The Nonman King stared up, blank about a heartbeat of hesitation. “It … it is a gift.”
“The gold … that sheen …” the ancient Hero crooned. “It is familiar to me …”
Nin’ciljiras said nothing.
“I revisit it in my thoughts … often.”
A flaxen-haired Man lay slumped in his hand … Could it be?
“It tyrannizes me,” the Lord of the Watch thundered.
“The Age has been unkind since you retired from the Mountain,” Nin’ciljiras said, his voice brittle for breathlessness. “I am the last of the line of Tsonos, the la—”
“Tell me, my brothers!” the voice clapped. The Hero whirled to those assembled. “What misfortune could excuse a disgrace so … so treacherous!”
The Nonman of Ishterebinth could make no answer.
“Tell one who has devoured ten thousand swine …”
His shout churned with dark passion, intonations of revulsion, injury and betrayal. Many among those assembled dared raise hands to their pommels. Nin’ciljiras actually stepped behind a rigid Harapior. Serwa glimpsed Guardsmen jostling through the fragmenting crowd.
“Tell one who has squandered centuries reliving the golden horror—the golden obscenity!”
Without warning, the giant Hero stepped directly toward her, and with a deftness of someone far smaller, deposited the unconscious form he held between her and her brother. Then, even as the guardsmen converged, the Lord of the Watch raised an oak-branch arm to point at the grandson of Nin’janjin. Serwa did not need to see the helmed face to know the violence of its sneer.
“Tell me,” Lord Oir?nas bellowed, “how the Vile have come to rule the Mountain!”
The accusation boomed across the gaping Ilculc?, an interval the Hero used to draw his monstrous sword, Imirsiol. A gleaming array of weapons appeared across the platform. Harapior’s eyes flared with radiant meaning. But the giant swung his immense blade up across the ceiling, shattering a legion of graven figures, sending debris raining—and sparks tapping—across the oil-drenched Nonman King …
The first flames were ghostly. Nin’ciljiras hooted and began slapping in panic regardless. The sheen across the golden scales, caught …
The Nonman King burst as a torch, began screaming like a live-braised lamb. Harapior rushed to assist him, but flame caught upon the scalps adorning his neck. He paused to beat at his neck and chest … and was cloven in twain by the legendary Hammer of Si?l.
“So it ends!” the Lord of the Watch roared over the shouting clamour, and he laughed and wept both.
Nin’ciljiras thrashed and screamed. The soggomantic gold blackened.
And from regions unknown, a single point of nothingness swung on an arc—a Chorae cast at her, she realized. But she could not move! She could only track its nearing course against a field of heaving, scissoring motion. It bounced across the grill immediately before her, clattered through a wagging groove directly toward her face, oblivion promising oblivion. A concussion wracked the platform, and, somewhere, an anchor snapped, and the whole dropped, tilted to her left. The Chorae chipped to a halt a mere cubit from her face. She followed the fingers clasped about the emptiness of the thing, and saw Sorweel, his face blooded for flayed skin, his blue eyes fluttering as he strained to focus upon her …
“This!” the Lord of the Watch boomed laughing. “This is our cannibal fate!”
Suddenly the Horse-King smiled. Chaos ruled the Sky-Beneath-the-Mountain—death and screams, but her eyes were consumed by him … for he was real …
As was the stained and blooded hand that he floated to her face.
A warrior’s hand.
“Sing,” he croaked through the uproar, yanking the black-silk gag clear her mouth and throat.
She gasped, drew deep the taste of smoke and war. The air reeked of burned mutton.
And she sang.
Made demonstration of her father’s dread portion.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
Dagliash
Even the God must eat.
—CONRIYAN PROVERB
Late Summer, 20 New Imperial Year (4132, Year-of-the-Tusk), the Urokkas
Not in the Near Antique days of Imperial Cenei, nor in the Far Antique days of Holy Trys?, never had the World beheld such a congregation, such a concentration of arcane might. The Sranc had at last been backed into the final corner of Yinwaul, and the Schoolmen of the Three Seas advanced upon them. The very ground smoked before the Magi, seethed. They had wrapped their faces with cloth soaked in sage and horse urine, so they might blunt the septic fumes. Otherwise, their billows flared in material contradiction of their phantom Wards, bolts of hanging cursive, a calligraphy that wooed the dawning sun with poetic threads of light. The chorus of their singing maddened the ears, drew eyes to unseen quarters. As one they walked upon a neck-breaking fall, one thousand sorcerers-of-rank, each a floating wildflower dissolving into stages of obscurity, each setting sorcerous spade to obscene earth.