“Do you not fear damnation?”
A careful look from the Hero-Mage.
“The Nonmen …” he said evenly. “They have taught us how to hide our Voices. How to bypass the Outside, find Oblivion.”
Eyes like bladders of ink, each reflecting the tripods across their shining curve. The fluting of gill-tissues along the neck. “You worship the spaces between the Gods …”
“Yes.”
A rasp like the screams of faraway children tangled in the wind. Inchoroi laughter. “You are already damned. All of you are already damned.”
“So say you.”
A deep chested rumble. Popping mucous. “So says the Inverse Fire.”
A flush of horror. Shaeönanra tensed against the sudden loosening in his bowel, not quite believing that the Inchoroi had dared name it aloud. Xir’kirimakra. The Inverse Fire. For a heartbeat he found his Voice divided between mere fear and what mattered. What? Did Aurang seek to seduce the Sohonc Archideme? Could he not see that Titirga was not one to suffer rivals, that Shaeönanra himself would be doomed were he to embrace their Holy Consult?
But these were vain questions. They fell away as quickly as Onkhis offered them up, so flimsy were the concerns that moved them. All that mattered, the Ground’s only consequential thing, was what he had seen …
Damnation.
Experience shredded into a thousand strings, each clawed and burned and burned, sucked like bottomless bones. Agony. Anguish. Horror. Lament. Shame … Shrieking-thrashing-screaming through the throat of his every memory, innumerable and one, groaning-choking-vomiting, his every particle a unique agony, a bereavement, a weeping-howling-scratching out eyes that grew and grew to witness anew, while burning-blistering-breaking—
It defeated the tongue, the intellect, what he had seen. Nevertheless it was in him, every moment in him, if not at the centre of his care then beneath, a hole that endlessly gnawed at his gut …
A terror, so profound, so abiding—and, yes, pure—that all other fears guttered into nothingness for lack of air. A terror that was a gift … such was the peace and certainty that followed upon it.
They had conjectured, the Mangaecca. They had experimented. They had taken captives and inflicted every possible agony simultaneously all in the name of some flimsy purchase, some scant knowledge of Hell. Drawing toenails, while crushing genitals, while setting afire, while murdering children, raping wives, strangling mothers, blinding fathers … They had visited lunatic misery on innocents, and they had found themselves utterly impervious, immune to the least remorse. Some of them had even laughed.
What was earthly anguish compared to what awaited them? Singular. Ephemeral. Little more than a bauble laid upon the monumental steps of the wretchedness to come. They were deluded fools, the Schoolmen of the Sohonc. Every one of them lived making belief—even more, making witless and numb—when it came to their Voices. It was sorcery they coveted, the lure of the power—such potency! The Voice had a way of walling off the future when power was at hand.
All Men wailed. All Men burned all the time. They need only die to realize it.
“So that is the source of your madness,” Titirga said. “The Inverse Fire.”
Shaeönanra closed his eyes against a shudder. “So you know of it …” he said on a long intake of breath.
“Nil’giccas told me. Yes.”
“He told you of the Three? The Three who entered the Golden Court of Sil during the Scourging of the Ark.”
“Upon the Upright Horn … Yes.”
“So you know what happened.”
A draft whisked through the chamber, the kind that washes over a floor of cloistered air in a flood. The golden infant skull braided into the Hero-Mage’s beard seemed to laugh for the to-and-fro sway of the fires potted upon the bronze tripods. It struck Shaeönanra that Titirga had stood absolutely motionless ever since setting foot in the Asinna. He seemed hewn of heavy oak as it was, but standing as he did, glaring from Man to Inchoroi to Man again, he almost seemed a thing of stone. Indestructible.
“Min-Uroikas had fallen,” the Hero-Mage replied. “The Ishroi laboured in vain to destroy the Ark, as did the Quya. They knew of the Golden Court, the Inver—”
“From Nin-janjin,” Shaeönanra found himself interrupting. Why? Why did they insist on repeating its name? A thing need not be named to be spoken of …
“Yes … From Nin-janjin,” Titirga repeated, something not quite identifiable sparking in his eyes. “And because they knew, Nil’giccas chose the Three to enter it. Two Ishroi, renowned for their valour—Misariccas and Runidil—and one Quya …” He paused as though to set his teeth against his hatred. “Cet’ingira.”
Shaeönanra found himself turning to the Inchoroi, cackling, crying, “He knows!” in a voice too maniacal to be his own. “He knows!”
