Words, incomprehensible, skittered chitinous across surfaces beyond the Real. The Aspect-Emperor’s skull became a furnace of alien meaning— A deafening crack. A piercing turquoise brilliance that blackened, blotted all that could be seen—one striking the Aspect-Emperor, not his Iswazi Ward!
Malowebi pulled, the omba stitched into his Erz? across his face. The black gauze filtered the glare, revealing the Aspect-Emperor gazing bleached for the incandescent violence that engulfed his Wards. Burning light sheared without Mark through the cyclone, a lance that began parallel to the earth, but angled upward as its unseen point-of-origin climbed skyward …
Water, Malowebi realized … Ps?khe.
Meppa!
The last of the Indara-Kishauri surmounted the whirling chaos, a shadow for his cataclysmic light. Boiling brilliance, blinding even through the omba, swallowed all that remained of the Aspect-Emperor’s image, a blue-white inferno that was at once a hammer, a torrential burning that stole breath for sucking air, a frenzied pounding that rent ears, sending cracks down to the bone of the earth …
And then it was gone … as was Anas?rimbor Kellhus.
Malowebi saw the Last Cishaurim hanging exposed in the arid sunlight, still garbed in the white silks of his convalescence, his feet bare, his face twisted for raging heartbreak. Sunlight slipped and flashed from the silver band obscuring his eyes. The black asp peered downward, swaying as a dowser’s stick from side to side.
“Fanayaaaaaal!” the man screamed. “Nooooo!”
“Such power …” Malowebi heard a deep voice murmur—from behind him.
The Iswazi sorcerer turned on a panicked spasm, glimpsed the looming horror of the Aspect-Emperor inside his Chalice. The man clubbed him to the ground. The reality of what happened stammered about the shadows.
“Deceitful!” Meppa howled in wrath from above. The gleaming curl of the asp had craned toward his Ward: the Primary had realized what happened. “Craven!”
It was as if the sun itself crashed upon the Muzz? Chalice. Malowebi could hear nothing, but through the black gauze of his omba he could see him standing, Anas?rimbor Kellhus, more curious than alarmed, craning his head about to inspect the Ward that preserved him. Malowebi could have released the fetish at that moment, he knew. He need only expose his palm, let slip the miniature iron cup, and they would both be washed away …
But he did not. Could not …
Besides … the Aspect-Emperor was no longer there.
The Chalice cracked.
Kelmomas ran, fleeing the long wire of his mother’s call. He traced a line through hooped cavities of what had been his home, puckering the billows of smoke, drawing its residue through the wailing air.
Something burns somewhere, he thought.
He found himself in his mother’s chambers with no memory of doubling back. He could smell her warm, earthen smell, the residue of the jasmine she had worn in his room. He knew the quake had destroyed her bedchamber before so much as setting foot upon the threshold. A turret from above had sheared through the ceiling and plummeted through the floor, leaving a ruinous pit. A hand waved like a frond in water from the heaped debris below. A great fragment of the far wall had been torn down its own slope, taking the mythic marbles of the secret entrance with it. At first he simply gaped, gazed across the void senseless to the horror.
His shadow palace lay cracked open, the mazed hollows utterly exposed.
Inrilatas crouched naked in what shadow remained, smeared with his own feces.
“You think you seek the love of our mother, little brother—Little Knife!”
Comprehension was slow in coming.
“You think you murder in her name …”
The eight-year-old swallowed. Nothing secret. Nothing fun. The Andiamine Heights had been boned as a bird. Laying broken, all the covert passages, all the chutes and tunnels and wells, stood revealed in countless places, a great lung drawing in every scream, every moan or wail, a soaking of all the rampant misery, siphoning, commingling, transmogrifying, creating a singular and most monstrous voice, a sound inhuman for the surfeit of humanity.
He stood transfixed.
Ruined! his twin shrieked from nowhere. You’ve ruined everything!
He was the panic-stricken one, as always, the helpless baby. Kelmomas suffered only a peculiar numbness, a curious sense of having outgrown not so much his mother or his old life as existence altogether.
It was a stupid game anyway.
This is the only game there is, you fool!
And he began shaking then, teetering over the pit, small in the vast croak issuing from the Andiamine Heights, the hideous roar that was humanity in sum. And when he regarded his abjection, he was puzzled, for he shook upon facts that he both knew and could not speak, an unbearable emptiness … loss … theft!
Something! Something had been taken!