Horror cracked the white enamel of his expression.
“We call it the Goad,” he continued, a ferocity cracking through his voice. “It is what has bound our Holy Consult these thousands of years …” A seizure of anguished fury. “To see the crimes committed against us! That is what drives us to blot the foul abomination that is this World! The torments revealed by the Inverse Fire!”
He had fairly screamed this, and now he stood riven, sinews finning his neck and arms, his hands clutching emptiness.
“But I suffer no torment,” the Anas?rimbor said.
Malowebi hung in numb oblivion. Mekeritrig was several heartbeats blinking before he could properly peer at him.
“So you think the Fire deceives?”
“No,” he replied. “This artifact senses the continuity of the Now with our souls as they exist outside of time. It siphons it like sap, boils it into an image the Now can comprehend. The Fire burns true.”
Pained scowl. “Then you see that you are my brother?”
The Golden Room swayed across the belly of Malowebi’s visual field: the Holy Aspect-Emperor had finally turned to face the founding soul of the Unholy Consult.
“No …” the Anas?rimbor replied once again. “Where you fall as fodder, I descend as hunger.”
Death.
So cool in the harem tangle. A Bashrag lay with its black-shag head in the crotch of its triune arm, like a child counting in a game of hide-and-seek. A Nansur Columnary sweated beneath, sprawled like something dropped from the sky. Another reclined almost as if snoozing, save for the unnatural crook of his neck where his head pressed against the trousered thigh of the former. A severed arm reached out, intent on tickling his ear …
And it all … tingled.
There was a simplicity to things dead, a stillness that was singular for perching within the husk of motion. And it struck her as the most beautiful thing, the immunity. To live was to grind possibility into an endless thread of actualities, to slough moments like a serpent shedding an infinite, anguished skin. But to die … to die was to be, to dwell with the ground as ground, an obdurate and impervious extension.
Imagine never having to breathe!
She gazed at the decapitated head of a handsome man, young, with fulsome lips and straight teeth set in a lantern jaw. How she had once prized young, handsome Men, wondered how even their filth could feel so clean. She imagined catching his eye in some gilded corridor on the Andiamine Heights, upbraiding him for some contrived oversight, a naughty old queen, flirting …
But then her gaze caught upon an Ursranc pinioned between human legs, and she found her fancy overthrown … for the creature was more handsome—and all the more repellent for it.
Tingling … within her and without.
She drew a finger across her lips, and blinking, turned to the commotion to her right, saw her daughter, Mimara, screaming soundlessly at her side, and her lover, Achamian, holding the pregnant girl’s hand, shouting words no one would know. She reached out, laid a tentative palm across her distended abdomen, wondered that it was so warm …
Birth.
And on a sharp intake of breath, her macabre tranquillity was expelled, and all the riotous urgency of living crashed through her once again.
All the dead eyes about her, even those cooked to snot in blasted sockets, turned away.
The Evil Siqu regarded him narrowly.
“Subterfuge!”
“So I am the first?” the Aspect-Emperor asked. “Have no others resisted the Goad?”
Mekeritrig said nothing, retreated to the Chair and its frame of wicked hooks. He leaned upon one buttock, pulled his legs onto the cushion the way an adolescent girl might. Aside from a hand upon his knee, shadow obscured all save his forehead and brow.
“Not even the famed Nau-Cay?ti,” the Nonman eventually replied from shadow. “The Great are always flawed. Always damned … I had assumed the same of you.”
Aurax bobbed its great crown at the Evil Siqu’s knees, like an abused dog seeking favour, only whispering scarcely audible syllables …
“Gassirraaaajaalrimri …”
Malowebi wanted to rejoice, but too many worries harried his thoughts—the fact that a window into Hell hung immediately above the least of them! What would he do, were he to witness the facts of his damnation? Embrace it?
Or embrace them?
The Anas?rimbor had said the Fire burned true, and he would know. He had been to Hell—or so his Three Seas enemies had claimed …
The Evil Siqu seemed to have no inkling of what he should do, as if his faith in the efficacy of the Inverse Fire had been complete. With silence, came the spectre of unrequited violence.
“Where is Shauriatis?” the Anas?rimbor demanded. “Where is your Halaroi master?”
Mekeritrig leaned from the Chair’s shadowy hood. “That will avail you nothing,” he said. “Baiting.”
“Why?”
“Because I am eight thousand years too old.”
“And still chained to the post,” the Aspect-Emperor snapped. “I tire of this shallow posturing. Tell me, witless C?nuroi dog, where is Shauriatis?”
The alabaster figure remained motionless, save for the pulse of a single vein high on his illuminated forehead …
Then, as if draped across cobwebs, a new voice fell upon the room.
“Calm … old friend …”
Followed by another voice …
“He knows all the ancient legends …”
Also frail, as if spoken on breathing’s final allotment.
“And you all but told him …”
“How the Inverse Fire rekindles your zeal …”
Five different voices had spoken, each cast of its own alloy and yet scratched into the unanimity of rust by hoary age. The Anas?rimbor had remained motionless, as if absorbed in some arcane scrutiny of their content or timbre. Now a subtle shift in position told Malowebi that he returned his gaze to the Chair-of-Hooks, and to the golden platform that floated down from the void above it … resolved as if growing as much as nearing.
Shauriatis?
The platform was the length and breadth of a skiff, shaped and curved like a great shield, but far too large to be wielded as such by human arms. At first it appeared to bear ten great candles set in a circle, wax gutted and knobbed and pale as bacon fat, each set within a stone pedestal … Except these candles clearly moved, and possessed (as quickly became obvious) living faces, rutted and as hairless as prunes, mouths like masticating sphincters, eyes like sparks set in mucoid shadow. The pedestals, he realized, were in fact perverse cradles, stone sconces for bodies bereft of limbs …
Ten senescent, larval forms had been welded upon the back of some great soggomantic shield …
The revulsion intensified as the thing neared, then settled next to the Chair-of-Hooks—just beyond the ghostly reflection of the Inverse Fire across the floors. Aurax grovelled beneath Mekeritrig’s feet.
“At lasht …” one of the ancient worms crooned.
“Our disparate Empires meet …” another gasped in completion.