It could not be … the horror Malowebi saw boiling across the soggomantic sheen.
Zeum was an ancient and imperial nation, pure of race and language, bound by strict law and subtle manner, steeped in millennial erudition. How could her Sons not hold the Three Seas in contempt? With its mangled maps and polyglot confusions, its perennial internecine wars over garden-plot provinces, its perverse need to forever dispute the sacrileges of their fathers. It was the nature of sausages to eat sausages, to undo what they could not outdo. So of course Malowebi had looked upon Fanayal and his motley court as barbarians, superstitious fools believing whatever their vainglorious agendas required—even more so when the man took Psatma Nannaferi as his concubine. A bandit Padirajah and an outlaw Mother Supreme! The dregs of yet another overthrown order …
How could he entertain anything such outcasts might say? Especially when it confirmed Likaro …
And now … there He stood.
“Our differences are contingent,” the dread image of the Anas?rimbor said, “artifacts of where we fell once cast out of Ishu?l …”
The Demon.
“You were delivered to the machinations of the Tekne. And now you see it as the consummation of D?nyain principles, the truth from which your very sinew and intellect are hewn. You think our error was to confuse the Logos with the movements of our souls, when in sooth it belongs to the machinery of the World. Your revelation was to understand that Logos was nothing but Cause as concealed by the darkness that comes before. You saw that reason itself was but another machine glimpsed in the blackness, a machine of machines.”
There He stood! Malowebi could actually see …
See Him.
“You realized the Mission was not to master Cause via Logos, but to master Cause via Cause, to endlessly refashion the Near to consume and incorporate the Far.”
His reflection twining and coalescing inward, sparking more and more with boiling discharges, bloating about glowering exchanges of submerged … power.
“But where you were delivered to the Tekne, I was brought to the Gnosis.”
Incorporeal, yet somehow more real than the pallid echelon of the Mutilated on their stairs, the bulbous distortion that was Aurax, or the masticating faces of the skin-spies thronging …
“I seized temporal power, usurped the Three Seas as you have usurped Golgotterath. But where you saw antithesis in your damnation, a goad to resume the ancient Inchoroi design, I saw fathomless power.”
The Four-Horned Brother had come …
“Where you immersed yourself in the Tekne, took up the generational toil of recovering what the Inchoroi have lost, I mastered the Daimos, plundered the Houses of the Dead.”
The Thief-of-Souls had found a way.
“Where you would shut the World against the Outside, and so secure your souls against damnation, I would conquer Hell.”
He had broken into the granary of the Living.
“Where you would strike the Outside from the hip of the Real, I would enslave it.”
And was about to plunder all.
The Mutilated regarded the boiling image.
“And if we choose to contest you?” the teeth-baring D?nyain asked.
Cinder black about the raging furnace within, the Four-Horned image of the Anas?rimbor raised its hand.
Mekeritrig abruptly appeared from the nethers of the golden fin, clawing at the incandescent noose about his throat as some invisible force or entity dragged him across the obsidian polish, then hoisted him naked and gagging for the benefit of the expressionless D?nyain. One of the mightiest Wills to walk the world, pinned to empty air, held upon the threshold of asphyxiation, utterly helpless.
When the Infernal figure spoke, his voice rumbled as distant thunder.
“You lured me here assuming the Inverse Fire would seduce me as it had seduced you. Failing this stratagem, you assumed numbers would serve you, that five would have no difficulty overcoming one. You need only cast my blasted carcass from the heights, and the Great Ordeal, dispossessed of its Prophet, would scatter to the winds.”
Ajokli … the Appalling Father … Prince of Hate …
“You lured me here because you assumed that this place, the Golden Room, was your place …”
A God of the Tusk!
“Even now you still believe that it is I who stand upon your Conditioned Ground.”
Woe! Woe! An Age of untold woe was about to descend upon Men!
“And how,” the burnt D?nyain said, gesturing to the silent throng of skin-spies, “could it be otherwise?”
Low growling laughter, terrifying for its immediacy, as if someone probed his ears with a knife-point.
“Because in all the World, no place has witnessed more terror, more obscenity, brutality, or sublime trauma. Your Golden Room is scarcely more than a bubble floating upon the Transcendent Pit. Hell, my brothers. Hell pollutes its every shadow, smokes from its every surface, creeps through its every brace …”
Again the creak of mighty torsions. Again the groan of warring angles. Like a troubled pool, the congregated reflections blurred for the passage of impossible forces.
“Because, brothers, this place, more than any other on the face of this fat World …”
The infernal image’s hand fluttered. Cet’ingira’s headless body flopped twitching to the black-mirror floors. The right hands of the skin-spies were yanked down in perfect unison, falling with the Evil Siqu’s decapitated head. The Chorae bound to their palms now nailed them to their obsidian reflections.
The Anas?rimbor’s head dissolved into a jetting torch.
“Is my place.”
Malowebi screamed.
The old Wizard could not breath.
Not grey. Not purple.
Becoming pink, flush with soundless shrieking.
A son.
Head craning, gazing through phlegm at the horror surrounding.
He had a son …
Stupefied perfection.
Esmenet was laughing soundless, weeping soundless, cradling the infant for him to see.
He had become numb unto vacancy, a hole blinking at a nascent soul.
Miniature fingers, clutching bosom air, already reaching, grasping.
And all he could think was, Another candle that would be lit.
Another pyre that would be burned.
Shame sent his eyes fleeing to Mimara, who lay gasping knees askew, her head vertically braced against the fell stone of Golgotterath. Her eyes had been seeking his, despite everything she had suffered. There was none of the exhausted relief he might have expected had he lived a life that could bear such expectations. Inhuman blood matted her scalp and cheek. Her face was drawn, funeral-swollen. Gone was the crutch and club of her anger, the obstinance of her mad ordaining. Gone was the indifference, the calluses of resignation worn into her by tedious months on the trail. No, acquiescence and acquiescence alone radiated from her look, a blameless will to yield her own life, even in the delicate glare of another’s dawning.
He understood instantly what she said, even though he could hear nothing beneath the Horde’s savage choir.
There’s another.