The Nail of Heaven glared as high on the horizon as he had ever seen, hoisted upon the shoulders of constellations he did not know—alien stars. The night air kissed what injury he had bared, and for a moment, he could almost breathe …
But when he blinked he could only see the masticating light, the mouths of the ghouls singing what was unthinkable. Whatever hopeful gloaming his relief found, he need only blink to tatter it, squint to blow it away.
His shoulders hitched in silent laughter—or was it sobbing?
“Brother?” he heard his sister call. She watched him intently from her side, her face a mask of pulsing orange. “Brother … I fear y—”
“No,” he barked. “You … you do not get to speak to me.”
“Yes,” Serwa replied. “Yes, I do. Pestering is the right of little sisters.”
“And you are not my sister.”
“Then what am I?”
He graced her with a sneer. “You are your father’s daughter. Anasûrimbor…” He leaned forward to cast a thigh-bone of wood into the fire. “Dûnyain.”
The Sakarpi youth was awake and watching now.
“Kindly tip your head, Brother,” Serwa said. “Pour out Harapior’s foul concoction.”
“Harapior’s poison?” he replied in mock surprise.
Animated by some self-annihilating will, he proceeded to tell the flames how she and Kayûtas had toyed with him from the beginning, playing upon habits so profound as to rule without existing. He had always been the one known, the one counselled, the plaything of capering abominations. Where other fathers gave their children dogs so they might learn how to make a thing—a thing with teeth—love them, Anasûrimbor Kellhus had given his children Moënghus. He was their pet, an animal they could train to trust, to defend, even to kill. He could feel his voice constricting, his eyes widening for the lunatic dimension of what he apprehended. He was their human diversion, their puzzle-box, their chest filled with games.
“Enough!” the Sakarpi youth cried. “What madne—?”
“Truth!” Moënghus snapped. His smile seemed to crack the fired clay of his face. It seemed he could feel the inner slop ooze. “They are always at war, Horse-King. Even when they pretend to sleep.”
Sorweel lingered upon his gaze, swallowed. The fire snapped violently, and he disguised his start by turning to Serwa.
“Is that true?”
She regarded the boy for one heartbeat too long.
“Yes.”
Sorweel awoke just before dawn. He ached in arcane ways, pangs rooted in muscle and tendon, yet following paths outward, forming joints where none should be. He blinked against images from his dreams, Nonmen on chariots, loosing flaming arrows across fields of sorghum, laughing for the starvation sure to follow. Serwa lay opposite the dead firepit, curled for warmth, still sleeping. She had taken her left arm as her pillow, squashing her cheek against her mouth and nose, but she seemed no more vulnerable for laying so placid, so insensitive to her wicked surroundings. His memories of their escape from the Weeping Mountain were hazy, fragmentary where at all clear. He need only close his eyes, it seemed, to see her hanging in the Ilculcû Rift, naked between brilliant panes and shining geometries, fending the booming song of the Last Quya … And here she lay unconscious across leaves become dirt, clutching a bolt of Injori silk, and she seemed no less magnificent, no less invincible.
Whatever the merit of her brother’s case, there could be no doubting the Anasûrimbor did not break. The Quya themselves had crumbled about her! As had her brother …
As had he.
Even now, he could feel it, buzzing proof of what he could not bring himself to countenance the previous day. He could feel his own decapitation—or evisceration, or whatever one called violent amputations of the soul. He could feel the absence of Immiriccas, a nagging, a scratching at what was missing, a groping for sources that had been torn away with the Amiolas. He could feel his halving as surely as he could feel his desire for the miraculous woman slumbering beside him, too far to reach.
He loved this Anasûrimbor before him. Where Ishterebinth had sundered Moënghus from his sister, it had welded Sorweel to her and her cause. And how could it not, when he could remember Min-Uroikas? He had seen the Copper Tree of Siol fall on the Black Furnace Plain! With his own eyes he had witnessed the horror of the Inchoroi and their wicked Ark! How could he serve the Dread Mother knowing that She could not, that She was blind, as Oinaral had said, to the possibility of Her impossibility?
The No-God was real.
