He looked to her uncomprehending.
“Many think the ghouls did not so much fall to the Tribes of Men,” she explained, gazing across the surrounding heights, raising her face to the clarity of her arcane light, “as bare their throats to them.”
He felt all the more at sea learning facts such as these. His ignorance was smaller without them.
“May our tribe be so lucky,” Mo?nghus muttered. Towering over the Emwama, he resembled some wild-maned warrior of yore, one of the “restive multitudes” so often referenced in the Holy Tusk.
A silence seized the ensuing moments, remarkable for the hundreds of Emwama crowded about them. There was noise, of course, the shrill of nocturnal insects, the dull of coughs and sniffs, but the soul has a way of hearing past these mundane things, of listening for what should be heard. Sorweel even looked up, convinced the Surillic Point hissed. He glimpse white wings kiting across the light’s upper limit, vanishing … A shiver fell through him.
He glanced to the siblings, as if fearful of discovery.
The Prince-Imperial stared at his sister, who had advanced several paces ahead, scanning the black. Though Sorweel had never thought otherwise, the Swayali Grandmistress’s command now seemed absolute.
“What are you thinking?” Mo?nghus asked.
“These Emwama are a good sign …” she replied without returning his look. “But the ruin is worrisome … Much has changed since Seswatha stood in this place.”
“Ruin?”
She turned to him, her face as inscrutable as ever. Her mouth opened. Her eyes sparked like twin Nails with the first impossible syllable. “Teirol—”
She snapped her head back to face the Mansion, extending her arms as if to seize its immensity in proxy. The Emwama before her wailed and scattered …
The Surillic Point winked out.
A line took its place, brilliant enough to parse the violet blackness, an incision of light, appearing instantly at all stages, from the floor below her arms to the very summit of the void, and broadening, as if a door as tall as creation slipped open …
A Bar of Heaven. Like that raised by Eskeles on the desolate tracts of the Istyuli; only, where his had illuminated leagues of bestial Sranc, hers revealed a far different host, one hung as if from hooks of stone.
Mo?nghus cursed, barked at his sister in the same unknown tongue.
“We are the children of the Aspect-Emperor …” she said tonelessly. “Light is our birthright.”
Strange hoots broke out among the Emwama, and a chest-thumping not unlike applause.
Sorweel simply blinked and gaped.
“Once it was called Ishori?l, the Exalted Hall,” Serwa was saying, her voice pitched above the babbling murmur of the Emwama. “Of all the Great Mansions, only Si?l could claim more glory …”
So near to the Weeping Mountain it seemed the light had inked a cavern across the sky. Only the great faces were as he imagined. The warlike bodies he had imagined beneath were in fact priestly, limbs like cliffs clothed in monkish robes, hands clasped low as if to assist someone climbing, outermost knees jutting as opposing turrets. Trees mobbed the crooks of their arms, some bent into claws, others upright. Scrub and grasses thronged anywhere the graven cloth was hooked into gullies, so that the twin immensities seemed draped in gardens. The faces themselves were plainly Nonmen, though they seemed uncanny for staring to the south rather than out and over the processional. Growth clotted eyes like skiffs.
“For an Age it bequeathed its wisdom to our race, dispatching its immortal sons, the Siqu, to advise our kings, train our artisans, teach our scholars … Nil’giccas foresaw the doom of his race, and knew that we would outlive them …”
The main entrance lay between the titanic figures, famed Minror the Unholy—the Soggomantic Gate. But two other portals flanked it, each half the size, each set beneath scarps of engraved riot. Their nimil doors lay askew, dazzling the dingy stone and wrack about them, but their mouths remained black for shadow. Wicked Minror also lay askew, a wall as savage as broken glass stacked and fused, only consisting of plates of soggomant—thousands of golden fragments looted from the Ark. But where the Bar of Heaven could scarcely plumb the depths of the lesser gates, here it beamed like a candle held to the socket of an eyeless man, revealing a monumental hall gagged with ruin. The legendary gate that had sealed the Mountain against the Great Ruiner had been destroyed from within …