The Great Ordeal (Aspect-Emperor #3)(29)

“For an Age it bequeathed its wisdom to our race, dispatching its immortal sons, the Siqu, to advise our kings, train our artisans, teach our scholars … Nil’giccas foresaw the doom of his race, and knew that we would outlive them …”

The main entrance lay between the titanic figures, famed Minror the Unholy—the Soggomantic Gate. But two other portals flanked it, each half the size, each set beneath scarps of engraved riot. Their nimil doors lay askew, dazzling the dingy stone and wrack about them, but their mouths remained black for shadow. Wicked Minror also lay askew, a wall as savage as broken glass stacked and fused, only consisting of plates of soggomant—thousands of golden fragments looted from the Ark. But where the Bar of Heaven could scarcely plumb the depths of the lesser gates, here it beamed like a candle held to the socket of an eyeless man, revealing a monumental hall gagged with ruin. The legendary gate that had sealed the Mountain against the Great Ruiner had been destroyed from within …

“Then Mog-Pharau came,” she continued, “and all the nations of the North were swept away. Nil’giccas withdrew, and these very gates were sealed shut. Ishori?l became Ishterebinth, the Exalted Stronghold. All surviving knowledge of the Tutelage passed to the South with Seswatha.”

Ishterebinth, he realized, had not so much been stripped of its natural skin as clothed in the mad intricacies of its soul. History. Icon and Image. Faith. All the things the Anas?rimbor bandied about with a philosopher’s contempt for belief had been writ into living rock, panel after panel, line after line. The only difference was that it was not script, though his eye everywhere insisted on seeing it as such. Nor was it engraving …

It was statuary, countless images, endless pageants, somehow prised out of the mountain’s hide. Sorweel knew this because of the very ruin that so concerned Serwa. Some sections had sloughed away like decrepit plaster, whereas others had been pocked by titanic impacts, revealing graven recesses deep enough for a man to hide. And he realized: for all its mad, bloated artifice, Ishterebinth was a place of senescence and death. Slowly, inexorably, weather and weight and assault were stripping it—denuding it. Channels scored the mountainous facades, tributaries where plummeting stonework had collected into rivers of artifice and gouged ravines through the granite embroidery. Debris lay heaped about the foot of every scarp, in some places as high or higher than Sakarpus’s walls. Broken meaning.

“The Stronghold is Exalted no longer,” Mo?nghus called out in wry warning.

Sorweel shared his misapprehension. An ally who could not keep his own walls was no ally.

“The ghouls are many things, Brother. Some less than Men, some more, and some incomprehensible.”

The Prince-Imperial grinned. “What are you saying?”

Sorweel could tell that for all the deference Mo?nghus showed his sister, he still saw her as the pestering child she had once pretended to be.

A dark look from his sister. “Only that humility would better serve our father.”

Mo?nghus cast a contemptuous glance at Sorweel.

“And if they decide that Father has violated the Niom?”

“Nil’giccas was Seswatha’s friend.”

Her tone remained poised, as always, at the pitch of indifference, but Sorweel somehow knew she was less than convinced.

“Bah! Look at this place, Serri! Look! Is this the House of a sane king?”

“No,” she admitted.

The Emwama milled about them, watching with a wonder marred for the perverse size of their eyes.

“You remember what Father told us,” Mo?nghus pressed. “The confused always seek the security of rules. That was why the Niom was so important, why this”—a thumb thrown in Sorweel’s direction—“kag’s hatred was so important!”

The Grandmistress scowled. “What do you want me to do?”

“What I wanted from the beginning!”

“No, Podi.”

A moment of fierce appraisal passed between the siblings, and somehow Sorweel knew that Mo?nghus meant to kill him—here and now if he could.

“Is that the D?nyain in you, Serri? Or is it Mother?”

“I said, no.”

Mo?nghus glared at Sorweel with barely constrained fury.

“Yul’irisa kak-kak meritru …” he grated to his sister.

And though Sorweel understood none of it, in his soul’s ear he heard, If I snap his neck anyway?

“It would make no difference.”

Something in her tone hooked the gazes of both men.

The ghouls. They were coming.



So they stood breathless on the High Floor beneath the Soggomantic Gate, the Believer-King and the children of the Aspect-Emperor. A murmur passed through the throngs, even though only those Emwama near the fore could have possibly seen the approach of their ageless masters. Terror has its own vision. A kind of cringing eagerness overcame the creatures, one that reminded Sorweel of beaten dogs. They did not so much crowd the three travellers as shrink against them, their smiles garish and false beneath looks of shy dread. One even clutched his hand—child fingers, only horned and callused like a man’s.

Sorweel found himself returning the insistent squeeze. And in a moment of madness he understood that the siblings hadn’t tormented him because he had witnessed their incest—the incest had been the torment! They had afflicted him because the terms of the Niom demanded that he hate the Anas?rimbor …