Now only dark and derelict passages remained, turn after turn, the walls belted with meaningless, miniature parades, the floor strewn with debris—bones among them. Gone was the light—Oinaral actually took care to avoid corridors housing the glow of isolate peerings. Gone was the swarm of regimented activity. And gone was the sound of cleansing rain …
For it was here that the Weeping Mountain took its name.
Sakarpus had wept the night and day following the triumph of the Aspect-Emperor, and though the chorus had immersed him, Sorweel had heard nothing save his own lamentations writ wide. No matter how distant, the wail on the wind could only be his own because the loss it declared was also his own. The losses of the Nonmen, however, lay far beyond his ken. His skin pimpled for the unnatural tenor. His ear recoiled for the lunacy of the screech. He could hear it in each tormented aria, the punishments of millennia whittled to the point of now, vast life concentrated into anguished slurry—horrors reverberating in a drum a thousand years dead. A dead wife. A treacherous lover. A disastrous rout. Sorweel could own none of these losses—and who could, given the mad individuality of each? Time itself had flown apart in the bowel of the Weeping Mountain. And so he heard fragments, a choir of crazed overreactions, torment, heartbreak, floating devoid of sense or origin. “The left leg is broken!” one voice bobbed across the turbulence. “The knee is not the knee!”
“Don’t look!” another voice erupted. “Turn aside thine eyes!”
The cacophony gathered density the deeper they fathomed, becoming an all-permeating roar, a wash of thousands thrashing as a snake caught upon a pitchfork. Neither Sorweel nor Oinaral ventured to speak. The Siqu led. Sorweel followed rigid with apprehension, starting at each new howl that issued raw from the black beyond Holol’s white light. The wailing grew louder, and with it, the madness thickened as cream, until he found himself reeling for a melancholy all his own, as if the multiplication of laments heard from without rendered them indistinguishable from sorrow within.
Sorweel clutched his hands against tremors, clenched his voice into a burning ball.
“An endless funeral …” he found himself gasping. “A blasted tomb! How could anyone dwell in such a place?”
“Gird your loins, Son of Harweel. The tempest is yet to come …”
Sorweel stopped, watched Oinaral and his point of light draw ahead of him.
“Enough!” he cried. “No more games! Tell me! Where are you taking me? What is your design?”
The Nonman turned to study him for a long moment—too long.
“I’m not a fool,” Sorweel continued. “I’ve survived months among the Anas?rimbor bearing murder in my heart! You refuse to lie—this is how I know you possess honour … and because these … memories I have assure as much. I knew you as a boy!” He paused to glare at the Nonman. “You cannot lie, Oinaral Lastborn, so you defer, evade … Why? If not to lure me too deep, past some point of return.”
A dark, glittering look. “This is what you think?”
“I think this is as far as I go. I think our time of reckoning has come!”
A shy, even anguished, edge crept into the porcelain expression. “Even if it costs the lives of the girl an—?”
“Enough!” the Believer-King erupted. “Enough! What is it you so fear to tell me? What awaits us in the dark?”
Oinaral cast an apprehensive look about them.
“We search for my father,” he said, bereft of expression, hope.
This caught Sorweel by surprise. The inhuman lament reverberated in the interval. The Cauldron lay numb as void, as if the bone of his skull had been knitted into it.
“Oir?nas?” he asked, knowing this name as surely as that of Niehirren Halfhand or Orsuleese the Faster, or any other Heroic Lord of the Plains. Oir?nas Oirasig, Survivor of the First Watch, and Master of the Second. With his twin brother, Oirinas, among the most renowned of the Si?lan Ishroi.
“He still lives?”
Solemn hesitation. “Yes.”
“But surely he’s …” Sorweel began, only to pause on a sudden scruple.
He knew the pain of lost fathers. The ache.
But the Nonman seemed unmoved. “The Dolour has claimed him entirely,” he said. “Yes.”
They stared at each other across the desolate hall, Man and Nonman.
“This is why you need me?” Sorweel said. “To survive your … your father?”
“Yes,” the ancient Siqu replied, averting his darkling gaze. “To beg of him one last legendary deed.”
So they walked, Man and Nonman.
Buried. Wandering the entombed heart of Ishterebinth, the Weeping Mountain. Encased. Enveloped by graven lattices of glory and orgiastic excess. Trampled by bootless meaning, otiose hope. The brute reality was dismaying enough, but the immateriality of the underworld trek was by far the worse. The losses.