The Nonman stepped around the heap the way one might a corpse found in a field. Obscurities resolved into crisp features as Sorweel hastened to follow. The Cauldron’s funereal light waxed more horrific with every step. A great hauberk comprised the body of the heap, laying folded across the curve of a shield immense enough to deck half the Haul. A helm large as a Saglander barrel crowned the bulk, intricacies dimpling a hide of dust. A sword as long as he was tall—a full Si?lan cubit—jutted from the sand immediately behind it, as though it were a cairn or grave. The youth gave the whole a wide berth, thinking this was how a hero’s discarded armour might seem to a toddler or a cat.
He glanced back to the Haul beneath the radiant peering, saw the Boatman casting swine, his existence a tireless sliver in the angle he occupied relative to the light. He watched a carcass slap onto the heap, glimpsed the snout jiggle in the bright. He noted the parallel bird tracks he and Oinaral had inked walking from the shore … Suddenly the monstrous gait that had trampled the strand surrounding became plain. Everywhere, pits had been stamped like fuzzy memories in the sand, elephantine impressions.
The blackness about them throbbed with hazard.
“What now?” he asked Oinaral on a tremulous voice.
He knew what awaited them. With his own eyes he had witnessed Oir?nas at Pir Minginnial, bellowing shouts that swatted the ear, casting ruined Sranc above the mobs with each colossal blow—crushing the throat of a Bashrag with a single hand!
The Lord of the Watch—he had seen him thus! With his own feet he had followed his rampage beneath the golden enormity of the Horns!
“He is here,” the Siqu said, still scanning the black. “Those are his arms.”
Many were out there, the youth realized. Monstrous souls in the dark, watching, waiting. This was where the Boatman came—where he delivered his ministry of swine and sustenance.
So this was where Oir?nas had carved his empire.
“So what now?” the youth repeated.
Oinaral stood rigid in the manner of those who cling to standing.
“Tell me, Manling …” he said, his voice curious. “Tell me … if you were you to find your father’s shade rotting in this desolate place, what passion would own you? If you found Harweel lingering here, would terror squeeze away your breath? Numb your limbs to lead?”
Sorweel gazed upon the Nonman’s profile.
“The very same.”
“And what,” the darkling figure asked, “would be your reason?”
It seemed he could taste something sour and despairing.
“For shame,” the youth replied. “For failing to be what his glory demanded.”
Oinaral pondered these words for what seemed a very long time.
Deep, my sons, delve deep,
Fortify the very bones,
Wed hope to what is solid,
Trust to space made,
Not emptiness stolen …
The Nonman drew Holol at last, waved it as a glowing revelation across the bleak regions before them. Pins of light carved the strand sterile white, uncovered bones and more bones, cracked and splintered, tossed through the pale sand.
Holding the arcane blade before him, the Nonman set off into the black. Silver shimmered along his chain-mail rim as he dwindled.
Sorweel hastened to follow on legs that seemed braided from straw. What would he do, were it his father hidden in the black before them? Would he rush forward, cast himself sobbing at his feet, beg for an undeserved forgiveness? Or would he flee as fast as his legs could carry, flee the truth of the Holy Deep?
Would he even still love Harweel, the wise and strong King of the Lonely City? Or would he hate him for having suffered so long the curse of his example? For abandoning his little boy to days so hard, a Fate so perverse and cruel.
Could Harweel still love him?
These questions precluded breathing.
Man and Nonman wandered across the wrack of bone and sand, into zones where the sand shallowed, pooled in great scallops of arid rock. Holol’s light whisked without sound over increasingly mangled terrain: gravel skirts heaped and bowled, stone shelves terraced the deepening darkness, climbing as a stair might. The visible limit brushed what seemed some kind of vast pier hanging above, detached from any other visible stone.
Oinaral Lastborn halted him with a restraining hand. After a moment of peering hesitation, the Siqu continued forward alone, his pace ginger, stalking the ascending clutter with the reverence of desperate souls at Temple. Just what he stalked eluded the youth for thirty heartbeats or more. A joint of stone reared from the foot of the shelves, angled so as to conceal the line dividing what breathed from what did not. Thus did the famed Lord of the Second Watch seem to be an extension of these, the deepest roots of the Weeping Mountain.
The ancient Hero lay naked with his head bowed to his chest. He seemed to slumber, but his posture—reclined with his wain-wide shoulders bent upright against unseen rock—warned otherwise.
Oinaral came about a mound of gravel, then followed a low rock defilade toward the hulking form. Ten thousand shadows swung on the whim of Holol’s pinpoint light, some as small as palms, others as long as night. The sum of existence swung upon his every step.
The stony string of the Boatman’s voice fell silent.
Oinaral paused just beyond the defilade, a scintillant beacon amid the dreck and gnawed desolation. Silence smothered all inkling of distance. His father lay some thirty paces before him on the second of the scalloped shelves, wreathed in shadow, his enormous frame motionless against his horn of rock, his face inscrutable.