The Great Ordeal (Aspect-Emperor #3)(30)

Because they needed evidence of what the Goddess would never let them see.

And now they thought themselves doomed.

What had he done? The youth stood riven. The Nonmen of Ishterebinth issued from the lesser gate to the right, an otherworldly file. Where the stone and lichens sopped the light, they reflected it, flashing small and iridescent beneath the vast, graven heights. Their gait betrayed neither urgency nor alarm.

Mo?nghus cursed, his great frame taut.

“Say nothing,” Serwa admonished the two men. “Do as I do.”

The False Men gathered more radiance as they approached, such was the burnish of their gown-length hauberks. Hairless as porcelain. Eyes like obsidian. Pale as melting snow. The mere image of them constricted Sorweel’s breast. Fair of face. Narrow of hip and broad of shoulder. Imperious without the least pretension—the assurance of an indisputable ascendancy in grace and glory as much as form. With their every step, something clawed Sorweel from the inside, a panic as old as his Race—a recognition, not of something other, but of something stolen. Where the Emwama disgusted for being less, the Nonmen repelled for being more, for achieving what were human sums, a measure writ into every Mannish soul. This was what made them False, inhuman …

The way they made beasts of Men.

Small wonder the Gods demanded their extermination.

The ghouls began fanning across the mall behind the foremost of their number, the one with small pelts of fur hanging against his chest. The Bar of Heaven glared above everything, a column hewn from the sun, so tall as to chase shadows into puddles about booted feet. The Nonmen hauberks, which had seemed chitinous mirrors, now made powder of the light, which coursed serpentine and scintillating up and down their forms. Black pommels jutted above their shoulders. Small moans and curious, keening whispers broke out among the Emwama. The little fingers in his hand curled into claws.

Sorweel’s heart began hammering.

“Say nothing,” the Swayali witch murmured.

The Nonman with the necklace of pelts—human scalps, Sorweel numbly realized—began barking incomprehensible words, his voice deep and ariose. The great mob of Emwama fell to their faces in almost perfect unison, so much so it seemed the ground itself had dropped. Sorweel lurched for vertigo, clenched his now empty hand. Both he and Mo?nghus looked to Serwa, but she seemed every bit as perplexed as they.

“Anas?rimbor Serwa mil’ir,” she called out. “Anas?rimbor Kellhus ish’alurij pil—”

The Nonman barked out another command—in the Emwama tongue, Sorweel realized—but there was no response from the prostrate masses. The otherworldly figure paused some ten paces before Serwa, his nimil skirts shimmering where they swayed, his marmoreal face devoid of passion. His companions formed a loose and cadaverous assembly behind him.

“Niomi mi’sisra,” Serwa ventured once again, her tone searching and conciliatory. “Nil’gisha soimi—”

“Hu’jajil!” the Nonman cried.

Serwa and Mo?nghus fell almost immediately to their knees, dropped their faces to the cracked ground. Witless, Sorweel was late in following, which was why he saw the Emwama behind Mo?nghus rise and, as quick as a dog slaps its tail, club the base of his skull. He cried out, tried to leap clear of the pungent little beasts, but the small callused hand had seized him once more—as did innumerable others, wrenching, twisting, pinching, striking. He heard Serwa frantically shouting in Ihrims?. He glimpsed Mo?nghus somehow roaring back to his feet, shrugging the wretches from his great shoulders, swinging one from a strapped arm— But an impact knocked all vision from him, snatched away his legs.

Clawing. Screeching. Stink and blackness.





CHAPTER THREE


Momemn


Men, who belong to nature, apprehend their nature as Law when it seems to them to be restrained, and as nature when it seems to them to be unruly. Thus do some Sages say that a lie, merely, divides Men from Beasts.

—MEMGOWA, The Book of Divine Acts





Early Autumn, 20 New Imperial Year (4132, Year-of-the-Tusk), Momemn

“Catch,” the Whore of Momemn calls across sunlight …

But the peach is already in his hand.

In the vast and vacant gloom of Xothei, the Gift-of-Yatwer stands motionless beside the idol of his Mother, watching several doddering priests raise and bear the carcass of their Shriah away. Three of them spit upon the floor at his feet. He looks back as the Inchausti lead him away, sees himself standing in the shadow of his gilded Mother.

Horns rifle the sky. Hoe and Earth! Hoe and Earth! Wicked Momemn lays blotted, struck from the Book for its iniquities. The Empress calls across the remains of the sun. “Catch …”

He does not so much wash as rinse the blood from his hands.

A thin and oddly-apparelled girl joins their company, Theliopa, whose subtlety has been honed into simplicity. “Someone who was there when it happens,” he explains to her, even as he watches her vanish beneath crashing black.

The Empress tosses a peach … “Catch.”

The fingers he submerges are brown, and yet crimson blooms through the water.

The Empress peers into his mien. “What you did … How could it be possible?”

Ruby-red beads hang quivering from the pads of his fingers. He cranes his ear down to listen: the water chirps ever so faintly. The ripples bloat out across all creation.