“It’s me!” the youth cried, arching against Oinaral’s ruthless pull, tugging at the ghoul’s mailed arm. But all at once Mu’miorn stumbled, crumpled about the lewd filth of his groin, then folded as a rug beneath the ghoulish figures vying behind him, vanished underfoot …
Sorweel howled, wrenched himself clear the Lastborn’s grasp, found himself scrambling upon his rump, helpless before the woebegone figures lurching toward him. Mouths working. Pallid skin blackened by filth. Eyes seizing upon different memories of degradation and hatred and sorrow—an inhuman will to avenge! Oinaral was not senseless to his plight. Holol appeared above the Believer-King, a wick of silver bearing a point of blazing radiance. And the cadaverous throng recoiled before it, raised arms in warding, blinked against the points of white pricking their eyes. An assembly of shrieking dead.
“Mu’miorn!”
Oinaral Lastborn stepped about him, drove the wretches stumbling back with his light. Sorweel crawled back as a crab over the offal, frantically peering between pallid and battered shins for sign of his lover. His left hand dropped into emptiness. He fell back, nearly pitched into the abyss for pursuing his arm. He rolled about instead, ribs bruising upon the drop, found himself gazing into the voided bowel of the Mountain, into the ink obscurity of the Holy Deep.
They had come to the ends of the Pier Floor.
Holol had waxed, becoming bright unto blinding, or so it seemed, for Sorweel could see the pale contours of the Great Entresol, the vast arches leaning out like slabs of sky, the chains hanging dead, the derelict gangways and stages, some twisted like twigs in cobwebs. Skeletal gantries cast shadows across the curve of the image-pitted walls. Innumerable figures huddled keening across the heaped quarters of the Pier Floor, along the raised balconies and colonnades and down the steps of the Helical, wending into abyssal blackness.
Clack … Clack … Clack …
His eye caught upon the Displacement, the fracture that formed a ragged hoop about the entirety of the Entresol, a rupture in the very bone of the World. Where the Ark had all but wrecked Viri, it had struck but a single, gargantuan break through the entirety of Ishori?l, a disfigurement that was at once a monument forever memorializing the fiends who had wrought such ruin and misery …
The horrid Gaspers … The Inchoroi …
Wrath. Ever had wrath been his fame and foundation. And ever had it been his weakness and his strength, the goad that rendered him reckless and heroic in equal measure, an imperial hatred, wild and unrestrained, a rapacious will to visit woe and destruction upon his foes. The Despiser, his Kinning had named him, Immiriccas the Malcontent, and it spoke to the darkness and violence of the Age that such could be a name of pride and glory.
They were the object of his fury—the Vile! They had done this. Everything that had been stolen had been stolen by them!
Fury, wild and blind, the kind that battered bones to gravel, swelled through the Believer-King, crashed molten through his limbs. And it renewed him. It made him whole. For hatred, as much as love, blessed souls with meaning, a more terrible grace.
He pressed himself about, saw Oinaral Lastborn standing mere cubits from the edge, sweeping Holol from side to side, his nimil coats shimmering, his porcelain scalp and mien white as snow. His ashen kinsmen lurched and thronged about him, each sullied face reflecting antique horrors. They hemmed the brilliant arc of the sword, at once dazzled and bullied. Several already lay dead or bleeding at their stamping feet.
And dismay stamped the youth’s fury to mud, for it seemed perverse that any glory should remain. The mail-draped Siqu seemed a figure out of legend, a glittering remnant of the past fending a bestial and desolate future—proof of doom fulfilled.
Clack … Clack … Clack …
The youth glanced up, realizing that the Great Entresol housed a second light, one descending from on high, more luminous than that belonging to the arcane sword. Gazing up, he saw a broad-bellied Haul, black-hulled as in days of old, the light of its peering breaching the rim of the Ingressus. He made to alert Oinaral, only to glimpse Mu’miorn once again, breaking from the piteous congregation, leaping toward him, only to catch his cheek upon the Siqu’s holy sword.
The brilliance dimmed, and in the abrupt gloom Sorweel saw his beloved’s head glowing as a bulb of violet and crimson. Mu’miorn fell away, relinquished Holol’s glaring light, slumped pallid upon the midden ground …
The Son of Harweel reeled on the edge …
Embraced the Lament as his own.