He shivers uncontrollably.
Only when the sun has drawn even to his height, when the first light draws his outline into the blackness within, does he stand upon the spine of his own shadow.
How? How could mere knowledge command such horror?
He will see for himself.
The whole centre of the chamber, gone.
It was not for nothing the Mangaecca had come here. It was not for nothing they had raised Nogaral upon the ruins of ancient Viri. Intent on plundering the dead Mansion, they took the vast pit they had discovered—the Viritic Well—as the axle of their construction. And so unknowingly created the one trap that could destroy the famed Titirga.
A great dank rose from the blackness, the stench of a mountain rotted with hollows. In ancient times the Well had sounded Viri, a city as magisterial as Ishterebinth, and deep, struck to the Ground’s very root. Shae?nanra teetered for a moment, his senses unbalanced by the cavernous absence before and below. He steadied himself, then leaned to better cast his spit after his foe.
“Tikhhus pir yelmor graum nihal!”13 he cried, the ancient curse of his forefathers.
He glimpsed a white twinkle sparking far below, a tube of surrounding stone. A sorcerous mutter climbed from the bottomless reek …
He blinked in disbelief.
“Quickly,” the nude Inchoroi cried, a noise like a dog’s cough.
He walks into the golden gloom, squinting, staring. Dust puffs about his feet, particles blooming in the intrusive brilliance of the sun, then vanishing into the flanking darkness. He peers … notices a different luminance wavering across the interior, more fluid and sultry, webbed as though refracted through waters …
Cants of Concussion. So the Man and the Inchoroi began, blasting the circular lip, striking great fractures into the grain of the rock, so that the Well’s mouth sloughed into its throat, a rumbling, clacking torrent. They pulled down the rooves of the Asinna, baring the deceit that was high blue sky. They stepped into the sunlight …
The Inchoroi beat his great scabbed wings, rising high upon the relentless Wind, spiralling like a vulture about a failing beast; the Man stood upon the earth’s phantom, hanging. Their skulls were as chalices of arcane light.
Their disparate voices seemed thrown from the horizon’s farthest corners, the mutter of petulant Gods. And the light of the Diurnal bathed them, so they seemed to glow in the way of things held high in the sun’s declining light. Their own shadows halved them, so that from certain angles they seemed naught but the rims of who they once were.
Quyan sorceries inscribed the empty spaces. Structure collapsed into the afterimage of searing geometries. Aurang husked the tower from without as he sailed in broad circles, slowing into a climb when turning to the Wind, then swooping about in a descending arc. The Diurnal’s arcane sun warmed cloth, pinched skin. Shae?nanra gouged the tower from within, hanging above the cratered Asinna, his hair and garment lashed into fins and ribbons. Sections of wall pitched into blackness, roared against the throat of the Well. Furnishings glittered like tossed torches, scraped and skidded, trailing clouds of orange sparks before blackness encompassed them.
Together they pulled down Nogaral, the High Round, raised it into a heap over the mouth of the Well.
He hears it, a faraway wind, the groan of impossible multitudes—the collective shriek. His lungs become as stone. Horror makes pins of his skin. And he feels it, the burning vaults above, the smoldering glimpses …
Shae?nanra raises his eyes.
At last they paused to regard their labour, the Inchoroi alighting upon the same spectral floor that bore Shae?nanra. Crimson sunlight bathed the southern ramps, inking the numberless crevices across the wrack and ruin. And they rejoiced, Man and Inchoroi …
They had no inkling of the greater violence their sorcery had unleashed.
The sky cracked. Iros shuddered. The impossible sun tipped and stumbled. Plumes of ejecta exploded from points along the mountain’s perimeter, scarcely visible for the Diurnal’s encompassing glare. The mound that had been Nogaral shrugged then slumped into its contradiction. It was as if a dome of cloth had been pressed into a dimple. Summit became basin. Illumination became shadow. The mountain had been rotten with Viri, its innumerable ways fractured by the cataclysmic impact of the Ark thousands of years before. The underworld mansion imploded, collapsed inward and downward, tier upon tier, hall upon hall, undone by this final indignity. This last outrage.
The Man and the Inchoroi toppled with it. Though suspended, they remained bound to the earth, and as with all drastic changes of circumstance, the meaning of their sorcery ceased to be. Only Aurang’s wings saved them. The Inchoroi seized the Man from kicking emptiness, bore him up beyond the Diurnal blue into the truth that was cold and night.
They set foot upon the depression’s edge. The Day Lantern painted a dishevelled landscape, drawing their shadows into the darkness of the great concavity below. The earth still shivered, resounded with hidden percussions, knocking dust into smoky halos about the debris.
Shae?nanra laughed in the crazed, marvelling way of children who find their destruction multiplied beyond belief. Once again, he succumbed to the sacrilege of Fate, he who walked ways invisible to the Gods. He exulted at this Sign, rejoiced that his hated foe would have a pit and not a barrow to memorialize his fall. And as the echoes trailed into cavernous thunder, he began singing, as a true Long-boned Son of ?merau should,
Your pride lies shattered with your shield,
Your wrath curls bleeding upon the field,
Now you linger in my shade weeping,
Mourning an honour that is my keeping,
Praying for children who are mine to enslave,
Beseeching lovers who are mine to deprave.
So the Archidemu Mangaeccu intoned: a paean for his vanquished enemy, a lament that was at once a psalm to his own glory—and the might of their Holy Consult.
For nothing mattered apart from what they had seen. Nothing.
They coupled on the smoking slopes, Man and Inchoroi, their silhouettes entangled, arching against a skewed, perpetually setting sun. They grunted for wonder, wheezed with ecstasy. They gazed in delirium, cried out across the great bowl of ruin, over flames arrayed in descending echelons, like teeth growing out a shark’s throat.
And daylight Stained everything, a false pocket of sun in the night.
The infinite night.
ENDNOTES
1 As the Norsirai called them. The Nonmen called them the Vir’holotoi, the “Wards-of-Viri.”
2 The Blessed Falling, when the Flesh-Angels first descended from the Void.
3 “The Newborn.” The star that Men call the Nail of Heaven.
4 The Artisan. The Siqu founder of the School of Contrivers, the Mihtr?lic.