The Great Ordeal (Aspect-Emperor #3)(27)
And he would wonder whether it were simply some mad nightmare …
Wake up … Sorwa, my sweet …
Life.
His eyes burned and his blinks had become wilful by the time they gained the great road they had spied from afar—the Halarinis, the Grandmistress called it, the Summer Stair. Sorweel and Mo?nghus both shrank to a crouch, glimpsing a torchless procession of figures along its length. Serwa, however, continued trudging forward the same as before.
“They’re Emwama,” she said turning in a pirouette that added no interval to her pace. With that she resumed her forward stride, utterly feckless. Mo?nghus followed, a heavy hand now upon the pommel of his broadsword. Sorweel lingered for a moment, glancing up at the granitic immensity of their destination, then resumed the place the Anas?rimbor had reserved him, the station of shame and hate.
Serwa called out a brief string of arcane syllables, and an eye of piercing brilliance opened a mere span above her, chasing shadows from the objects of its glare.
The Emwama sickened him.
Sorweel knew what they were, or at least what they were supposed to be: the Mannish servitors of the Nonmen—slaves. But whatever they were, they had long since ceased being Men. Deer-eyed and round-faced. Stunted both in form—the tallest scarcely reached his elbows—and intellect. They were clad as rustics for the most part, though a few wore gowns that bespoke some kind of rank or function. Those travelling up the mountain bore astonishing loads, everything from wood to game to stacked rounds of unleavened bread. Short of breasts there was scarcely any way to distinguish the males from the females, save that a number of the latter carried sleeping infants in slings braided out of their remarkably voluminous hair.
From the outset, they crowded about the three travellers, great eyes wide and glistening, gaping like astounded children, and chattering in an insensible tongue, their lilting voices as deformed as their stature. Despite the uproar, they managed to keep their distance—at least at first. Their native shyness quickly waned, and the boldest jostled closer and closer. Eventually several dared to reach out wondering fingers, as if intent on touching what they could not quite believe. Serwa, especially, seemed to be the object of their adoring curiosity. Finally she barked at them in a tongue reminiscent of the one she used canting, but utterly unlike that of the Emwama.
They understood nonetheless. Several moments of screeching turmoil ensued as the misbegotten creatures fought to grant them what seemed some ritually prescribed space. Afterward, it almost seemed a miracle, the way the mob accumulated more and more misshapen souls and yet somehow managed to respect the invisible perimeter Serwa had imposed about them. Within a watch the mob they had gathered extended far beyond the outermost ring of Serwa’s sorcerous light. For those confined to the dark, there was no way they could be anything more than illuminated glimpses of sharper, more sacred archetypes, and yet somehow they managed not to crowd their stunted brethren.
But it was the stink, more than anything, that fondled Sorweel’s gut, for it was human through and through, no different than the stink of Men of the Ordeal gathering for march: at times earthen and almost benign, with various corners acrid and sweet, at times tar-like with the musk of unwashed armpits, thick enough to taste. Had they smelled any other way, be it forest moss or moulting snakes or unmucked stalls, he could have looked upon all their myriad differences as features proper to their form, things belonging to an essence distinct from his own. But their smell, like a carpenter’s plumb, revealed them for what they were: inbred grotesqueries. Their eyes were bulbous, their spines crooked, their skulls simian. His horror, in some small measure, was the horror of the husband who is presented a deformed son.
There was no concealing such disgust. “Think of the difference between your cattle,” Serwa called to him at one point, “and the elk who rule the plain.” He understood instantly what she meant, for there was something at once bovine and doughty about the Emwama, the incurious hardiness of those bred to serve ruthless masters.
“More like dogs to wolves,” Mo?nghus shouted in reply. He brandished a fist in mock fury, laughed at the scrambling panic its shadow caused among the halflings.
Sorweel glanced to the breathless spectacle of Ishterebinth above and before and was shocked by his ire. The old Girgallic Priests were always railing about the wickedness of the World in Temple, not as something to lament, but as something to celebrate. “Clean hands cannot be cleansed!” they would cry, reading from the Sacred Higarata. An unpolluted world was a world without martial honour, a world without sacrifice or compensation. The glory lay in the adulteration of the waters.
But this … this was a pollution that begged no glory, an evil that could beget only tragedy—travesty. The evils of the World, he was beginning to realize, were more complicated than the goods by far. To the debauchery of the Anas?rimbor, he could now add the deformity of the Emwama. Perhaps pious fools confused simplicity for pious truth for good reason.
The World was not so elementary as Sakarpus, where there were Sranc and there were Men and nothing but dumb beasts in between.
Are you such a fool, Sorwa?
No.
No, Father.
Sorweel did his best to ignore the diminutive throngs. The three travellers climbed, leaning into the incline, though it seemed they were borne as flotsam on the stream of heads and shoulders and packs that Serwa’s light carved from the mobbed darkness. They laboured past the pillars that flanked the road. It was as if they had been carved of soap, so indistinct were the figures engraved upon them. The only feature they shared, aside from dimension, was a visage beneath the capitals, each one of them worn fish-like by the ages, and facing what Sorweel assumed was south, regardless of the turns in the road’s direction.