“A lunatic God … perhaps. The Hells that you think you see. Something … Something adulterate, foul. Something that craves feasting, that hungers with an intensity that can bend the very Ground.”
Aurang had stood silent during this time, gazing down at the two bickering men. After the intimacies they had shared, it seemed Shae?nanra could sense the pulse of his passion. Lust in the lazy tumescence of his member. Impatience in the incline of his shield-long head. Hatred in the flicker of membranes …
“Does that not trouble you?” the Hero-Mage pressed. “That you have but one eye!”
Tedious. Tedious. Tedious.
“Why, Titirga?” Shae?nanra implored. “Why have you come here?” He shook his head, arguing with the floor. “Did you hope to show me my folly?” And it all seemed a pantomime, this incontinence of voice and expression. For beneath, he knew exactly what he needed to do. He could feel it, the certainty of snakes coiled in the darkness, the confidence of things that neither run nor sleep. “There’s no folly in what I do, I assure you. I know. I have seen!” He jerked his face back, squinting and scowling. “What are your reasons compared to this? Your guesses? Your rumours of a dead age?”
“But what, Shae?nanra? What is it you have seen? Your damnation or your goad?”
“Did you hope to strike a bargain?” Shae?nanra exclaimed, spinning to face the Hero-Mage. “Or did you come here to cow me, to strut and boast and discourse, thinking that the throat of my design might choke on the bone of your glorious presence?”
The Hero-Mage had stalked him in a curious, distanced way, careful to move at tangents that would keep him facing both of his antagonists, Mannish and Inchoroi. His manner, which had seemed lazy with arrogance but a moment earlier, had become wary, expectant.
“Titirga … Did you come here to kill?”
For the first time the man surprised him.
“Of course I did.”
Six days.
Six days Cet’ingira, the most-famed of the Siqu, the Most-feared-and-hated, stands upon the High Threshold, the arcane bass of his voice climbing from the pores of all that could be seen, his arms outstretched, a myriad of Mathesis Pins drawn into a circle of sparking white before him, a disc of needles, endlessly pricking the fractal intricacies of the Barricades.
And Shae?nanra, the Balancer’s son who had risen to become Archidemu Mangaeccu, Master of the Cunning School, felt a different fear hiss through the anxious hum of his schemes. He retreated as if in disgust, took four steps, steeling himself against the impulse to cringe—because at any instant, any heartbeat, he could find himself cut or bludgeoned or blasted from this world and—
“Kill me?” he heard himself say, his tone far from manly.
The Hero-Mage laughed his famed laugh, the one that had inspired so many lays. With his beard and wolf-skin cloak, he looked both savage and indomitable, every bit as elemental as the legends painted him. With his Stain, drawn and tinctured in a manner no Man or Nonman had ever seen, he seemed outrageous with power.
“No, my friend,” he said, letting his gaze stray to the Inchoroi, hulking and inhuman. “I have come to kill this … obscenity.”
A new Age was dawning. Since the First Father, Men had always spoken to command the Ground. Since the Shamans, they had called and Reality had answered, a brother, a deceiver, an assassin. But there was another way, one without the treacherous hooks of meaning, one built up out of the granules of existence, the way termites raise their multiform wattle. A power that could be crafted and shaped, that could be applied to its own proliferation, and so accelerate, radiating out across the span of need and desire. A power that could uproot cities and hurl them across the Void.
The Tekne.
Mechanism. Only mechanism could save their Voices.
“Perhaps it is fitting,” Titirga said to the glistening Inchoroi, advancing a step. “Perhaps this is your Doom, to die here on the grave of Viri.”12
Wheezing silence.
“Shae?nanra,” Aurang finally said. “I tire of this.”
“Patience, my brother,” the Mangaeccan Archideme replied, drawing the Inchoroi back by the forearm, pressing him to the perimeter of the grand room.
It would happen soon.
“Brother?” the Hero-Mage cried, his voice cracked with what seemed genuine dismay, pained incredulity. “You call this monstrosity brother?”
Only now was it dawning on the fool, the intimacy of their pact, the truth of their Holy Consult. Only now, Shae?nanra realized, could he see how profoundly Damnation had conjoined them.
Man. Nonman. Inchoroi.
Six days. Until his voice dwindled to a rasp. Until blood fell from his nose, tracing the branches of his grimace. Six days singing.
Titirga strode toward him, to the centre of the Asinna, the point where all the glittering fires overlapped. Shae?nanra resisted the urge to raise his arms in warding. He understood why the bards called him the Bull in their songs. The way he lowered his face to glare through his brows. How he puffed out his chest, huffed fury through his flared nose. How he trembled for rage …
Titirga was the very embodiment of the Wirg, a true Long-boned Son of ?merau. He used all the tools the Gods had bequeathed him, including his famed stature. He always came close … eventually … always loomed, carrying the stink of the garlic they so prized in Sauglish.
Vanity. Nothing makes Men more predictable.
“You will answer for this, Shae?nanra!”
The Archidemu Mangaeccu turned his back on the Hero-Mage for a third and final time. He glanced at Aurang, who fairly hunched over his famished loins—an Inchoroi battle stance.
“You! Will! Face! Me! Feal!”
He nodded to the black shining eyes.
“Face me!” Titirga thundered, his voice booming so raw that spiders seemed to scuttle across Shae?nanra’s spine and back. “Need I show you the fact of your Damnation!”
A sorcerous word sizzled across the corners of everything. Aurang’s eyes flared crimson.
“Face me or di—!”
A crack of wood and stone, beam and joist. Shae?nanra whirled just in time to see it happen: the floor dropping, the brushed rug sucked down, folding into ravines about the falling Hero-Mage, the tripods tipping outward, fires bursting into sparks, the whole slipping into the plummet, a great white iris dropping into deeper stages of gloom—
Gone.
Shae?nanra finds the Nonman thus, sprawled unconscious before the Barricades—or what remains of them. He kneels at his side, lays fingers on his cheek. Warm. He looks to the shattered portal, to the hanging plates, the mangle of the Stain. His immobility shocks him as much as his terror shames. He has always been proud with power, Shae?nanra, knowing that even the Quya wonder at his subtlety. But now he is simply a Man, a lowly mortal, and he can smell his own stink taint the aura of burning.
The true sun is rising behind him.
The shadow of the Threshold arcs across the soaring cylinder of gold. He sees his frail silhouette hunched atop it. And he watches it descend, as inexorable as the rising dawn, sinking into the maw of the broken Barricades.