The Great Ordeal (Aspect-Emperor #3)(23)

“But I despise you,” he said, returning her gaze.

She continued peering for several heartbeats.

“No, Sorweel. You do not.”

As if hearing the same inaudible thing, they both looked to the clearing, their eyes sorting between the slow drifting points of fluff.

Resolutions, promises, threats. These things whispered make hearts strong.

No one need hear. No one save the Goddess.

Deliver them, Mother. Deliver them to me.



Shame is a great power. Even in the womb, we shrink from the furious glare of the father, the horrified glance of the mother. Before we draw our first wailing breaths, we know; the taunts we will flee, the alchemy of more refined derision, and the way it dwells in the meat of us, little pockets of despair, making foam of our heart, of our limbs. One can hold anguish in their teeth, fury in their brow, their eyes, but shame occupies us whole, fills our shrinking skin.

Weakening even as it awakens.

Part of Sorweel’s dilemma lay in the span between their sorcerous leaps, the way he so often found himself watching her while she dozed to recover her strength. She was a different soul when she leapt, one that murmured in fright, grunted for exertion, cried out in murky horror. Eskeles had also borne the curse of the Dreams, had also endlessly suffered as he slept. But then Eskeles had been nowhere near as serene as Serwa when he was awake. His nocturnal travails in no way contradicted his sunlit humanity. Sorweel could not hear Serwa whimper or sob without swallowing some kind of pang in his throat.

When she slept it seemed he could see her as she could be, if only he could tear down the conceits of her gifts and station. What she should be were he strong and she weak.

After she roused herself, they made one last sorcerous leap from the shoulders of the Demua to a hill that was more a monstrous stump of elevated stone, a pillar hewn at the base. Ivies thatched the clearings. Great oaks and elms raftered the gloom, their roots parsed about immense blocks of stone. Mossy ground wheezed beneath their feet. Elephantine roots spanned the cavities that inexplicably pocked the terrain, trailing ringlets of dulcet moss. The air was hard with the smell of things rotted soft. The light was diffuse and marbled with shadow, as if refracted through uneasy waters.

“I have no recollection of this place,” Serwa said, wandering ahead.

“At last,” Mo?nghus chided, “we can enjoy some death and ruin without being lectured.”

Birdsong whistled through the greening heights. Sorweel found himself squinting at the glare of the sun through the canopy.

“The ghouls are older than old …” she called into the dank hollows. “I wager even they’ve forgotten …”

“But are they happy for it?” her brother answered. “Or merely perplexed?”

The branching shadows climbed from his breast to his face, like some great black vein. Sunlight painted a thousand white circles about the rim of his nimil corselet. He was often like this, Sorweel had learned, before the melancholy that made him so mercurial struck. Glib. Sarcastic in the manner of those returning to some despised toil.

Serwa stepped between two massive blocks, drew her hand across scabbed and pitted planes, along fractures worn as smooth as stones thrown up by oceans. She walked the way she was prone, at once waifish and intent, hard in the manner of souls absolutely assured of her power. It made her seem cruel.

“The stone carries an ancient bruise … a … mustiness … older and more faint than any I have ever seen.”

But then everything she did made her seem cruel.

“Let the dead be dead,” her brother muttered.

Her reply was muted for the intervening greenery, but no less musical. “One cannot raise walls against what has been forgotten …”

The white-eyed warrior looked directly at him, smirking. “She was always Father’s favourite.”

Sorweel stared down at scabbed and stained knuckles.

“Who was Harweel’s favourite?” the Prince-Imperial pressed, mocking.

Serwa’s voice climbed from the mossy, arboreal gloom. “This place was abandoned before Arkfall …”

“I was his only son,” Sorweel replied, at last looking to the black-haired Anas?rimbor.

There is a darker understanding between Men, shapes that can only be discerned in the absence of women—in the absence of light. There is a manner and a look and a tone that Men alone can see, and it exists as much between brothers as it does enemies from across seas. It needs no voice to be bellowed, no colour to be unfurled, only momentary solitude between masculine souls, a cinching of the air between them, a mutual glimpse of all the murders that had made each possible.

“Yes,” Mo?nghus said, his tone ferrous. “I heard them speak of it in Sakarpus.”

Sorweel licked his lips rather than breathe. “Speak of what?”

“How good Harweel squandered his seed on your mother.”

They shared a single hard breath between them, the one drawing in what the other expelled.

“They said her womb …” the Prince-Imperial continued, “died before she did …”

A fog rose up within the youth, one that chilled his skin for interior heat.

“What happens here?” Serwa said, stepping from behind one of the monstrous oaks. Neither man was surprised. Nothing escaped her notice for long.

“Look at him, Sister …” Mo?nghus said without breaking eye contact. “Tell me you do not see hate …”