Bashrag rose like speared bales; Men webbed all the spaces between. Blood had drowned all the depressions, forming pools with cracked ceramic rinds.
The Exalt-Magus simply stood watching her wards. There was no talk, no reproaches or expostulations of gratitude, simply because there was no sound that could be heard through the monumental wail. The three refugees lay huddled, the two women upon some wall-hanging they had managed to rescue from the encampment, Drusas Achamian on blood-slicked stone. The old Wizard grimaced as he tore fabric from the corpse of an Imperial Columnary—to bind about his ankle, Serwa realized. Her mother lay slack and almost entirely witless against the wall. Mimara knelt at her side, attended to her despite the paroxysms of agony that wracked her. Serwa watched her pregnant sister thrust a finger into a leather pouch that she held cradled in a shuddering hand, withdraw it covered in dust, then press it between their mother’s lips …
This small task completed, Mimara slumped onto her rump, surrendered to her anguish …
Or was about to, for her look immediately fastened upon her younger sister standing above, clicked from point to point about her nude form, lingering on the blisters and ulcerations that were her only garb. Pity and horror. After a covert glance at the old Wizard, she proffered the pouch, wincing about some pang as she did so.
Serwa hesitated.
What is it? she asked with a look.
She need only see her elder sister’s lips to hear his name.
Malowebi struggled to recover his inner composure.
“Before Sil,” Mekeritrig said, “it was Ark who commanded, Ark who apportioned, Ark who judged …” A wan and predatory smile. “And the Holy Swarm hung upon It as a babe from the teat.”
The Evil Siqu leaned into the wavering fullness of the downward-burning light. He drew his hips forward, lowered a bare foot to the mirror-polish of the floor. There was a glory to his nude body, a perfection of manly form and proportion that was disconcerting. He reached to the left of the wicked Chair, stroked the long curve of what Malowebi saw was a scalp … the greater skull of another Inchoroi, resembling Aurang in every respect, save for its meek bearing. Where the Horde-General had imperiously consumed the space surrounding, this creature—Aurax, the Mbimayu sorcerer realized—shrank from it, as if simple emptiness were indistinguishable from mortal peril. It huddled against the Chair-of-Hooks as if stranded over a lethal fall.
“A machine,” Anas?rimbor Kellhus said. “The Inchoroi were ruled by a machine.”
Mekeritrig smiled. “Aye. But then the Inchoroi held that all are machines … not unlike the D?nyain. Ark ruled simply because Ark was by far the mightier machine.”
“Until the Fall.”
The Nonman retrieved his hand, gazed without blinking at the Anas?rimbor. Aurax made as if to follow the caress, then shrank back to its grovelling station.
“They were wrecked for losses,” the Evil Siqu replied. “Yes. But they were wrecked for the ruin of Ark most of all. They had become—How would you say?—parasites … Yes. Worms in the vast gut of Ark.”
He stood to reveal the alabaster magnificence of his form—a beauty that rendered all mortality decrepit.
“It was Sil who first climbed free of their stupor, who rallied the Divine Inchoroi Swarm. It was Sil who fashioned this place …”
“Before Sil,” the Holy Aspect-Emperor said, “it was Ark who commanded.”
Malowebi found himself confused by the repetition, until he realized that the Anas?rimbor tested the ancient Erratic, probed the limits of what must have been an ailing memory.
A bleary, scowling look. An ancient indecision.
“It was Sil who raised the Inverse Fire from the Bowel,” Mekeritrig continued, “installed it here, so that all who petitioned him might fathom the Onus.”
“Yes …” the Anas?rimbor said with peculiar distraction. “The reason all mention of this room was struck from the Is?phiryas.”
It seemed clear the Inverse Fire was the brazier hanging inverted and elephantine above them—as was the fact that the Anas?rimbor (whose face remained hidden) gazed into it. What perplexed and worried the Mbimayu sorcerer was the Evil Siqu’s triumphant sneer …
“I cannot but envy you,” Mekeritrig said, stalking about the gossamer phantasms reflected across the floors. “And mourn. Yesss … Seeing the Inverse Fire for the very first time.”
Aurax shuddered at his departure, lowered its chin to its feet, seemed to whimper.
“We entered from over there,” the Evil Siqu declared. He cast some Quyan version of a Surillic Point on an arcane whisper, threw it out upon a flung arm. The white light made liquid of the obsidian floors and fractured confusion of all else, thousands of shining white points slipping like oil across myriad intricacies of gold. It paused above the first in a series of six stairs that simply plummeted into the black sheen. The original golden room had been a juncture of some kind, Malowebi realized, opening onto a dozen or so corridors that, capsized, had become stairs, six descending from the level of the new floor to their left, and six ascending to their right.
“There were three of us,” Mekeritrig continued, raising his eyes to the Inverse Fire. “Wise Misariccas, cold and cruel R?nidil, and myself. We were wary. Sil had managed to turn not just Nin-janjin, but all of the Viri—a people famed for their mulish will! We knew it had something to do with this place …”
The Nonman glanced back toward the Anas?rimbor in a covert manner—dark humour flashed in his eyes … and satisfaction.
“But nothing more.”
As far as the Mbimayu sorcerer could tell, the Aspect-Emperor continued peering into the flames …
What was happening here?
“How well I remember!” the Evil Siqu gasped, raising his face as if to some morning sun. “Such … glorious … horror …”
What was the Inverse Fire?
“Misariccas stood where you are standing … transfixed … unable to tear aside his gaze …”
Some kind of sinister weapon?
“R?nidil—always so harsh, so contemptuous of display!—he fell there … began weeping, bawling … grovelling on his belly and crying out gibberish!”
Were they already doomed?
“And you?” the Anas?rimbor asked.
It was not manly, the gratitude that washed through him for hearing the man speak.
Look away! he cried in his thoughts. Turn down your eyes!
The smile that hooked the Nonman’s lips was as unseemly as any the Mbimayu sorcerer had ever seen. “Why … I laughed …” A sudden frown seized the porcelain features. “What else does one do, learning they had lived and murdered for the sake of lies?”
Mekeritrig gazed back up into the Inverse Fire with an attitude of sharing something sacred—miraculous.
“I am whole in its presence,” he said on a profound sigh. “Present.”
The Anas?rimbor remained conspicuously silent—and motionless.
He deceives you! Lulls you!
“You should have heard my stalwart Ishroi brothers rant upon our return! We’re deceived! We are deceived! We’re damned all of us! Condemned to eternal torment! The Inchoroi spake true!”