They understood nonetheless. Several moments of screeching turmoil ensued as the misbegotten creatures fought to grant them what seemed some ritually prescribed space. Afterward, it almost seemed a miracle, the way the mob accumulated more and more misshapen souls and yet somehow managed to respect the invisible perimeter Serwa had imposed about them. Within a watch the mob they had gathered extended far beyond the outermost ring of Serwa’s sorcerous light. For those confined to the dark, there was no way they could be anything more than illuminated glimpses of sharper, more sacred archetypes, and yet somehow they managed not to crowd their stunted brethren.
But it was the stink, more than anything, that fondled Sorweel’s gut, for it was human through and through, no different than the stink of Men of the Ordeal gathering for march: at times earthen and almost benign, with various corners acrid and sweet, at times tar-like with the musk of unwashed armpits, thick enough to taste. Had they smelled any other way, be it forest moss or moulting snakes or unmucked stalls, he could have looked upon all their myriad differences as features proper to their form, things belonging to an essence distinct from his own. But their smell, like a carpenter’s plumb, revealed them for what they were: inbred grotesqueries. Their eyes were bulbous, their spines crooked, their skulls simian. His horror, in some small measure, was the horror of the husband who is presented a deformed son.
There was no concealing such disgust. “Think of the difference between your cattle,” Serwa called to him at one point, “and the elk who rule the plain.” He understood instantly what she meant, for there was something at once bovine and doughty about the Emwama, the incurious hardiness of those bred to serve ruthless masters.
“More like dogs to wolves,” Mo?nghus shouted in reply. He brandished a fist in mock fury, laughed at the scrambling panic its shadow caused among the halflings.
Sorweel glanced to the breathless spectacle of Ishterebinth above and before and was shocked by his ire. The old Girgallic Priests were always railing about the wickedness of the World in Temple, not as something to lament, but as something to celebrate. “Clean hands cannot be cleansed!” they would cry, reading from the Sacred Higarata. An unpolluted world was a world without martial honour, a world without sacrifice or compensation. The glory lay in the adulteration of the waters.
But this … this was a pollution that begged no glory, an evil that could beget only tragedy—travesty. The evils of the World, he was beginning to realize, were more complicated than the goods by far. To the debauchery of the Anas?rimbor, he could now add the deformity of the Emwama. Perhaps pious fools confused simplicity for pious truth for good reason.
The World was not so elementary as Sakarpus, where there were Sranc and there were Men and nothing but dumb beasts in between.
Are you such a fool, Sorwa?
No.
No, Father.
Sorweel did his best to ignore the diminutive throngs. The three travellers climbed, leaning into the incline, though it seemed they were borne as flotsam on the stream of heads and shoulders and packs that Serwa’s light carved from the mobbed darkness. They laboured past the pillars that flanked the road. It was as if they had been carved of soap, so indistinct were the figures engraved upon them. The only feature they shared, aside from dimension, was a visage beneath the capitals, each one of them worn fish-like by the ages, and facing what Sorweel assumed was south, regardless of the turns in the road’s direction.
“Where Men hold places holy, the Nonmen extol passages …” Serwa explained, spying his wondering gaze. “The Summer Stair was a temple to them once …”
The Believer-King glanced at her, only to have his eyes yanked to the peak of the column rising behind her as she paced him in the crush—to the stork standing pale and gracile against the infinite vacancy of the night. Fear did not suffer his gaze to linger.
“To walk this road was to be purified,” she continued, her own eyes probing the mountainous heights before them, “cleansed of anything that might pollute the Deep.”
He shuddered for the meaty deformity of the Emwama.
So they gained the Cirr?-nol, the legendary High Floor of Ishterebinth, accompanied by the children of a degenerate race. The mountain had swallowed the Nail of Heaven as they approached. Even raising a hand to block the glare of Serwa’s light, Sorweel could discern little more than the bruising black. He could make out monstrous faces, each hanging high enough to cramp his neck and staring out at a diagonal to the south, the same as those gracing the processional pillars. He did not so much see as assume the cyclopean bodies beneath. A hush, at once anxious and reverent, fell across the Emwama. They began looking about the gloomy expanse, casting hectic glances into what he guessed was the maw of the gate. The disrepair of the Summer Stair had prepared him for the wreckage they found. But not even the plodding, drawn-out nature of their approach, nor the obscuring darkness, could deaden him to the scale, the lunatic enormity …
Such a place.
The shiver began as a tickle, more in his breath than his body, but within heartbeats, it owned him to his bones. He clutched his shoulders, clamped his teeth against any chatter.
“Imagine our ancient forefathers,” Serwa said to him, her face strange with sharp lines of light and shadow. “Imagine them storming such a place with shields of leather and swords of brittle bronze.”