“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 …”
“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.