“Yes. But for all she has suffered, mercy remains her primary instinct.”
The old sorcerer, his skin blackened for filth, his beard wire-white, stood braced beneath his cloak of ragged pelts, gazing at them in turbulent indecision.
“So she is weak after all.”
“She is worldborn.”
Something swelled within the old man, a crippled ferocity …
After the Brethren had thrown back the Shriekers’ first assault, they had pried opened the creature’s skulls. They had been careful to take captives, both for the purposes of interrogation and study. The Neuropuncturists quickly realized the Shriekers weren’t natural. Like the D?nyain, their neuroanatomy bore all the hallmarks of artifice, with various lobes swollen at the expense of others, the myriad articulations of Cause branching into configurations alien to all other earthly beasts. Structures that triggered anguish in everything from lizards to wolves elicited lust in the Shriekers. They possessed no compassion, no remorse or shame or communal ambition …
Again, like the D?nyain.
But there were differences as well, every bit as dramatic as the similarities, only more difficult to detect for their structural subtleties. Of all the regions known to Neuropuncture, none was so difficult to chart or probe as the Outer Sheath, especially those portions crowded behind the forehead. After centuries spent mapping Defectives, the Brethren had discovered that this structure was naught but the outer expression of a far larger mechanism, a great net cast across deeper, more primitive tracts. Cause. Cause soaked the skull through the senses, ran in cataracts that were unwound into tributaries, only to be knotted and unravelled again. At turns superficial and profound, it was siphoned and tapped into a tangle that could only be likened to a marsh, Cause splintered into imperceptible eddies and swirls, currents wrapped across the inner circumference of the skull, before draining back into the cataracts once again.
The first Neuropuncturists called it the Confluence. It was—for them—their primary resource and their greatest challenge, for it was nothing other than the soul, the light they coaxed into ever more brilliance with each passing generation. The Confluence was the structure that distinguished even the most malformed of the Defectives from beasts. And the Shriekers possessed none. Cause coursed through them in rills and tributaries and rivers without so much as touching the light of the soul.
They were creatures of darkness, the Brethren realized. Utter darkness. Not one sky dwelt within their skulls. Not one thought.
As much as they resembled the D?nyain, the Shriekers were actually their antithesis, a race honed to give perfect expression to the darkness that comes before. Where the D?nyain reached for infinity, the Shriekers embodied zero.
This old man who would kill them, the Survivor knew, dwelt somewhere in the shadowy in-between. The woman had poured her Cause into the cup of his skull, where it had rushed and swirled, before soaking into the dim swamp of his soul. And now it was about to drain into action.
The old man dropped his chin to his breast, crushing his wild, white beard. He began speaking the way the Singers had spoken, words that sparked light, a voice that rose not from the mouth, but from the limit of everything surrounding. He had pinched shut his eyes against tears. Now open, they flashed like twin Nails of Heaven.
“ … irsuirrima tasi cilliju phir …”
“Cling to me,” the Survivor commanded the child. “Simulate love and terror.”
The boy did as he was told.
Thus they stood, a scarred monstrosity and a crab-handed child, stranded and helpless. The old man hesitated, anarchic and unkempt, little more than a rind wrapped about shining power.
The Survivor wondered that light could throw shadows in full sun. The boy feigned an involuntary cry.
The pregnant woman watched, her right hand clutched about her belly. The Survivor need only glance at her to hear the thrumming heartbeats, born and unborn …
Finally, she called out.
CHAPTER NINE
Ishterebinth
But what could be more essential than the belly and the whip? Where I dwell, these are the blatant movers of our souls; words are little more than garlands. So I say Men must suffer in ways that words can retrieve lest they die. That is the simpler truth.
—AJENCIS, Letter to Nikky?menes
Late Summer, 20 New Imperial Year (4123, Year-of-the-Tusk), Ishterebinth
He could not feel the pillow.
Sorweel lay in bed—a grand one, hewn from image-pitted stone—and yet he could not feel the pillow.
But there was sunlight, pale for being filtered so deep … and the inconstant flux of chill and astringent air.