Many questions remained, of course—countless complications. Sorweel was newborn thanks to the Amiolas. His future lay blank before him, utterly inscrutable outside the fact of his conversion. And his past had yet to be rewritten, the history of hating and, yes, even plotting against the Aspect-Emperor, this man who dared the Gods in the name of Men.
The fact of her open eyes spared him this labour. She batted her unswollen eye, slurped drool the way any human soul would. “How, Sorweel?” she asked, her voice gentle, so as to not spook the sunrise. “How could you still love me so?”
He still lay as he had slept, his head resting in the crook of his arm. He swallowed, focussed upon a small spider scuttling along a barked branch on the forest floor between them, then found her eyes once again.
“You have never loved, have you?”
Something unfathomable gleamed in her eyes.
“I am as my brother says,” she replied. “I am Dûnyain.”
Sorweel’s smile felt crooked for crawling out from his arm. His heart hammered in his ears. The sound of Moënghus hacking and spitting snuffed any possibility of reply.
They collected themselves from the forest floor with an air of incredulity. They lived. They were safe. No one had possessed the heart to discuss anything yesterday, let alone what happened next. But sleep had sealed the interval between them and the Mountain, whose blue hulk yet obscured the southwestern horizon. Yesterday they had fled; today, they resumed a journey they had thought doomed.
“Father is almost certainly in Dagliash by now,” Serwa declared. “He needs to know what happened here.”
“So do we leap?” Sorweel asked, both alarmed and thrilled by the sorcerous prospect. The ghost of her lithe form tingled along the inside of his arm.
She shook her head. “Not yet. We’re too deep in the wood.”
“She fears the Mountain polluted her,” Moënghus grunted, spitting blood. If there was malice in his observation, Sorweel could not hear it.
“What are you saying?”
The Prince-Imperial twitched as if jabbed by a fork. He looked even more a ruin in the infant light. He held his face down, as though preparing to retch, but his white-blue eyes glared up from beneath his brow, peering through crabbed locks of hair. “The Cant of Translocation. Meaning turns on being, does it not, Little Sister? It’s Metagnostic … at the very limit of her abilities. If the Mountain has remade her, then it has unmade those abilities …”
The Swayali Grandmistress ignored him. “We go that way,” she said, pointing to the bald outline of a hill rising to their immediate north.
“But I’m guessing,” Moënghus continued, “that she has escaped unscathed …” He regarded her grinning as if he too had been untouched. “Eh, Little Sister?”
Serwa graced him with a blank look. “We’re too deep in the wood.”
And so they struck out beneath the lifeless canopies of Giolal, great boughs winding as pumice tusks, forking into branches worn into thorns. Sunlight showered through, grilling the ground with shadow. Sorweel accompanied Serwa, while Moënghus trailed various distances behind. No one spoke. Heat thickened the spare chill of the early morning air. Movement lubricated aching limbs.
“Oirûnas brought you the Hanging Citadels …” she finally said.
Sorweel told himself to not look stupid. “Yes.”
He could remember so little of what had happened after Oinaral had died in the Holy Deep.
“How does
a boy fall in with a legendary Nonman Hero?”
Sorweel shrugged. “The Hero’s son takes him on a mad journey through his mad mansion, all the way down to the Deepest Deep, where his father dwells …”
“You mean Oinaral?”
His heart winced for her knowledge of him. “Yes.”
I saw the Whirlwind walk …
“Oinaral took you to his father … His Erratic father. But why?”
“To let his father know that the Consult ruled Ishterebinth.”
She was peering at him now. “But why take you?”
He prayed the Spit-of-Yatwer that Porsparian had rubbed into his cheeks wouldn’t falter for his apostasy. What madness, depending on the dispensations of the very Goddess he now sought to deceive!
“I th-think because I could remember.”
And it seemed the greatest wonder and beauty he had ever seen, her blue-eyed belief.
“What happened when you found Oirûnas?”
The Believer-King of Sakarpus trudged onward, now watching the slow scroll of barren forest floor, despairing the perversity of his straits.
