The Great Ordeal (Aspect-Emperor #3)(60)

Whale bones she finds herself thinking …

Once, during her second year in the brothel, an Ainoni caste-noble named Mipharses had fallen in love with her—at least as much as any man could fall in love with a child-whore. He would lease her for days at a time, long enough for her to dare dream—despite the suffocating misery of his bed—of escaping the brothel and becoming a wife. Once he took her down the River Sayut on his pleasure barge, through the idyllic channels of the delta, to a cove filled with what he called Narwhales, fish that were not fish, white and ghostly beneath the lucid distortions of the surface. She had been frightened and enthralled in equal measure: the beasts periodically blasted from the surface, where they would seem to hang in an armless twist before crashing back into the window blue.

“This is where they come to mate,” Mipharses said, pressing as much as holding her to his lap. “And die …” he added, pointing to a swale of beach beneath the overgrown shore.

And there she saw the carcasses, some bloated and blackened like sausages, others little more than bones cast up like flotsam in a storm.

Bones like these bones.

“Does the Sea pitch them up after?” she had asked. She never fails to cringe when she recalls the tenderness of her look and manner during these years. She never fails to curse her mother.

“The Sea?” Mipharses had replied, smiling the way some men are prone when sharing vicious truths with coddled women. She would never forget the way his yellow teeth contradicted the ludicrous perfection of his oiled and pleated beard. “No. They swim here to die … Beasts can sense their ending, little dear. That is what makes them nobler than Men.”

And looking at him she had agreed. Far nobler.

She hears the Wizard’s boots scuff the floor behind her.

“What is this place?” he calls with a kind of querulous wonder.

A tingling horror stops her reply.

“These bones …” he continues. “Other than the skulls, they aren’t … human.”

The very air sparks. It seems that she sways, even though she stands as rigid as a shriving pole.

“Yes,” she hears herself say. “They are …”

As human as the D?nyain could be.

In the war of light and shadow that is her periphery, she glimpses the old Wizard gazing at her in numb alarm.

She turns her back to him, cradles her abdomen in her hands.

The Eye opens …

A dizzying moment. Vision wars against vision, one world crisp with edge and grit, the other milky with warring angles, the budding of things long hidden …

And she sees it, Judgment, implacable and absolute, bleeding like dye through the sack-cloth of the mundane. She sees it, the world become a jurist’s scroll, and she cannot but read …

Damnation.

The shattered sword near the entrance: she sees the progression of hands that once clasped the pommel, the parting flesh, the plunging point, the mewling screams of its soulless victims, the glittering perfection of the lines it once sketched through pockets of subterranean gloom.

An invisible palm presses her cheek, forces her gaze across what she does not want to see …

The torment of the Whale-mothers.

Between women and men, women possess the lesser soul. Whenever the Eye opens, she glimpses the fact of this, the demand that women yield to the requirements of men, so long as those demands be righteous. To bear sons. To lower her gaze. To provide succor. The place of the woman is to give. So it has always been, since Omrain first climbed nude from the dust and bathed in the wind. Since Esmenet made herself a crutch for stern Angeshra?l.

But the horror the Eye reveals before her …

The insect obscenity of their innocent forms. Bulbous, their flesh little more than quivering cages. Women bred into monstrous instruments of procreation, until they had become little more than pouches slung about their wombs.

The misery. The huffing and moaning. The mewling screams. The inhuman men filing to their assignations, utterly heartless and insensate. The slapping of hip and genitalia. The animality of coupling stripped to its essential germ, to the milking pitch of insemination …

Sadism without desire. Cruelty—unimaginable cruelty—absent the least will to inflict suffering.

An evil that only the Inchoroi could surpass.

And when her gaze flinches, she sees that this crime is no aberration, but rather an inevitable and extreme implication of what rules the whole. Everywhere she looks she sees it with heart-scratching clarity, rising like bruises beneath the world’s tender skin. Craft. Cunning. The devious pitch of intellect, domineering, devoid of compassion or humility …

And the will—the blasphemous will most of all. The deranged hunger to become God.

She begins trembling. “Akka …” she hears herself gasp. “You-y-you …” She trails to recover her voice and her spit. Tears flood her cheeks.

“You were right.”

Even as she says this a part of her balks—the part that knows how desperately he has yearned to hear these words …

The Holy cares nothing for the designs of Men. And their appetites, it denies outright. The Holy, at all turns, demand the sacrifice of mortal projects, the carrying of burdens that slow, even kill. The Holy was the path of detours, even dead ends. The road that punished for following.

“What are you saying?” the old Wizard croaks.