Mo?nghus slackened his pace to draw beside him, but acknowledged him in no way beyond his forbidding proximity. In all such exchanges, it was the place of the degraded soul to first implore.
“What did she do to me?” Sorweel finally asked, watching the shadows dapple across Serwa’s pack and shoulders some twenty paces before them.
“A Cant of Compulsion,” the man replied after consideration.
Ghosts of what had happened plagued his innards.
“But … how cou—”
“Could she make you shit your breeches?” The hewn face turned to look down upon him, but with curiosity, not derision. There was something otherworldly about his white-blue eyes …
Scylvendi eyes, Zsoronga had told him.
“Yes.”
The Prince-Imperial puckered his lips in thought, glanced ahead. Sorweel followed his gaze, glimpsed her face turning like a shell in a wave. She had heard them, despite the filtering birdsong, the twig-combing breeze. This he knew.
“How does hunger make you eat?” Mo?nghus asked, still peering after her.
They slept beneath dead elms that night with only the distance of the mountain wolves and their nocturnal wail to mark the leagues they had travelled. The following morning they threaded forest galleries so deep as to seem tunnels; they could scarcely see the sky, let alone gauge their progress. Giolal, the land was called, the famed hunting preserves of the Injori Ishroi. They trekked in silence for the most part. Sorweel walked without thought, at first, as though he were a being of glass, paralytic for fear of breaking. When he finally dared ruminate, images of the previous day came to him as cramps of shame and humiliation, and he could do little more than dwell on preposterous and petty schemes to secure revenge. But even then, the inkling had germinated within him … the knowledge that something more than their incestuous love affair moved the Imperial siblings.
It even occurred to him that he was meant to catch them making love …
The day was all but exhausted when they finally crested a ridge that afforded a view. Sorweel had climbed a clutch of gargantuan boulders, their northern shelves chapped with lichens. It almost seemed another arcane leap, so sudden was the view.
Ishterebinth … at last. Ishterebinth … mountainous upon the ramping of lesser hills, its bulk obscuring the sky before them. The sun hung low on the horizon to the south, a blooded orb. The Mansion reared into its waning brilliance, so that its ascending scarps and slopes were stamped with the contrast of ink on cream vellum. The scale was such that his heart refused to credit it at first.
A mountain … skinned and hewn, its every surface shorn into planes and pitted … with apertures, terraces, and graven images—graven images most of all. Such detail that it pained the eye to probe it.
Sorweel crawled forward on all fours.
“How could such a thing be?” he asked, his voice glutinous for disuse.
“Endless life,” Serwa said, “is endless ambition.”
The forest knotted the terrain immediately below them, climbed several of the mountain’s foundational phalanges before ending in what appeared to be whole tracts of dead trees. The posture of the mountain was that of a penitent, a kneeler whose thighs were outstretched. A road parsed the centre, paved with white stone and curiously ribbed with columns and roofless vaults, though most of the latter (and even some of the former) had collapsed at some point. Even from this distance, Sorweel could see figures labouring up its length, a file of mites that reached all the way to the Mansion’s shadowed groin, where masses seemed to congregate beneath cliffs of stacked imagery. Two massive figures flanked the maw of the entrance, the face of the latter rising above the line of shadow, staring out to the southern horizon, orange and crimson and impassive.
“Sorcery …” Serwa remarked to her brother. “The whole is sopped in the Mark.”
“What do we do?” Mo?nghus asked, his gaze rapt upon the Mansion.
The Swayali witch spared the man a grim look, said nothing. She sat upon the lip of the ridge-line, swung her feet over the edge.
And then Sorweel heard it blooming like a sheet hung in the wind, low and fluting, yet bearing the gravel of misery nonetheless.
“What’s that?” he called. “That sound …”
Now that his soul had fastened upon it, it gripped the throat of all sound, a profound wrongness on fine summer air.
“The Mountain weeps,” Serwa replied, already upon the ground. “It’s the Weeping Mountain.”
They spent watches labouring through the dwindling light, ascending wooded slopes and gravelled spines. There was no talk of stopping. The forest did not so much end as die, the trees stripped of greenery, the ground pestled barren. Only the Nail of Heaven illuminated their way across the ruin. They teetered across dead-falls, stumbled over mats of unearthed roots. Branches ragged the starry arches of the night.