“I have no riddle.”
“Oh, but you do, Son of Summer—you do. Any mortal soul raised in such monstrous company must.”
“They’re not monsters!”
“Then you do not know what it means to be D?nyain.”
“I know well enough!”
Harapior laughed the way he always laughed—without sound. “I will show you …” he said, gesturing to figures in the black beyond him.
And so he found himself chained before his younger sister, and he had wept, understanding the trap they had lain. He was to be her goad, as she was to be his. The ghouls would draw the knife that is sheathed in all love, and they would cut what they could. Harapior and his understudies smashed him against her, made a bludgeon of his suffering, and she remained … imperturbable.
When they exhausted what mundane atrocities they could commit, they turned to sorcery. In the dark, their heads had smoldered red, a muddy glow about blue-white precision. They were creatures of blood, no different than Men. Pain had its miracles, and chained beneath his nude sister, Mo?nghus learned the obscenity of each. He screamed, not so much for the sum of his torment as for its division, like a thousand thousand wicked little jaws with wicked little teeth affixed to his every vessel, his every sinew, chewing, savaging …
He screamed and gagged. He voided his bowel, bladder, stomach and dignity.
And more than anything he had begged.
Sister! Sister!
Show them! I beg you please!
Show them our Father’s portion.
And she gazed through him and … sang … words he could not understand, in Ihrims?, the accursed tongue of the Ghouls … words that flexed and resonated, that coiled serpentine through the blackness surrounding … a wandering knife’s edge. She sang her love—of all things in creation, love!—but not to him, the one she had professed to love many times, to them, the abominations … the Ghouls!
He could scarce remember details. Endless convulsions. Hanging entirely intact and utterly mangled … skinned and shredded. Harapior whispering mock profundities, revelations …
“Think of Hell, child. This is but a scintillant drop in that ocean, what you suffer …”
And his divine sister, Anas?rimbor Serwa, celebrated and dreaded across the Three Seas, the one soul who could speak her father’s miracles … who could rescue her broken brother if she wished … If she wished!
Singing ancient lays … goading the ghouls to ever greater acts of depravity, the recitation of Torture Cants unknown to any Gnostic sorcerer, inflicting agonies unknown to this, the bleeding side of life. With the patience of fat wolves, they tore pain from pain, despair from despair, horror from horror, separated his ever quivering thread, so they might weave tapestries of sublime misery.
The physical indignities they had merely smeared upon him as butter. Like all artists, they were loathe to forego all visible sign of their labours.
“A drop …”
The Lord Torturer had stayed with him in the blackness afterward, watching him drip.
“I know because I have seen.”
I know.
Who was he, the wolf-eyed child upon the Aspect-Emperor’s knee?
The truth, Mo?nghus would later realize, had always lurked in Esmenet’s embrace, the absence of instinctive desperation, the way a decision of some kind always lay behind it … He loved her, more fiercely than any of his siblings could love, but he always knew, somehow. Anas?rimbor Esmenet, the Blessed Empress of the Three Seas, never captured him in her arms, never clutched and clung, at least not the way she did the others.
But as obvious as it was, the question of his parentage had never occurred to him—likely because she had hair as black as his. He had mooned over her, marvelled as little boys are prone to marvel at their mothers, adored the way his pallid siblings made her dark beauty wax bright. And he assumed that he merely stood halfway between his parents, possessing her jet hair and his alabaster skin. If anything, he had been proud of his distinction.
Then Kay?tas told him that mothers provide no more than the soil for a father’s seed.
Even after Theliopa and the others were born, Esmenet would come to cuddle “her bigger boys” together before bedtime, so one night he asked her if she were his real mother.
Her hesitation alarmed him—he would always remember that much. The pity would be forgotten.
“No, sweetling … I’m your adoptive mother. Just as Kellhus is your adoptive father.”
“Seeeee?” Kay?tas had said, nestled against her right side. “That’s why your hair is black, while ours is blon—”
“White, more like,” Esmenet chirruped, poking the boy for his impertinence. “Only slaves live in the sun—you do realize this!”
To dwell with and to not know is to trust; belonging is ever a matter of insensitivity to what divides. And what ignorance can no longer serve, only indifference can provide. Perhaps this was why the Blessed Empress had elected to make light what had buried him alive.
“So then who are my real mother and father?”
This time her hesitation terrified.
“I am your father’s second wife. His first wife was Serw?.”
He spent several heartbeats digesting these words. “The woman from the Circumfix? She’s my mother?”
“Yes …”
Absurd facts are often the easiest to bear, if only because of the way impossibility mimes abstraction. Things grasped with a shrug are generally things easily released.
“And my father … Who is he?”
The Blessed Empress of the Three Seas breathed deep, swallowed.
“Your mother’s … first husband. The man who delivered our Holy Aspect-Emperor to the Three Seas.”
“You mean the … the Scylvendi?”
And suddenly it became so obvious, the turquoise gaze regarding him in the mirror.
Scylvendi eyes!
“You are my child, my son, Mo?nghus—never forget that! But you are also the child of legends, martyrs. Short your mother and your father, none of this would be, and the very World would be doomed.”
She spoke in the rush to make reparation, to recast things lost as things gained. But the heart knows catastrophe as well as the mouth knows the tongue and its propensity to lie. Either way, there was very little she could say that would long survive the ruthless scrutiny of his brothers and sisters.
They would decide what he thought and how he felt about the matter. They always had …
At least until Ishterebinth.
They passed back into the forests of Giolal, walked beneath the dead boughs in shambling file, each too emptied to speak. They dared a fire, supped on sorrel, wild apples, and an ailing wolf they found limping through a ravine. Mo?nghus could scarcely feign sleep, let alone surrender to it. His sister and the Sakarpi youth had fairly collapsed into slumber, and he found comfort in the sight of them about the dying flames, or the memory of it. They fretted for him, he knew.