The Great Ordeal (Aspect-Emperor #3)(78)

“Why? ”

“Because they would love you, if they could.”

Sorweel thought of the pathetic Emwama child cringing at the foot of the Black Iron Seat.

“Love me?”

Oinaral Lastborn walked three paces before turning to him, looking down without quite matching his gaze—much as the Nonman King had. “You are not safe here, Son of Harweel. You will find only madness in the embrace of Ishterebinth.”

A numbness confounded his frown.

“So the oath of Ishterebinth means nothing?” he asked.

Oinaral Lastborn did not answer. They passed beneath the mirror sheen of the Concavity Gate, and Sorweel hunched for the intimation of hanging stone immensities. The peerings etched no more than pockets of graven image in either direction, transforming the underworld road into a necklace beaded by twilight worlds and primordial times. The Inner Luminal, it was called, the Hall that would become a euphemism for their King, Nil’giccas, after the construction of the Concavity.

“I know things …” Sorweel said, only to be perplexed by the sound of his own voice.

Oinaral led him opposite the way they had originally came, deeper, he somehow knew, into the Weeping Mountain.

“How do I know these things?”

Oinaral strode at a brisk pace, said nothing.

Sorweel hastened after him, marvelling at the panels passing overhead, triumphs and tragedies, stacked one upon the other to the ceiling vaults above, the rising layers of a doomed race. Before, the scenes had been intelligible insofar as they offended, wholly debauched. Now they all but exploded for recognition, each glimpse a peering into times and worlds. Lovers reclined in forbidden liaison (for her breasts were bared) at a banquet for the Feast of the Mere. The annual Embassy between Nil’giccas and Gin’yursis, the great assembly of Injori Ishroi in the High Halls of M?rminil …

How he had hated the sullen, ashen halls of Cil-Aujas!

For the first time, Sorweel understood the sage-stumping miracle that was knowledge, the condensed opacity that was its substance. He knew these things, and aside from its rank impossibility, this knowing was indistinguishable from any other, so obscure were the machinations of the soul. These memories were his, rising from the very point of him, even though they could belong only to this underworld.

What was happening?

These walls were interwoven with minutiae, roped with power, glory blotting glory, and lust and tenderness and contemplation populating all. He could read them as surely as he could read the murals of his ancestral home.

“You did this by hand …” he blurted to Oinaral—his Siqu—who had drawn paces ahead.

He received scant regard from the Nonman, less than a glance. “I fail to understand.”

“You spent thousands of years doing this! These engravings …”

The wonder of such a task. It seemed he could even see it in his soul’s eye, something both more and less than images, the chisel, the mallet, and the toiling thousands, the compulsion leaping as contagion through the surviving Mansions, the demand to unearth some fragment of themselves from dead stone.

“Aye,” Oinaral admitted. “An entire Age. We are not so fractious as Men. We live our lives as tribute … not prizes.”

“Such a toil,” Sorweel said, boggled by the enormity of such a task.

“To secure such life we had left,” Oinaral replied. “If a fortress be raised of stone, then we would make a fortress of our Memory, of all that we had lost. We succumbed to the imperial urge, the brute certainty that what is large is unassailable.”

“Madness!” Sorweel cried—once again with a passion he could not recognize.

Oinaral had stopped, and now loomed before him, his breastbone even with Sorweel’s forehead, his black-silk gown open to reveal the nimil mail he wore beneath.

“All mighty endeavours beg contradiction,” he said, frowning. He turned to the very line of panels Sorweel had made the object of his gesture. “Look … Look between the moments of glory, and you find moments of a far different sort … Look, husbands dandling children … wooing lovers … appeasing wives …”

He spoke true. Scenes of the small had been hewn into the sublime procession, but it seemed the eye had to look to find them, not for lack of prominence, but because they were not historical, things recognizable in form merely. Tokens of what was ineluctable.

“We were losing it all,” the Nonman continued. “All the delights that grace hard life, be they carnal or paternal or anything that cobbles life with joy were drifting into oblivion. Do not be so quick judge, Son of Harweel. Madness is often the only sanity left, when hope alone serves the living.”

Sorweel’s hands no longer tingled, though they shook for rage and incredulity …

“You squandered it!” he barked stamping. “Squandered the last age remaining!”

Oinaral appraised him without expression, a Sranc with a wise man’s soul. The light of the nearest peering daubed his eyes with points of white.

“This is not you speaking.”

“You fools! You set aside sword and scroll for this? How could you do such a thing?”

The Siqu flinched for the violence of his expostulation, resumed his haunting regard.

“Raise your hands, Son of Harweel … Touch your face.”

A tickle, like that of a feather, caught the youth’s throat. He coughed, once again without the least sense of face and mouth.