The Great Ordeal (Aspect-Emperor #3)(62)

So while Mimara remained rooted to where she stood, Achamian took a seat on a block of ruin, a perch that set his face a hand’s span below that of the standing child.

“You are D?nyain?”

The boy seemed to search his gaze. “Yes.”

“How many of you remain?”

“Just me and one other. The Survivor.”

“And where is he?”

“Somewhere in the Halls beneath us.”

The floor now tingled beneath the old Wizard’s boots.

“Tell me … What happened here?”

Achamian asked this even though he knew what had happened here, even though he could reconstruct its stages in his soul’s eye. But for the nonce he was old and he was terrified, and there was courage in the asking of questions—or at least the semblance of it.

“The Shriekers came,” the boy replied, his manner mild unto blank. “I was too young to remember … much …”

“So how do you know?”

“The Survivor told me.”

The old Wizard pursed his lips. “Tell us what he told you.”

There is always a dare in the eye of bold children, an arrogance that comes with lacking the weakness of more worried elders. The crab-handed boy’s fearlessness, however, was devoid of demonstration.

“They came and they came, until the whole valley seethed. The Shriekers threw themselves at our walls, and the slaughter was great. We heaped their corpses to the battlements. We threw them back!”

Mimara watched from his periphery, not comprehending, but from the keen cast of her gaze, understanding all the same. So little separates tales of woe.

“Then the Singers came,” the boy continued, “walking across empty air, shouting in voices that made lanterns of their mouths. They pulled down the walls and the bastions, and the surviving brethren withdrew into the Thousand Thousand Halls … They could not contend with the Singers.”

The “Shriekers” were obviously Sranc. The “Singers,” Achamian realized, had to be Nonmen Quya, Erratics who had turned to the Consult in the pursuit of murder and memory. He could see the battle unfold as the boy spoke: mad Quya, screaming light and fury as they walked over the high pines, endless mobs of Sranc surging below. It seemed mad and strange and tragic, that such a war could be waged so far from the knowledge of Men. It did not seem possible that so many unknown souls could die unknown deaths.

Without sorcery or Chorae, the D?nyain, for all their preternatural ability, were helpless before the Erratics. So they fled into the labyrinth they had spent one hundred generations preparing, made a citadel of what the boy called the “Thousand Thousand Halls.” The Quya pursued them, he said, crashing through barricades, flooding the corridors with killing lights. But the brethren simply fell back and back, retreating ever deeper into the complexities of the maze.

“For all their might,” the boy continued in his monotone drawl, “the Singers were easily confused. They lost their way, wandered howling. Some perished for thirst. Others went mad, and brought the ceilings down upon themselves in their desperation to escape …”

It seemed Achamian could feel them, ancient lives ending in blindness and suffocation …

Explosions in the deep.

His diction flawless, the boy explained how the invaders mustered legion after legion of Sranc, poured them into the labyrinth, crazed and screaming, the way yeomen might try to drown rodents in their burrows.

“We lured them deep,” he said, his voice utterly devoid of the passions and hesitations that belong to childhood. “Left them to starve and thirst. We killed and we killed, but it was never enough. There was always more of them. Shrieking. Snarling …”

“We fought them for years.”

The Consult had made a screaming cistern of the Thousand Thousand Halls, filled the labyrinth until it could hold no more, and death spilled over. The boy could actually remember the latter stages of the underworld siege; corridors packed with listless and dying Sranc, where the brethren need only step and spear to move on; chutes and stairwells choked with carcasses; the flights and the assaults, wave after endless wave, ferocious and unrelenting, so much so that brother after brother would finally falter and succumb.

“And so we perished one by one.”

The old Wizard nodded in sympathy he knew the boy did not need.

“Everyone except you and the Survivor …”

The boy nodded.

“The Survivor carried me in,” he said. “The Survivor walked me out. The Logos has always burned brightest within him. None among the brethren stood so close to the Absolute as he.”

Mimara had stood rooted this whole time, her face blank, alternately studying the boy and peering out into the surrounding gloom.

“Akka …” she finally murmured, staring into the dark.

“And what is his name?” Achamian asked, ignoring her. The boy’s description of the Survivor troubled him for some reason.

“Anas?rimbor,” the boy replied. “Anas?rimbor Koringhus.”

This name seized Mimara’s attention as violently as it seized the old Wizard’s heart.

“Akka!” she fairly shouted.

“What is it?” he asked dully, his wits addled by stacking implications. Ishu?l destroyed. The D?nyain evil. And now … another Anas?rimbor?