The Great Ordeal: Book Three (The Aspect-Emperor Trilogy) Read online

  “What?” Moënghus bellowed. “Why do you persist? Run, little boy—Run!”

  “You ca-call me cursed!” Sorweel cried. “Me?”

  “I ca-call you wretched. Weak.”

  “Tell me, then! Where do incests burn? What part of Hell has your holy father reserved for you!”

  A lupine grin and careless shrug. “The one where your father keens like a pregnant widow …”

  From whence does the power of words come? How can mere breath and sound strike the rhythm from hearts, the stone from bones?

  “Podi!” Serwa called to her brother. “Yus’yiril onpara ti …”

  Even though there was warning in her voice, Moënghus laughed. He glared at Sorweel for a moment, then, spitting, turned to descend the slopes. Sorweel watched the light and shadow break across his receding back, his heart a cracked and cooling cauldron.

  He turned to the Swayali witch, who gazed at him with a fixity that should have shamed both of them. Out of spite, he welcomed her peer. Sunlight traced glowing threads through her hair.

  “How?” she finally asked.

  “How what?”

  “How could you still … love us?”

  Sorweel looked down, thought of Porsparian, his dead slave, rubbing the mud and spit of Yatwer across his face. This was what she saw, he realized, the spittle of the Goddess, a magic that was no magic—a miracle. They picked and sneered and goaded, and yet saw only what their dread father had seen: the adoration proper to a Zaudunyani Believer-King. Hatred strapped his heart, his being, and yet she saw only desire.

  “But I despise you,” he said, returning her gaze.

  She continued peering for several heartbeats.

  “No, Sorweel. You do not.”

  As if hearing the same inaudible thing, they both looked to the clearing, their eyes sorting between the slow drifting points of fluff.

  Resolutions, promises, threats. These things whispered make hearts strong.

  No one need hear. No one save the Goddess.

  Deliver them, Mother. Deliver them to me.

  Shame is a great power. Even in the womb, we shrink from the furious glare of the father, the horrified glance of the mother. Before we draw our first wailing breaths, we know; the taunts we will flee, the alchemy of more refined derision, and the way it dwells in the meat of us, little pockets of despair, making foam of our heart, of our limbs. One can hold anguish in their teeth, fury in their brow, their eyes, but shame occupies us whole, fills our shrinking skin.

  Weakening even as it awakens.

  Part of Sorweel’s dilemma lay in the span between their sorcerous leaps, the way he so often found himself watching her while she dozed to recover her strength. She was a different soul when she leapt, one that murmured in fright, grunted for exertion, cried out in murky horror. Eskeles had also borne the curse of the Dreams, had also endlessly suffered as he slept. But then Eskeles had been nowhere near as serene as Serwa when he was awake. His nocturnal travails in no way contradicted his sunlit humanity. Sorweel could not hear Serwa whimper or sob without swallowing some kind of pang in his throat.

  When she slept it seemed he could see her as she could be, if only he could tear down the conceits of her gifts and station. What she should be were he strong and she weak.

  After she roused herself, they made one last sorcerous leap from the shoulders of the Demua to a hill that was more a monstrous stump of elevated stone, a pillar hewn at the base. Ivies thatched the clearings. Great oaks and elms raftered the gloom, their roots parsed about immense blocks of stone. Mossy ground wheezed beneath their feet. Elephantine roots spanned the cavities that inexplicably pocked the terrain, trailing ringlets of dulcet moss. The air was hard with the smell of things rotted soft. The light was diffuse and marbled with shadow, as if refracted through uneasy waters.

  “I have no recollection of this place,” Serwa said, wandering ahead.

  “At last,” Moënghus chided, “we can enjoy some death and ruin without being lectured.”

  Birdsong whistled through the greening heights. Sorweel found himself squinting at the glare of the sun through the canopy.

  “The ghouls are older than old …” she called into the dank hollows. “I wager even they’ve forgotten …”

  “But are they happy for it?” her brother answered. “Or merely perplexed?”

  The branching shadows climbed from his breast to his face, like some great black vein. Sunlight painted a thousand white circles about the rim of his nimil corselet. He was often like this, Sorweel had learned, before the melancholy that made him so mercurial struck. Glib. Sarcastic in the manner of those returning to some despised toil.

