And of course the bronzed skull of an infant child braided into his beard—his famed totem.
“Archideme,” Shaeönanra repeated, offering the ritual repetition, at once a rebuke and reprieve: to refer to equals by name before formal greetings was an affront among the Umeri. Had the Archidemu Sohoncu at last adopted the crude ways of the Cond?
“You look pale” Titirga said. “It is good that I bring sunlight.”
Shaeönanra snorted.
“You Mangaecca,” the Hero-Mage continued, “always thinking that Wisdom is a mushroom. The Ground is so broad, and yet you and your brothers insist on digging deep.”
A sour look.
“Nogaral greets you … Archideme.”
Titirga walked about him as if pacing the high corner of a circle. He carried himself as only a master of the Sohonc, the Learned School,5 could: erect in the manner of nimble, sound-sleeping men, relaxed in the way of high clan-nobility. He gestured to the marmoreal wreckage about them, the stumps of pillars struck in arrested daylight.
“The ruins of Viri.”
“The very same,” Shaeönanra replied.
“A lesson,” Titirga said, “to those who would dig too deep.”
Shaeönanra sighed conspicuously. “To what do I owe the honour of this visit?” he asked, gesturing for Titirga to enter his vast abode.
“Whispers,” Titirga responded, drawing his gaze about him before stepping into the shadow of Nogaral’s gate. He was making an inventory, Shaeönanra knew, of all the Wards coiled within the stonework about him.
Nothing that could threaten him—certainly.
Casting a final glance at the impossible dusk, Shaeönanra strode forward, baring his back the way the laws of hospitality demanded. He fairly cracked his teeth for apprehension.
He passed beneath the enormous lintel, into the warmth of plastered walls. The Wind’s roar was pinched into a chalky whistle. A step ahead of the Hero-Mage, Shaeönanra walked on a bolt of sunlight so bright that, for the first several paces, the braziers were filled with wavering invisibility for fire.
“Whispers brought you here?”
“Aye,” the man said from behind. “They say that you have found something.”
Had he not known Titirga, Shaeönanra would have thought him a rank fool, coming here like this, alone. But he knew Titirga’s might, and more importantly, he knew the way the man used hectoring boldness to magnify that might. To come here like this was to say he could arrive at any time …
And that he possessed no fear.
Shaeönanra paused and turned, regarded his old rival. The man had a warrior’s face, chipped from fearless bone, everything blunt in the way of shields. “What does it matter what we find?” he said. “The Ark is a riddle without solution.”
The first hard moment passed between them.
“Who,” the Archidemu Sohoncu replied, “can say which riddles can or cannot be solved beforehand?”
He gazes past the mad Nonman, to the second Horn, vast and golden, its phallic curve canted over the mountainous ruin of the Occlusion.
“None possessed my cunning.”
Cet’ingira lowers his chin to his chest.
“We shall see.”
“Come,” Shaeönanra said. “Loose your gaze. See. You will understand what I mean.”
He resumed leading Titirga down the main reception hall, “winding the small,” as the Nonmen put it, affecting careless questions about the affairs of the All. “Do they still riot in Sauglish?”6
“The Library is secure,” the Sohonc Insinger7 said in clipped dismissal. “And yet, I see Nogaral is all but abandoned …” he added in an airy, peering-around-corners tone. “Just as they say.”
The Archideme of the Mangaecca resisted looking back, knowing the Hero-Mage smiled.
“Who says?”
At last they outran the final vestiges of the Day Lantern. Their shadows now jumped in counterpoint, sweeping like spiders’ legs as they approached and passed each of the corridor’s flaming braziers.
“Your spies, Shaeönanra.”
The Archidemu Mangaeccu managed to stifle his laughter. They walked the remainder of the corridor in silence. Despite his worry, Shaeönanra had occasion to feel shame for the mean and brutish nature of his abode, for in spite of everything, he had been raised an Umeri of the Long-bones, the same as Titirga. He knew the askance judgments, the summary ease of the man’s condemnation: Only dogs dwelt in kennels.
