“Why, Kellhus?” she called across the interval between them. “Why … persist …” Her eyes had grown wide as her voice had grown small. “Why … forgive?”
“I know not,” Kellhus said, shifting his position. “You are my only darkness, wife.” He wrapped her within greater arms, pulled her into the warm blanket of his embrace.
“The only place I can hide.”
Kelmomas clung to the cold beneath, the World rolling beneath the Void, willing his flesh to become earth, his bones to become twig and bramble, his eyes wet stones. His brother shrieked and wailed, knowing his mother could deny his father nothing, and his father wanted them dead.
CHAPTER
TWO
Ishterebinth
One topples from events mighty and great
as from clouds and not mountains.
—TSILARCUS, The Sumptitudes
Early Autumn, 20 New Imperial Year (4132, Year-of-the-Tusk), Ishterebinth.
“The Anasûrimbor is almost certainly your Saviour …”
There was serenity in confusion when it was profound, a peace that comes from fathoming so few distinctions as to grasp contradictory things as one. Sorweel was a Man. He was a prince, and a Believer-King. He was an orphan. He was the instrument of Yatwer, the Dread Mother of Birth. He was a Son of Sakarpus, scarcely a man. He was Immiriccas, great among the Injori Ishroi, older than the ages.
He was stretched between life and damnation.
He was in love.
He lay panting as the world resolved into sensible form. The Weeping Mountain loomed, but more as a papyrus cutout than anything substantial. His face pricked for being naked, bald. Clots of Emwama raced through fog, frantic, running as fast as their stunted frames would allow. Memories came flooding back, images indistinguishable from panic. Descending through screeching halls. Oinaral dying in the Holy Deep. The Amiolas—
Sorweel clawed his cheeks, fingers hooked in dimpled skin. He was free! Free of the accursed thing!
And halved.
He remembered the swine-larded Haul, the descent down the Ingressus. He remembered Oinaral’s father, Oirûnas, the monstrous Lord of the Watch.
He remembered Serwa bound and gagged, reaching out, even as his eyes found her in the mayhem, standing wrapped in a bolt of black that lay like paint across her skin—Injori silk. Wind thrashed the gold from her hair. Ishterebinth climbed beyond her, obstructing all creation with recombinant imagery and ruin. Smoke issued from points across its immensity.
Sorweel made to call out, only to be choked silent by misapprehension. Did she know? Had the Ghouls told her of the Dread Mother? Did she know what he was?
What he was supposed to do?
With consciousness comes place. They lay upon the Cirrû-nol, he realized, the great mall before Ishterebinth’s shattered gates. He pressed himself from the stone, drew up one knee.
“Wha-what happens?” he croaked over the uproar.
She turned to him as if jolted from some disturbing reverie. Her left eye was a violet grin for swelling, but her right fixed him with characteristic clarity. His breath caught in joyous certainty that she knew as little of his part in what had happened as he knew of hers.
Even then, he began rehearsing his lies.
“The Last Mansion dies,” she called. “The Intact war one against the other.”
“Good!” a voice barked from behind Sorweel. The young Believer-King turned on a start, saw Moënghus sitting upon debris as though upon a latrine, slouched, great arms slung across his knees, black-mane obscuring his face. He, like his sister, was clothed only in a bolt of silk, black like hers, only embroidered with a crimson horse motif, and bound into a kilt about his waist. Blood dribbled from the fingers of his right hand.
“Good?” Serwa asked. “What could be good about such a thing?”
The Prince-Imperial did not look up. The wailing of the Emwama sounded like bleating sheep.
“I heard you, Sister …”
Blood continued to bead and drip from his fingertips.
“Between my screams … I heard you … sing …”
“Pain too has its sorcery,” the Ghoul-most-hated had said.