“I know only what Nil’giccas told me. That Misariccas and Runidil returned shrieking—”
Yes. Shaeönanra had also shrieked … for a time. And wept.
“—and that Cet’ingira counselled his King to have them killed.”
A barking laugh. “And did he tell you why?”
A moment of fierce scrutiny.
“Because they could not be trusted. Because they had been ensorcelled … Possessed.”
“No!” Shaeönanra heard himself cry. “No!” Could this be him, wagging his head like a fly-maddened ox, gesticulating like an old hag at a funeral? “Because they had seen the Truth!”
Titirga gazed with undisguised distaste. “Such is the form of all possession. You know as mu—”
“Nooo!” Shaeönanra cried. “Nil’giccas lied to you! What else could he do? Think! Think of the war they had just won—think of the toll! The Nonmen had sacrificed everything, their wives, their daughters, to triumph over the Inchoroi. And now they discover that all along the Truth belonged to their foe?”
The Archidemu Mangaeccu began berating himself even before he finished, such was the unmanly violence of his expression. He had to recollect himself … Recall! He had to own what happened here, not for the sake of Men—for none would ever know—but for the sake of his immortal Voice.
“Nil’giccas lied to his Ishroi,” he continued, speaking on a long drawn breath, “just as he deceived you. He lied because he had to!”
Titirga stood watching him, his fulsome lips hanging open in hesitation. And Shaeönanra rejoiced, knowing even the mighty Hero-Mage had his doubts. That the Mangaecca could be seduced was no surprise, for they had always placed knowledge before honour. But Cet’ingira? The most famed of the Siqu? For that matter, how could any Nonman enter into a pact with Inchoroi?
Unless …
Shaeönanra cackled, feeling a new deliberation sop the wildness from his bones.
“Horrifying, isn’t it? Titirga. Hero of Ûmerau. Disciple of Noshainrau. To think that everything you have believed, you have believed for naught. A whole life expended, toiling, condemning, murdering, all in the name of misapprehension!”
The gaze of an old and undefeated chieftain.
“What has become of you, old friend.”
Shaeönanra had expected many things from this visit, but never that it would become so quaint.
“Yes,” he said on a sigh. “You did know me before. You knew many of us.10 You knew how fractious we were, how given to mercenary pursuits, all the Mannish flaws that you Sohonc used to evidence your superiority. You remember when gold was all that you needed to induce treason …”
He raised a hectoring fist, one Royal Umeri to another. “And now you hear the whispers … the rumours …” He drew his hand out to embellish the sarcasm. “Your torturers shake, so deep they must reach!”
He had stepped forward as he spoke, coming to a halt directly before the Hero-Mage and his legendary wrath. Something in the man’s height and proportion made him think of the Nonmen heroes, and how they never ceased growing.
“Possessed, you tell yourselves. Possessed! We are different because we are no longer ourselves. Y
ou counsel the All-King to crack our Seal, destroy us and all we have toiled to achieve. Our Voices are polluted, unclean!” He threw his back in Feal laughter, cackled with spite and glee. “So tell me, if we are possessed, who is our new owner?”
“The Tekne,” the Archidemu Sohoncu said with grim confidence. “The Mangaecca have been enslaved. You have been enslaved.”
Shaeönanra blinked. Of course the fool was unmoved. Of course he had his reasons. No matter. This was indulgence, arguing like this, availing reason.
He warred with his expression—something between a grimace and a grin. “Yes … But who is our new master?”
A peculiar weariness haunted Titirga as he shook his maned head: one not so much of as for.
Feal, something whispered from his gaze.
“A lunatic God … perhaps. The Hells that you think you see. Something … Something adulterate, foul. Something that craves feasting, that hungers with an intensity that can bend the very Ground.”
Aurang had stood silent during this time, gazing down at the two bickering men. After the intimacies they had shared, it seemed Shaeönanra could sense the pulse of his passion. Lust in the lazy tumescence of his member. Impatience in the incline of his shield-long head. Hatred in the flicker of membranes …
“Does that not trouble you?” the Hero-Mage pressed. “That you have but one eye!”
Tedious. Tedious. Tedious.
