The Great Ordeal (Aspect-Emperor #3)(79)

“I …” he said helplessly. His face?

Oinaral either nodded or simply lowered the white oval of his chin. “Touching your face has not occurred to you because It does not want you to. The Union happens faster when the Donning Soul remains ignora—”

“It?” Sorweel interrupted on welling panic. “It … doesn’t want me to?”

“Touch your face, Son of Harweel.”

Had they all gone mad in his absence?

“What has happened here, Cousin?” he cried. “What has become of the Holy Kinnings? How can you speak of these things without shame?”

“I will explain everything …” Oinaral said, smiling reassurance. “You need only touch your face.”

Sorweel at last raised his hands, frowning, perplexed …

And found his face missing.

Not missing … replaced.

A stunned heartbeat. His fingertips recognized the silken polish of nimil, which always seemed warmer than the air. He swept frantic hands across curves and swales of metal, all of it stamped in intricate symbols …

A faceless helm of some kind?



Mammalian panic. Suffocation. He seized the thing, wrenched at it in futility. It seemed continuous with his skull!

“Get it off!” Sorweel cried to the watching ghoul. “Get it! Off!”

“Calm,” Oinaral said with what seemed the supreme assurance. The graven walls bobbed about him.

“Get it off!”

With one hand, he wrenched a fistful of nimil-mail from Oinaral’s breast, while the panicked other skittered across the helm, thumbing every crease, every crevice, searching for some kind of seam or latch or strap—something!

“Take it off now!” he cried. “Honour your Embrace!”

Oinaral clasped his wrist, held his hand fixed between them.

“Calm,” he repeated. “Recall yourself, Sorweel, Son of Harweel.”

“I can’t breathe!”

He began thrashing as one drowning. The Nonman grinned for effort, revealed a wetted expanse of fused teeth. Glare and grip—something irresistible lay in the combination, an inhuman resolve.

“I will honour my Mountain’s Embrace,” he said through a grill of exertion. “None are more true than the False Men, so long as they are Intact. But if I do take the helm from you …”

Even in his panic, the youth saw a shadow float through the ghoul’s gaze.

“What? What?”

“Anas?rimbor Serwa is dead.”

Words that slapped, that cracked his knees as twigs.

He slumped kneeling.

And it gave way. What was real began turning about the peerings, the vignettes on the walls, and the engravings within, the childish antics, the mortal sorrows, all pulled apart, strewn as wreckage amid a life far more terrible, images of degenerate glory, epic savagery, golden horns goring the sky, all spinning into a great gyre …

But the black-gowned Nonman had hauled him back to his feet, crying, “Walk! Walk, Son of Harweel!”

And he was reeling down the pillared processional, glimpsing swatches of floor passing between his battered boots.

“Jealousy and vigilance …” Oinaral said, pacing him in the gloom between great lanterns. “These will save you. Jealousy of the life that is yours, vigilance for the life that is not.”

Sorweel pawed the ensorcelled helm once again, drawing his fingers across the intricate filigree stamped into the metal … His head was entombed, and yet he could see! It was as if he traced the surface of perfectly transparent glass, but distorted somehow, like his soul simply could not admit to seeing through, so that it seemed he reached out behind what existed, grasped what was near from about the back of distance.

“The Sons of Trys? called it the Cauldron,” the Siqu explained. “The Sons of ?merau, the Embalming-Skull …”

Sorweel lowered his hands and saw what appeared to be the terminus of the Inner Luminal ahead, some three lanterns ahead.

“We have always called it the Amiolas,” the gaunt Nonman continued. “Many have worn it, but I fear too many years have passed since last it suckled life …”

“It contains a soul!” the youth gasped in renewed panic.

“A shade, a soul shriven of depth, one that slumbers until it dreams.”

“You mean-mean … planted within someone living!”

“Yes.”

“So I’m possessed? My soul isn’t my own?”

Oinaral walked three, meditative paces before replying.

“Possession is an imprecise metaphor. One and one make one, with the Amiolas. You are no longer the soul you once were. You are something new.”

The Horse-King staggered alongside his Siqu, groping, fending. He had to be who he was. Was he not dead otherwise? He had to be who he was! But how? How could a soul sit in judgment of itself and say, I am this, and not that? Where lay the vantage? The point prior to all pointing? How did one catch the catching hand?

“To parlay one must understand,” the Nonman was explaining. “To understand one must be. So the Amiolas weds the soul of its wearer to the ancient shade of the Ishroi trapped within it …”

He was not who he was!

“This is how you speak my tongue, know my Mansion and my Race …”