The Great Ordeal (Aspect-Emperor #3)(74)

“They said I would be among the first to Succumb …” he continued, “back when this Age was young. They thought what was horror for them was horror for all. They could not see how honour, the pride that throws souls upon the anvil, was what fed the Dolour.” The shadow had laughed in whispers. “Their honour had blinded them.”

He had dragged her face up by the maul of her hair.

“So they dwindle, mortal whore, and … I … remain …”

He grasped her jaw in a hot hand. He did not think she could see him, such was the gloom. He thought he terrorized her, an entity in the black … a malice in the deep.

He did not understand her Father.

He crouched, brought his lips to hers, close enough that she could feel their inhuman heat. He cooed into her mouth as if it were an ear—or the entrance to the place where she lay hidden.

“I remain, child … Now we shall see what song you sing for me.”



Cries filtered through the honeycombed dark, myriad and deep, choruses cracked into countless strands of lament, rising raw with outrage and incredulity, fading hoarse into misery and exhaustion. Souls most ancient … reliving … and reliving … forever caught upon the shoals that had wrecked them.

Ishterebinth, Sorweel realized in dim, rolling horror. Ishterebinth had them.

They were lost among the Lost.

Four ghouls bore him through the riddled deep, two holding the pole to which his arms were bound, and two walking before. They loomed as cruel and evasive shadows for the most part, smoke to the glimpse, stone to the touch. Their pace remained constant whether he lurched with them or hung limp, his booted toes scrawling across the floors. Lights rose like beads on a string from the linear gloom—peerings, he realized, the sorcerous lanterns of the Nonmen. Halls and galleries, all squeezing his breast for the inkling of monstrous depth. Graven images rebuked his every bobbing glance, pageant upon dead pageant, figures stiff with ancient manner, faces leering and passionless.

Something was amiss. His legs seemed incidental, things too slick to be held fast. His eyes no longer blinked. He spent what seemed the better part of a watch trying to determine if he even breathed.

Did he breathe?

There was much that he seemed to know, even though he could not reason without spinning into confusion. He knew the sun had finally set upon the Nonmen as Serwa had feared, that they had outlived their allotment of sanity. He knew they had cast their lots against the House of Anas?rimbor …

That they tortured Serwa and Mo?nghus in the deep.

A great and broken voice welled from the blackness of a portal passing to his right.

“W-wake … Please wake up!”

They turned down an enormous processional, a pillared gallery that was an underworld road. For the first time he realized the utter absence of scent. A portal loomed before them, a monumental gate framed by a graven bestiary. A guard stood at the foot of the nearest column. He was draped in an elaborate gown of nimil chain like all the others, motionless save for his head, which he rolled with his chin against his breast, muttering. The ensconced lights bobbed across his scalp.

“How, my love … How could you think that a flower could …could …”

They passed through the murk of a narrow, defensive passageway. The shadow of the mountain fell away, and they found themselves on a balcony wrought from black iron, set on the waist of an enormous, globular hollow, a chamber great enough to house the Blackwall Citadel entire.

He stood upon the Oratorium, he realized, in the legendary audience chamber called the Concavity, the bastion that Nil’giccas had raised against madness and forgetting. A dozen peerings flared from points about the interior equator, anchoring ethereal and overlapping spheres of illumination. The iron platform hung over the curved plummet, as long and broad as a warship’s deck. Dozens of Ishroi watched his entrance from points across its grilled expanse, pale and hairless as marble, nude beneath gowns of resplendent nimil chain. But the approach of the Exalted Bark, the famed floating dais of the Nonman King, had seized the youth’s dazzled attention.

As he watched, it levitated across the vacant heart of the Concavity, rotating as though on a gentle breeze. It was about the size of a river scow, a gilded counterpart to the Oratorium platform. The sacred Aeviternal Seal, the Shield-of-the-Mountain, bisected it, a great coin fraught with icon and imagery rising about the Black Iron Seat, the legendary throne of Ishterebinth.

The Exalted Bark descended as if turning upon an ethereal screw, revealing the figure ensconced within the eruption of horns and quills comprising the Black Iron Seat. The young king of the Lonely City set eyes upon Nil’giccas, the Great King-upon-the-Summit, gowned in scales of gold, dripping as if pulled from some pool, and regarding him with marmoreal inscrutability.

The youth returned his scrutiny, numbed by a dawning realization …

The Bark slowed as it closed the interval between it and the Oratorium. The sound of hidden linkages scraped the air. The grilled floor shuddered beneath his feet.

The ghoul upon the Black Seat … Somehow he knew it was not Nil’giccas.

But how could that be when they were entirely indistinguishable from one another—or Sranc for that matter?

The Ishroi surrounding him and his keepers crouched in unison, pressed their faces against their knees. Left to stand on his own, Sorweel wobbled, found that he also recognized many of the illustrious court about him. The radiant Cilc?liccas, named the Lord of Swans for his preposterous luck. The crimson armoured S?jara-nin, the Farthrown, a Dispossessed Son of Si?l. Cu’mimiral Dragon-gored, who was called Lord Limper …