How? How had we been laid so low?
The Nonman Siqu explained everything, how they travelled through the Chthonic to reach the Vast Ingressus, the massive well that sank through the greater part of the Weeping Mountain. Oinaral had not seen his father since the Hero had forsaken the Citadels a millennium previous, but he had heard rumour enough to know that he lived, and to believe that he wandered the Mere—the Holy Deep. For all the disorder of their souls, the Erratics remain shackled to animal necessity. This was why Sorweel and Oinaral had so far only heard them, why the lamentations had remained before them. Save for a few, the Wayward congregated about the Ingressus, where they scavenged what food they could.
The caterwaul waxed. Oinaral flinched at first sound of the clacking, stone hammering stone. He paused, stood white and rigid in Holol’s light, listening to the noise repeat as relentlessly as a wheel …
Clack … Clack … Clack …
“Time is short,” he finally called. “We must run!” He seized Sorweel by the arm, drew him into the black passage before them—into the immured cacophony.
“What?” the Believer-King cried, stumbling after him. “What is it?”
“The Boatman comes!” Oinaral replied, breaking into a trot while holding the luminous point of Holol out before them.
Clack … Clack … Clack …
Graven surfaces unspooled in the light. They crossed a reception hall of some kind, one reduced to scorched wrack for fire or sorcery. In the sweep of shadows, Sorweel glimpsed a nude figure huddled amid the debris.
“So we take the Haul?” he asked, not quite fathoming.
Another nude figure in the black, this one standing, pounding its face into the doll-sized imagery before him. Sorweel saw a whole panel roll beneath the light, the figures smashed like teeth from jaws, the remaining roots smeared with blood.
“Run!” the Nonman cried over his shoulder.
A hair-raising screech. The light struck two filth-smeared figures locked upon the soiled floor, strangling, each striving to rape or murder the other. Sorweel’s boot cracked through a rib cage, and he pitched forward to the ground—realized that what he had assumed ash and dust was in fact excrement. He glimpsed movement in the blackness, the shine of Sranc scalps. The gloom howled.
Oinaral stooped to assist him. His light seemed to pick out random images of horror.
“Cousin!” Sorweel shouted—a cry punched from him by horror and incredulity. “This cannot be!”
But wailing had conquered all heights of sound. They stood in the Wormery, he realized, where the famed silks of Injor-Niyas were manufactured for the Kings of lands as distant as Shir and Kyraneas. The Ingressus was close … Very close!
A wretch stepped out of the howling blackness and fell upon Oinaral’s nimil-armoured knee, his ribs inked in shadow, so famished as to resemble a Sranc in body as well as mien. The Siqu turned in revulsion and horror, struck the piteous soul upon the brow with Holol.
Clack … Clack … Clack …
Figures tossed in the greater gloom about them.
They ran about a great mound of ruin—some bricked structure toppled. A portcullis jutted from the shattered blocks, nine black-iron teeth pointed as pitchfork over a shoulder, each adorned in severed Nonman heads in varying stages of decay.
Oinaral cast his gaze about, then gestured for Sorweel to climb. He followed the Siqu to the ruin’s summit, the Horde’s screech resonating within the unholy Cauldron. Holol’s radiant point shed a chiaroscuro of shadows across the floors beneath them. Pallid figures leapt into existence in the interstices of light, ghouls become larval with grief, wailing, rocking, slapping offal across their cheeks and skulls. Gesticulating hands. Fused teeth about howling maws. Skin blackened for filth and feces. Rictus after anguished rictus, hundreds of them, all hairless and fungal white, bobbing like buoys across the murky expanse. And the spectacle brought the youth to his knees, struck him to the root. Rot had become his marrow, cinders his heart …
These! These were their wages! The fruit of their mad conceit, their blasphemous folly!
The unthinkable had come to pass. The People of Morning were truly dead.
The Nonman’s light flew out across space, revealing the hulks of columns and piers, stations gutted and gigantic, heights of graven glory hanging cadaverous over writhing floors.