Sorweel stood arrested on the threshold. Her distance belonged to one of those adult reveries that children are apt to ignore, but her kerchief lay slack in her hand across her skirted lap, the one she used to catch her coughing, the one she always kept bundled in an angular fist. It almost seemed sinful, seeing the linen of its pinched knees pried apart. He glimpsed what he thought were rose petals.
She started at the sight of him. The kerchief vanished beneath clenched hands. He met the terror in her gaze, matched it, understanding at that instant the truth of the rose petals.
Her horror melted into concern, then beamed into adoring reassurance—mothers sacrifice nothing so much as their sorrow and fear. Her hands wrung the kerchief into a horseshoe.
“Tell the abomination …” she croaked through bulbous earth. “To give what has been given.”
Words he did not remember.
He blinked between worlds. The Sranc face toiled now, twisted about unheard exhortations, brilliant exhalations.
“Tell us!” the Asker bawled.
For the first time Sorweel saw the inconsistency between what it mouthed and what he heard.
Serwa was singing something soft, reassuring … Somewhere.
“You need not Compel me,” the young King of Sakarpus gasped. “The Niom has been observed.”
“I am Harapior,” the Nonman had said.
Serwa knew him, both from the High Floor beneath the Soggomantic Gate and from her Dreams. All had heard of the Lord Torturer in Seswatha’s day.
“They said I would be among the first to Succumb …” he continued, “back when this Age was young. They thought what was horror for them was horror for all. They could not see how honour, the pride that throws souls upon the anvil, was what fed the Dolour.” The shadow had laughed in whispers. “Their honour had blinded them.”
He had dragged her face up by the maul of her hair.
“So they dwindle, mortal whore, and … I … remain …”
He grasped her jaw in a hot hand. He did not think she could see him, such was the gloom. He thought he terrorized her, an entity in the black … a malice in the deep.
He did not understand her Father.
He crouched, brought his lips to hers, close enough that she could feel their inhuman heat. He cooed into her mouth as if it were an ear—or the entrance to the place where she lay hidden.
“I remain, child … Now we shall see what song you sing for me.”
Cries filtered through the honeycombed dark, myriad and deep, choruses cracked into countless strands of lament, rising raw with outrage and incredulity, fading hoarse into misery and exhaustion. Souls most ancient … reliving … and reliving … forever caught upon the shoals that had wrecked them.
Ishterebinth, Sorweel realized in dim, rolling horror. Ishterebinth had them.
They were lost among the Lost.
Four ghouls bore him through the riddled deep, two holding the pole to which his arms were bound, and two walking before. They loomed as cruel and evasive shadows for the most part, smoke to the glimpse, stone to the touch. Their pace remained constant whether he lurched with them or hung limp, his booted toes scrawling across the floors. Lights rose like beads on a string from the linear gloom—peerings, he realized, the sorcerous lanterns of the Nonmen. Halls and galleries, all squeezing his breast for the inkling of monstrous depth. Graven images rebuked his every bobbing glance, pageant upon dead pageant, figures stiff with ancient manner, faces leering and passionless.
Something was amiss. His legs seemed incidental, things too slick to be held fast. His eyes no longer blinked. He spent what seemed the better part of a watch trying to determine if he even breathed.
Did he breathe?
There was much that he seemed to know, even though he could not reason without spinning into confusion. He knew the sun had finally set upon the Nonmen as Serwa had feared, that they had outlived their allotment of sanity. He knew they had cast their lots against the House of Anas?rimbor …
That they tortured Serwa and Mo?nghus in the deep.
A great and broken voice welled from the blackness of a portal passing to his right.
“W-wake … Please wake up!”
They turned down an enormous processional, a pillared gallery that was an underworld road. For the first time he realized the utter absence of scent. A portal loomed before them, a monumental gate framed by a graven bestiary. A guard stood at the foot of the nearest column. He was draped in an elaborate gown of nimil chain like all the others, motionless save for his head, which he rolled with his chin against his breast, muttering. The ensconced lights bobbed across his scalp.
“How, my love … How could you think that a flower could …could …”