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 …”
The youth could not but wonder whether this would be all that remained of him … or Serwa … ere this latest nightmare were through.
“I alone am to blame,” the ancient Siqu declared to the miniature glories.
“But you said as much yourself. One need not leave the Mountain to flee. What would it matter if Nil’giccas roamed the mines or the Mere? He had fled already, Cousin. Nin’ciljiras would have been acclaimed regardless.”
The Son of Oir?nas finally turned to him. His cheeks gleamed. Pink rimmed his black-glittering eyes. He was a wise soul, the youth knew, but one jealous of its madnesses.
“How many remain Intact?” Sorweel asked.
The Nonman hesitated for an instant, as if loathe to yield the topic of his heartbreak. Renewed resolution deadened his expression.
“Scarcely a dozen. Several hundred others dwell, like Nin’ciljiras, in the twilight between.”
“So few.”
Oinaral Lastborn nodded. “The wound the Vile struck was mortal, though it would take three Ages for the poison to prevail. Our very immortality was our extinction.” Something, the irony perhaps, hooked his lips into a sneer. “We have dwelt with Apocalypse since before Far Antiquity, Son of Harweel. I fear we have at last embraced it.”
The glare had been so bright as to make straw of everything that gleamed, and chalk of all that was indistinct. Ordealmen laboured across the plain, each soul bearing his shadow beneath him. Their dust conspired to create a second Shroud, dwarfish and insubstantial.
“And if Ishterebinth has fallen to the Consult? What then, Father?”
A grave look.
“You are my daughter, Serwa,” Anas?rimbor Kellhus replied. “Show them my portion.”
Nin’ciljiras had come without explanation, Oinaral explained, disgorged by the very horizon that had swallowed him an Age previous when he and the other Dispossessed Sons of Viri had fled the Judgment of the Seal. The son of Ninar had come in all due humility, invoking the Canon of Imimor?l, demanding a hearing before the Aged. Some had sought to kill him, to execute the sentence Nil’giccas had passed. But his return so soon after the disappearance of the King was no coincidence. Nin’ciljiras had found Ishterebinth in uproar, for never had a Mansion wanted for a Son of Tsonos! So the Aged, those upon the Dolour’s mad bourne, seized upon the cur, immediately declared him, fearing strife and rebellion otherwise—sorrows that would all but toss them to madness. What could any of the Younger do? They had no voice in matters of Canon. They remained Intact entirely because they had no honour, for honour was nothing but the summit of life, and they had lived not at all. Aside from sneers, what could they command in the presence of heroes?