The Great Ordeal (Aspect-Emperor #3)(176)
It occurs to her to pray. She hugs her abdomen instead.
Fear not, little one. Shush.
Blue-face smells rancid with urine—to ward against insects, she decides, after slapping her own cheek. The shrouded sky becomes threadbare. The first stars wink through rags of supernal gauze. The ground becomes more pitched, treacherous with humped stone and crabbed earth. The canopy thins then falls away, and they find themselves on the rounded edge of a scarp, staring out across a broad floodplain, one pillared with gigantic carbuncles of stone. The fires of the encamped host are not numerous, but then the night is old.
The Nail of Heaven pierces the northern skies.
Blue-face leads them down a ramp, between cyclopean stones shagged in growth. The air smells of smoke and latrines. They loiter while Blue-face consults one of their escorts, a chieftain, by the look of him, grey-maned and sporting an antique Kianene helm. Mimara notices Achamian, how his lips work in the manner of addled old men rehearsing defeats. The weariness melts away, forms a crust about a renewed sense of alarm.
Grey-mane heels his pony, spurs galloping into the darkness before them. Blue-face signals the resumption of their march.
They filter as much as pass through the slumbering host. Few yaksh populate the murk: the plainsmen slumber in the open with their ponies, larval beneath blankets of felt. There are no paths or alleys between them, so everywhere the war-party treads they are greeted with curses and scowling looks. She is unnerved by the white-blue of their irises, how they gleam in the blanched light of the Surillic Point. For all the world, they look like the eyes of one man staring from the cheek and brow of many.
They all reek of piss, like Blue-face.
One of the rock towers that peg the plain rears before them, a misshapen silhouette against the infinite arch of night. She glimpses the dancing crown of a fire upon its summit. Numerous yaksh crowd the scarped base, arranged in fungal clutches through the dark. Grey-mane awaits them on foot. Blue-face whistles, and the Chorae war-party dismounts. She can feel them in groups of two or three congregating with their bearers, accursed Trinkets … Tears of the God.
She finds herself clasping the old Wizard’s arm, squeezing against his tremors. He spares her a wild sidelong look, one belonging to horses encircled by fire. The boy merely observes with the same impervious curiosity with which he observes everything. The Surillic Point brings out the boy’s resemblance to his grandfather, she thinks, as does his thickening hair …
For the first time she realizes that he is her nephew.
Blue-face begins picking his way up a ramp of tossed stone, following Grey-mane. When they hesitate, one of the Scylvendi shoves Achamian forward, hard enough to swing his beard to his shoulders. There is something ominous about the way the old Wizard collects himself from the ground. Suddenly she fears the vacant expression on his face as much their captors. The soul that is perpetually beset often loses patience with life …
She knows this fact too well.
More yaksh crowd the uneven heights, devoid of dyed colour or the least ornamentation. The air reeks of charred lamb.
Blue-face leads them toward the lone pillar of smoke rising into chill oblivion. Embers twirl and luminesce before fading into moth wings. A reluctance creeps into her step. The escorting Scylvendi have to bully her into the presence of the bonfire. It wheezes and spits, roars like tattered sails in the wind. Through the consuming brilliance, she discerns the earthworm tangle of torsos and limbs. They burn Sranc, she realizes.
Achamian allows his Surillic Point to wink into nothingness.
They stand upon ruins, she decides—something more than ancient old, something beaten into the crabbed semblance of nature. A line too long uninterrupted. A cylindrical curve. A stone bent at the elbow.
Blue-face directs them past the macabre bonfire into a depression that is a rectangular pool of ink for the brightness of the flame. Men await them. Nine sit along the depression’s rim, their backs to the heap of burning grease and skin, their faces bent toward oblivion. One sits alone at the far end, narrow of shoulder, large of hand. The bonfire is his sculptor, scoring his arms with tiger stripes, etching the wend of veins. Dignity is his stone.
A series of poles rise from the mound of mossed debris behind him. A pony hangs skewered upon them, punctured and weeping, a ghastly apparition in the firelight. A Scylvendi warrior lolls dead upon its saddle, propped with sticks like a scarecrow.
Following Blue-face, they wade into the blackness, peering to assure their footing. She stands where he directs: with the boy opposite the Nine. Achamian he thrusts tripping toward the centre. The old Wizard topples, vanishes as if over a precipice. Mimara cries out, thinking a pit concealed in the shadow. But she sees the rolling glint of nimil and the shag of rotted pelt. He regains his footing with surprising decorum, like that of a holy man beset by rascals. It seems the blackness should fall from him in draining sheets, it is so complete.
The Scylvendi King-of-Tribes observes without word or expression. He is younger than she had expected, as hard as the ruin about him. His mane is jet-black, wild in the manner of autumn weeds. His face is too rustic to be handsome, yeoman simple, yet harbouring an intelligence too nimble not to be vicious. His eyes are keen, the irises almost white, but quick, she senses, to become bored—and all the more ruthless for it.
Mimara stands breathing into the onerous weight of her womb. The bonfire twists and whooshes, the Nine little more than silhouettes beneath its white-glaring contortions. In her periphery, the Chorae Bowmen assemble along the depression’s unoccupied rim, their shafts knocked and drawn.