But what did it matter, this false home, when their true abode would drop any mortal to his knees? The Ark. They could stack a hundred Libraries within it … A thousand!
At last they entered the broad circle of the Asinna, the expansive hub of Nogaral. A great rug woven of brushed white grasses softened both the floor and the gloom. Bronze tripods glowered golden, casting yellow petals across the weave. Tablet racks fashioned of black ash loomed about the chamber’s circumference. Shaeönanra stifled a grin of duping glee, knowing that a stylus had never touched any of them.
He walked toward the lone attendant—a near-naked Scintian slave—who awaited them with refreshment near the centre. He paused and turned when he realized that Titirga had failed to follow him.
“There is someone beneath me,” the Hero-Mage said scowling. “Someone deeply Stained.”
Shaeönanra paused … nodded. “A precaution, nothing more. It is of no consequence.”
Wrath flashed in Titirga’s eyes. “Nevertheless, there remains someone beneath me. Someone hooded in our shared sin.”
They gazed at each other with the flat hostility of lizards. Shaeönanra found himself shirking first, if only to hasten the pantomime—or so he reassured himself. Even still, he could feel the prickle of stink beneath his robes. The ache of expectation in his throat.
“Must I take precautions of my own?” Titirga asked, his voice as mild as blades in water.
The Archidemu Mangaeccu made as if his throat required clearing. “I apologize. He will withdraw.”
This earned a heartbeat of avid scrutiny.
“No. I would like to hold him in my eye.”
Again, Shaeönanra found himself wilting before the Hero-Mage’s glare, exactly (it seemed to him) as he would have in the old days. Paramount among the many worries that had plagued this mad gambit was the fear that he could no longer be the Feal that Titirga would expect him to be, now that death had become his sole horror …
Now that he had seen.
“Very well,” Shaeönanra conceded, bowing in the shallow, cursive way of the Umeri. He turned to the attendant. “Summon our …” He paused as if at the humour of the word Onkhis had delivered to him. “Our guest.”
His terror plain, the young slave scampered into the gloom of the nearest hallway. Shaeönanra resumed suffering Titirga’s onerous regard …
And contempt, as it turned out.
“They speak of you often in Ûmerau and Sauglish,” Titirga said, his manner sinister for being so bland. “They say you have the eyes of a serpent …”
Shaeönanra smiled. Vanity had been a well-known flaw of his, yes. He had preened in the days before …
“No. Just a dog. No different than other Men.”
What a child he had been.
They call it the Threshold, a narrow phalange of iron set high upon the Upright Horn, the hanging porch of the Barricades, which the Ishroi of old had raised about the uppermost sanctum of their wicked foe. You can see the Nonman there as much as not, sitting on the edge, where the air is too thin for fat men to breathe, waiting for souls more ordered than his own to tear down the Barricades.
“What the Artisan has wrought …” Shaeönanra says to him.
“Does not seem possible.”
The Archidemu Mangaeccu nods.
“Yes … But only if you look at it as something to be forced.”
Tears well in the Nonman’s eyes. “What are you saying?”
“Some doors need not be broken.”
The attendant reappeared, p
ale, eyes anxious unto rolling. A raggish shadow lurched beyond the threshold behind him, a movement that would have been limping were it not balanced leg for leg. At the last instant Shaeönanra turned to watch the mighty Titirga’s face …
He saw the famed eyes slacken, dull—even weary in the manner of wise men grasping the inevitability of horrific futures. How many years of concerned watching? How many months of labourious counsel, fretting this very possibility …
An odour of sweat and fish insinuated the chamber.
They stood thus, motionless. Something fluid had entered the breathing silence of the room. A fluttering of mucous and membrane.
Even though nothing was said, Shaeönanra could see it plain in the Hero-Mage’s look.
True. The dread rumours were true.
The Archidemu Mangaeccu turned to the newcomer as much to conceal his smile as to bask in the glory of his foul image. For he had literally wept upon finding him and his brother, wept for joy, knowing that the two could decipher the horror of what they had seen.
