The Niom had been a ruse for her father as much as for what remained of the Nonmen—she realized that now. It was merely a vessel, a thing possessing no significance aside from the terrible cargo it bore. Sorweel and Mo?ngus had been sent to vouchsafe her father’s artifice, nothing more. They were little more than dupes in the end, witless tokens of a far more daring ambit …
She. She was the masterstroke … the monstrous cargo.
Anas?rimbor Serwa, Grandmistress of the Swayali, the greatest Witch to ever walk the Three Seas.
Lord Harapior called the Nonman company to heel from someplace near. The sack was whisked from her head; she found herself blinking against raw brilliance. They were still in a corridor, she noted, with no little alarm—a grand one to be sure, but a corridor nonetheless. The Upper Luminal, she reckoned.
The Lord Torturer crouched before her, his waxen features close enough to nip. Wrath splashed as agony across his face. In a single motion, he raised his right fist and struck the left side of her face.
“From the King-under-the-Summit,” he growled. “He asked that I drive down your price.”
She glared at him, left eye fluttering for tears.
He raised a hand to her throat, scratched the ensorcelled metal about her neck instead. Her Agonic Collar.
“Emilidis himself wrought this,” he said. “No one who has tested it has survived.” His glittering black look faded for a heartbeat, straying into thoughts both awful and inscrutable. “You would die were you to shed the least light of Meaning … Certainly! To suppose otherwise would be to blaspheme the Artisan.”
He swallowed, his gaze roaming down to the points of her breasts and beyond.
The great pupils once again locked upon her own.
“But then I know that you are D?nyain … I know that every blunted edge you bare conceals a poison pin.”
He sighed in mockery.
“I was a fool for thinking that knowledge would make me your master … So now I’m suspicious beyond all reason. I obsess, wondering where I might find the poisoned pin. And I ask, What will my King do when he at last lays eyes on you? What would any soul do when presented a famed songbird as a gift?”
He sneered.
“Of course, he would bid it sing.”
He seized the back of her head, jammed the silken sack deep into her mouth and throat. She gagged and convulsed as someone human might. His eyes gleamed for satisfaction.
“No voice,” he said. “No poison pin.”
The Gods were wolves baying beyond the ageless gates of death, gluttonous and all-powerful. The Nonmen, the progeny of Imimor?l, would deny them the leathery meat of their souls, such was their pride. So where Men asked how they might live so as to become prized pets in Heaven, they asked how they might live so as to die invisible, to plummet beyond the Outside and vanish into the Deepest Deep.
“That is why your father came down here,” the youth asked, “to find Oblivion?”
They followed the black path of their shadows into regions of dwindling light, toward the heap Sorweel had spied earlier.
“All seek it,” Oinaral replied softly. “He came here because he is Tall, and all the Tall come to the Mere when they Succumb.”
“Why?”
“The Dolour affects them differently: their confusion is less profound, but their violent humours rule them more completely. They come here because only the Tall can hope to survive the mad humours of the Tall.”
They crossed into a debris field on the verge of the Haul’s failing light, an accumulation of thousands upon thousands of bones strewn and piled across the sands. Sorweel initially assumed they all belonged to pigs, but the sight of two black sockets staring up from the sand informed him otherwise. A skull the size of his torso …
“Then how do you know your father yet lives?” he murmured to his Siqu.
For the first time the youth noticed the pale luminance upon the ground before him and him alone. The Amiolas, he realized.
“Because only Ciogli the Mountain could throw him from his feet.”
The Nonman strode ahead to scrutinize the heap. The great skull Sorweel had noticed earlier sparked a second bolt of terror as the Lastborn stepped around it: the pate climbed as high as his nimil-gowned knee!
Sorweel shrugged against rising hackles, threw glances across what little he could see.