The Great Ordeal (Aspect-Emperor #3)(65)

Malowebi started for the contradiction of seething fertility and stringy, old crone laughter. Even in the shadowy confines of Fanayal’s pavilion, she seemed illuminated, a thing drawn out of chill waters, raw, tasteless for being … so clean.

“Then burn me!” she cried. “The Fanim share that custom with the Inrithi at least! Forever burning those who Give!”

Padirajah finally whirled, his face twisted. “Fire is merely how it ends, witch! First I cast you as a rag to my warriors, let them rut and stamp your sex into mud! Then I hoist you high above the bramble flame, watch you writhe and shriek! burst into a beacon warning of all that is foul and wicked!”

The old woman’s laugh became silent.

“Yes!” she croaked. “Give … me … all … their … seed! All their fury bound to the Mother’s pitiless womb! Let your entire nation lean hard upon me! Groan as grinning dogs! Let them know me as you have known me!”

The Padirajah lunged toward her, only to be hung from his wrists, held as if leashed to opposite corners of the pavilion. He craned his head about, crying out, groaning. At long last his wide, palpating eyes found Malowebi where he stood riven between shadows. For a moment, the Padirajah seemed to implore him—but for things too great for any man to bodily yield.

The look slipped into oblivion. Fanayal collapsed to his knees before the vile seductress.

Psatma Nannaferi wailed her amusement. The nails of her darkling look scratched the Mbimayu Schoolman’s image—for the merest instant only, but it was enough, enough for him to glimpse the crimson filigree of veins, the uterine webs she had sunk as roots into the Reality surrounding.

Flee! Run you old idiot!

But he already understood that it was too late.

“Share me!” she shrieked. “Burn meeee! Do it!” A sound like a dog’s growl, close enough to send the Zeumi’s skin crawling against his foul robes. “Do it! And watch your precious Snakehead die!”

Ice ached in the craw of his bones. Malowebi understood the truth of her infernal hilarity—and the truth of everything that had transpired with it. The Dread Mother had been among them all along. That fateful day in Iothiah, they had been delivered to Psatma Nannaferi, not vice versa.

The time to flee had itself fled long ago.

“What are you saying?” Fanayal asked, his face bereft of dignity, his knees wide across the carpets.

“The black blasphemer knows!” she chortled, throwing her chin in Malowebi’s direction.

Curse Likaro!

“Tell me!” the Padirajah cried, all the more pathetic for attempting to sound imperious.

A black-hearted smirk.

“Yeeeessss. Your every ambition, the whole pathetic empire of your conceit, is bound to me, Son of Kascamandri. What you take from me, you cut from yourself. What you gift to me, you gift to yourself …” Her eyes roamed the shadowy spaces about them. “And,” she said, her voice dropping to a croak, “to your Mother …”

“But can you save him?” Fanayal cried.

A teasing laugh, as though from a girl smitten by a lover’s foibles.

“Of course,” she said, leaning forward to caress his swollen cheek. “My God exists …”



Malowebi had fled that night—eventually.

He watched her bid Fanayal reach two fingers between her thighs. His breath abandoned him. His very heartbeat became entangled on the rapturous violence of her reaction …

He watched the Padirajah withdraw his fingers, stare in abject horror at the blood clotted upon them. Psatma Nannaferi curled as a pampered cat upon the settee, her eyes drowsy.

“Press it into his wound …” she said on a languorous breath. Her eyes were already closed.

Give.

Fanayal stood as a man precarious upon a mountain’s summit, unsteady, astounded, then he turned to the Last Cishaurim.

And Malowebi fled, his gown stained about the thighs. He fairly flew across the encampment, slinking through shadows, cringing from all for shame. In the safety of his tent he tore off all his elaborate accoutrements, stood shivering and naked in his own stink. He would not remember falling asleep.

When he awoke, he found his index and forefinger stained cherry red.

He was no fool. As little as he knew about the Dread Mother of Birth, he knew well enough what perils lay ahead. He was what his people called “wairo”, snared by the Gods. According to the K?bur?, the most ancient lore of his people, the calamity of wairo lay in the caprice of the Hundred. But the Mbimayu had a more nuanced and therefore more frightening explanation. Where Men had to forever toil, forever accumulate the wages of their labour to hope for their descendant’s prayers, the Gods stood outside the very possibility of individual acts. The substance of their limbs was nothing other than the passage of events themselves. They gripped and steered the World through bounty, yes, but through catastrophe far more. Wars. Famines. Earthquakes. Floods.

These were their Hands, both holy and terrible.

Which was why those judged wairo were often driven into the wild. When he was but nine, Malowebi had found a dead woman curled about the base of a great cypress on his grandfather’s estate. Her rot had dried—the Parch had been hard that year—but her ligaments yet held and this, with her clothing, lent her a horrific substance. Weeds surged about her edges, as well as places in-between. His grandfather refused to have her moved when he showed him. “No animal has touched her,” he had said, his eyes wide with urgent wisdom. “She is wairo.”