The Great Ordeal (Aspect-Emperor #3)(76)

“And the daughter?”

The son of famed Oir?nas paused. “Surely Harapior has told you …”

An oily smile.

“I would hear your thoughts, Lastborn.”

Oinaral shrugged. “What your allies told yo—”

“You mean our allies!” Nin’ciljiras snapped.

The Nonman tested his sovereign with three heartbeats of silence. “Nothing sorcerous can compel her,” he finally replied. “Nothing. Even more, she has proven entirely indifferent to Harapior’s … other inducements. Indeed, if anything, she torments him.”

“That is a lie!” Harapior cried from his station beside the Black Iron Seat.

“It must trouble you,” Oinaral said, “the way the Goddess so effortlessly followed this boy into the Thresholds, into the place where your tresspasses cannot be seen. Do you tremble, Lord Torturer, knowing your infernal room has hidden nothing from their eyes—that all your crimes have been counted?”

Harapior stood sputtering—and obviously terrified.

Oinaral turned from him in disgust, shouting, “She is proof!” to the assembled Lords of Ishterebinth. “Proof of her father’s blood! Proof tha—!”

“Enough!” Nin’ciljiras screeched.

Murmuring alarm hung as a cloud about the platform. Sorweel could do naught but roil in animal terror … Other inducements? Weeks? What was happening here?

How could he know all these ghouls?

“We are one Mansion!” Nin’ciljiras keened, glaring wildly, then turning to his oil for respite once again. “One!” He raised his face to better savour the looping chill, then paused to regard the brown-eyed Emwama child, who promptly tried to huddle into invisibility.

“What do you advise?” Lord Cilc?liccas called from the assembly.

“That we honour the Niom,” Oinaral began, “as we have across each and every Age befo—”

“And what?” the Nonman King grated. “Ally ourselves with Men! The beasts that burned Holy Si?l, scattered her Sons! That cut Gin’yursis’ throat! What? You would have us cling to mere words, when all of us, Erratic and Intact”—he looked about in triumph—“can be saved from Hell?”

Oinaral Lastborn said nothing.

The Son of Ninar grimaced as if at some discomfort of the bowel. “I tire of this, Oinaral Oir?narig. I tire of perpetually treating for your soul, always sparing you horror … as you care to define it …”

He had raised his gaze to the assembled Ishroi as he spoke—his true audience, Sorweel realized. A bead of oil hung from either hairless brow, each gleaming with a miniature replica of the assembly.

“I weary of pandering to your delicacies while we—we!—dwell in such fear of Hell as to become Hell unto ourselves, husks—husks!—about a roaming madness. We! We are the bulwark! That is why we crumble! While you are cosseted? Relieved of the martial obligations of your Kinning? Your Race? Spared so you might be spared our curse?”

A heartbeat of silence, fraught with inhuman intimations.

“I am spared your glory and your respect,” Oinaral Lastborn replied, his manner mild. “That much is true. But no one is spared the treachery of your blood, Son of Viri.”

Something sharp crept into the gaze of Nin’ciljiras then, and Sorweel understood, not simply the brute meaning of the words, but the circumstantial intricacies as well. The ghoul who was King was the grandson of Nin’janjin …

Nil’giccas was no more. What remained of Ishterebinth had been cloven in two.

“Such words meant death not so long ago,” Nin’ciljiras said in a voice like a wire.

Oinaral snorted in amusement.

“We age better than our meanings, it se—”

“You shall accord me as you accorded my cousin!” Nin’ciljiras screamed wroth. “You! Shall! Accord! You shall reckon my holy station, for it flows from the blood of the Kinning Most High-and-Deep, the Kinning of Kings! I! I am the last Son of Tsonos in this House, and only Tsonoi may rule!” He threw down his arm in a gesture that was both alien and familiar, sending a spatter of oil across the black grillwork. “I alone can claim the blood of Imimor?l!”

“Then perhaps,” Oinaral said mildly, “the Canons of the Dead serve only the dead.”

“Sacrilege! ” the Nonman King raved. “Sacrilege!” His voice scraped across the near curves of the Concavity, hung as reeds upon the high air. At first Sorweel assumed the outburst meant doom for the ghoul called Oinaral Lastborn, but the bewildered, hunted expression of the Nonman King assured him otherwise. His overseer did not so much risk as provoke, Sorweel realized. He did not so much dare as demonstrate …

The fact that Nin’ciljiras was being eaten by the Dolour before their very eyes.

“None here contest your right, Tsonos,” Lord Cilc?liccas declared, stepping forward to intervene, scowling at Oinaral as he did so—but not in fury. He towered over Sorweel to stand before the Lastborn, his nimil hauberk a lucid contrast to the sordid gold worn by Nin’ciljiras—a soggomant hauberk, the youth dimly realized. A great deal was shared in their momentary, mutual look. The Quya clapped a white hand upon Oinaral’s shoulder, fairly wrenched the Nonman to his knees before turning to join him.

All those across the Iron Oratorium joined in their obeisance, knelt with their fingers clasped across the small of their backs.