The Great Ordeal (Aspect-Emperor #3)(172)
The dream he suffered now was like this death sentence, something dark and drowning, something he could thrash and kick within, but never escape. A Pursing both more protracted and more profound.
Somehow, from a vantage he could not quite explain, he saw himself hanging before Anas?rimbor Kellhus, the World spinning ruin around them. The man’s sword scissored across the angle of the sun, and Malowebi screamed as his head tipped from his shoulders and dropped to the woven earth …
His head! Rolling like a cabbage.
Malowebi’s corpse twitched in the man’s irresistible grip, spouted blood, voided itself. Casting his blade into the carpeted earth, the Aspect-Emperor seized one of the Decapitants, wrenched the diabolical trophy from his girdle, then raised the horror to the welling stump of neck …
The unconquerable Anas?rimbor Kellhus spoke. His eyes ignited like blown-upon coals, flared with infernal meaning.
The union of desiccate tissue with warm, ebony flesh was instantaneous. Blood sluiced into and soaked the desert-rotted papyrus, transforming the Decapitant into something horrid and sodden, a bundle of pitch-soaked rags. The Aspect-Emperor released the thing, watched with utter indifference as it stumbled forward to its knees, swayed …
Malowebi screamed, kicked and clawed at the nightmarish fabric, choked on his own terror—drowned. This isn’t happening! This cannot be happening!
The abomination raised his hands, held them about the sorcerous turmoil of its face, the knitting of his blood to its blasted meat and skin. Malowebi screamed for watching Malowebi reborn in demonic replica.
The whirlwind roared about them both, a ruinous blur.
“Return to the Palace of Plumes,” the Aspect-Emperor called to the unholy slave. “End the line of Nganka’kull.”
Without lungs, void was his only wind. He howled until void was all that remained.
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
The Demua Mountains
To stand tallest beneath the sun is the yearning of the child and the old man alike. For verily, age raises us up and strips us down. But where the child dreams as he should, the old man is naught but a miser. The curse of growing old is to watch one’s passion fall ever more out of season, to dwell ever more in the shadow of perversity.
—ASANSIUS, The Limping Pilgrim
Late Summer, 20 New Imperial Year (4132, Year-of-the-Tusk), the Demua Mountains
The boy flies up a nearby tree as quick as a monkey despite his crabbed hand. She and Achamian run across the forest floor, both huffing and lurching under their respective burdens, age and womb. The sun flashes through the shadowy dapple. Throngs of scrub, fern, and weed scrape and tug at their scissoring legs.
Fear not, little one …
A Sranc screams through the bowered gloom behind them, a skinned sound, glistening with anguish, yanked short by something unknown.
Your father is a Wizard!
“There!” Achamian cries on a hoarse exhalation. He makes a gesture, palsied by exertion, to an overgrown pit at the base of an oak that some storm or tumult had toppled at the roots. They slip through a curtain of nettle, curse the sting under their breath.
One without any sense of direction …
Another Sranc shrieks, this one to the west. She thinks of faraway dogs barking in the morning chill, the way they made a tin pot of the World. It smells dank and sweet in their trench, like sunless soil and rotting green.
“Another mobbing?” she asks under her breath.
“I don’t know,” Achamian peers through the fingers of their blind, searching the cavities between gnarled trunks and bands of sunlight. “Those cries. Something is different …”
Enough!
“The boy?” she asks.
“Has survived far worse than this, I’m sure.”
Nevertheless, she peers into the canopy, sorting between branches that elbow rather than wend. Ever since returning to K?niüri she has noticed an oddness to the trees, an arthritic angularity, as if they would sooner raise fists than leaves to the sky. She can see nothing of the boy, though she was certain she knew which tree he had climbed.
A mucoid hiss draws her eyes back to the forest floor. She follows Achamian’s squint.
She cannot believe it at first. She observes without breath or thought.
A man on a horse. A man on a horse follows the Sranc …
Little more than a silhouette at a glance, leaning back against a high cantle, swaying to his mount’s tedious gait. Then a glimpse of wild black hair, a lancer’s shield across his horse’s rump. His arms are bare—this is how she knows what he is. It seems she sees the scars before the skin.
“Seju!” Achamian curses under his breath.
Neither of them speak. They track the Scylvendi horseman through the glare and gloom, watch him pass from obscurity into plain sight, then back into interleaving obscurity.
“Sweet Sejenus!” Achamian finally hisses.
“What should we do?” she asks.
The old Wizard slumps backward into the earthen recess, as if finally overrun by relentless ill-fortune.
“Should we run? Climb back into the Demua?”
He smears a palm across his forehead, thoughtless of the filth.
The angularity has seized her once again, that unerring need she has come to identify as motherhood.
“What, Akka?”
“Give me a blasted moment, girl!” he cries under his breath.