She wonders that a Consult abomination would save her.
“Nothing …” the old Wizard murmurs beside her.
She turns to him with a curiosity she feels only with her face.
“No ornament,” he explains, running a knobbed hand across the wall nearest to him. “No symbol. Nothing …”
She looks to the walls and ceiling, feels the surprise of considering things noticed but not pondered. The sorcerous light is crowded and bright about them, darkening in stages as her eyes stray into the near distance. Everything is bare and … perfect. Only the random marks of conflict score them—the mad quill of discord.
The contrast unnerves her. The descent into Cil-Aujas had been a descent into chaotic meaning, as if strife and loss and story had composed the heart of the mountain.
There is no story here. No reminders. No hopes or regrets or vain declarations.
Only blank assertion. The penetration of density by mazed space.
And she realizes …
They explore the bowel of a far different mansion. One less human.
Ishu?l.
Even before they enter, it seems that she knows this room. She—a child of the brothel.
It lies waiting, a square of pure black at the end of the corridor. The absence of resistance surprises her as she steps across the threshold, as if the hairs on her arms and cheeks had warned her of some invisible membrane.
The point of light slides effortlessly before them, gouging deep hollows from the blackness. They both stand breathing and staring. The ceiling is so low and broad as to seem a different floor. What seem to be lidless sarcophagi line the arc of the walls, dozens of large pedestals hewn from living rock, receding into the deeper gloom. But where the buried dead are typically lain with ankles bound, foot-to-foot, these sarcophagi flare outward: pinning their occupants spread-eagled, providing a space between …
A place.
She swallows against a nail in the back of her throat. Stepping across a shattered sword, she approaches the nearest pedestal to her right. Bones and dust, dimpled and ragged like sheets of rotted skin, crowd the interior. Jawless skulls tipped on their sides. Ribs like halved hoops, implying torsos far broader than her embrace. Femurs like clubs, still threading the iron straps that had once restrained them. Pelvises, rising like antlers from the detritus …
Whale bones she finds herself thinking …
Once, during her second year in the brothel, an Ainoni caste-noble named Mipharses had fallen in love with her—at least as much as any man could fall in love with a child-whore. He would lease her for days at a time, long enough for her to dare dream—despite the suffocating misery of his bed—of escaping the brothel and becoming a wife. Once he took her down the River Sayut on his pleasure barge, through the idyllic channels of the delta, to a cove filled with what he called Narwhales, fish that were not fish, white and ghostly beneath the lucid distortions of the surface. She had been frightened and enthralled in equal measure: the beasts periodically blasted from the surface, where they would seem to hang in an armless twist before crashing back into the window blue.
“This is where they come to mate,” Mipharses said, pressing as much as holding her to his lap. “And die …” he added, pointing to a swale of beach beneath the overgrown shore.
And there she saw the carcasses, some bloated and blackened like sausages, others little more than bones cast up like flotsam in a storm.
Bones like these bones.
“Does the Sea pitch them up after?” she had asked. She never fails to cringe when she recalls the tenderness of her look and manner during these years. She never fails to curse her mother.
“The Sea?” Mipharses had replied, smiling the way some men are prone when sharing vicious truths with coddled women. She would never forget the way his yellow teeth contradicted the ludicrous perfection of his oiled and pleated beard. “No. They swim here to die … Beasts can sense their ending, little dear. That is what makes them nobler than Men.”
And looking at him she had agreed. Far nobler.
She hears the Wizard’s boots scuff the floor behind her.
“What is this place?” he calls with a kind of querulous wonder.
A tingling horror stops her reply.
“These bones …” he continues. “Other than the skulls, they aren’t … human.”
The very air sparks. It seems that she sways, even though she stands as rigid as a shriving pole.
“Yes,” she hears herself say. “They are …”
As human as the D?nyain could be.
In the war of light and shadow that is her periphery, she glimpses the old Wizard gazing at her in numb alarm.
She turns her back to him, cradles her abdomen in her hands.
The Eye opens …