The Great Ordeal (Aspect-Emperor #3)(59)
The light soundlessly shoulders away the dark, revealing a pocked and blasted region a cavity where everything tingles with sorcerous residue. Some kind of gate, she realizes, glimpsing the mangle that had once been an iron portal. They had happened upon an underworld bastion of some kind.
“They brought the ceilings down …” the old Wizard says, his eyes probing the cragged hollows above them. “All this has been excavated.”
“What do you think happened?”
“The D?nyain,” he says, speaking in the airy way of someone describing images drawn from the Soul’s eye. “They fled the walls above when they realized they were overmatched. They sealed themselves in the tunnels below. I’m guessing they brought the ceilings down when the Consult assaulted this gate.”
Her eyes roam the pitted surfaces, confirming.
“To no avail,” she says.
A grim, beard-crushing nod. “To no avail.”
The tunnels complicate beyond the destroyed gate, chambers like nodes, opening onto further corridors. Mimara finds her earlier presentiment of immensity confirmed. Somehow she just knows that the tunnels go on and on, forking and twining, veining the mountain foundations with complexity and confusion. Somehow she knows they have been designed to defeat comprehension as much as courage …
That they stand at the threshold of a labyrinth.
“We must mark our way,” she tells the old Wizard.
He glances at her, frowning.
“This place is D?nyain,” she explains.
They wander across littered floors, a bead of illumination bumping and shuffling through the black. An aging Wizard and a pregnant woman.
Cil-Aujas howls from some deep pit in her memory, rendering the silence that much more palpable, enough to squeeze her chest, freight her limbs. And it strikes her that she never truly surfaced, that the long mad flight through the Mop and across the Istyuli were but a different underworld, the endless skies a different ground, as crushing as any mountain. She tries guessing at the function of the chambers they pass through, recess after recess, walls scorched, floors chapped with desiccated gore. The spaces yield to the relentless light, lines firm and straight, reaching out with geometric perfection. Most are blasted, their contents stamped to ruin, kicked into corners. But one possesses iron racks, some kind of restraints for human forms, arranged in a radial arc. Another appears to be some kind of kitchen.
The Wizard marks every room with the charcoal nub of an abandoned torch. Crude chevrons tipped on their side, always pointing to the obscurity before them.
They pass through several more chambers, breathing cobweb-air. They clamber down a half-ruined stairwell, enter the throat of what seems a long corridor. Fragments of bone and debris gravel the floors.
She tries to imagine the D?nyain. She has heard tales of her stepfather’s martial skill, how it dwarfed even that of the skin-spies, so she sees Soma in her soul’s eye, only in D?nyain guise, battling through Sranc and blackness, his sword sketching impossible figures in the screeching dark. When the images fade she falls to pondering Koll, the final face worn by the thing called Soma, and the madness of Sauglish.
She wonders that a Consult abomination would save her.
“Nothing …” the old Wizard murmurs beside her.
She turns to him with a curiosity she feels only with her face.
“No ornament,” he explains, running a knobbed hand across the wall nearest to him. “No symbol. Nothing …”
She looks to the walls and ceiling, feels the surprise of considering things noticed but not pondered. The sorcerous light is crowded and bright about them, darkening in stages as her eyes stray into the near distance. Everything is bare and … perfect. Only the random marks of conflict score them—the mad quill of discord.
The contrast unnerves her. The descent into Cil-Aujas had been a descent into chaotic meaning, as if strife and loss and story had composed the heart of the mountain.
There is no story here. No reminders. No hopes or regrets or vain declarations.
Only blank assertion. The penetration of density by mazed space.
And she realizes …
They explore the bowel of a far different mansion. One less human.
Ishu?l.
Even before they enter, it seems that she knows this room. She—a child of the brothel.
It lies waiting, a square of pure black at the end of the corridor. The absence of resistance surprises her as she steps across the threshold, as if the hairs on her arms and cheeks had warned her of some invisible membrane.
The point of light slides effortlessly before them, gouging deep hollows from the blackness. They both stand breathing and staring. The ceiling is so low and broad as to seem a different floor. What seem to be lidless sarcophagi line the arc of the walls, dozens of large pedestals hewn from living rock, receding into the deeper gloom. But where the buried dead are typically lain with ankles bound, foot-to-foot, these sarcophagi flare outward: pinning their occupants spread-eagled, providing a space between …
A place.
She swallows against a nail in the back of her throat. Stepping across a shattered sword, she approaches the nearest pedestal to her right. Bones and dust, dimpled and ragged like sheets of rotted skin, crowd the interior. Jawless skulls tipped on their sides. Ribs like halved hoops, implying torsos far broader than her embrace. Femurs like clubs, still threading the iron straps that had once restrained them. Pelvises, rising like antlers from the detritus …