The Great Ordeal (Aspect-Emperor #3)(73)

“The Niom has been betrayed,” a voice accused from nowhere.

The Thresholds, the ghouls called it, a place that was no place, where the Nonmen of Ishterebinth sought to conceal their most appalling crimes from the Hundred …

The youth had not the least inkling how he knew this.

“You are no enemy of the Aspect-Emperor.”

A Sranc face hung against the blackness immediately before him, watching with glistening intensity. The white lips opened, and he glimpsed the merest gleam of fused Sranc teeth before light dazzled him. The watching eyes became incisions upon the sun. A third strand of sorcerous singing seized Sorweel’s ears from the inside.

“You love his Issue,” his accuser continued. The Asker, as he would come to call him. “You yearn for the Witch, Anas?rimbor Serwa.”

He was taller than the rest, gracile as a woman, save that his hips were narrow and his shoulders were broad. He alone stood as was proper (though why Sorweel should know as much escaped him), hands clasped in the small of his back. He alone was Ishroi.

I hate them, the youth replied, somehow, for he had no awareness of breath or lips.

He could hear Mo?nghus weeping … Somewhere near. He heard only what he was meant to hear, he realized.

“And yet you fear for them.”

Yes …

And there was bliss, answering as he did. For the first time he could remember, he felt unfettered—free! The Sranc regarded him, and for all the wonder of its light, Sorweel had never known anything so reasonable. What it wanted to take was simply identical to what he needed to give—what could be more reasonable?

“Because you love them?”

No.

“Then why?”

Because the Dread Mother has cursed them.

There were pauses like this, when the Asker fell silent, and the Sranc-faced Singer simply watched, its eyes shining like sunlight.

“The one Men call Yatwer?”

Take care, he chastised the ghoul, puzzled that he could speak something so dire whilst so profoundly at ease. She does not count you among Her children.

The Sranc Singer turned momentarily to the Asker, then swivelled back to him. Its neck was human, and obscene for it.

“The Dread Mother speaks to you?”

As I speak to myself.

The Asker’s face appeared above the Singer’s shoulder. What looked like tears brimmed from its black eyes, spilled upon a single blink, and it seemed more wickedness, that such beasts should weep.

“And what does She say?”

The sorcerous voice swelled upon a wailing phrase; Sorweel suffered a torsion of the eyes, as if a second, peering soul saw what he saw falling. The voice that answered had the sound of bare feet scuffing, old women wheezing …

That you are False.

The two white faces leaned closer.

“And the Aspect-Emperor … What does she say of him?”

That She hath poured for him two portions—a soul filled, and a soul anointed.

There was as much curiosity as horror in the Asker’s aquiline face.

Oinaral … the youth somehow remembered or realized or … he was not quite sure. He knew only that his interrogator was named Oinaral …

That he recognized him.

“And you … Are you Filled or Annointed?”

I am the one Anointed.

“Anointed to kill the Aspect-Emperor?”

And something rebelled within him. A sudden reluctance cramped his shining will.

The Sranc face wailed about a bolus of light, as if labouring to pry away the obstruction, but it was immovable, immune.

An opening leaned before him, obscured all that was dark and dying. And he saw her, his beloved mother sitting at the westward window of the Lookery, lost in some faraway thought. The dusk made a scarlet plate of the Plain beyond her, burnishing the very earth the Great Ordeal would pock with latrines years later.

Sorweel stood arrested on the threshold. Her distance belonged to one of those adult reveries that children are apt to ignore, but her kerchief lay slack in her hand across her skirted lap, the one she used to catch her coughing, the one she always kept bundled in an angular fist. It almost seemed sinful, seeing the linen of its pinched knees pried apart. He glimpsed what he thought were rose petals.

She started at the sight of him. The kerchief vanished beneath clenched hands. He met the terror in her gaze, matched it, understanding at that instant the truth of the rose petals.

Her horror melted into concern, then beamed into adoring reassurance—mothers sacrifice nothing so much as their sorrow and fear. Her hands wrung the kerchief into a horseshoe.

“Tell the abomination …” she croaked through bulbous earth. “To give what has been given.”

Words he did not remember.

He blinked between worlds. The Sranc face toiled now, twisted about unheard exhortations, brilliant exhalations.

“Tell us!” the Asker bawled.

For the first time Sorweel saw the inconsistency between what it mouthed and what he heard.

Serwa was singing something soft, reassuring … Somewhere.

“You need not Compel me,” the young King of Sakarpus gasped. “The Niom has been observed.”



“I am Harapior,” the Nonman had said.

Serwa knew him, both from the High Floor beneath the Soggomantic Gate and from her Dreams. All had heard of the Lord Torturer in Seswatha’s day.