The ground whumped in the black—concussions so powerful that the grains shivered about him. He scrambled back from the sound, turned to stand and run. He was lost …
He was lost!
The obstruction loomed like a great black tortoise, knocked his shins and thighs—Oir?nas’s arms and armour. His momentum pitched him to the bones and grit.
Another titanic yowl.
“I … have … mur-murdered him, Brother … Murdered mine own son!”
The blackness roared in its wake, thrummed with intimations of hovering, hanging doom. The light of the Amiolas, he realized, scrambling across dimpled sand to find refuge behind the Nonman Hero’s great, empty helm. The Amiolas was what would kill him! Across the Mere’s every shore, the ghastly visage of Immiriccas was the only thing visible! He was the lone silver lure in the deep—jigged and dandled by his own frantic efforts no less!
Sorweel cringed behind the helm, found his eye drawn to the sullen hint of polish beneath the dust. In spite of himself he drew a sleeve across the obese curve … and saw the luminous apparition that was his own aspect staring from the shining frame of the Amiolas. He gawked at the reflection, dumbfounded.
Mother. He saw his mother, the wane beauty she possessed in his most sunlit memories.
He recoiled, scrambled back until blackness had obliterated it, and found himself marooned nowhere once again, his heart hammering, his thoughts grasping thoughts grasping thoughts, like a children’s finger game.
“What happens, Brother?” boomed hoarse from the dark.
From across the desolate, underworld strand, the Boatman’s voice scrawled the guttural intonations of a new song:
They did hoist Anarl?’s head high,
and poured down its blood as fire.
And the ground gave forth many sons,
Ninety-nine who were as Gods,
and so bid their fathers
be as sons …
Sorweel dared stand. He whirled about, aching to hear, to locate the direction, but the Amiolas baffled the sound the way it baffled his other senses …
Great Oir?nas, Lord of the Watch, leaned from blackness into materiality immediately before him. Sorweel tripped backward to the sand and bones—and the gargantuan form followed. Massive fists pummelled the strand to either side of his head, elephantine arms pumping, pounding. “Nooo!” cracked the smothered deep. The colossal face blotted the blackness, a pallid aspect as broad as a Columnary shield, wrought with anguish, nostrils flaring, alien teeth clenched as a shipwright’s vice, eyes thick with what seemed dreamlike exhaustion, the pulping dismay of knowing it could not be undone. The horror he had just authored, the crime, the unthinkable …
“Nooo!”
It could not be undone.
Sorweel cringed, arms crossed before his face. Anvil fists struck smoke from the ground. The Cauldron’s harrowing visage gleamed as foil in the ink of each appalling eye. “Why?” the hole of its mouth boomed.
“Why!”
The sand whumped.
“Why!”
The voice beat as wings across his tripping heart.
“Why!”
And then the mammoth fury was gone … swallowed by the blackness.
The void hummed for absence of echoes.
Somewhere in the black the Boatman sang, his voice sawing yet more ancient wood, another song of Imimor?l and the oldest of the old.
“Nil’giccas has abandoned th-the Mountain!” Sorweel coughed into the dark.
Oinaral lay sprawled as clothing over bones, the only kind of suicide a Nonman could be.
“Nin’ciljiras! Nin’janjin’s accursed seed, he rules …”
He was never a charm for Oinaral! He was surety that truth would be heard, so that terrible consequences might follow.
“He has surrendered Ishterebinth to Min-Uroikas—to the Vile!”
The Vile—only now could he taste the violation that name tokened.
He looked down to the spectral illumination his face cast upon his hands. Dust and grit bearded both palms. The left one bled black in the light.
“All hope and honour have fled the Mountain!”
The giant swooped into the small light, clapped him in monstrous digits. The Lord of the Watch, who had ceded all sanity to the Dolour so long ago, hoisted the Son of Harweel slack, and then wrenched him in two.
The Sky-Beneath-the-Mountain.
As Seswatha, she had supped with Nil’giccas upon this, the pinnacle stage. She had clutched his breast for terror at hearing the Nonman King’s dark tale.
But Nil’giccas no longer ruled. At Harapior’s command they strapped her head to the iron-grille floor with a leather belt.