The Great Ordeal (Aspect-Emperor #3)(96)
“To be loved …” the youth said, at once horrified and unsurprised. “Then murdered.”
“Yes.”
“You must do something!”
“The Aged coddle me,” Oinaral said, “make grand gesture of all the strife I am spared. At least some ember of them, they proclaim, shall glow long into the black. But for all their fatuous celebration, I am despised just the same. Thus the bitter irony of my curse, Son of Harweel. I am the greatest shame my Kinning has known, a reclusive Scribe among grasping Heroes, and yet only I recall the distinction between honour and corruption …”
The Injori Ishroi rolled his head about his chin as if facts could seize throats.
“Only I can remember what shame is!”
And it amazed Sorweel that this underworld could be so similar to his own. Men forever ornamented their words with more words, claiming to be moved by compassion, eloquence, and reason, when in sooth the station of the speaker was their only care. If anything rendered the Nonmen “false,” he decided, it was their nobility, their solidarity, their steadfast refusal to contravene the claims of their fathers …
Their utter contempt for things convenient.
“This is why you need me to overthrow Nin’ciljiras?” the young Believer-King asked. “The bigotry of the Aged?”
Oinaral stared forward, his marmoreal profile expressionless. “Yes.”
“But if your word counts for nothing, what could the word of Men do?”
“I do not need you to speak, Son of Harweel.”
“Then what do you need me for?”
The Siqu refused to meet his gaze, gesturing instead to a great stair that plummeted into blackness and living rock to their right—the Inward Stair, Sorweel realized. Light flared at the terminus below, but nowhere along the passage.
“To survive,” Oinaral replied.
“I don’t understand,” Sorweel said as they descended into the gloom. The wondrous bestiary ornamenting the halls above had yielded to the same crammed welter of history. But where the miniature dioramas stood a fair cubit and were stacked parallel to the floors elsewhere, these issued at an angle upon every step, ribbing the ceiling with epic scenes of strife and glory.
“You are God-entangled.”
Sorweel could scarcely feel his own frown. “I fear my doom lies in a different direction, Oinaral.”
“Doom has no direction, Son of Harweel. The time and place of your death has been assigned, no matter when or where you find yourself.”
The thought unnerved the youth, despite all the months he’d squandered mulling it.
“So?” he asked on a thin voice.
“To be doomed is also to be an oracle …”
“A way to read the future?”
The dark eyes appraised him.
“In a manner, yes … I know only that you cannot die within the Weeping Mountain.”
The youth scowled. Was this what he had meant about Fate before?
“You want to use me as your charm!” he cried. “As proof against your own death!”
The tall Siqu descended some ten steps before answering. His elaborate coat and gown shimmered in the nearing light. His shadow climbed the steps behind him.
“Where we go …” he began, only to pause as if caught upon some obscure scruple.
“I cannot survive where we go,” he resumed, “unless I stalk your shadow—your Fate.”
“And where do we go?” Sorweel asked, raising a hand against the breaching light, for though the stair continued, its cloistered, subterranean passage had come to an end. The oppressive ceilings fell away …
If evasion had been his design, then the Siqu had timed his confession perfectly. Even with the knowledge afforded by the Amiolas, the spectacle struck him speechless. Hundreds of peerings burned as a constellation of little suns, so bright as to dazzle the eyes, shedding light across the whole of what was called the Ilculc? Rift, a vast, diagonal wedge of emptiness struck into the Mountain’s heart. The Inward Stair flared outward across the lower slope, broadening into something truly monumental, and descending to the lowest trough of the Ilculc?. But the wonder lay above, stamped deep into the opposite face of the Rift: the famed Hanging Citadels of Ishterebinth.
“We dwindle,” Oinaral said, “but our works remain …”
Sorweel found himself gawking for awe, even though Immiriccas had despised the ostentation. The opposite depths of the Mountain, Sorweel knew, were riddled with the palatial complexes of the Injori Ishroi, a maze of underworld manors, all opening onto the hanging face of the Ilculc?, forming a great and eclectic ceiling, one possessing numberless embrasures, dozens of colonnades and terraces—a veritable scarp of gilded and graven structure! A labyrinth of iron platforms subtended it all, hanging like nets pinned to a fisherman’s ceiling, descending in stages, conjoining all of the strongholds. Some sported balustrades, but most hung as plates in air, lavishly furnished in places, sparsely in others, all of it bound into a surreal commons. The Believer-King could see dozens of figures through and across the haze of grilled floors, some congregated, some paired as lovers, and a great number solitary.
Discourse hung as a thin mutter upon the air. Periodic shouts of grief pealed across the gulf.
“Behold,” Oinaral said, his tone bitter and bent, “Mi’punial’s Famed Hidden Heaven …”