Laughter, peculiar for its fragility.
“Such fools! Speaking truth—unthinkable, unlivable Truth!—to power, any power, let alone that of a Nonman King! Oh, Nil’giccas was wroth, demanded that I, the silent one, the cryptic one, explain their blasphemy. And I looked to them, Misariccas and R?nidil, their eyes so certain that I would confirm their manic claims, certain because we had become brothers the instant we had gazed up into these flames, brothers possessing a bond that no coincidence of blood and bone could rival. They looked to me … eager … dismayed and disordered … and I turned to my wise and noble King and said, ‘Kill them, for they have succumbed as Nin-janjin had succumbed …’”
Another laugh … this one intentionally false.
“And so was Truth saved …”
The Evil Siqu looked down once again, blinking as if at some arcane disorientation.
“For Nil’giccas would have murdered me as well, had I not.”
And it seemed to Malowebi that he floated, his every experience nothing more than a bubble drifting through cold horror. For he at last understood what it was, the Inverse Fire …
And the object of the Anas?rimbor’s enraptured gaze.
Damn you, look away!
“What was I to tell him? That the hallow Between-Way was a fraud? That everyone he had lost, his comrades-in-arms, his son and daughters, his wife! Was I to tell him they all shrieked in Hell?
“Look!” the Evil Siqu cried, gazing upward, hands drawn up in horror and incredulity. “Look, D?nyain! Look at the heinous madness of their crimes, the way they unravel you! Suck the grease of anguish from your very thread! Unthinkable trespasses! Raped to the being! Decanted into screams!”
“Nay …” he suddenly laughed, a mania shining through his gaze. “There was no explaining this. Not to Nil’giccas—or any Nonman King. That was what Misariccas and R?nidil failed to reckon: the Inverse Fire cannot be told …”
Cet’ingira fixed his darkling gaze on the Anas?rimbor.
“It must be seen.”
“Skuthula!” the Exalt-General bellowed into the cracked throat of the Obmaw. “I would parlay with you!”
The sooty blackness remained every bit as inscrutable.
Apperens Saccarees stood at his side, but no one else, some twenty paces out on the saddled causeway. Over one hundred Ainoni Knights had just died attempting to swarm the Intrinsic Gate: their charred and smoking corpses matted the floors both about and within the blasted hole.
“Skuthula! Speak to me, Black Worm!”
A lesser man would have yelped at the sight of great, serpentine eyes opening in the darkness, black slashes for pupils, embedded in irises that flexed like a weave of golden blades. Even Saccarees shrank back a step before recalling himself. Anas?rimbor Kay?tas merely stood as inscrutable as before.
“Whooo?” the Wracu intoned on a gaseous croak. A malefic orange glow revealed the breadth of its jaws, made one hundred silhouettes of its scimitar teeth. “Who believes reason might prevail where sword and sorcery fail?” An incandescent grin, like a blazing furnace seen about a corner …
Laughter like tumbling heaps of coal.
“Anas?rimbor Kay?tas! Prince-Imperial of the New Empire! Exalt-General of the Great Ordeal!”
“Ahhhhh … Namesake of the Accursed Slayer.”
“What binds you, Wrac?? How have you been enslaved?”
“You would bait me with your insolence …”
“You are chattel, a dog chained to the stoop of your master!”
“I am no more a slave than you are the Slayer.”
“Indeed, Wracu, I am not my namesake—any more than you are Skuthula the Black, the Great Obsidian Worm!”
The golden eyes snapped shut, then reopened narrow with malice, hatred, and suspicion.
“I shall savour thee, manling. Cunning makes the flesh swee—”
“What happened to the great and terrible Wracu of legend?” Kay?tas interrupted with shouting violence. “The Skuthula I know roosted upon the summit of mountains, tyrannized the very Heavens! Who is this imposter who skulks and snaps from a badger’s hole?”
The Exalt-General’s voice peeled across the soaring gold faces, hung for a heartbeat before vanishing into the Horde’s ambient wail.
The Wracu’s eyes narrowed ever further, became slits bent into shining bows. Orange light waxed behind the cage of teeth, limned the crocodilian scowl …
Then the leering visage disappeared.
The two Men stood waiting, peering.
“Just as the legends say,” the Mandate Grandmaster finally murmured. “Bodies scaled in iron, souls skinned in gauze …”
The Obmaw hung slack and ruined before them, utterly empty.
“Too much so,” Kay?tas said. “I fear he will die before relinquishing Obmaw now.”
“Perhaps not,” Saccarees replied. “Perhaps he has already abando—”
The twinkle of light in the portal’s black gullet stole the Grandmaster’s words …
Spewing, exploding brilliance engulfed all else.
“Have you found yourself?” the Evil Siqu asked, his voice silken and oceanic.
“Everyone who looks finds themselves, everyone who has dared any kind of greatness in this accursed World.”
The Mbimayu sorcerer howled in voiceless fury, as much for impotence as for what transpired.
Avert your eyes!
“Do you see, D?nyain?” Mekeritrig screeched with sudden intensity. “Do you see the necessity of Resumption! Why Mog-Pharau must walk! Why the World must be shut!”
The Anas?rimbor had not moved in the slightest.
“Tell me that you see!”
Malowebi might as well have been bound to a post.
“I see … myself … Yes.”
A scowl hooked the Evil Siqu’s zeal into something less certain.
Malowebi found himself caught on wonder.
“But you feel it … like a memory that resides in your veins …”
Deny him! Please!
“Yes.”
What was happening? The Mbimayu sorcerer wanted to believe that the Anas?rimbor had somehow prepared for this threat. But Mekeritrig so utterly assumed the Inverse Fire would reveal … What? The truth? Could a deeper, far more horrific layer of revelation lay beneath what he had already grasped …
Could the Aspect-Emperor be deceived?
Schoolmen were loathe to ponder Hell. They built innumerable habits of avoidance into their lives.
The infamous Nonman Outlaw gazed back up to the Inverse Fire—what for Malowebi remained a play of spectral incandescences across the mirror-black floors. Convections cast shadows like liquid or smoke across the length of his chiselled white frame. After several heartbeats, an opiate glassiness emptied his look.
“After a time,” he said vacantly, “the sheer profundity of it, the monstrous scale of the anguish … it becomes soothing … sublime …”
The sluicing of firelight across white skin.
“And never … never repeating, always different … like some kind of broken arithmetic …”