They climbed the footings of the Weeping Mountain, as much fleeing those who fled the Soggomantic Gate as anything. Serwa led them into the graven heights, following the joints that welded the eastward ramparts to the greater bulk of Ishterebinth. The ways were guttered with shattered masonry, the slough from the faces and forms stamping the heights above. Smoke spewed from the countless shafts the Ghouls used to ventilate their obscene Mansion, streamers of grey and black, even white gilled with odious yellow. All of them had suffered, but Moënghus need only glance to know that his had been the greatest trial. They did not stumble and sway as he did, one thousand muscles warring over one hundred bones, a slouching motley of passions, grimacing about sobs, shuddering about breaths that stabbed for the ruin that inhaled them. They moved as singular souls possessing but one lever for their actions. They looked to the horizon, while he could only boggle at his naked feet. They had been tested, and their temper had rung true.
He had been sacrificed.
Mocked. Tortured. Possessed. Raped.
And now this … weeping?
No matter how far the High Floor dwindled behind and beneath them, the air nipped and nauseated for corruption. All of them blinked, periodically pestled their eyes with their thumbs for the sting. But only he sobbed. Only he shook for terrors buried a league below.
Who? Who was this little black-haired boy? Who was this child who drew the smirking eye of gossips wherever he pattered? “Imperial Bastard,” they had called him, a name he had even dared relish, for a time. Wear a thing long enough, and you will think it something earned.
Like the name Anasûrimbor.
The Weeping Mountain reeled about him, a vertical landscape of ghouls chiselled enormous and small, their poses unnatural, dead-eyed. Serwa found him huddling between great thighs of granite, somehow crouched, somehow muttering. Her beauty terrified him for but an instant.
“Podi! Brother! We must make haste!”
She loomed above him, upon the higher step as always, garbed only in depraved Nonmen silk. The purple cleft that was her eye did not so much obscure her beauty as shout her complicity. Graven heights and noxious plumes piled above.
“Yooooou!” he heard himself roar, a sound all the more titanic for the tremulous keen that had preceded it. His throat ripped about it. For the first time he could remember, he saw his sister recoil in shock.
A single blink occasioned her recovery.
“Harapior is dead,” she said with matching sibling fury. “You are still alive! How long you lay upon his unholy rack is something only you can decide.”
It made her all the more accursed and inhuman, spearing matters to the pith with but a single breath.
He cast his eyes from her aspect, spat for the taste of damnation. The sun. Even smothered in clouds, it was too bright.
To be human was to be bound, aye, to suffer what one was, always, no matter what the debility or perversity. To be human was to flinch from the raised hand, to conspire against the indignity, to shrink from the torment, run and run from the horror. And Moënghus was human—he had no doubt of that now. The notion that he might be more had been murdered in the black bowels of the Weeping Mountain … along with countless other things.
So they fled Ishterebinth, which had once been Ishoriol, possessing such might and glory as to be extolled to the ends of the World. So they fled the Nonmen’s last, guttering light. He climbed as they climbed, scrambling across the breakneck slopes, but where they fattened the distance behind them, he accrued only more emptiness. He could no more escape the Thresholds than he could carve his bones from his frame. He was human …
Unlike his accursed sister.
The bulk of the Mountain now lay between them and the sun, softening the contrast between the graven figures and the recesses they stared from. What had been int
ricate in bald sunlight now seemed dissolved for millennial neglect. Noses no more than pinched clay, mouths reduced to lines, eyes little more than holes between brows and cheeks. Moënghus started for realizing he and the others stood upon a great palm, the base of the thumb rising like the flank of a dying horse, fingers shorn so long ago as to be little more than nubs.
“Sing to me!” he heard himself cry. “Sing that song to me once again, Little Sister!”
Serwa regarded him with her infamous pity. “Podi …”
“Vas sillja …” he cooed in sneering mockery, hearing her voice wend dulcet through his flailing screams. “Do you remember? Vas sillja enil’cu va loinirja …”
“We have no time for th—!”
“Tell me!” he roared. “Tell me what it means!”
