Their descent did not slow, nor did the Boatman relent in his grisly toil. To preserve the balance of the vessel, he drew from the forward and rear spates equally, forcing the Siqu and his ward to retreat to the blood-greased stern. In unending succession, the Most Ancient Warrior hurled the wooden bodies out on what seemed impossible arcs given their bulk. His accuracy was likewise miraculous: time and again Sorweel thought a carcass would spin short, only to watch it skid into sudden, bloodless immobility upon the very lip.
Both watched mesmerized, the throwing and the feeding, listening to the Boatman’s effort lunge and release through his voice as he sang:
Let this song as unguent flow,
fly as sunlight upon virginal snow,
Sing breath sing! Declare our dissolution,
at the horned hands of Men,
how we raised one thousand sticks of light
against them,
how our heroes waded into their clamour,
until our dying buzzed as flies in our ears.
Sing! Declare golden Si?l’s smashing
the Breaking of the Mountain Most-Holy
and our long exile beneath the Starving,
and how our brothers embraced us
upon the iron shoulder of Injor.
Flow! Make such perfume as might be made,
from ruin and an hour …
And Sorweel found himself gazing at Oinaral—the last of the Siqu—and pondering the will that might make peace with a Race so artless and so rapacious as Man. The Boatman sang the Lay of Little Teeth, the recounting of Si?l’s fall in the first of the great migrations of Men from E?nna. The Amiolas knew well the bitter toll of those years, how darkness had crawled across the great, vacant empire of the Mansions, how the Men multiplied and multiplied, forever encroaching and invading, sacking Mansion after Mansion, hunting the False Men to extinction … through all the World save here, the last refuge remaining.
Ishterebinth.
And there was no end to them,
for endless were the E?nnites, endless and accursed
Strong was their hatred, reckless were their heroes—
mad to prove a trifle of life!
And cunning was their claim,
for as their teeth, so too were their thoughts both little,
and sharp.
The Haul continued clacking relentlessly downward. The Reduced dwindled in number, until no more forms puled from the tunnel-pocked walls. The Boatman resumed his station beneath the peering, his eyes lost to the shadow of his brows, his forehead and cheeks white and scrotal, his mouth working about the intonations of another ancient old song. The Haul seemed transformed for the dispensation of so many swine carcasses. The spates now piled no higher than the knee, so that the whole of the bark could be assayed from stern to prow in a single glance, at once battered and bright, lacquer peeling, wood bruised with violet, crimson, and watery pink, the whole endlessly sinking into the Stygian blackness below.
Of the three captive waterfalls that had rifled the walls of the Great Entresol above, two had vanished, redirected to different underworld regions, leaving only a third, immured in a chimney that serviced communal water grottos, recesses set along the entirety of the Mines, possessing walls as pocked with graven imagery as any of the galleries above. Some kind of cataclysm had shattered the chimney mere fathoms below the last of the Reduced, exposing the white cataract, which became ever more hairy and diffuse as it plummeted. Everyone was quickly sodden. Moisture clung as a mucous. Oinaral gleamed as a fish in his nimil hauberk and gown. Soon a scintillant haze was all that remained, a mist that the peering transformed into a prismatic infinity, pinprick colours conjured from gaping space. Sorweel seized upon the spectacle as an excuse to avoid the roiling that was his heart, extended his fingers to comb the infinitesimal lights. It seemed at once proper and criminal that beauty could only be found in things so small, so deep. The haze thinned and thinned until it was no more than a luminous fog, and then nothing at all …
Sorweel clutched the gunwale for vertigo, cast his gaze from side to side.
But the wraparound cliffs of the Ingressus were nowhere to be found.
“We have come to the Holy Deep,” Oinaral Lastborn said.
Like spiders riding silk from the mouth of a mountainous spout, they dropped into a perfect void. Looking up, Sorweel saw the rim of the Ingressus recede into a ceiling that made him hunch for scarped enormity. The clacking expanded into an echoic gas.
“Our pilgrimage is almost done?”
The Siqu nodded, his eyes likewise searching the dark.
“Aye. Pray to your Goddess, mortal, for peril is nearly upon us.”
“I am done praying,” he said, more vacant than alarmed. “The blind yield no favour.”
Oinaral regarded him, concerned rather than relieved. The Nonman had known he would capitulate all along, Sorweel realized, that the Weal would blot Harweel’s murder. Was it the degree that worried him?
“It is the Amiolas,” Oinaral said in explanation. “The soul you have become is resolving contradictions between your commingled beliefs.”
That word … contradiction … caught as ice in Sorweel’s breast.
“But if I no longer believe,” he exclaimed, “then what of Her Grace?
Oinaral made no reply.