The Great Ordeal (Aspect-Emperor #3)(97)
“The Sky-Beneath-the-Mountain,” Sorweel replied in awe. “I remember …”
He looked to his Siqu, not quite credulous of his certainty. “I remember singing …” he said, fumbling between thoughts and images not his own. “I remember the peerings ablaze, the horns pealing morning bright—and the whole Rift booming with sacred song!”
“Aye,” Oinaral said, turning his head away.
“The Ishroi and the Indentured would congregate across the Sky-Beneath,” Sorweel continued, “and they would sing … from the Hipinna, mostly … Yes … for that was the favourite of the wives and the children …” And it seemed he could hear it, the holy chorus, at once thunderous and sweet, magical for the seamless compounding of hearts and voices, passion struck from the mire of the flesh, raised to the mystic purity of the Ecstasis. He found himself looking from side to side across the expanse of the Inward Stair, noticing for the first time the small mounds of debris scattered across its entirety. “We would vanish into our songs,” he said, glimpsing things some other soul had seen, “and the Emwama … they would assemble on these very steps, and weep for the beauty of their masters!”
Sorweel turned to the ancient Siqu. “They worshipped us then … Adored the hand that whipped them.”
“As they do now,” Oinaral said darkly. “As they are bred.”
“And the singing?” the soul that had once been Sorweel asked. “Has song fled the Mountain, my Brother?”
The Siqu paused upon one of the strange, small piles of debris. He chipped his boot against the fibrous mass, expelling something that clattered down the steps at an angle before and below Sorweel …
The bowl of a human skull.
“Song has fled the Mountain,” the ghoul said.
The gloom was such that only forms could be discerned at any distance. Anas?rimbor Serwa knew him by the wary scruple of his passage, how he never followed quite the same path to where she hung. The Thresholds had been wrought to baffle the Gods, a place where the Nonmen might escape as a thief into a crowd, and Harapior, more than any of the others, lived in terror of what sins might find him. Just as he, more than any other, found terror and torment in her singing.
Glory was a drug to them, her father had said. She never need fear them so long as she remained extraordinary.
She sang as she always sang … another ancient C?nuroi hymn.
“My wife, Mirinq?, would sing thus,” the Lord Torturer said, “as she prepared my kit before battle.” He had paused just outside the penultimate threshold; now he grimaced for crossing, stood riven in her presence. “That very song, that very way …”
He raised and lowered his left hand, blinked two tears from his eyes.
“In her voice …”
Wrath clawed his expression.
“But your singing was not so exact in the beginning … No … Not at all.”
He lowered his wax-white face in contemplation.
“I know what you do, Anas?rimbor witch. I know that you sing to torment your tormentors. To heap yet more turmoil upon our blasted hearts.”
He stood impassive, absolutely still, and yet wild violence emanated from him.
“But how you do it—that is the question that consumes my brothers.” He drew his black eyes up. “How does a mortal girl, a captive hidden from sun, sky—even the Gods!—become the terror of the Ishroi, throw all Ishterebinth into uproar?”
He bared fused teeth.
“But I know. I know what you are—the secret of your obscene line.”
He knew of the D?nyain, she realized.
“You sing Mirinq?’s songs because of what I have said. You sing with her-her … her voice because of what I remember! You are the captive, yet it is I who confesses—who betrays!”
There could be no more doubt as to who ruled in Ishterebinth.
Again he reached out; again his will fell short her skin. He balled the hand into a shaking fist, raised it to her temple. Monstrous passion deformed his face.
“I would draw my blade now!” he screeched. “You would sing then, I assure you!”
And he warred with himself, Lord Harapior, swayed and moaned for tides of disordered passion. He lowered his face once again, stood gasping, clenching and unclenching his fists, listening to the dulcet call of long-dead daughters and wives.
“But your rumour has spread too far,” he grated in a broken voice. “They speak only of you throughout the Mountain … the daughter of Men who has tortured the Torturer.”
He stood breathing, folded a final tremor into the serenity of immortal hatred.
His manner became that of a thumb testing a vicious edge.
“You will have no voice left, Anas?rimbor, ere you find peace in the Weeping Mountain.”
The peerings faltered, then became no more than husks surfacing in the gelid light of Holol, which Oinaral held point-out as they descended into the Chthonic Manse, the riddled heart of the Weeping Mountain. They passed great veins of quartz, and the sword dazzled the shelves of lucent statuary, visions that awed the youth, but left him no less boggled. The empire of the ghouls was nothing if not time, the stacking of Ages in the mist. But what could walls sheathed in miraculous simulacra provide eyes that could not see?
The ghouls had chiselled their souls into their walls for naught. They had remade the Mountain in their image for naught. They had presumed they could render the spirit material, make of it something hard as stone, all for naught. The deeper Oinaral Lastborn led Sorweel, the more the pageants heaped upon the walls shouted tragic vanity.