For a heartbeat, it seemed she might almost stammer. “No good can come of it.”
“Good?” he heard himself cackle. “I fear the damage has been done. I look for no good from you, Little Sister, not anymore. I seek only truth … Or has that also fled you?”
She watched him with a pensive sorrow he knew no Anasûrimbor could suffer, not truly. “‘Your lips,’” she began, tears welling, her voice splinted with false regret. “‘Only your lips can balm my weal …’”
Her voice trailed into the ghostly roar emanating from the Mountain.
“And what is the song?” he barked. “What is it called?”
He so wanted to believe the slack eyes, the tremulous lips.
“The Lay of Linqiru,” she said.
And it dropped from him, then, the ability to feel.
“The Incest Song?”
The first of many falls.
“It burdens you,” Harapior had said. “That name.”
Everything we say to one another, we also say to souls absent. We continually speak to the speech that comes after our voice, forever prepare those who would listen. No truth spoken is true simply because words have consequences, because voices move souls and souls move voices, a great radiation. This is why we so readily admit to corpses what we dare not confess to the living. This why only the executioner can speak without care of consequence. Our speech finds freedom only when the speaker is at an end.
This was how Harapior spoke to him: as to a dead man.
Honestly.
“No one can see us, here, manling, not even the Gods. This room is the darkest place. You can speak without fear of your father in the Thresholds.”
His courage had been that of the idiot. “I do not fear my father.”
“But you do, Son of Summer. You fear your father because you know your father is Dûnyain.”
“Enough of this madness!”
“And your brothers and sisters … Do they likewise fear him?”
“No more than I!” he cried. Few facts are more tragic than the ease with which outrage bends about terror, how we will betray anyone with our meaning so long as we are conceded the look and tone of defiance.
“Yes …” the ghoul said, once more hearing words other than those spoken. “Of course. For them, solving the riddle of their father solves the riddle of themselves. Not so you. Your riddle lies elsewhere.”
“I have no riddle.”
“Oh, but you do, Son of Summer—you do. Any mortal soul raised in such monstrous company must.”
“They’re not monsters!”
“Then you do not know what it means to be Dûnyain.”
“I know well enough!”
Harapior laughed the way he always laughed—without sound. “I will show you …” he said, gesturing to figures in the black beyond him.
And so he found himself chained before his younger sister, and he had wept, understanding the trap they had lain. He was to be her goad, as she was to be his. The ghouls would draw the knife that is sheathed in all love, and they would cut what they could. Harapior and his understudies smashed him against her, made a bludgeon of his suffering, and she remained … imperturbable.
When they exhausted what mundane atrocities they could commit, they turned to sorcery. In the dark, their heads had smoldered red, a muddy glow about blue-white precision. They were creatures of blood, no different than Men. Pain had its miracles, and chained beneath his nude sister, Moënghus learned the obscenity of each. He screamed, not so much for the sum of his torment as for its division, like a thousand thousand wicked little jaws with wicked little teeth affixed to his every vessel, his every sinew, chewing, savaging …
He screamed and gagged. He voided his bowel, bladder, stomach and dignity.
And more than anything he had begged.
Sister! Sister!
Show them! I beg you please!
Show them our Father’s portion.
And she gazed through him and … sang … words he could not understand, in Ihrimsû, the accursed tongue of the Ghouls … words that flexed and resonated, that coiled serpentine through the blackness surrounding … a wandering knife’s edge. She sang her love—of all things in creation, love!—but not to him, the one she had professed to love many times, to them, the abominations … the Ghouls!
He could scarce remember details. Endless convulsions. Hanging entirely intact and utterly mangled … skinned and shredded. Harapior whispering mock profundities, revelations …
“Think of Hell, child. This is but a scintillant drop in that ocean, what you suffer …”
And his divine sister, Anasûrimbor Serwa, celebrated and dreaded across the Three Seas, the one soul who could speak her father’s miracles … who could rescue her broken brother if she wished … If she wished!
