaaaa!” Kelmomas bawled into her side.

The Gods wrought this.

“Mommaaaa!” Kelmomas keened …

Kelmomas. The one that yet lived …

Out of all those who had mattered.

She felt herself divide then, divide as she had cradling the final convulsive breath of Samarmas, broken about the fault line that fissures all mothers, the instinct to bury what was mad for loss beneath what was mad for making safe. She stared at the creviced ceiling, tried to ignore the sheeting heat of her tears. She rallied about her numb core—there was no time for this!

“Sh-sh-shhh …” she managed to coo to her shuddering boy. She had to get him to safety—away from all this horror. Saxillas! What was it Saxillas had said? She leaned from her rump, wiped a furious sleeve across her face. The ships! She must get him to the harbour! She must be strong!

But the image Theliopa so … ruined yanked her back to the shattered bricks.

“Noooooo,” she moaned as though only now happening upon her daughter. “This isn’t …”

She lowered her eye to the heel of her palm, rubbed at the grit that afflicted her.

“This-this isn’t …”

She shook her head in the groggy manner of drunks.

Kelmomas detached himself, swatted his cheeks and eyes while watching her.

“M-momma—?”

“There’s so many monsters!” Esmenet shrieked with her bones, her hair and her skin. “Wh-hy Th-Thelli?” she gasped on hitching breaths. “When-when there are so many monsters?”

Kelmomas moved to embrace her, but she was already exploding to her feet …

“He doesn’t even care!” she roared into emptiness, her fists balled to either side. “He has no heart to break! No will to weaken! No fury to provoke! Don’t you see? You take nothing from him when you take his children! Nothing!” She fell to her knees gagging, raised a wrist to her mouth.

“You only take … take … from me …”

The palace swung as if upon hooks about her axis, a revolving motley of gleaming splendour and chalk destruction. She thrummed as a string breaking, from skin to pit and beyond. All spears! All spears were aimed at her. A spite that dwarfed the Ages!

The Gods! The Gods hunted her and her children! Leering, coiling, burning, shaming, murdering, watching and watching and sometimes touching too, ever since she was a terrified little girl, sobbing into her terrified mother’s arms, saying, “I saw eyes, Momma! Eyes!” and her mother saying, “Shush … I did too …”

“Tomorrow we will kill a bird.”

Sundry glories lay crashed into ruin all about her. Her gaze roamed the wreckage, fell to the simple, idiot enumeration of what exists. Her little boy had lived in this room once—her youngest. She picked items from the dreck: the leather rocking horse that had sparked so many brawls with Sammi; the Cheribi cherry wardrobe stoved in the collapse that had killed Thelli; the five porcelain Kidruhil figurines given to him by Kay?tus, miraculously intact; and there, his silver Whelming Seal tipped against a ramp of bricked debris, reflecting the image of Kelmomas himself standing behind her to the right, his face framed in a flaxen maul. A dimple in the metal collapsed one cheek into his eyebrow—otherwise his expression one of malice and … joy?