  Serwa stepped between two massive blocks, drew her hand across scabbed and pitted planes, along fractures worn as smooth as stones thrown up by oceans. She walked the way she was prone, at once waifish and intent, hard in the manner of souls absolutely assured of her power. It made her seem cruel.

  “The stone carries an ancient bruise … a … mustiness … older and more faint than any I have ever seen.”

  But then everything she did made her seem cruel.

  “Let the dead be dead,” her brother muttered.

  Her reply was muted for the intervening greenery, but no less musical. “One cannot raise walls against what has been forgotten …”

  The white-eyed warrior looked directly at him, smirking. “She was always Father’s favourite.”

  Sorweel stared down at scabbed and stained knuckles.

  “Who was Harweel’s favourite?” the Prince-Imperial pressed, mocking.

  Serwa’s voice climbed from the mossy, arboreal gloom. “This place was abandoned before Arkfall …”

  “I was his only son,” Sorweel replied, at last looking to the black-haired Anasûrimbor.

  There is a darker understanding between Men, shapes that can only be discerned in the absence of women—in the absence of light. There is a manner and a look and a tone that Men alone can see, and it exists as much between brothers as it does enemies from across seas. It needs no voice to be bellowed, no colour to be unfurled, only momentary solitude between masculine souls, a cinching of the air between them, a mutual glimpse of all the murders that had made each possible.

  “Yes,” Moënghus said, his tone ferrous. “I heard them speak of it in Sakarpus.”

  Sorweel licked his lips rather than breathe. “Speak of what?”

  “How good Harweel squandered his seed on your mother.”

  They shared a single hard breath between them, the one drawing in what the other expelled.

  “They said her womb …” the Prince-Imperial continued, “died before she did …”

  A fog rose up within the youth, one that chilled his skin for interior heat.

  “What happens here?” Serwa said, stepping from behind one of the monstrous oaks. Neither man was surprised. Nothing escaped her notice for long.

  “Look at him, Sister …” Moënghus said without breaking eye contact. “Tell me you do not see hate …”

  Pause. “I see only what I have alw—”

  “He even clenches his pommel! Threatens to draw!”

  “Brother … We have discussed this.”

  What were they talking about?

  “If he were to strike me dead now!” Moënghus cried. “Would you believe it then?”

  “All hearts are divided! You know this. And you kno—”

  “He! Hates! Look at hi—!”

  “You know that I always see deeper!” the Grandmistress of the Swayali cried.

  “Bah!” the towering Prince-Imperial spat, turning on his heel.

  Sorweel stood rigid, his fury not so much blunted as cracked into gravel for confusion. He watched Moënghus’s broad back dip and dwindle across the sun-striped floor.

  “Madness!” the youth spat to the girl. “Both of you are mad!”

  “Or maddened,” Serwa said.

  He turned to her, saw the same imperturbable expression he always saw.

 
“Am I such a riddle?” he asked on a snarl.

  She stood upon a canted slab, its back carpeted in black-green moss, its edges caked in white lichen. She seemed taller than him because of it … mightier. A lone lance of sunlight bathed her face, made her glow like her accursed father.

  “You love me …” she said, her voice flat as her gaze.

  Rage, as if he were a catapult and her voice the release.

  “I think you are an incestuous whore!”

  She flinched, and some vicious fraction of him exulted.

  But her retort fell as liquid brilliance from her mouth, rose as steam from the surrounding gloom.

  “Kaur’silayir muhiril …”

  Sorweel stumbled back, first for astonishment, then for articulations of seizing light. His feet pedalled air. He was thrown back, pinned against a great rutted oak. Her voice crashed upon him from all angles, as if he were a leaf tossed in the tempest of her will. Rancourous light flashed from her gaze, bright as the obscured sun. An obsidian nacre framed her, a black that twigged and branched as if chasing cracks into the very cut of existence. Falcons of gold battled her whipping hair.

  And she was upon him, not so much traversing as cutting down the interval between them, seizing his shoulders, setting his skin afire with her light, sucking all air from his breast with her emptiness, looming with the compressed weight of mountains, compelling, demanding …

  “What are you hiding?”

