She would not bow otherwise.
The air nipped with the chill of malice. The gilded and graven facades of the Hanging Citadels sloped overhead and down across her right periphery, while to her left the tumbling void of the Ilculc? Rift pulled her against the pinching floor. Nin’ciljiras she recognized by his armour of golden scales—which glistered for being wetted. She could see him conversing with Harapior, casting avid glances in her direction. They had pinned her for display on an annex to the higher stage, so that she could see both the Nonman King’s chair and the broader, petitioning floor below, all of it miraculously hooked over the Rift’s dizzy plummet. Some hundred or more Ishroi and Quya stood congregated on the lower platform, each gowned in splendour, each an effete image of manly perfection.
She felt rather than saw them bringing Mo?nghus out to join her. She had heard him bull-shouting what Ihrims? curses he knew in the corridors earlier, so she wasn’t surprised to see him also gagged when they thrust him to his knees mere paces away, naked and bound as she was.
What surprised—even appalled—was his condition … that he could still draw breath, let alone wrench and war against his restraints. The ravaged face turned to her, rising and falling on heaving breaths, black locks pasted to wounds. The glacial eyes seemed mad, overbright.
Was this what had she had wagered on her mad throw? A brother?
What Father had wagered.
And it descended as lightning, the realization the she had failed.
Harapior had guessed her gambit. Very soon, they would become the plaything of some decrepit and inhuman will, something to sin against and so purchase some brief term of sanity.
His gored arms wrenched back, Mo?nghus swayed upon his great and macabre frame, staring as if she were something he should remember.
It rose from the darkness, then, clawed her face from the inside. It kicked each of her lungs … shame for what was … terror of what would be …
Her mother’s inheritance.
For the first time in her brief life, Anas?rimbor Serwa grimaced for darkness, not artifice.
A sob kicked through her. And it was as if she had spilled grain in times of famine. On a heartbeat, the sonorous thrum of Nonman voices fell silent, leaving her gagged cry stranded in the void of Ilculc?, a hitching note more profound than any she had yet to sing, if not more beautiful. The sound of feminine despair …
And it seized their black hearts, compelled their senescent fascination.
“The black-haired brother!” a crimson-armoured Si?lan Ishroi cried, hooking her from her grief. S?jara-nin, a detached fraction of her realized. “I would hear him weep as w—!”
The hanging iron frame shuddered.
To a soul the assembled ghouls whirled about. Nin’ciljiras bolted golden from his kingly seat …
Serwa peered across the congregation, blinked for the hairs of light obscuring her gaze …
And saw one the Tall stride from a crouch to his full, gargantuan height as the slope of image-pitted stone above permitted. His steps resounded through the iron platform, sent dust raining from the iron anchors above. The assembly shrank from his titanic approach. The giant should have gleamed with the same lustre as his fellows. He was decked in full battle armour, wearing a great slit-faced helm and a monstrous hauberk of stamped plates set in mail—accoutrements that had not seen the field ere Far Antiquity. But all of it was skinned in rotted pelts of dust …
Not that it mattered, given the four points of perfect oblivion that had been affixed to it … Chorae, set upon either thigh and either shoulder.
“Lord Oir?nas!” Nin’ciljiras cried with surprising alacrity. He spared Harapior an intent look before stepping to the edge of his penultimate platform. “You honour us!”
Oir?nas …
The twin of Oirinas. The Lord of the Watch. The legendary Hero of the first wars against the Inchoroi.
“Honour,” the giant boomed from his helm, “is the sum of my purpose here.” The platform grille bit her cheek at the impact of his following step.
Nin’ciljiras retreated an involuntary step. “The Dolo—” he began, only to slip on the oil that doused him.
“What of it?” the Hero asked, pausing to tower over the Nonman King.
“Are—?” the usurper asked, attempting to raise himself, only to slip into Harapior’s arms. “Are your thoughts … ordered?” he asked, regaining his feet.
The giant loomed fearsome across the silence. The assembled Ishroi and Quya watched stunned; even the most Wayward among them blinked in awe, for Memory itself had risen from the grave that was the Mountain.
“I suffer but one disorder …”
For some reason, this seemed to occasion some kind of relief for Nin’ciljiras. For the first time, Serwa glimpsed the body laying slack in the Hero’s mighty left hand.
“And what might that be?”
“The armour you wear …”