The Great Ordeal (Aspect-Emperor #3)(94)

“And so the Weal becomes the Dolour, so the Intact become the Erratic. Think on it, mortal King, the way melancholy is prone to make you cruel, impatient of weaknesses. Your soul slowly disassembles, fragments into disconnected traumas, losses, pains. A cowardly word. A lover’s betrayal. An infant’s last, laboured breath. And for the heroes among us, the heartbreak commensurate with their breathtaking glory …”

Oinaral lowered his head as if at last conceding to some relentless weight.

“This is how you know that you stand before the least of my Race,” he voice raw. “The fact that I stand lucid and Intact before you.”

Their boots sent echoes muttering into the excavations buried about them.

“And that is why Nil’giccas is dead and gone …” Oinaral said on cracking passion. “He warred valiantly—I know this because for long centuries I was his Book. It was he who contrived the Bark and the Concavity, who made the Seal-of-the-Mountain a floating jewel. None toiled against the Dolour so mightily—or piteously—as he. The more he came apart, the more he demanded that his surroundings bind him together. But nothing could remedy his dissolution …

“Depravity, Son of Harweel. Only depravity retrieves the Wayward soul. No one knows why, but only horrors can render it whole, the commission of atrocities. You recover yourself for a slender interval, and you despair, crack for shame at the dishevelled beast you have become, and you rejoice. You live! The hunger for life burns far stronger in us than in Men, Son of Harweel. The suicides among us are miraculous, rare names in the Great Pit of Years …

“And so Nil’giccas—the most Illumined of our ancient Heros—took to depravity …”

Oinaral fell silent. His gait even slowed, as if he dragged his ruminations across the floors behind him.

“What did he do?” Sorweel asked.

A momentary glance to the littered floors—detritus leached from the porous walls.

“He took to the Emwama—a practice that Nin’ciljiras continues. That oil he pours upon his face and head is distilled from the fat of his victims. Atrocity! Simply to warrant his claim to be Intact!”

The Siqu cast his right arm down in the Injori gesture of disgust and symbolic ablution. “But this is to be expected from a Son of Viri, the line of Nin’janjin. But from Nil’giccas? The Blessed Man-Tutor?”

“So what did you do?” the youth asked, understanding that Oinaral gave him a confession in lieu of explanation.

“I feared. I mourned. I cautioned. Finally I threatened. When he persisted, I abandoned him.”

The Siqu walked riven now, his fists clenched, his neck finned above the folds of his nimil coif.

“And this would be all that he would remember … My betrayal …”

The youth could feel his own heart swell.

“Second Father!” Oinaral boomed, his voice crashing through the black tunnels, ripping through the film of shadows. “Lover! Sharer of Secrets! I abandoned thee!”

The Nonman collapsed to his knees, and Sorweel glimpsed his own image slip across Oinaral’s nimil shield as he pitched forward in kneeling anguish— The reflection seized him about the throat.

Head sealed within the eldritch helm, a cauldron pitted with inscription …

And a face where there should be no face, as if shining across the skein of nimil sigils …

A Nonman face.

“He would have died a thousand deaths for me!” the Siqu cried. “And in his darkest watch, I abandoned him!”

Sorweel gazed hapless. “But he had succumbed to depravity … What else was there to be done?”

“The ancient learn no lessons!” Oinaral roared. In a blink he was back upon his feet, looming martial over the stunned youth. “A mortal should know as much! You do not punish the aged as you would children! Doing such simply salves your own conceit! Indulges your own malice!”

His eyes rolled ceiling-ward. His face clenched into something indistinguishable from a Sranc, and in a heartbeat Sorweel understood that the skinnies had been cut directly from them, that they were but the most horrific fragment of the ancient being before him—a demented mockery!

Such a blight the Inchoroi had been.

“I was weak!” Oinaral cried. “I punished him for failing to be what he had always been! I punished him for wronging me!” He seized Sorweel by his stained tunic, wrenched him into his spittle. “Don’t you see, Manling? All of this is my fault! I was the last rope remaining, his only tether!”

Confusion clouded the Siqu’s fury. He let slip Sorweel’s tunic, looked to the ground, blinking, shaking.

“What happened to him?” the youth asked. “What did he do?”

Oinaral whirled away in what resembled—to human eyes—childish shame. Sorweel turned away, but more to avoid his own reflection across Oinaral’s shield than out of respect.

“He fled …” the Nonman moaned into the graven walls, hunched as though paring his fingernails. “Vanished the fortnight following. I abandoned our beloved King, and he abandoned his sacred Mansion, the last surviving Son of Tsonos … until Nin’ciljiras returned.”

“But he would have fled regardless …”

“Only a fraction flee the Mountain … Some retreat into the Holy Deep, where they dwell in the blankness of the black, with no meaning to pain them. And others, the thousands of wretches below us, simply dwell, wander the compass of their most primitive habits, circling hearths they cannot remember, endlessly crying out, endlessly gathering and dropping the smashed pottery of their souls …”