Singing ancient lays … goading the ghouls to ever greater acts of depravity, the recitation of Torture Cants unknown to any Gnostic sorcerer, inflicting agonies unknown to this, the bleeding side of life. With the patience of fat wolves, they tore pain from pain, despair from despair, horror from horror, separated his ever quivering thread, so they might weave tapestries of sublime misery.
The physical indignities they had merely smeared upon him as butter. Like all artists, they were loathe to forego all visible sign of their labours.
“A drop …”
The Lord Torturer had stayed with him in the blackness afterward, watching him drip.
“I know because I have seen.”
I know.
Who was he, the wolf-eyed child upon the Aspect-Emperor’s knee?
The truth, Moënghus would later realize, had always lurked in Esmenet’s embrace, the absence of instinctive desperation, the way a decision of some kind always lay behind it … He loved her, more fiercely than any of his siblings could love, but he always knew, somehow. Anasûrimbor Esmenet, the Blessed Empress of the Three Seas, never captured him in her arms, never clutched and clung, at least not the way she did the others.
But as obvious as it was, the question of his parentage had never occurred to him—likely because she had hair as black as his. He had mooned over her, marvelled as little boys are prone to marvel at their mothers, adored the way his pallid siblings made her dark beauty wax bright. And he assumed that he merely stood halfway between his parents, possessing her jet hair and his alabaster skin. If anything, he had been proud of his distinction.
Then Kayûtas told him that mothers provide no more than the soil for a father’s seed.
Even after Theliopa and the others were born, Esmenet would come to cuddle “her bigger boys” together before bedtime, so one night he asked her if she were his real mother.
Her hesitation alarmed him—he would always remember that much. The pity would be forgotten.
“No, sweetling … I’m your adoptive mother. Just as Kellhus is your adoptive father.”
“Seeeee?” Kayûtas had said, nestled against her right side. “That’s why your hair is black, while ours is blon—”
“White, more like,” Esmenet chirruped, poking the boy for his impertinence. “Only slaves live in the sun—you do realize this!”
To dwell with and to not know is to trust; belonging is ever a m
atter of insensitivity to what divides. And what ignorance can no longer serve, only indifference can provide. Perhaps this was why the Blessed Empress had elected to make light what had buried him alive.
“So then who are my real mother and father?”
This time her hesitation terrified.
“I am your father’s second wife. His first wife was Serwë.”
He spent several heartbeats digesting these words. “The woman from the Circumfix? She’s my mother?”
“Yes …”
Absurd facts are often the easiest to bear, if only because of the way impossibility mimes abstraction. Things grasped with a shrug are generally things easily released.
“And my father … Who is he?”
The Blessed Empress of the Three Seas breathed deep, swallowed.
“Your mother’s … first husband. The man who delivered our Holy Aspect-Emperor to the Three Seas.”
“You mean the … the Scylvendi?”
And suddenly it became so obvious, the turquoise gaze regarding him in the mirror.
Scylvendi eyes!
“You are my child, my son, Moënghus—never forget that! But you are also the child of legends, martyrs. Short your mother and your father, none of this would be, and the very World would be doomed.”
She spoke in the rush to make reparation, to recast things lost as things gained. But the heart knows catastrophe as well as the mouth knows the tongue and its propensity to lie. Either way, there was very little she could say that would long survive the ruthless scrutiny of his brothers and sisters.
They would decide what he thought and how he felt about the matter. They always had …
At least until Ishterebinth.
They passed back into the forests of Giolal, walked beneath the dead boughs in shambling file, each too emptied to speak. They dared a fire, supped on sorrel, wild apples, and an ailing wolf they found limping through a ravine. Moënghus could scarcely feign sleep, let alone surrender to it. His sister and the Sakarpi youth had fairly collapsed into slumber, and he found comfort in the sight of them about the dying flames, or the memory of it. They fretted for him, he knew.