  Her lips opened about the surface of the sun.

  His words rose on the back of blackness to meet her demand.

  “Nothing …”

  Not as toil, as freedom.

  “Why do you love us?”

  “Because I hate what you hate …” Like words spoken on pipe-smoke. “Because I believe …”

  On the breath following a kiss.

  Ink had clotted and conquered his periphery, folding the vein-spangled wood and the airy spheres beyond into oblivion. She alone remained, a titanic presence, her eyes flaring like Nails of Heaven.

  “Can you not see our contempt?”

  A word like a wave to a friend.

  “Yes.”

  She leaned forward, wrath incarnate, terror incarnate, and he was blown as paint across the bark.

  “I think not.”

  His head arched back in abject terror, he could only stare down his cheeks at her catastrophic aspect, only moan his lament, his blubbering shame. His water spilled as hot as blood. His bowel.

  And in a span of a heartbeat it was all gone.

  Her sorcery. His honour.

  “Why?” she was crying. “Why would you love us? Why?”

  Shivers blew through him, twirled like a breeze. He had soiled …

  “Can’t you see we’re monsters!”

  Soiled himself. He glimpsed something uncertain, even vulnerable in her gaze … Fear?

  Trembling for … for …

  The reek of his own unmanliness rose about him …

  The proof.

  The first sob, wrenched from his breast by an ethereal fist. “Wh-who?” he coughed, his face grinning for madness. Degradation, crashing through, crushing against. Then, all of it.

  Everything.

  Losing Harweel. His little brother hot in his callused palm. Losing his inheritance, his people. The image of them—sinuous and obscene. Sitting with Zsoronga in the fading light, listening to Obotegwa forgetting to breath. The glistening cleft. Watching the Sranc-faced Goddess claw muck from her own womb. The brandishing—the bestial heat! The growl that climbed to the tip. Crying out as Porsparian threw his throat upon a spear. The lunging bliss! Fierce with … Taut with … Riven. Cringing in a cavern of inhuman faces, clutching Eskeles, the whole world roaring, raving, gibbering …

  Threads of seed branching hot across knuckled shame. His father flapping as a vexed goose—afire.

  His mother grey as stone.

  His seed! His nation! The smell of shit and shit and shit—

  Let-me-kill-let-me-kill—

  He was on his knees, bent forward, bobbing as if priming his gut to vomit. But he understood little or nothing of this—or anything. The keening noises that cracked from his chest were not his own. Not more …

  Proof.

  She stood gazing down upon him, cold and indistinct.

  “Who?” his throat scratched, his voice wheezed. A sound like cattle lowing.

  “Love us …” she said, turning aloof from his spectacle. “If you must.”

  He had shrunk beneath the mighty oak, curled against its cruelty, folding more and more of himself into the indistinct roar. And still her voice plucked him with … with …

  I have Compelled him!

  Confusion.

  What more would you have me do? What I have Compelled the ghouls will Compel also. He loves us.

  Her brother’s voice was indistinct, too much of the roar to rise above it.

  Father misjudged the depth of his wound.

  But it mattered not at all, the clarity of her accursed voice.

  Our Father is wrong about more than you know … The World overmatches him as it does us or anyone …

  He understood none of it …

  He simply carries the battle deeper.

  And the world swayed in spirals, slow and warm.

  My face dwells beneath your face … Shush and you will see …

  And the Mother hummed and stroked. With his own hands she bathed him.

  Hush …

  Hush, my sweet.

  “Momma?”

  Eternity dwells within you. A power indistinguishable from what happens …

  “Am I mad?” he asks.

  Mad …

  And ever so holy.

  “The Quya,” Serwa was saying, “are not to be trifled with.”

  Sorweel sat heedless of the plummet before him, gazing westward with swollen eyes. He had crept to a crater pooled with water following his humiliation, bathed as she had slept and Moënghus had skulked across their inland island. For what seemed a watch he had lain floating upon ancient black, numbed to the cold, listening to the slurp of his own motions, the sound of his own breathing. Not a thought had passed through him. Now, his hair damp, his breeches still sopping, he stared dumbfounded at their destination in the distance. It erupted from the table’s edge of the horizon, a silhouette only slightly darker than the sky gaping violet about it: a mountain stranded on a carven plain.