“Oinaral provoked him … intentionally, I think …” He drew a shuddering breath. “And in a fit of antique rage, Oirûnas killed him … murdered his own son.”
His friend. Oinaral Lastborn. The second brother the World had offered him after Zsoronga.
“And then?”
The youth shrugged. “It was like he … Oirûnas … came to his senses. And I knelt there … trembling upon the Deepest Deep, and I told him what Oinaral had instructed me to tell him … that the Vile had taken Ishterebinth.”
She paced him in silence for quite some time. The grade had tipped upward in stages, so that they now climbed as much as walked. Bare white sky could be glimpsed through scrambled growth ahead, revealing the bare line of the summit.
“I have some experience with the Amiolas,” she said without prompt or warning. “Seswatha wore it thrice, more than any other man. Each time, he was changed irrevocably—because of Immiriccas, the Goad. Why Emilidis would use such a vengeful proxy for his artifact has always been a matter of fierce debate. Immiriccas was a stubborn, ferocious soul. Seswatha believed it was Nil’giccas’s doing, that the Nonman King compelled the Artisan to use him, hoping to instill the Goad’s hatred in every Man who donned the Amiolas.”
Sorweel expelled a reservoir of anxious air. Blinking, he glimpsed his lover, Mu’miorn, in the Entresol, so filthy and malnourished. He shook the image away.
“Yes,” he said more raggedly than he would have liked. “Stubborn.”
They clambered up slopes of bare sandstone, rock that twinkled on different angles of sunlight and observation. The sky seemed to shrink from all things terrestrial, featureless and starving. Moënghus had fallen behind—an alarming distance, Sorweel thought, but Serwa did not seem concerned in the least. Together they tottered to the pinnacle of the scalp, watching the distances rise to greet their will to circumvent them, hills folded into ramps, piling into the crisp blue of the Demua mountains.
Their first leap was going to be mighty.
He turned to Serwa in abrupt concern, recalling what Moënghus had said earlier. She was already watching him—waiting. His breath caught for her beauty, how the Injori silk managed to at once conceal and expose her nudity.
“There’s something I must tell you before my brother comes,” she said. A gust caught her flaxen hair, lashed it about her face.
The youth cast a glance down to Moënghus labouring up the slope, then looked back to her squinting. “What?”
“The love you bear for me …”
It was too windy to breathe, he decided.
“Yes.”
“I have never seen anything like it.”
“Because it’s my love,” he lied. “And you have never seen the likes of me.”
She smiled at that, and he almost whooped for wonder.
“I thought I had,” she said, still peering at him. “I thought you callow, wrecked by hatred and sorrow … But that was before …”
The Believer-King of Sakarpus swallowed.
“Sorweel … What you did in the Mountain … And what I see in your face! So … divine …”
A dark, masculine corner of his soul realized that for all her worldly knowledge and power, Anasûrimbor Serwa, Grandmistress of the Swayali, was still a child.
And what did lies matter so long as love was real?
“Ware yourself!” Moënghus barked, now scaling the bald stone immediately below. He climbed into their midst, chest heaving, looming, scowling.
“Their words are never soft, Horse-King … only too sharp too feel.”
Serwa had no difficulty with the Metagnostic Cant. Sorweel found that leap and the one following exhilarating in ways he could not articulate. Where before he had been thrown, now he strode from place to place, bringing horizons to heel with a single planted foot. He found it hard to concentrate, what with his every other thought reaching for a soul that was no longer his own, knowledge assumed yet missing, desire kindled yet bereft of fuel. He knew he was broken, that the Amiolas had rendered him a perpetual fragment, but whether dealing with Moënghus or Serwa, he found this made him more impervious, more thoughtlessly assured.
