To lose is to cease to exist for the Game; to be as dead. Since the Game is always the same Game, rebirth belongs to the survivor. The dead return as strangers.
—Fifth Canto of the Abenjukala
Early Autumn, 20 New Imperial Year (4132, Year-of-the-Tusk), Ishterebinth
Ishori?l. O’ Exalted Hall!
How glorious she had been! Famed for her silks, her chain, her song, and for the way her Ishroi rode horses rather than chariots into war. Sons from all the Mansions of E?rwa travelled to its fabled gates to beg knowledge of her craft. Only Cil-Aujas could boast a greater population, and only Si?l, the House Primordial, could boast more sublime learning or warlike glory.
How bright the peerings had blazed! How the concourses had thronged! How the air had rumbled with discourse and play! And here, within the Great Entresol, the cavernous chamber where the Ingressus served the great belly of the Chthonic, here more than anywhere. All had been enamelled in white—a gloss that banished all shadows, delivered clarity to every corner. The black painted Hauls hung from their nimil chains, some moored to black-iron gangways, others rising and falling, each the size of a river barge, the sorcerous Heavers muttering their incessant song upon the stern. The sky was nothing but a pinprick at the terminus of the Ingressus so very far above, twinkling like a second Nail of Heaven, a sublime measure of holy depth. Activity everywhere. Crowds milling across the Pier Floor. Overseers sipping liqueurs upon their balconies. Trains of Emwama bearers crisscrossing the gang-stages, loading and unloading the holds of the hanging ships. The sound of cracking whips, careless voices laughing. The bumblebee hum of the Injori lutes …
Women and children … laughing.
Clack … Clack … Clack …
Widowed fathers screaming.
How? The Believer-King’s eyes rolled up and across the vacancy of the Great Entresol, the walls once smooth and draped with garlands now pitted with insufferable images. This was Ishterebinth! Oinaral held him fast beneath his left arm and chest, dragged him among the threshing of fungal shadows. How could this nightmare be true? He rolled his head about to see masses more stark in Holol’s constant light, nested like plucked birds up and down the midden swales that choked the Pier Floor. About them, the Great Entresol somehow bundled the Lament into a vast and horrific resonance, one that probed his ears with hot fingers.
Clack … Clack … Clack …
What had Nil’giccas done to him?
A pursuing shadow seized his attention. Sorweel turned and saw a lurching figure … saw him …
Mu’miorn.
Walking naught more than a pace from his dragging heels. Naked. Emaciated. The youth had no clue how these ghouls could tell one from the other, and yet the face hanging above him was more familiar—more known—than his own. Tender lips, now savaged with ulcers. Hard brow now scored with filth. But the always-injured eyes were the same, as were the tears silvering his cheeks. Mu’miorn! ruined, wrung to the last embers of his life, scarcely more than an anguished cloud. Mu’miorn, reeling after him, a dark intensity in his eyes … a recognition.
And horror delivered the Believer-King to what was soundless in the caterwauling air, a place where shriek defeated shriek, and the sepulchral quiet of the Deep could be heard. Something cut him from the inside, peeled away some inner rind …
For he had loved this wretched apparition, lain within his hot-skinned embrace night upon night. He had teased. He had played. He had shouted within him, even as his shout looped opalescent across his skin. He had cursed him for jealousy’s sake, struck him for his betrayals, and knelt weeping at his knees, begging forgiveness. Though stranded upon the mere threshold of manhood, the long-suffering Son of Harweel knew the love of turbulent centuries, the epochal cycles of addiction and exhaustion, outrage and ecstasy …
“Mu’miorn!” he cried out in futility.
Disgust, for making as a woman with a man. Revulsion. And heartbreak. And horror.
Horror and more horror.
Clack … Clack … Clack …
Mu’miorn staggered and wept, spittle hanging from his gagging mouth. He could not believe, Sorweel realized. He could not believe!