  Ishterebinth. The final refuge of the ghouls.

  He had dreamed of the Nonmen in his youth, as had every Son of Sakarpus. The Priests called them inhuman, the False Men, who had offended the Gods by usurping the divine perfection of their form, for making like women with men, and—most heinous of all—for stealing the secret of immortality. One Girgallic Priest in particular, Skûtsa the Elder, used to delight in regaling the children with descriptions of their wickedness during After-Temple. He would draw out the ancient scrolls, reading first in the ancient dialects, then providing lurid translations. And they would seem scriptural, the Nonmen, obscene for all the ways they surpassed Men, and yet somehow belonging to the wild and dark world in a way that Men could not, a race born of the blackest, most primeval recesses, harbouring a malice that would see them burn for all eternity.

  “Sranc with souls,” Skûtsa once declared in fit of palsied disgust. “Only the patience of their lies distinguish them!”

  And the horror that cracked in his voice had become tinder for dreams more fiery still.

  Now he sat dull and chill, staring at the apparition of the Last Mansion as Serwa explained why they would have to travel the remaining distance on foot.

  “You forget the toll. I would be too weak to protect you after we arrive.”

  “Then take us to that wooded hillock,” Moënghus said. “We can stay hidden until you recover. I wager it’s two watches to the Mountain from there.”

  “And if the Cant is seen? You would gamble everything to spare your feet?”

  “The Shortest Path, Si
ster.”

  They climbed down the encircling cliffs, and struck north and east across forest floors even more pillared, pitted, and rotted than those upon Nameless. Every so often they encountered the hulks of immense elms, dead and decrepit, climbing knuckled to neck-cramping heights, bark hanging like sack-cloth from sweeps of bone. Neither Serwa nor her brother made any comment, even passing beneath rafters of shorn branches.

  Heroes had been his fare, growing up—the recounting of triumphs, not humiliations. Sorweel was surprised, the way all degraded Men are surprised, to find that a station awaited him, that the degraded had a place reserved. He was the one who trailed, the one who was avoided. He was the one not spoken to, and only regarded to scold or to settle some point of comedy or ridicule. The remarkable thing was that he need not even contemplate these facts to grasp them, that this knowledge had always dwelled within him. The world never wants for abused souls.

  Moënghus slackened his pace to draw beside him, but acknowledged him in no way beyond his forbidding proximity. In all such exchanges, it was the place of the degraded soul to first implore.

  “What did she do to me?” Sorweel finally asked, watching the shadows dapple across Serwa’s pack and shoulders some twenty paces before them.

  “A Cant of Compulsion,” the man replied after consideration.

  Ghosts of what had happened plagued his innards.

  “But … how cou—”

  “Could she make you shit your breeches?” The hewn face turned to look down upon him, but with curiosity, not derision. There was something otherworldly about his white-blue eyes …

  Scylvendi eyes, Zsoronga had told him.

  “Yes.”

  The Prince-Imperial puckered his lips in thought, glanced ahead. Sorweel followed his gaze, glimpsed her face turning like a shell in a wave. She had heard them, despite the filtering birdsong, the twig-combing breeze. This he knew.

  “How does hunger make you eat?” Moënghus asked, still peering after her.

  They slept beneath dead elms that night with only the distance of the mountain wolves and their nocturnal wail to mark the leagues they had travelled. The following morning they threaded forest galleries so deep as to seem tunnels; they could scarcely see the sky, let alone gauge their progress. Giolal, the land was called, the famed hunting preserves of the Injori Ishroi. They trekked in silence for the most part. Sorweel walked without thought, at first, as though he were a being of glass, paralytic for fear of breaking. When he finally dared ruminate, images of the previous day came to him as cramps of shame and humiliation, and he could do little more than dwell on preposterous and petty schemes to secure revenge. But even then, the inkling had germinated within him … the knowledge that something more than their incestuous love affair moved the Imperial siblings.