The creature stood naked, as was his wont, his wings folded into wicked hooks about either side of his great skull, which would have been cumbersome, had it not curved into a crest, narrow and deep, like an oyster set on end. A proportionate face hung from the fore, loutish with the absence of expression, nostrils drawn into shining gashes, sockets plugged with lobes of bare white meat. A second face filled the mouth, sheathing a second skull fused within the crocodilian jaws of the greater. Second eyes regarded the Hero-Mage with leering expectation. Second lips grinned about teeth like nails …
The light cast by the tripods slicked the creature in lines of luminous white, yellow and crimson, but otherwise, the intestinal translucence of its skin rendered it devoid of colour—the pallor of things drawn from the depths. Though he stood no more than half again as tall as man, he seemed enormous: for the wings, for the fiendish stoop, for the webbing of stone-dense muscle …
And Shaeönanra could feel the tugging glamour, the promise of surrender within irresistible limbs. He could feel his own ardour rise, an answering will to be taken … ravished!
Aurang … a fabled Inchoroi … A creature out of legend and childhood terror.
His lover.
“He bears the Stain as deeply as any Quya …” Shaeönanra heard Titirga say from behind him. The Mangaeccan Archideme turned from his infatuation to face his hated foe.
“Is this why you await me thus?” the Hero-Mage said. He bent his head in a curious, almost Cunuroi way, as if some rage to kill bent him from within. “Do you think that combined you could rival me?”
And Shaeönanra knew that this was no ploy, that Titirga would, without a breath of hesitation, deliver his impossible fury to his tower. He had heard the tales—the whole Ground had heard the tales. Titirga Mithalara, they called him—the Giver of Mercy!—ironic renown for his ruthless extermination of his foes. He was certainly the most powerful Insinger ever born. And if what Cet’ingira said was true, the most powerful, period. No living Quya had the purity of his Recitations. Even his Stain was different, somehow muted, as if he could cut the Inward without scarring it. Even now, simply regarding him, his distinction literally glared from his image, a strange, sideways rinsing of the Stain.
The vital difference. The threat.
They said he had been blind as a child, that Noshainrau himself had found him begging in the streets. They said he went mad while Canting. They said his words seized things that should not be seized.
Shaeönanra gestured to the attendant to dispense the sere.8 The fool almost fumbled the vessels for terror.
“Rival you?” he replied under cover of this trivial distraction. “The Ground is at peace. The Scintya are pacified.9 The All-King watches from Ûmerau.” He turned with a bronze vessel that Titirga waved away.
“Aurang is my guest,” he said, sipping the burning liquor.
The Hero-Mage did not shout or rave. He did not need to, so grating was the resolve of his voice.
“It is Inchoroi.”
The man spat the name with its clipped, Nonman inflection, the hatred of his teachers cracking his voice. Inchoroi. For the first time, he let slip his Umeri face—the one that would claim all judgment for itself, such was the gulf that divided the Feal from the Wirg—and beseeched his rival Archideme.
“Shaeönanra … Think!”
Think. No word was so raw with ancient assumption.
The Archidemu Mangaeccu simply regarded his Sohonc counterpart, the way one might regard a fool brother who has yet again spoken foolishly. Something scarcely perceptible hardened the man’s stance and manner.
“I will not implore you a second time, old friend.”
Finally. A genuine threat. Shaeönanra pursed his lips against the tickle of his thin mustache, sighed as if in profound resignation. He glanced at the black coin of sere swinging in the bottom of his appropriated cup, downed it with a gasp.
How could the man know? Even with his rumoured Grace. There was no going back, no undoing what had been done, no unseeing. Shaeönanra had committed unspeakable … nay, unthinkable … acts. They all had. Debaucheries. Desecrations of self and other. Shrieks for cries of passion. Blood for grease. Mere recollection set his skin afire, such was the orgiastic ecstasy. He had exalted in the trackless void, the hole where good and evil had once been.
And he had resolved. Resolved most of all, for he had seen.
