The Great Ordeal (Aspect-Emperor #3)(166)
Her eyes simply hung upon the image, awaiting the arrival of her teetering soul.
“Kel!”
The reflection’s eyes fastened on her gaze—jubilation slumped into grief.
Her heart cramped about the jagged stone of that transformation. She whirled to confront him, floating for the heat flushing through her limbs, once again crying, “Kel!” She reached out to seize him, possessed by a savagery she could not feel. But he leapt backward, into the air, and landed crouching on the far side of his dead sister’s body. She stumbled hard onto her knees, skinned her right palm.
No-no-no-no-no …
“Kel …” she called sobbing. “No … please.”
I can pretend!
But the Prince-Imperial turned and fled.
Remnants of Psatma Nannaferi oiled the curve of the Muzz? Chalice in smoking blood.
“Declare!” the Aspect-Emperor boomed.
The Mbimayu Schoolman pressed himself to his feet, confronted the soul that had roused the Gods. Anas?rimbor Kellhus—the great and terrible Aspect-Emperor.
But what was he forsooth? Prophetic redeemer or demonic tyrant?
Or was he the inhuman Thought-dancer described by Drusus Achamian?
“Declare yourself, Zeumi!”
The D?nyain paused tall and savage before the Mbimayu Schoolman, his edges fluttering like wildfire for the sorcerous whirlwind. Golden discs shimmered about a head and hands noxious for their Mark. He stood glaring just beyond the circuit of the Chalice, near enough that Malowebi had to lean into the virulent aura to remain upright.
“Un-under …” the Second Negotiant croaked, coughed at the panic crowding his lungs. “Under th-the provisions of the Blue Lotus Treaty struck between y-you and the Great Satakhan of High Holy Zeum …”
There was no thought of surviving a contest with this man. The Anagogic fetish sorcery of the Iswazi was no match for the Gnosis, let alone the Metagnosis. Even still, across the limit of his arcane sensitivity, Malowebi could feel the Fanim amassing Chorae beyond the whisking cyclone. Delaying was his only hope …
“Fanayal was no nation,” the dread figure snapped, the judgment in his voice as absolute as geometry. “You stand in contempt of the very Treaty you invoke.”
Time! He just needed more ti—
The Aspect-Emperor barked laughing, stepped so as to place Malowebi between himself and two of the dozen or so Chorae now surrounding the whirlwind. Even the husked demon-heads upon his hip seemed to howl.
Malowebi stood, mouth hanging, bowel churning, knowing he was doomed, and it cut him, pierced him through, thinking how Likaro would laugh. Curse his miscre—!
Words, incomprehensible, skittered chitinous across surfaces beyond the Real. The Aspect-Emperor’s skull became a furnace of alien meaning— A deafening crack. A piercing turquoise brilliance that blackened, blotted all that could be seen—one striking the Aspect-Emperor, not his Iswazi Ward!
Malowebi pulled, the omba stitched into his Erz? across his face. The black gauze filtered the glare, revealing the Aspect-Emperor gazing bleached for the incandescent violence that engulfed his Wards. Burning light sheared without Mark through the cyclone, a lance that began parallel to the earth, but angled upward as its unseen point-of-origin climbed skyward …
Water, Malowebi realized … Ps?khe.
Meppa!
The last of the Indara-Kishauri surmounted the whirling chaos, a shadow for his cataclysmic light. Boiling brilliance, blinding even through the omba, swallowed all that remained of the Aspect-Emperor’s image, a blue-white inferno that was at once a hammer, a torrential burning that stole breath for sucking air, a frenzied pounding that rent ears, sending cracks down to the bone of the earth …
And then it was gone … as was Anas?rimbor Kellhus.
Malowebi saw the Last Cishaurim hanging exposed in the arid sunlight, still garbed in the white silks of his convalescence, his feet bare, his face twisted for raging heartbreak. Sunlight slipped and flashed from the silver band obscuring his eyes. The black asp peered downward, swaying as a dowser’s stick from side to side.
“Fanayaaaaaal!” the man screamed. “Nooooo!”
“Such power …” Malowebi heard a deep voice murmur—from behind him.
The Iswazi sorcerer turned on a panicked spasm, glimpsed the looming horror of the Aspect-Emperor inside his Chalice. The man clubbed him to the ground. The reality of what happened stammered about the shadows.
“Deceitful!” Meppa howled in wrath from above. The gleaming curl of the asp had craned toward his Ward: the Primary had realized what happened. “Craven!”
It was as if the sun itself crashed upon the Muzz? Chalice. Malowebi could hear nothing, but through the black gauze of his omba he could see him standing, Anas?rimbor Kellhus, more curious than alarmed, craning his head about to inspect the Ward that preserved him. Malowebi could have released the fetish at that moment, he knew. He need only expose his palm, let slip the miniature iron cup, and they would both be washed away …
But he did not. Could not …
Besides … the Aspect-Emperor was no longer there.
The Chalice cracked.
Kelmomas ran, fleeing the long wire of his mother’s call. He traced a line through hooped cavities of what had been his home, puckering the billows of smoke, drawing its residue through the wailing air.