The Great Ordeal (Aspect-Emperor #3)(167)
Something burns somewhere, he thought.
He found himself in his mother’s chambers with no memory of doubling back. He could smell her warm, earthen smell, the residue of the jasmine she had worn in his room. He knew the quake had destroyed her bedchamber before so much as setting foot upon the threshold. A turret from above had sheared through the ceiling and plummeted through the floor, leaving a ruinous pit. A hand waved like a frond in water from the heaped debris below. A great fragment of the far wall had been torn down its own slope, taking the mythic marbles of the secret entrance with it. At first he simply gaped, gazed across the void senseless to the horror.
His shadow palace lay cracked open, the mazed hollows utterly exposed.
Inrilatas crouched naked in what shadow remained, smeared with his own feces.
“You think you seek the love of our mother, little brother—Little Knife!”
Comprehension was slow in coming.
“You think you murder in her name …”
The eight-year-old swallowed. Nothing secret. Nothing fun. The Andiamine Heights had been boned as a bird. Laying broken, all the covert passages, all the chutes and tunnels and wells, stood revealed in countless places, a great lung drawing in every scream, every moan or wail, a soaking of all the rampant misery, siphoning, commingling, transmogrifying, creating a singular and most monstrous voice, a sound inhuman for the surfeit of humanity.
He stood transfixed.
Ruined! his twin shrieked from nowhere. You’ve ruined everything!
He was the panic-stricken one, as always, the helpless baby. Kelmomas suffered only a peculiar numbness, a curious sense of having outgrown not so much his mother or his old life as existence altogether.
It was a stupid game anyway.
This is the only game there is, you fool!
And he began shaking then, teetering over the pit, small in the vast croak issuing from the Andiamine Heights, the hideous roar that was humanity in sum. And when he regarded his abjection, he was puzzled, for he shook upon facts that he both knew and could not speak, an unbearable emptiness … loss … theft!
Something! Something had been taken!
He glimpsed the dust-chalked hand waving from the crotch of two great stones below. Horns creased the ragged air with alarm—battlehorns …
And he was running once again, his feet flying upon a ground that was a drum, dashing through rings of glory and ruin. Smoke hung as thick as the cries in the air. Some halls were wrecked, the marble facings cracked, or shed altogether, the floors buckled or buried under shattered masonry. The Ministerial Gallery was impassable, receiving, as it had, a good portion of the Sea Beacon, which had imploded upon its foundations. Others ran, but they were as irrelevant to him as he was to them. Some milled in a stupor, blooded, or chalked colourless. Some shouted for help as they heaved at rubble, others rocked, wailing over inert bodies. Only the dead possessed decorum.
He paused for a train of slaves and functionaries bearing an enormous body grey for dust, black for bleeding. As they passed he recognized the bulk as Ngarau, strings of blood swinging from his slack lips. The little Prince-Imperial stood agog, ignoring the bearers and their concern. A slave boy no older than he trailed in their wake, staring at him with wide, questioning eyes. Glimpsing movement past his bloodied cheek, Kelmomas saw Issiral crossing the next juncture down the hall—a form shadowy not for garb or speed, but for unnatural intent …
He stood motionless, tingling, staring at the now vacant intersection. Several heartbeats passed before he could dare think what was manifest—the Truth that pricked for being so plain …
So laden with dread portent.
The Four-Horned Brother wasn’t finished with the Anas?rimbor.
Strange, the ways of the Soul.
How it kicks when it should be still.
How it resigns when it should roar and spit and grapple.
The Chalice crumbled beneath the luminous ferocity of the Water. Malowebi spat blood, his face numb for the Aspect-Emperor’s blow. The fetish kicked and burned like saltpetre in his fist, but he did not release it. The great strength of the Iswazi was the way it drew on the will that bound the fetish. Rather, he raised himself to his knees, held out his fire-spitting fist, swayed against the calamitous demonstration of the Ps?khe.
He thought he could hear Meppa screaming … somewhere.
Or maybe it was him.
Metagnostic singing clambered up out of the being of things once again, and the brilliant cataract winked into nothingness. Ps?khic thunder trailed into roaring Metagnostic winds. Malowebi pitched forward, cradled the agony of his ruined hand. Grit lashed him as the remnants of the Muzz? Chalice melted away. He huddled wincing against the root of the sorcerous cyclone. Furnishings whooshed overhead, whipping around, as did sections of the pavilion itself, flapping as rapid as bat-wings across the sun. He could no longer sense the Chorae floating about the whirlwind’s circuit: it seemed the desert warriors had fled with the arrival of Meppa …
And word that Fanayal ab Kascamandri was truly dead.
The black gauze had made shadows of what was flesh and flesh of what was light. Hunched against the tempest, the Mbimayu Schoolman watched mouth agape. Meppa hung on high as before, releasing cascades of scalding light. The Aspect-Emperor stood painted lightning-white below, Fanayal’s chalk corpse not more than two paces distant. A mosaic of angular planes sheared into the Waterbearer’s deluge mere cubits above them, refracting the concussive glare across an arc that impaled the heights.