Her brother’s aggrieved humour forced them to segregate, and so the young Believer-King found himself, impossibly, alone with the Aspect-Emperor’s daughter upon the flank of Shaugiriol, or “Eaglehorn” as she called it, the northernmost peak of the Demua. Finding some place to comfortably sleep was no easy task on a mountainside. Moënghus claimed the first, meagre horizontal shelf they encountered, forcing him and Serwa to scale a diagonal cleft to a lolling tongue of granite some twenty cubits above. Sorweel’s hands seemed to float and his boots seemed leaden. He dared not look up, lest some opportune glimpse of her nethers strike him numb. He feared for his life as it was, such was his vertigo, the sense of sideways gravity drawing him outward. But he clung and he climbed, the stone close enough to his face to smell. His breath a shallow pang, he followed her out to the edge of the outcropping, joined her sitting, gazing. He silently thanked the Hunter for the preternatural absence of wind.
The Nail of Heaven flared high and white directly to the north, frosting the nocturnal tracts below, and he listened as she explained the vast stage before them—the Leash, and Agongorea, and the soaring Yimaleti—enthralled not so much by her knowledge as by her proximity, her heat in such high, clean air, and he wondered how it could possibly be, wooing the daughter of an incarnate God with weapons provided by one without time or place.
“And Golgotterath,” she said, “lies in that direction.”
If she had said “Min-Uroikas,” his bones would have bolted in their flesh. Instead he turned, heart thrumming, to kiss her bare shoulder. She clasped him by his soft-furred cheeks, drank deeply from his lips. He lay back, drawing her down upon him. Taking the stars as her mantle, she straddled him, whispered, “I am not what you think I am,” as she lowered her fire upon his.
“Nor am I,” he replied.
“I can see through you …”
“Nooo,” he groaned. “You cannot.”
And so they made love, perched high on the Eaglehorn, the mountain from which so many ancient invasions had been spied. They moved slowly, gasped rather than cried, and yet the violence of their coupling, the desperation, would leave them sapped of all difference, wrapped one about the other, slicked in the same sweat, breathing as a single human being.
He awoke for a need to urinate. Eaglehorn’s stone was harder than it had seemed in the fog of carnal undertaking: the ground gnawed with grit and cold. Serwa lay nestled against him, buttocks to thighs; he rolled away, lest his rising lust disturb her. Far more than he or Moënghus, she required sleep. So he lay breathless and throbbing, his manhood aching in open air.
He gazed northward, searching for distraction. Golgotterath lay out there … somewhere. He looked for some glimpse of its fabled glimmer, but found himself
peering after a flicker of movement instead, something hanging high in the great gulf between mountains. He squinted, even raised a hand to shield the Nail’s glare.
Horror climbed as a foam through him, crawling from his innards to his extremities …
A stork strung the dark void, buoyant upon the gusts, edges bleating.
The whole mountain seemed to turn on a wheel moving too slowly to see but still quickly enough to dizzy.
The Dread Mother was watching.
She had not forgotten her apostate assassin.
She knew.
His thoughts roiled. How did the Old Gods punish his brand of treachery? Damnation?
Would he burn for loving Anasûrimbor Serwa?
For seeing what Holy Yatwer could not?
He lay motionless, his body pressed against the space between him and the woman that had so bewitched him. A sob cracked the chill air, and he started a second time, afflicted by the mad certainty that he had authored the noise. But it was Moënghus, he realized, weeping upon his shelf below. Bull-chested gasps punctuated high-hooking moans, so obviously the issue of someone mighty, but belonging to a child all the same, the little black-haired boy who had been raised among the Dûnyain.
And so the Believer-King drifted back to sleep believing sleep would be denied him.
Mu’miorn held him pinned to the pillows, grunting in time with his thrusts. Unpared nails left threads of pink and violet across milk white skin.
And then Serwa was crying out to him, and he found himself shivering upon the lip of oblivion. “We are in peril, Son of Harweel! Up! Up!”
He blinked against the dawn glare, the impossible bright, rolled to his fours groaning, immediately realized that what he had thought soil upon their roost was in fact the aggregate of bird droppings. He pressed himself to his feet, only to be felled by the yawing spaces, the plummet of what seemed all things …
Serwa was crouched at the edge, staring down. “Do you see them, Brother?” she was calling. “Approaching from the east!”
Sorweel steadied himself upon one knee, squinted at the Grandmistress, dumbfounded as much for her beauty as for the dregs of unwanted dreams. His breath bubbled about the fact that they had lain as man and wife—man and wife! And now …