“None know how or why the stone-eaters responsible carved them thus,” Oinaral said from his periphery, perhaps sensing his unease, perhaps not. “The stone-eaters themselves said they did it to honour the Fathoming, as a goad to self-examination and an accounting of sins. To apprehend memorials without, they said, was to neglect the testimony of what lies within.”
Sorweel shuddered, such was the effect of the thousands of motionless faces.
“And you do not believe them?”
“Their expressions …” the Siqu said, his voice as searching as his gaze. “There is too much hatred in them.”
But the youth could see no expression in any of them at all. They simply watched, great rings of miniature faces, band stacked upon murky band, their eyes so indifferent as to be dead, so numerous as to be one. The Lament yet lay clear upon the air, a morass of shouts and wails, a racket barbed so as to hook as burrs upon more lucid souls. And the contradiction raised his hackles, the sight of judgment given and the sound of judgment received …
And he realized the Fathoming had always been a thing of dread for Immiriccas, whose aversion to reflection approached loathing. Action should be enough!
But for him to stand in judgment of Immiriccas was at once for Immiriccas to stand in judgment of him. Who he had been the dismal months preceding came in a cringing flood, images churning as foam. Mewling when blood should have been spilled. Bemoaning what should have been avenged. Questions like sparrows battling in his breast, leaving him winded. Sorweel shrank from the ancient and inflamed gaze, the immovable eye of the Ishroi, even as he bowed before the thousands stacked in great rings about the walls of the Ingressus …
Clack … Clack … Clack …
The Haul descended, and Sorweel fell a second time, into deeps no less irrevocable. Humanity had been his ground, his implicit ordering frame, and like so very many things human, it could only command so long as it remained unseen. Thus are pride and courage so eager to example witless faith: only not knowing allows Men to be what they need to be. So long as Sorweel had remained ignorant of his countless mortal frailties, they could secure him thoughtless foundation. But now that he had fathomed himself from a greater vantage, a far mightier and more noble frame, he could only see himself as anxious and deceitful, craven and imbecilic, crooked and grotesque, an ape that lurched in mockery of the true rule.
The Nonmen.
The lions fled, and there they rested content,
And they placed yokes upon the groaning Emwama,
Who placed yokes upon the braying beasts,
And brought forth abundance for the Sons of Si?l
Judgment ever belongs to the greater. He saw himself the way the Injori Ishroi saw Men in days of ancient old, as strutting beasts, by turns devious and absurd, rotting even as they lived, shouting boasts from atop their barrow-graves. Weed or flower, it did not matter, for their time was too short to count anything but the dregs of glory. Henceforth, his would always be a miscreant life.
And so the last of the boy left to the Son of Harweel died in the Weeping Mountain.
The walls of the Umbilicus had been dyed black to make stark the gilded halos about his head and hands. Perhaps no soul in the Empire aside from herself and her elder brothers knew this.
“And if I should fail? What then, Father?”
His presence had dwarfed for intensity more than dimension. His look passed through her the way it always had, twin cables strung taut across the interval that was her soul.
“Spend your final breath on prayer.”
She became real, kneeling before him like this, just as she had as a little girl. Always.
“For me?”
“For everything.”
Clack … Clack … Clack …
The Lament gradually faded into the boom of waters. They continued sinking, a vacant bulb of illumination dropping into viscous black. Sorweel abandoned his position, sat upon the deck opposite the stacked carcasses, his head—or the Cauldron, rather—bent against the glare. If Oinaral wondered at his silence, he made no sign. The Nonman stood leaning from the stern as before, a pale shadow decked in armour lurid with scintillant light. Perhaps he too grappled with misgiving and unwelcome insight. Perhaps he too sounded waters the intellect could only muddy.
The youth lay slack, hung in incredulity. An image of Serwa floated beneath his soul’s eye, and his blood ran cold.
The Boatman began a different dirge, another song the Amiolas remembered, an epic lay of love in the shadow of extinction. Sorweel turned to him. He was scarcely more than a silhouette for the radiance above, an apparition of smoke rising into sunlight.
She stripped and she clothed him,
but she fed him not,
and with her brother,
they became runners beneath the Starving,
fleeing into the wilds of Ti,
where the rivers vanish,
in the cruel shadow of the House Primordial.
Sorweel lay drowsing as he listened, his body a thing forgotten, at once bound upon the rack and entombed in clay. Watching the Boatman, he saw a scuttling of shadows about his feet … He thought it a cat, at first, for he had seen innumerable cats upon the river barges of his home. Then the first of the figures strode from the Boatman’s shadow and into horrific reality.