The Great Ordeal (Aspect-Emperor #3)(55)

Ishu?l perched over the lowland creases, its towers and walls overthrown, little more than a socket where a jewel was supposed to be.

Ishu?l … The ancient sanctuary of the K?niüric High Kings, hidden from the world for an entire age.

He had not known what to expect when he and Mimara had crested the glacier the previous day. He had some understanding of time, of the mad way the past formed an invisible rind about the present. When life was monotonous—safe—what happened and what had happened formed a kind of slurry, and the paradoxes of time seemed little more than a philosopher’s fancy. But when life became momentous … nothing seemed more absurd, more precarious, than the now. One ate, as one always ate, one loved and hoped and hated the same as before—and it all seemed impossible.

For twenty years he had cloistered himself with his Dreams, marking progress in the slow accumulation of nocturnal variance and permutation. The growth of his slave’s children became his only calendar. His old pains evaporated, to be sure, and yet everyday had seemed to be that day, the day he cursed Anas?rimbor Kellhus and began his bloody-footed trek into exile, so little had happened since.

Then Mimara, bearing long-dead torment and news of the Great Ordeal …

Then the Skin Eaters with their evil and blood-crazed Captain …

Then Cil-Aujas and the first Sranc, who had driven them into the precincts of Hell …

Then the madness of the Mop and the long, manic trail across the Istyuli Plains …

Then the Library of Sauglish and the Father of Dragons …

Then Nil’giccas, the death of the Last Nonman King …

So he had wheezed and huffed to the glacier’s summit in the calamitous shadow of these things, not knowing what to think, too numb and bewildered to rejoice. For so long the very World had been the mountain between them, and his limbs and heart trembled for climbing …

Then, there it lay: Ishu?l, the sum of labourious years and how many lives; Ishu?l, the birthplace of the Holy Aspect-Emperor …

Blasted to its foundations.

For a time he simply blinked and blinked. The air was too chill, his eyes too old. The sun was too bright, dazzling the icy heights. No matter how hard he squinted, he could not see …

Then he felt Mimara’s smaller, warmer hands enclose his own. She was standing before him, gazing up into his face.

“There’s no cause to weep,” she had said.

But there was.

More than enough.

His laughter forgotten, he now gazed at the wrecked fortress, his eyes clicking from detail to detail. The great blocks, scorched and fractured, spilling down the encircling slopes. The heaped debris …

Dawn silence thundered in his ears. He found himself swallowing against a hollow pinned to the back of his throat. So much … was all he could think, but whether he meant toil or suffering or sacrifice, he could not say.

The despair, when it came, crashed through him, bubbled through his bowel. He looked away in an effort to master his eyes. Fool! he cursed himself, worried that he had outgrown his old weaknesses only to inherit the frailties of old age. How could he falter at such a time?

“I know,” he croaked, hoping to recover himself by speaking of his Dream.

“What do you know?”

“How Shauriatas survived all these years. How he managed to cheat Death …”

And damnation.

He explained how the Consult sorcerer had been ancient even in Far Antique days, little more than a dread legend to Seswatha and the School of Sohonc. He described a hate-rotted soul, forever falling into hell, forever deflected by ancient and arcane magicks, caught in the sack-cloth of souls too near death to resist his clutching tumble, too devoid of animating passion.

A pit bent into a circle, the most perfect of the Conserving Forms …

“But isn’t trapping souls an ancient art?” she asked.

“It is …” Achamian replied. He thought of the Wathi doll he once owned—and used to save himself from the Scarlet Spires when everyone, including Esmenet, had thought him dead. He had been reluctant, then, to think of the proxy that had been trapped within it. Had it suffered? Was it yet another of his multitudinous sins?

One more blemish for Mimara to glimpse with her Judging Eye?

“But souls are exceedingly complicated,” he continued. “Far more so than the crude sorceries used to trap them. The intricacies of identity are always sheared away. Memory. Faculty. Character. These are cast into the pit … Only the most base urges survive in proxies.”

Which was what made them such useful slaves.

“So to have your soul caught …” She trailed, frowning.

“Is to be twice-damned …” he said, trailing at the behest of a queer reluctance. Few understood the monstrosity of sorcery better than he. “To have your hungers enslaved in the World, while your thoughts are tormented in the Outside.”

This seemed to trouble her. She turned back to the vista, her brow furrowed. He followed her gaze, yet again felt his heart slump at the sight of Ishu?l’s cracked foundations rising above the black carpet of pine and spruce.

“What does it mean?” she asked of the wind.

“The Dream?”

“No.” She glanced at him over her shoulder. “The timing.”

Now it was his turn to fall silent.

He thought, as he always did when he became agitated, of the Qirri. A querulous part of him groused, wondering why Mimara should bear the Nonman King’s pouch, when he was the leader of their piteous company—their Slog of slogs. But like an old dog caught in the rain yet one more time, he shook away these peevish thoughts. He had come to understand the narcotic ash over the months of his addiction, at least enough to distinguish its thoughts from his own.