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.
If his human portion was baffled, the inhuman portion was appalled: the thought of his brothers huddled as aggrieved misers over their dwindling hoard of memories. It was the penance of the besotted, souls bent upon the vindication of suffering, the proof of persecution that would seal their claim against Fate. They had been condemned by a folly that was theirs and theirs alone, and so they had committed the most human of humanity’s numberless sins …
They had blamed Heaven.
Sorweel need only prick his ear to the black to sound the wages of their folly. For where Nonmen had once toiled singing, they now wailed as bewildered beasts in the dark. Oinaral had spoken true: song had fled these halls long, long ago. Only paeans and dirges graced the Mountain now.
Thousands had once populated these levels, the bulk of the Injori. Below the Hanging Citadels of the Ishroi and far greater in extent, the Chthonic Manse had housed the Indentured, those born into the Sworn Kinnings. This had been the unheralded but no less vital heart of Ishterebinth. Throngs had streamed beneath the peerings, packed the concourses of the Lesser Rifts. Sorweel could remember the perpetual sound of rain, not for any actual rainfall, but for the noise of endless industry broken across adorned walls, filtered until nothing but vapour reached the ear.