“What? Nonmen can surrender dignity, but not life?”
“All dignity and more!” the ghoul cried, his face twisted into something nearly frantic with grief. “We would all be dead—Ishterebinth would be naught but a mouldering tomb!—were suicide something our nature permitted!”
Clack … Clack … Clack …
Sorweel stood glaring, his limbs stuffed with straw, his heart still hammering. To think he had bemoaned the madness of his quest with Serwa and Mo?nghus!
“So if they didn’t leap—then what?” He paused, realizing the dread alternative. “Were they thrown?”
Oinaral glanced at him sharply, then resumed staring upward, the swales of his face shining for the radiance of the peering.
“Were they thrown?” Sorweel pressed. “Could Nin’ciljiras somehow know what we attempt?”
Oinaral remained silent, avoiding his gaze as ever.
“We have reached the Q?lnimil,” he finally said in semblance of resolution. “The great Mine of Ishori?l …” A grimace marred his chiselled mien. “We shall reach the Mere soon.”
The false Believer-King turned from him in dismay. Grace, the Siqu had said. He would save himself by stalking his blessed shadow, by following the path that Yatwer had marked for the Son of Harweel, the boy doomed to murder the Aspect-Emperor. But what grace could be found in a pit so deep, amid horrors so sordid and appalling? If anything, he owed his life to Oinaral—not otherwise!
The Haul-hammer resounded through the black, its crack ragged for echoing across the fractured surfaces now soaring about them, counting out the unrelenting beat of the Boatman’s ancient song.
And far from the Starving,
in the deepest of the Deep,
they brought forth their accursed spear.
Cu’jara Cinmoi, a soul ever aimed
at this, our desolation,
for they had lain together, brother and sister,
in mockery of Tsonos and Olissis.
The Incest Song of Linqiru, Sorweel realized. A version he—or the soul he had become—had never heard, one bearing the warp of the future … of doom come true.
The Nonman Apocalypse. A whole race locked in the lightless depths, wailing for losses, raging against bargains sealed in bygone ages, souls drifting from defeat to folly to tragedy, ever more at sea, ever more removed from the shores of the now. Soon the last of the Intact would Succumb to the Dolour, the Emwama would abandon them, the last of the peerings would wink out, and silence and blackness would rule the vacant heart of Ishterebinth.
The Mountain would cease weeping.
And Sorweel understood, seized the fact that outran most all Men until ruin at last ran them down. The End will have out. The Nonmen, for all their staggering age, were no more immortal than their engravings. Despite all their pious might and ingenuity, the ages had laid waste to their dominion, had made smoke of their breathtaking splendour. They were the stronger race, the wiser, and yet doom and degradation had claimed them. The wolves had fallen. What hope was there for mongrel dogs such as Men?
And upon a single forgotten breath, the ancient grudges of the Amiolas and the perplexing facts of the Great Ordeal came together. He had a sense of being taken up, of being aimed anew, turned toward a reality as gritty and as grim as truth. There was no deception here. Oinaral did not dissemble. Ishterebinth was not some absurd pantomime. The End was not some daring fancy, a way to pass impiety off as courage.
It was simply inevitable.
And so it came to pass that the Son of Harweel apprehended the horizon of a new and terrifying world from the very bowel of the Mansion, one where the Unholy Consult was real, the extinction of Men was nigh, and Anas?rimbor Kellhus was the only hope—the one true Saviour of Men! A world where the fraction that the Dread Mother could see had blinded Her to the fraction She could not …
A world where he could love Anas?rimbor Serwa.
He need only survive and escape this mad and vicious place … Flee!
For all hope had fled the Weeping Mountain.
Other than Lord Harapior, she did not know any of the nimil-armoured Nonmen who came for her. But she knew from their looks that they had heard of her, who she was, and what she had done. There was lust in their darkling gazes, but curiosity and apprehension too.
They placed a sack over her head, one woven of Injori silk as soft as rose petals across her cheeks and forehead. Her body they left uncovered, save for shackles of iron about her ankles and wrists—and the Quyan variant of the Agonic Collar welded about her neck.
They did not speak, and she did not resist.
But the hatred she had incited in the Lord Torturer was too profound to be ruled.
“Sing for us!” Harapior growled. “Sing for us, witch! Score our hearts with your foul impersonations!”
She did not oblige him—but not out of spite, for she cared nothing for the ghoul. She did not sing simply because the watch she had sung for had come and gone.