No one spoke.
The silence was that of breathing beneath blankets, punctuated by the brittle string of droplets falling from the Boatman’s oar. The blackness was absolute, as indifferent to eyes as to water or rock. At first he tried to see, to force some concession from what was impervious, but that stoked the intimation of blindness—terror. So he looked without straining to look, stared without the bigotry of focus. The beads upon the oar ceased dripping. The silence was of a stone deeper than mountains. And in that darkness he saw the Darkness that is the fundament of all things, the shadow within the light, the Darkness that doffs and dons Men as masks, that always claws outward and never in.
Oblivion.
An urge to kick or to scream seized him … to prove the existence of echoes. But he remembered his Siqu’s warning, leaned riven against the gunwale.
The peering fluttered back to fierce life, and the sewer that was the Mere lay revealed about them once again, the glitter of greasy, swollen things. His hood heaped about his shoulders, Morimhira stood gazing and scowling at the brilliance, aglow like an angel against the black mire beyond, his eyes sparking as a sorcerer’s might.
He too had been surprised.
The ancient Nonman resumed paddling the Haul forward, his back pulling into a broad V with every alternating stroke. Sorweel found himself returning to the mirroring waters, drawn by some strange will to gratify horror—not simply to regard the horrid aspect, but to see through its eyes …
But the armoured Siqu clapped a long hand upon his shoulder, drew him around. Whatever rebuke his gaze held faltered the instant he looked into the Cauldron.
The Boatman toiled just over his shoulder, and, glancing at him, Sorweel saw a band of grey resolve from the far-forward limit of the peering’s light—a strand. Stagnant beach climbed from the blackness, the sand white and grey, the waterline black with viscous coagulum. He followed the light’s expanding margin, watched the tracts of sand unfurl, shadows shrinking into countless dimples. He spied a heap of some kind coming into murky materiality just as he realized the Haul was about to strike. He reached out to the Siqu’s sleeve, seized a fistful of nimil links …
Held him as the Haul lurched to a halt on the underworld beach.
Rather than thank him, Oinaral averted his eyes and turned to the prow, gesturing for him to follow. The Boatman barged past them on his way aft, and Sorweel found himself shocked by his density as much if not more than by his creased face. It was as if an engine of war lay primed within him, torsions as mighty as he was old. The youth glanced backward one last time before leaping from the Haul in pursuit of the Siqu.
Sorweel landed on the prow’s furthest shadow, just beyond the fouled waters. The sand was neither warm nor cold, as fine as silk. He watched his shadow stand as he stood, only elongated across the trampled strand. The brightness of the peering was enough to render the filth of the surrounding waters translucent, and to reveal the mire of floating bodies clotted about the shore. Here and there some had been rolled out of the water, beached—most likely by the Haul itself, given the septic stillness of the Mere. Though intact within the water, their bodies had been rotted to sodden bone and leather once exposed to air.
He turned to Oinaral, who stood several paces inland, gazing out into the black.
The Boatman shocked him scraping about on the prow above and behind. He watched the Most Ancient Warrior launch a carcass to land with a dusty thump mere paces from Sorweel on the sand. The youth hastened to join his Siqu where he stood.
Oinaral turned to his approach, murmured, “Listen.”
Sorweel paused, his ears pricked. “I hear nothing.”
“Indeed,” the Nonman replied. “That is what makes the Deep our only Temple. Silence is what we count as most holy.”
He knew this, but it stood among the many things that bewildered for knowing.
“Silence … Why?”
Oinaral’s face tightened.
“Oblivion,” he said. “It is where we would hide, if we could.”
Serwa hung limp from the pole wedged between her arms and back, her covered head slung low, her breath hot on the fabric. The peerings passed as a succession of luminous bruises through the silk hood as her captors bore her through the mazed ways of Ishterebinth.
She pondered, not without care, the brief tragedy of her life, how circumstances could blunt, fracture, and obliterate even the most painstaking designs. She contemplated how the number-sticks ruled all …
Everything save the Shortest Path.