The Great Ordeal (Aspect-Emperor #3)(28)
“Where Men hold places holy, the Nonmen extol passages …” Serwa explained, spying his wondering gaze. “The Summer Stair was a temple to them once …”
The Believer-King glanced at her, only to have his eyes yanked to the peak of the column rising behind her as she paced him in the crush—to the stork standing pale and gracile against the infinite vacancy of the night. Fear did not suffer his gaze to linger.
“To walk this road was to be purified,” she continued, her own eyes probing the mountainous heights before them, “cleansed of anything that might pollute the Deep.”
He shuddered for the meaty deformity of the Emwama.
So they gained the Cirr?-nol, the legendary High Floor of Ishterebinth, accompanied by the children of a degenerate race. The mountain had swallowed the Nail of Heaven as they approached. Even raising a hand to block the glare of Serwa’s light, Sorweel could discern little more than the bruising black. He could make out monstrous faces, each hanging high enough to cramp his neck and staring out at a diagonal to the south, the same as those gracing the processional pillars. He did not so much see as assume the cyclopean bodies beneath. A hush, at once anxious and reverent, fell across the Emwama. They began looking about the gloomy expanse, casting hectic glances into what he guessed was the maw of the gate. The disrepair of the Summer Stair had prepared him for the wreckage they found. But not even the plodding, drawn-out nature of their approach, nor the obscuring darkness, could deaden him to the scale, the lunatic enormity …
Such a place.
The shiver began as a tickle, more in his breath than his body, but within heartbeats, it owned him to his bones. He clutched his shoulders, clamped his teeth against any chatter.
“Imagine our ancient forefathers,” Serwa said to him, her face strange with sharp lines of light and shadow. “Imagine them storming such a place with shields of leather and swords of brittle bronze.”
He looked to her uncomprehending.
“Many think the ghouls did not so much fall to the Tribes of Men,” she explained, gazing across the surrounding heights, raising her face to the clarity of her arcane light, “as bare their throats to them.”
He felt all the more at sea learning facts such as these. His ignorance was smaller without them.
“May our tribe be so lucky,” Mo?nghus muttered. Towering over the Emwama, he resembled some wild-maned warrior of yore, one of the “restive multitudes” so often referenced in the Holy Tusk.
A silence seized the ensuing moments, remarkable for the hundreds of Emwama crowded about them. There was noise, of course, the shrill of nocturnal insects, the dull of coughs and sniffs, but the soul has a way of hearing past these mundane things, of listening for what should be heard. Sorweel even looked up, convinced the Surillic Point hissed. He glimpse white wings kiting across the light’s upper limit, vanishing … A shiver fell through him.
He glanced to the siblings, as if fearful of discovery.
The Prince-Imperial stared at his sister, who had advanced several paces ahead, scanning the black. Though Sorweel had never thought otherwise, the Swayali Grandmistress’s command now seemed absolute.
“What are you thinking?” Mo?nghus asked.
“These Emwama are a good sign …” she replied without returning his look. “But the ruin is worrisome … Much has changed since Seswatha stood in this place.”
“Ruin?”
She turned to him, her face as inscrutable as ever. Her mouth opened. Her eyes sparked like twin Nails with the first impossible syllable. “Teirol—”
She snapped her head back to face the Mansion, extending her arms as if to seize its immensity in proxy. The Emwama before her wailed and scattered …
The Surillic Point winked out.
A line took its place, brilliant enough to parse the violet blackness, an incision of light, appearing instantly at all stages, from the floor below her arms to the very summit of the void, and broadening, as if a door as tall as creation slipped open …
A Bar of Heaven. Like that raised by Eskeles on the desolate tracts of the Istyuli; only, where his had illuminated leagues of bestial Sranc, hers revealed a far different host, one hung as if from hooks of stone.
Mo?nghus cursed, barked at his sister in the same unknown tongue.
“We are the children of the Aspect-Emperor …” she said tonelessly. “Light is our birthright.”
Strange hoots broke out among the Emwama, and a chest-thumping not unlike applause.
Sorweel simply blinked and gaped.
“Once it was called Ishori?l, the Exalted Hall,” Serwa was saying, her voice pitched above the babbling murmur of the Emwama. “Of all the Great Mansions, only Si?l could claim more glory …”
So near to the Weeping Mountain it seemed the light had inked a cavern across the sky. Only the great faces were as he imagined. The warlike bodies he had imagined beneath were in fact priestly, limbs like cliffs clothed in monkish robes, hands clasped low as if to assist someone climbing, outermost knees jutting as opposing turrets. Trees mobbed the crooks of their arms, some bent into claws, others upright. Scrub and grasses thronged anywhere the graven cloth was hooked into gullies, so that the twin immensities seemed draped in gardens. The faces themselves were plainly Nonmen, though they seemed uncanny for staring to the south rather than out and over the processional. Growth clotted eyes like skiffs.