Finally. A genuine threat. Shae?nanra pursed his lips against the tickle of his thin mustache, sighed as if in profound resignation. He glanced at the black coin of sere swinging in the bottom of his appropriated cup, downed it with a gasp.
How could the man know? Even with his rumoured Grace. There was no going back, no undoing what had been done, no unseeing. Shae?nanra had committed unspeakable … nay, unthinkable … acts. They all had. Debaucheries. Desecrations of self and other. Shrieks for cries of passion. Blood for grease. Mere recollection set his skin afire, such was the orgiastic ecstasy. He had exalted in the trackless void, the hole where good and evil had once been.
And he had resolved. Resolved most of all, for he had seen.
He watches the true sun rise above the horizon’s crown, low and bloody as sunset, throwing shadows outward along lines the Nonmen could describe in arithmetic. He can sense Cet’ingira’s desperation, so he prolongs the reverie, pretending to wonder at the fragments of darkness scoring the broken landscape below.
Then he turns to the Barricades, examines its fractal complexities.
He begins to sing …
His voice slips the point of vocalization, drops outward in every direction, until all of Creation sings with him. Between his hands, a needle of raw incandescence twists into existence, shines with a brilliance undimmed by the glare of dawn.
Shae?nanra turns to the great Nonman Quya. “Do you see, old friend?”
Cet’ingira stands gazing, parsed by the sun into silken light and dolphin shadow. A vulture rides a great arc in the blue emptiness behind him, ragged and black. More and more, the scavengers have taken to circling the Horns.
“The Barricades,” he continues. “They fold … intervals. Somehow Emilidis found a way to pinch emptiness into angles. This was why no dispensation of sheer force could batter them down … In a sense, everything you and my predecessors threw at it simply … missed.”
The black eyes pierce him. “And what is this?”
“A Mathesis Pin … A derivative of an ancient Entelechy Theorem. It whittles force down to an arithmetical point—pricks where all else bludgeons …”
Wonder dawns in the ancient gaze. “A force that does not occupy space … cannot be redirected in space.”
“Yes,” Shae?nanra says. “My gift to you.”
He could feel it all the time, what he had seen, feel it like worms in his bones, rotting him, making him less substantial than what he was, a tingling fog, a meaty flex. Horror now thumbed the edges of his every sensation.
The image of his Damnation.
“Who are you to condemn?” Shae?nanra cried in the mock way of too-learned Men. “The Schools have no stake in Nonman wars.”
This much was true. The Siqu were loathe to speak of the War—even Cet’ingira, who had led the Mangaecca to the Ark and the revelation of the Xir’kirimakra. Their feud with the Inchoroi was theirs and theirs alone, so much so they denied their Mannish pupils all but the most elliptical knowledge of it.
But Titirga frowned as if at a tiresome juvenile. “Who are you to decide our stake?”
Shae?nanra stood blinking, cursing. “How?” he cried, holding an arm out to the hoary majesty of Aurang. “How can you fools not see how small this makes us?”
“Plainly,” Titirga replied, frowning at the creature’s groin.
“Fool! The stakes of everything have been rewritten! Everything!”
At long last fury clenched Titirga’s brow.
“What was sane before we knew of the Ark remains sane now! Shae?nanra! This thing is … is obscene!”
Why could they not see? They were every bit as damned as he—damned! What overriding reason could there be? What possible logic could annul Eternity?
“The sky, Titirga! Think! The sky is an endless void. Each star is another Sun, like our own, and Grounds spin about them—whole Grounds hanging like motes in the Great Void!”
He was not simply offering them salvation, he was showing them sanity!
“Other Grounds?” Titirga cried with a derisive bark, and why not? when the Ground was by definition the basis of everything. It was just as Aurax had said. Truth becomes ignorance when Men make gods of Deceit.
“I know how this sounds,” Shae?nanra said. “But what of the Ark? The Inchoroi? They prove the existence of other Grounds, do they not? Grounds like our own!”
“Noooo …” the glistening Inchoroi rasped, speaking an archaic intonation of Ihrimsu, his inhuman voice falling like a flake of ice upon sweaty skin. He had stepped into Shae?nanra’s blind flank and now loomed over him, his frame a sleek motley, like fish skinned and sutured together. “Not like your own.”
The Hero-Mage fairly gaped at the creature.
“It speaks to me.”
“This Ground …” Aurang continued, oblivious to his transgression. “This Ground is the one Promised. Salvation lies within your grasp. Salvation in this life …”
Insolence.
“Other Voices must commend yours before you speak,” Shae?nanra said to the creature, trusting the savagery of his backward glance to serve as warning.
But Aurang continued his shining scrutiny of Titirga. A transgression that Shae?nanra found unnerving.
“Do you not fear damnation?”
A careful look from the Hero-Mage.
“The Nonmen …” he said evenly. “They have taught us how to hide our Voices. How to bypass the Outside, find Oblivion.”
Eyes like bladders of ink, each reflecting the tripods across their shining curve. The fluting of gill-tissues along the neck. “You worship the spaces between the Gods …”
“Yes.”
A rasp like the screams of faraway children tangled in the wind. Inchoroi laughter. “You are already damned. All of you are already damned.”
“So say you.”
A deep chested rumble. Popping mucous. “So says the Inverse Fire.”
A flush of horror. Shae?nanra tensed against the sudden loosening in his bowel, not quite believing that the Inchoroi had dared name it aloud. Xir’kirimakra. The Inverse Fire. For a heartbeat he found his Voice divided between mere fear and what mattered. What? Did Aurang seek to seduce the Sohonc Archideme? Could he not see that Titirga was not one to suffer rivals, that Shae?nanra himself would be doomed were he to embrace their Holy Consult?
But these were vain questions. They fell away as quickly as Onkhis offered them up, so flimsy were the concerns that moved them. All that mattered, the Ground’s only consequential thing, was what he had seen …
Damnation.
Experience shredded into a thousand strings, each clawed and burned and burned, sucked like bottomless bones. Agony. Anguish. Horror. Lament. Shame … Shrieking-thrashing-screaming through the throat of his every memory, innumerable and one, groaning-choking-vomiting, his every particle a unique agony, a bereavement, a weeping-howling-scratching out eyes that grew and grew to witness anew, while burning-blistering-breaking—
It defeated the tongue, the intellect, what he had seen. Nevertheless it was in him, every moment in him, if not at the centre of his care then beneath, a hole that endlessly gnawed at his gut …