All those able followed, a great wallowing column.
He stood motionless for a time at the river mouth, gazing across the slow-twisting rafts of Sranc dead, out to the line of the far shore, Agongorea … the Fields Appalling. More and more of the Scalded climbed the gravel shores behind him, black for scorching, sodden with water that dripped crimson, an assembly both spectral and appalling. Never had the World witnessed a multitude more wretched: souls with hanging skin, weeping burns and ulcerations, naked backsides clotted with excrement and blood. Their hair fell into the wind, creating a haze of black and gold filaments that was drawn out over the Sea.
No less than one hundred souls perished during the ensuing vigil. Not a man among them knew what it was they were doing, only that it was proper—the thing demanded. The sun crawled down from its meridian, sank low enough to match the gaze of the wasted Cepaloran Chieftain-Prince. Incredulous, the Scalded watched as the dead that had rolled out to Sea began drifting back, funnelled into the river mouth even as those upstream continued bumping south. The tides were rising, the learned among them murmured. The tides that flooded the Nele?st with brine had stalled the effluence of the River Sursa, the way they had since time immemorial. The waters became cloudy and viscous with decay.
More and more dead Sranc were rolled from the deeps, clotting and tangling, forming a macabre plate that spanned the whole of the river mouth. Here and there a glimpse of hair shocked the lithe, porpoise tangle. Sibaw?l Vaka stepped upon the waterlogged carcasses. He lurched and stumbled like a toddler, but nevertheless began crossing the great and ghastly expanse, kicking loose clouds of midges and flies like so much sand from a river’s bottom.
Men wept for watching the dark miracle.
And followed.
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
Momemn
It is no accident, they say, that Men pray to the Gods and the dead both: far better silence than truth.
—AJENCIS, Theophysics
VI. The Game, as the reenacting of the whole as whole, is cruel to strangers. To lose the Game is to take loss as a lover.
—The Sixth Canto of the Abenjukala
Mid-Autumn, 20 New Imperial Year (4132, Year-of-the-Tusk), Momemn
The honour of awakening the Blessed Empress of the Three Seas fell to ancient Ngarau, the Grand Seneschal. His mother, however, dismissed the pouch-faced eunuch, electing to laze in bed with her darling little boy instead. And so he lay in her embrace feigning sleep, his back curled into the gentle furnace of her bosom, covertly watching the pastel colours climbing from the frescoes on the walls, the sheers glowing for the morning sun. It never ceased to astound him, the way his soul would bob and float in her embrace, a thing ethereal, tethered and safe.
She did not think herself a good mother, Kelmomas knew. She did not think herself a good anything, for that matter, so long and so chill were the shadows thrown by her past. But the terror of failing her damaged son (for how could he not be damaged, given the horrors he had suffered?) cut her to the quick like no other fear. The boy seized upon these maternal insecurities without fail, sometimes stoking, other times soothing, always exploiting. He would often complain of being hungry or lonely or sad, anything that might provoke her guilt and indulgence.
She was too weak to be a good mother, too distracted. They both knew that.
She could only lavish him with affection afterward … always afterward.
So regularly did he play the neglected child that it now took effort not to, and he had found himself caught on several occasions, needing to escape, yet playing on her guilt anyway, trusting that her duties would force her to abandon him all the same. But sometimes, her fear for her precious son was such that it blotted all other concerns. “Let nations burn,” she had once told him, her gaze unnerving for sudden ferocity. This was such a morning.
He needed to resume his surveillance of the Narindar, not because he still believed watching the Four-Horned Brother would keep him safe, but because he needed to see … just what he did not know.
The happening of what happened, he supposed.