“The Boatman …” Sorweel at last ventured to Oinaral. He had no wish to speak of what had happened, but neither did he wish to be alone with thoughts that were not his own. “I don’t remember him.”
“The Amiolas knows him,” the Siqu replied without turning. A violet stain lay upon his cheek, a swatch of dried blood curved like a flower petal. The youth recoiled from thoughts of Mu’miorn, the violence of a grief that was not his own. “We were always a long-lived race,” the Siqu continued, “and he was ancient ere Nin’janjin returned, a wonder even, ere Sil first tempted his nephew, the Tyrant of Si?l. The Inoculation did not work for any of the aged save him …”
“Morimhira …” Sorweel gasped in a realization that confounded him. The legendary Father-of-Orphans—as famed as any among the Exalted. Morimhira, the violent uncle of Cu’jara Cinmoi, who had cut short the Verse of innumerable lives back in the luxurious days before the Ark, when Mansion yet warred against Mansion.
“Yes,” Oinaral said. “The Most Ancient Warrior.”
So decrepit.
“How has he come to look like this?”
So human.
“The Inoculation worked, but not entirely. Since no disease can claim him, he is deathless …”
“But not ageless.”
The Siqu glanced to the darkness below. “Aye.”
“But how could he …” The youth trailed in confusion. His knowledge seemed a book whose spine had unravelled—or worse, two books. All he had were sheaves scattered and heaped, facts and episodes. With his every knowing, it seemed, he became more disordered, not less, as if every page pulled open was another page torn.
“How has he escaped the Dolour?” Oinaral said, guessing his question. He shrugged his great shoulders. “None know. Some think he was the first to suffer it, that his acts had been so violent and his life so long that he was already Erratic ere the Second Watch was abandoned, and that this … natural derangement … has rendered him immune to the violence of what the others suffer. He does not speak, though he understands much of what is said. He does not grieve or weep—at least not outwardly.”
“And he cares for them now? The others? Feeds them?”
The bald head shook in negation beneath the motionless white point of the peering gleaming upon it.
“No. The Emwama tend to the Chthonic. The Boatman goes where they cannot. He ministers to those who wander the Holy Deep.”
Clack … Clack … Clack …
“Like your father, Oir?nas.”
Oinaral was several heartbeats in replying.
“He completes a Fathoming each day, every day …” he said. “What was once a holy pilgrimage before the Chthonic was abandoned. Some say he does penance for all those he killed before the coming of the Vile.”
“What do you say?”
The Siqu turned to him—daring the ethereal visage of Immiriccas, Sorweel now knew.
His visage.
“That a wild labyrinth lays about him,” the Lastborn said, glancing as if in gesture to the blackness, but in truth out of aversion to his aspect. “And he cleaves to the only path that recognizes his feet.”
The Haul descended to the cracking of hammers and the Boatman’s rust-iron voice.
Facing the sun, there Imimor?l dug a great well,
And bid his children enter.
In the bone of the world, there he conjured song and light,
And his children feared no more the starving Sky.
Here! Here Imimor?l drew down the face of the mountain,
Bid us seize the halls of the House Primordial—here!
Here lies a home that cleaves the tempest asunder,
A home that breaks the shining beak of the dawn.
So the Most Ancient Warrior sang. And Sorweel learned that the earth was mazed, the ground riddled with cavernous hollows. It seemed horrific somehow, that intervals should haunt the foundation of foundations. This was the ground, he realized in numb disbelief—the ground!—and they travelled through it, cranked into its black maw. The changes in the engravings seemed instant when he finally noticed them, but he somehow understood they had come about gradually, figure by sculpted figure. At some point in the descent, when the Lament yet resounded perhaps, the stone populace of the walls had begun to notice them. One by one the fist-sized faces turned, and the cubit-tall figures began to form ranks against the observing void. By the time Sorweel observed the change, the little sculptures had already barricaded the panels, standing, watching, face after indistinguishable face.
Clack … Clack … Clack …
The soul divided between Sorweel and Immiriccas gaped in horror.