“The No-God stands outside inside and outside,” Oinaral continued. “The Gods of your idols could not foresee its coming two thousand years ago. When It walked the World in actuality they saw only the ruin that was its shadow—ruin they blamed on other things! The priests of Men cried out and out and out, for naught. The masses huddled in the Temples wailing, and their Gods—your Gods!—heard only madness or mockery …”
Sorweel gaped faceless. The Amiolas, which had been an insufferable burden, seemed the only thing holding him upright.
“What are you saying? That Yatwer is deceived?”
“More. I’m saying that given Her nature, She cannot but be deceived.”
“Impossible!”
Oinaral merely shrugged. “Necessity always seems such to the ignorant.”
Sorweel reeled, suppressed an urge to bellow his exasperation. How? How could a boy simply awaken one morning and find himself beset by such perversities? Prophets who were not prophets, but were saviours all the same? Gods who ruled as blindly as Kings?
At every turn! Whenever he found some kernel of resolve, whenever he thought he had glimpsed the truth of his straits, the World said otherwise … How? How had he become such a lodestone for madness and contradiction?
“You wear the Amiolas, Son of Harweel. The knowledge dwells within you, as certain as suffering itself. The Unholy Consult seeks the destruction of the World …”
He need not reflect to know the canny Nonman had spoken true. The memories were there, mountainous with portent and implication, heartbreak and hatred, but like gears belonging to a different mill they remained inert, immovable, like something that could only be scratched, never seized.
“You bear the Weal, the same as us …”
And he simply knew … knew that Oinaral Lastborn spoke true … The Inc?-Holionas had come to exterminate all souls … and the Gods could not see it at all …
The Dread Mother was blind.
They descended to the Fourth Observance, one of the more ancient halls of Ishterebinth. Sorweel glimpsed yet another panel depicting Min-Uroikas—Golgotterath—this one hewn from stone grained like violent waters. The Mountain loomed obdurate about them, a crushing forever caught in suspension. His thoughts bobbed and twitched like butterflies, absurd for being so insubstantial in a crypt so massive.
Ishterebinth.
“They plot our extinction …” the youth said.
“Yes,” Oinaral Lastborn replied, his voice timbered in too many passions.
“But why? Why would anyone war for such an insane outcome?”
They crossed another baroque junction. The sound of nearby weeping momentarily scraped the walls.
“Salvation,” the Nonman said. “There is no reprieve from such sins as they have committed.”
An implacable fury swelled through Sorweel’s limbs, an urge to throttle—to strike! But it was cracked for the absence of foes, broken into aimless urgency.
“They seek …” he said, using calm words to force calm into his demeanour. “They seek to save themselves from … from damnation?”
“You know this as well,” Oinaral said. “You only balk because of its implication …”
“Implication? What implication?”
He could scream, such was the absurdity of it all.
“Because it means the Anas?rimbor is almost certainly your Saviour.”
And there it was. The Amiolas need not blot his sense of breathing.
The Mother-of-Birth had doomed him to assassinate a Living Prophet, the true Saviour.
Effigies of her father often came to her in the blind watches, glimpses, episodes. She would dwell upon them so as to stop her ears against her brother’s odd shrieks, reliving her own past as she relived Seswatha’s in her sleep. And sometimes, when the rigours of her captivity waxed ascendant, she found herself rehearsing conversations that did not exist. Her father would come to her bearing bread, water. He would rinse skin she could not feel, ask her how she was now captive in a place so pitiless, so dark.
“Hate had not come easy,” she would tell him. “His love for me was … was …”
“So is this the end, little Witch? Are you so ready to forget?”
“Forget … What do you mean?”
“That you are my daughter.”
A Nonman huddled naked on the corner of the next intersecting hall, his face buried in tangled arms and knees. The nearest peering illuminated the bulb of the wretch’s head, rendered him a thing of white wax and motionless shadow. He seemed a part of the Mountain. Were it not for the pulse of a lone vein, Sorweel would have sworn the ghoul dead.
Oinaral took no notice.
“A Man once told me that hope dwindles with age,” the Siqu said after a handful of paces. “That was why, he said, the ancients were happy.”
Sorweel could only reply out of numb habit. “And what did you say?”
“That there was hope, and there was hope for, and that this was what made the ancients happy … hoping for.”
Deafening silence.
Sorweel simply continued walking, blank for being overmatched by this latest revelation.
“You do understand, do you not, Son of Harweel?”
“I can scarce understand my burden. What am I supposed to make of yours?”
Oinaral nodded.