“No. I would like to hold him in my eye.”
Again, Shae?nanra found himself wilting before the Hero-Mage’s glare, exactly (it seemed to him) as he would have in the old days. Paramount among the many worries that had plagued this mad gambit was the fear that he could no longer be the Feal that Titirga would expect him to be, now that death had become his sole horror …
Now that he had seen.
“Very well,” Shae?nanra conceded, bowing in the shallow, cursive way of the Umeri. He turned to the attendant. “Summon our …” He paused as if at the humour of the word Onkhis had delivered to him. “Our guest.”
His terror plain, the young slave scampered into the gloom of the nearest hallway. Shae?nanra resumed suffering Titirga’s onerous regard …
And contempt, as it turned out.
“They speak of you often in ?merau and Sauglish,” Titirga said, his manner sinister for being so bland. “They say you have the eyes of a serpent …”
Shae?nanra smiled. Vanity had been a well-known flaw of his, yes. He had preened in the days before …
“No. Just a dog. No different than other Men.”
What a child he had been.
They call it the Threshold, a narrow phalange of iron set high upon the Upright Horn, the hanging porch of the Barricades, which the Ishroi of old had raised about the uppermost sanctum of their wicked foe. You can see the Nonman there as much as not, sitting on the edge, where the air is too thin for fat men to breathe, waiting for souls more ordered than his own to tear down the Barricades.
“What the Artisan has wrought …” Shae?nanra says to him.
“Does not seem possible.”
The Archidemu Mangaeccu nods.
“Yes … But only if you look at it as something to be forced.”
Tears well in the Nonman’s eyes. “What are you saying?”
“Some doors need not be broken.”
The attendant reappeared, pale, eyes anxious unto rolling. A raggish shadow lurched beyond the threshold behind him, a movement that would have been limping were it not balanced leg for leg. At the last instant Shae?nanra turned to watch the mighty Titirga’s face …
He saw the famed eyes slacken, dull—even weary in the manner of wise men grasping the inevitability of horrific futures. How many years of concerned watching? How many months of labourious counsel, fretting this very possibility …
An odour of sweat and fish insinuated the chamber.
They stood thus, motionless. Something fluid had entered the breathing silence of the room. A fluttering of mucous and membrane.
Even though nothing was said, Shae?nanra could see it plain in the Hero-Mage’s look.
True. The dread rumours were true.
The Archidemu Mangaeccu turned to the newcomer as much to conceal his smile as to bask in the glory of his foul image. For he had literally wept upon finding him and his brother, wept for joy, knowing that the two could decipher the horror of what they had seen.
The creature stood naked, as was his wont, his wings folded into wicked hooks about either side of his great skull, which would have been cumbersome, had it not curved into a crest, narrow and deep, like an oyster set on end. A proportionate face hung from the fore, loutish with the absence of expression, nostrils drawn into shining gashes, sockets plugged with lobes of bare white meat. A second face filled the mouth, sheathing a second skull fused within the crocodilian jaws of the greater. Second eyes regarded the Hero-Mage with leering expectation. Second lips grinned about teeth like nails …
The light cast by the tripods slicked the creature in lines of luminous white, yellow and crimson, but otherwise, the intestinal translucence of its skin rendered it devoid of colour—the pallor of things drawn from the depths. Though he stood no more than half again as tall as man, he seemed enormous: for the wings, for the fiendish stoop, for the webbing of stone-dense muscle …
And Shae?nanra could feel the tugging glamour, the promise of surrender within irresistible limbs. He could feel his own ardour rise, an answering will to be taken … ravished!
Aurang … a fabled Inchoroi … A creature out of legend and childhood terror.
His lover.
“He bears the Stain as deeply as any Quya …” Shae?nanra heard Titirga say from behind him. The Mangaeccan Archideme turned from his infatuation to face his hated foe.
“Is this why you await me thus?” the Hero-Mage said. He bent his head in a curious, almost Cunuroi way, as if some rage to kill bent him from within. “Do you think that combined you could rival me?”
And Shae?nanra knew that this was no ploy, that Titirga would, without a breath of hesitation, deliver his impossible fury to his tower. He had heard the tales—the whole Ground had heard the tales. Titirga Mithalara, they called him—the Giver of Mercy!—ironic renown for his ruthless extermination of his foes. He was certainly the most powerful Insinger ever born. And if what Cet’ingira said was true, the most powerful, period. No living Quya had the purity of his Recitations. Even his Stain was different, somehow muted, as if he could cut the Inward without scarring it. Even now, simply regarding him, his distinction literally glared from his image, a strange, sideways rinsing of the Stain.
The vital difference. The threat.
They said he had been blind as a child, that Noshainrau himself had found him begging in the streets. They said he went mad while Canting. They said his words seized things that should not be seized.
Shae?nanra gestured to the attendant to dispense the sere.8 The fool almost fumbled the vessels for terror.
“Rival you?” he replied under cover of this trivial distraction. “The Ground is at peace. The Scintya are pacified.9 The All-King watches from ?merau.” He turned with a bronze vessel that Titirga waved away.
“Aurang is my guest,” he said, sipping the burning liquor.
The Hero-Mage did not shout or rave. He did not need to, so grating was the resolve of his voice.
“It is Inchoroi.”
The man spat the name with its clipped, Nonman inflection, the hatred of his teachers cracking his voice. Inchoroi. For the first time, he let slip his Umeri face—the one that would claim all judgment for itself, such was the gulf that divided the Feal from the Wirg—and beseeched his rival Archideme.
“Shae?nanra … Think!”
Think. No word was so raw with ancient assumption.
The Archidemu Mangaeccu simply regarded his Sohonc counterpart, the way one might regard a fool brother who has yet again spoken foolishly. Something scarcely perceptible hardened the man’s stance and manner.
“I will not implore you a second time, old friend.”