Her next song would command fire and ruin.
The Nonmen threaded a pole between the crotch of her elbows and her spine and bore her thus from the Thresholds.
“Noooooooo!” she heard her eldest brother, long broken, snuffle and cry. “Leave her!” he roared with sudden, bestial ferocity. “Let her be! Let! Her! Beeeeeeee!”
And it cut her far more than any indignity she had so far suffered that he might yet cry out his devotion thus, despite all the degradations, all the mutilations. Finding her body useless, the Lord Torturer had sought to make Mo?nghus an implement of her torture. And she had sang songs of blessing in Ihrims? as they cut him … as they brutalized the dark boy who had worshipped her for as long as she could remember.
She had sung in celebration while watching him sob and shriek for torture …
And still he loved—the same as Sorweel.
Anas?rimbor Serwa pondered this as the company of ghouls bore her blind into the heights of the Weeping Mountain … the love of troubled brothers and orphaned kings.
And the cruelty demanded by the future.
Sorweel watched as the Boatman, still singing, began gripping the carcasses about the ankles, then whirled about on quick steps to pitch them out over the gunwale.
The clacking drew them like larva from holes in the rotted walls. They groused and gesticulated, perched upon precarious ledges or iron gang-stages, rooting the air like blind pups. As wretched as those above had been, these were far worse: emaciated, ulcerated, adorned with scabs, clad in nothing but raiments of filth, their knees and palms as black as Zsoronga’s shoulders, their scalps as jaundiced as human bone. The pallor of each had been scuffed from blackened skin in a manner peculiar to each, lending ornamental distinction to what misery had ground to meal otherwise. For eccentricities in motion aside, they all leaned out to the Haul with the same compulsive sway, and they all ate with identical frenzy.
These Mines had been the glory of Ishterebinth, what brought embassies from all other Mansions to reside within their mountain. For nimil—the famed silver of the Nonmen, more doughty than steel, as soft and warm as cotton against the skin—had ever been the great obsession of their Race. Once the Vast Ingressus had thronged with Hauls laden with ore bound for the furnaces and smithies of the Chthonic above. Peerings had burned. Emwama had teemed about iron walks and platforms, cringing beneath the harsh cries and cracking whips of their immortal overseers.
And now this … this …
Perversity.
“These are the Reduced,” Oinaral said. “In a thousand years hence, this is what will become of those who yet survive in the Chthonic above.”
The youth bit back on abhorrence, said only, “They do not weep.”
“What we call the Gloom has fallen upon them. Centuries of reliving memories wear them to dust. The clarity of the horror endured is leached, until nothing but a dark fog remains—an obscurity that is their souls …” He paused as though struck by some novel implication.
“Yet another living Hell!” Sorweel cried in incredulous retort. “Your Boatman performs no mercy, casting swine to them. It-it’s obscene allowing such misery to persist! A Man would just let them die!”
The Siqu stiffened at the rail. He turned from the congregation wagging across the pitched stone to regard the apparition where Sorweel’s face should lie.
“And what of the Hells?” he asked.
The question surprised the youth. “What of them?”
Oinaral shrugged. “We have spurned your infernal Gods … and we have sinned.”
“Pfah!” the youth spat. “What do we care for Gods?”
“But the Hells—we do care for them. The paths to Oblivion are few—as tight as the arrow’s notch, Emilidis would say. Tell me, Son of Harweel, who is to decide when these wretches should hazard damnation?”
Sorweel stood dumbstruck.
Oinaral looked away, glanced about the limits of the peering’s light, from the ghastly forms level to them to those rending and gorging above. “The most wasted souls are the eldest,” he continued, “the most tragic—the friends and rivals of the one who feeds them. The Boatman knows, mortal: Even the Gloom is a blessed interval compared to what awaits.”
Understanding cracked the youth’s heart, knowing this World could countenance such misery at all, let alone as a lesser evil. It deadened him, hammered blunt yet another inner edge.
Clack … Clack … Clack …