Let-me-kill-let-me-kill—
He was on his knees, bent forward, bobbing as if priming his gut to vomit. But he understood little or nothing of this—or anything. The keening noises that cracked from his chest were not his own. Not more …
Proof.
She stood gazing down upon him, cold and indistinct.
“Who?” his throat scratched, his voice wheezed. A sound like cattle lowing.
“Love us …” she said, turning aloof from his spectacle. “If you must.”
He had shrunk beneath the mighty oak, curled against its cruelty, folding more and more of himself into the indistinct roar. And still her voice plucked him with … with …
I have Compelled him!
Confusion.
What more would you have me do? What I have Compelled the ghouls will Compel also. He loves us.
Her brother’s voice was indistinct, too much of the roar to rise above it.
Father misjudged the depth of his wound.
But it mattered not at all, the clarity of her accursed voice.
Our Father is wrong about more than you know … The World overmatches him as it does us or anyone …
He understood none of it …
He simply carries the battle deeper.
And the world swayed in spirals, slow and warm.
My face dwells beneath your face … Shush and you will see …
And the Mother hummed and stroked. With his own hands she bathed him.
Hush …
Hush, my sweet.
“Momma?”
Eternity dwells within you. A power indistinguishable from what happens …
“Am I mad?” he asks.
Mad …
And ever so holy.
“The Quya,” Serwa was saying, “are not to be trifled with.”
Sorweel sat heedless of the plummet before him, gazing westward with swollen eyes. He had crept to a crater pooled with water following his humiliation, bathed as she had slept and Mo?nghus had skulked across their inland island. For what seemed a watch he had lain floating upon ancient black, numbed to the cold, listening to the slurp of his own motions, the sound of his own breathing. Not a thought had passed through him. Now, his hair damp, his breeches still sopping, he stared dumbfounded at their destination in the distance. It erupted from the table’s edge of the horizon, a silhouette only slightly darker than the sky gaping violet about it: a mountain stranded on a carven plain.
Ishterebinth. The final refuge of the ghouls.
He had dreamed of the Nonmen in his youth, as had every Son of Sakarpus. The Priests called them inhuman, the False Men, who had offended the Gods by usurping the divine perfection of their form, for making like women with men, and—most heinous of all—for stealing the secret of immortality. One Girgallic Priest in particular, Sk?tsa the Elder, used to delight in regaling the children with descriptions of their wickedness during After-Temple. He would draw out the ancient scrolls, reading first in the ancient dialects, then providing lurid translations. And they would seem scriptural, the Nonmen, obscene for all the ways they surpassed Men, and yet somehow belonging to the wild and dark world in a way that Men could not, a race born of the blackest, most primeval recesses, harbouring a malice that would see them burn for all eternity.
“Sranc with souls,” Sk?tsa once declared in fit of palsied disgust. “Only the patience of their lies distinguish them!”
And the horror that cracked in his voice had become tinder for dreams more fiery still.
Now he sat dull and chill, staring at the apparition of the Last Mansion as Serwa explained why they would have to travel the remaining distance on foot.
“You forget the toll. I would be too weak to protect you after we arrive.”
“Then take us to that wooded hillock,” Mo?nghus said. “We can stay hidden until you recover. I wager it’s two watches to the Mountain from there.”
“And if the Cant is seen? You would gamble everything to spare your feet?”
“The Shortest Path, Sister.”
They climbed down the encircling cliffs, and struck north and east across forest floors even more pillared, pitted, and rotted than those upon Nameless. Every so often they encountered the hulks of immense elms, dead and decrepit, climbing knuckled to neck-cramping heights, bark hanging like sack-cloth from sweeps of bone. Neither Serwa nor her brother made any comment, even passing beneath rafters of shorn branches.
Heroes had been his fare, growing up—the recounting of triumphs, not humiliations. Sorweel was surprised, the way all degraded Men are surprised, to find that a station awaited him, that the degraded had a place reserved. He was the one who trailed, the one who was avoided. He was the one not spoken to, and only regarded to scold or to settle some point of comedy or ridicule. The remarkable thing was that he need not even contemplate these facts to grasp them, that this knowledge had always dwelled within him. The world never wants for abused souls.