Despite the diurnal heat, the quiet of winter stole over the world.
Ishterebinth loomed to their right, slowly drawing to their fore as Serwa led them over the back of its eastern thigh. Sorweel’s mother had shown him an ancient heirloom once, a seal carved out of ivory, a relic of some Southron potentate, she had said. She had pulled him into the bowl of her crossed legs, laughing as she explained its peculiarities with her chin on his shoulder. She called it a “ziggurat”, a miniature of the false mountains that certain pickish Kings, loathe to surrender their bodies to the pyre, constructed for their tombs. What had fascinated him were the hundreds of miniature figures that had been etched into its terraced sides: it scarcely seemed possible that any artisan could render images so small. For some reason, the detail hooked his soul like a burr, and he was sure he had tested his mother’s patience, considering each of the figures—some no larger than a babe’s nail clippings—and speculating, “Look-look! Another warrior, Mama! This one with spear and shield!”
Ishterebinth was no false mountain, and aside from its flat summit, it possessed none of the ziggurat’s geometric simplicity. There was a lurid wildness to the size and arrangement of its imagery, an unkempt intensity to its detail, that utterly contradicted the tidy and sane parade of figures about the ivory terraces, the slaves toiling about the base, the kingly court promenading about the pinnacle. Even still, he felt a mote, crawling toward something too immense to be wrought. Each time he scaled Ishterebinth with his gaze, some past premonition of that boy—still drowsy with the certainty that his mother and father would live forever—sparked within him. He would even smell the attar-of-spruce wafting from the censor, hear the evening orisons …
And he would wonder whether it were simply some mad nightmare …
Wake up … Sorwa, my sweet …
Life.
His eyes burned and his blinks had become wilful by the time they gained the great road they had spied from afar—the Halarinis, the Grandmistress called it, the Summer Stair. Sorweel and Mo?nghus both shrank to a crouch, glimpsing a torchless procession of figures along its length. Serwa, however, continued trudging forward the same as before.
“They’re Emwama,” she said turning in a pirouette that added no interval to her pace. With that she resumed her forward stride, utterly feckless. Mo?nghus followed, a heavy hand now upon the pommel of his broadsword. Sorweel lingered for a moment, glancing up at the granitic immensity of their destination, then resumed the place the Anas?rimbor had reserved him, the station of shame and hate.
Serwa called out a brief string of arcane syllables, and an eye of piercing brilliance opened a mere span above her, chasing shadows from the objects of its glare.
The Emwama sickened him.
Sorweel knew what they were, or at least what they were supposed to be: the Mannish servitors of the Nonmen—slaves. But whatever they were, they had long since ceased being Men. Deer-eyed and round-faced. Stunted both in form—the tallest scarcely reached his elbows—and intellect. They were clad as rustics for the most part, though a few wore gowns that bespoke some kind of rank or function. Those travelling up the mountain bore astonishing loads, everything from wood to game to stacked rounds of unleavened bread. Short of breasts there was scarcely any way to distinguish the males from the females, save that a number of the latter carried sleeping infants in slings braided out of their remarkably voluminous hair.
From the outset, they crowded about the three travellers, great eyes wide and glistening, gaping like astounded children, and chattering in an insensible tongue, their lilting voices as deformed as their stature. Despite the uproar, they managed to keep their distance—at least at first. Their native shyness quickly waned, and the boldest jostled closer and closer. Eventually several dared to reach out wondering fingers, as if intent on touching what they could not quite believe. Serwa, especially, seemed to be the object of their adoring curiosity. Finally she barked at them in a tongue reminiscent of the one she used canting, but utterly unlike that of the Emwama.