The Great Ordeal (Aspect-Emperor #3)(58)

But there are other powers. Spiteful powers.

She smells it first … the ghost of rot. A waist-high section of wall conceals it, though she realizes she has seen it all along in the wandering arc of ruin heaped about its rim. A strange kind of astonishment trills through her, like finding a horrible scar on a new lover.

“Akka …” she calls weakly.

The old Wizard glances up in alarm. She expects him to either ignore or rebuke her, but something in her tone, perhaps, hooks his concern.

“What is it?”

“Come … Look …”

He is quick in trotting to her side—almost too quick. She has never grown accustomed to the nimble alacrity that the Qirri has lent his old bones. All such reminders trouble her … in a vague way.

So reckless with his heart, little one.

They stand side-by-side, gazing into the maw of a great pit.

The hole falls at a steep angle rather than straight down, with the ruin piled like a cowl about its ceiling edge, and the floor descending like a tongue opposite. It resembles a gigantic burrow, not unlike the one leading to the Coffers in the Library. Blackness fills its throat, almost tangible for the surrounding brightness, viscous with threat.

Achamian stands stupefied. She is not sure what draws her to climb the far side. Perhaps she has lost her stomach for deep and dark places. Regardless, she picks her way to the crest, which overlooks the far limit of the fortress, and finds herself staring down a vast incline of branches—only they are not branches …

Bones, she realizes.

Sranc bones.

Innumerable. So many that their sum has eclipsed the scale of manufactured things and become one with the mountain’s foundations. An enormous ramp, broad and shallow enough to bear a wain near the peak, dropping scores of feet, flaring out like a skirt, spilling into the forests.

She turns voiceless to the old Wizard, who scrambles to join her on the summit of the pitch.

He stares as she stares, trying to comprehend …

The mountain wind tousles his beard and hair, twisting and wagging its iron-grey tails.

“The Consult,” he murmurs from her side, his voice thin with dread. “The Consult did this.”

What was going on?

“This was where they pitched the fallen …” he continues.

In her soul’s eye she sees Ishu?l as it must have been: cold walls climbing from vast heaps of dead. But even as the image rises, she dismisses it as impossible. They found no bones among the ruined fortifications, which suggests the walls were destroyed before any mass assault.

She looks at him sharply. “And the battle?” Even as she speaks, her fingers are working to release the pouch from her belt …

Qirri … Yes-yes.

The Wizard glances toward the great pit, shrugs without sincerity.

“Beneath our feet.”

She has the premonition of rotted ground, and a dread fills her. The ruined fortress merely barks the surface, she realizes. The tracts buried beneath are riddled with far-flung veins and hollows, like termite-infested wood.

The hole runs deep, she realizes. Cil-Aujas deep.

A shudder rocks her balance from her. She stumbles, catches herself.

“Ishu?l …” she begins, only to trail in indecision.

“Is but the gate,” the old Wizard says, his eagerness outrunning his apprehension.

She turns to him with a beseeching look, but he is already clambering back the way he came, his eyes bright with rekindled hope.

“Of course …” he mutters. “Of course! This is a D?nyain stronghold!”

“So?” she calls down, standing welded upon the heaped rubble.

“So nothing is what it appears to be! Nothing!”

Of course.

Within heartbeats he has rounded the wreckage and found his way back to the pit’s black maw. He pauses, looks up to her both frowning and squinting. The ruins radiate out about them, buzzing in the sunlight. They gaze at each other across the interval, exchanging unasked questions.

At last his eyes click to her waist, where her right hand pensively fingers the pouch.

“Yes-yes,” he says roughly. “Of course.”



Renewed, they creep into the darkness together.

She can still feel the panic, cold enough to prick, but her thoughts have become woolen with relief, as if she has found leisure at the end of some arduous task. The Qirri is forever dredging up inappropriate passions, it seems, moving her soul at angles to her circumstances. The tunnels they plumb are entirely unlike the ancient obsidian marvels they explored in Cil-Aujas, but they are the same nonetheless. Halls that flee the sun. Chutes into blackness. Graves.

And despite her terror, she finds that she does not care.

Blessed be the Nonman King … his residue …

They descend at a shallow angle. The old Wizard’s Surillic Point bleaches their surroundings with white detail. Detritus and scabbed ruin clot the floor. The walls are so scored she cannot but glimpse the shrieking legions of Sranc that had once trod them. Otherwise, the stonework is both meticulous and devoid of ornamentation.

They slip deeper into the earth, a bead of white in dungeon blackness. The air remains rank, the odour of dead things mouldering, rot drained to the dregs. Neither of them speak. The same questions move their souls, ones that only the black depths can answer. To speculate aloud, it seems, would be to waste precious wind. Who knew what air dwelt below? What foulness?