He watches the true sun rise above the horizon’s crown, low and bloody as sunset, throwing shadows outward along lines the Nonmen could describe in arithmetic. He can sense Cet’ingira’s desperation, so he prolongs the reverie, pretending to wonder at the fragments of darkness scoring the broken landscape below.
Then he turns to the Barricades, examines its fractal complexities.
He begins to sing …
His voice slips the point of vocalization, drops outward in every direction, until all of Creation sings with him. Between his hands, a needle of raw incandescence twists into existence, shines with a brilliance undimmed by the glare of dawn.
Shaeönanra turns to the great Nonman Quya. “Do you see, old friend?”
Cet’ingira stands gazing, parsed by the sun into silken light and dolphin shadow. A vulture rides a great arc in the blue emptiness behind him, ragged and black. More and more, the scavengers have taken to circling the Horns.
“The Barricades,” he continues. “They fold … intervals. Somehow Emilidis found a way to pinch emptiness into angles. This was why no dispensation of sheer force could batter them down … In a sense, everything you and my predecessors threw at it simply … missed.”
The black eyes pierce him. “And what is this?”
“A Mathesis Pin … A derivative of an ancient Entelechy Theorem. It whittles force down to an arithmetical point—pricks where all else bludgeons …”
Wonder dawns in the ancient gaze. “A force that does not occupy space … cannot be redirected in space.”
“Yes,” Shaeönanra says. “My gift to you.”
He could feel it all the time, what he had seen, feel it like worms in his bones, rotting him, making him less substantial than what he was, a tingling fog, a meaty flex. Horror now thumbed the edges of his every sensation.
The image of his Damnation.
“Who are you to condemn?” Shaeönanra cried in the mock way of too-learned Men. “The Schools have no stake in Nonman wars.”
This much was true. The Siqu were loathe to speak of the War—even Cet’ingira, who had led the Mangaecca to the Ark and the revelation of the Xir’kirimakra. Their feud with the Inchoroi was theirs and theirs alone, so much so they denied their Mannish pupils all but the most elliptical knowledge of it.
But Titirga frowned as if at a tiresome juvenile. “Who are you to decide our stake?”
Shaeönanra stood blinking, cursing. “How?” he cried, holding an arm out to the hoary majesty of Aurang. “How can you fools not see how small this makes us?”
“Plainly,??
? Titirga replied, frowning at the creature’s groin.
“Fool! The stakes of everything have been rewritten! Everything!”
At long last fury clenched Titirga’s brow.
“What was sane before we knew of the Ark remains sane now! Shaeönanra! This thing is … is obscene!”
Why could they not see? They were every bit as damned as he—damned! What overriding reason could there be? What possible logic could annul Eternity?
“The sky, Titirga! Think! The sky is an endless void. Each star is another Sun, like our own, and Grounds spin about them—whole Grounds hanging like motes in the Great Void!”
He was not simply offering them salvation, he was showing them sanity!
“Other Grounds?” Titirga cried with a derisive bark, and why not? when the Ground was by definition the basis of everything. It was just as Aurax had said. Truth becomes ignorance when Men make gods of Deceit.
“I know how this sounds,” Shaeönanra said. “But what of the Ark? The Inchoroi? They prove the existence of other Grounds, do they not? Grounds like our own!”
“Noooo …” the glistening Inchoroi rasped, speaking an archaic intonation of Ihrimsu, his inhuman voice falling like a flake of ice upon sweaty skin. He had stepped into Shaeönanra’s blind flank and now loomed over him, his frame a sleek motley, like fish skinned and sutured together. “Not like your own.”
The Hero-Mage fairly gaped at the creature.
“It speaks to me.”
“This Ground …” Aurang continued, oblivious to his transgression. “This Ground is the one Promised. Salvation lies within your grasp. Salvation in this life …”
Insolence.
“Other Voices must commend yours before you speak,” Shaeönanra said to the creature, trusting the savagery of his backward glance to serve as warning.
But Aurang continued his shining scrutiny of Titirga. A transgression that Shaeönanra found unnerving.