“Why, Titirga?” Shaeönanra implored. “Why have you come here?” He shook his head, arguing with the floor. “Did you hope to show me my folly?” And it all seemed a pantomime, this incontinence of voice and expression. For beneath, he knew exactly what he needed to do. He could feel it, the certainty of snakes coiled in the darkness, the confidence of things that neither run nor sleep. “There’s no folly in what I do, I assure you. I know. I have seen!” He jerked his face back, squinting and scowling. “What are your reasons compared to this? Your guesses? Your rumours of a dead age?”
“But what, Shaeönanra? What is it you have seen? Your damnation or your goad?”
“Did you hope to strike a bargain?” Shaeönanra exclaimed, spinning to face the Hero-Mage. “Or did you come here to cow me, to strut and boast and discourse, thinking that the throat of my design might choke on the bone of your glorious presence?”
The Hero-Mage had stalked him in a curious, distanced way, careful to move at tangents that would keep him facing both of his antagonists, Mannish and Inchoroi. His manner, which had seemed lazy with arrogance but a moment earlier, had become wary, expectant.
“Titirga … Did you come here to kill?”
For the first time the man surprised him.
“Of course I did.”
Six days.
Six days Cet’ingira, the most-famed of the Siqu, the Most-feared-and-hated, stands upon the High Threshold, the arcane bass of his voice climbing from the pores of all that could be seen, his arms outstretched, a myriad of Mathesis Pins drawn into a circle of sparking white before him, a disc of needles, endlessly pricking the fractal intricacies of the Barricades.
And Shaeönanra, the Balancer’s son who had risen to become Archidemu Mangaeccu, Master of the Cunning School, felt a different fear hiss through the anxious hum of his schemes. He retreated as if in disgust, took four steps, steeling himself against the impulse to cringe—because at any instant, any heartbeat, he could find himself cut or bludgeoned or blasted from this world and—
“Kill me?” he heard himself say, his tone far from manly.
The Hero-Mage laughed his famed laugh, the one that had inspired so many lays. With his beard and wolf-skin cloak, he looked both savage and indomitable, every bit as elemental as the legends painted him. With his Stain, drawn and tinctured in a manner no Man or Nonman had ever seen, he seemed outrageous with power.
“No, my friend,” he said, letting his gaze stray to the Inchoroi, hulking and inhuman. “I have come to kill this … obscenity.”
A new Age was dawning. Since the First Father, Men had always spoken to command the Ground. Since the Shamans, they had called and Reality had answered, a brother, a deceiver, an assassin. But there was another way, one without the treacherous hooks of meaning, one built up out of the granules of existence, the way termites raise their multiform wattle. A power that could be crafted and shaped, that could be applied to its own proliferation, and so accelerate, radiating out across the span of need and desire. A power that could uproot cities and hurl them across the Void.
The Tekne.
Mechanism. Only mechanism could save their Voices.
“Perhaps it is fitting,” Titirga said to the glistening Inchoroi, advancing a step. “Perhaps this is your Doom, to die here on the grave of Viri.”12
Wheezing silence.
“Shaeönanra,” Aurang finally said. “I tire of this.”
“Patience, my brother,” the Mangaeccan Archideme replied, drawing the Inchoroi back by the forearm, pressing him to the perimeter of the grand room.
It would happen soon.
“Brother?” the Hero-Mage cried, his voice cracked with what seemed genuine dismay, pained incredulity. “You call this monstrosity brother?”
Only now was it dawning on the fool, the intimacy of their pact, the truth of their Holy Consult. Only now, Shaeönanra realized, could he see how profoundly Damnation had conjoined them.
Man. Nonman. Inchoroi.
Six days. Until his voice dwindled to a rasp. Until blood fell from his nose, tracing the branches of his grimace. Six days singing.
Titirga strode toward him, to the centre of the Asinna, the point where all the glittering fires overlapped. Shaeönanra resisted the urge to raise his arms in warding. He understood why the bards called him the Bull in their songs. The way he lowered his face to glare through his brows. How he puffed out his chest, huffed fury through his flared nose. How he trembled for rage …
Titirga was the very embodiment of the Wirg, a true Long-boned Son of Ûmerau. He used all the tools the Gods had bequeathed him, including his famed stature. He always came close … eventually … always loomed, carrying the stink of the garlic they so prized in Sauglish.
Vanity. Nothing makes Men more predictable.
“You will answer for this, Shaeönanra!”
The Archidemu Mangaeccu turned his back on the Hero-Mage for a third and final time. He glanced at Aurang, who fairly hunched over his famished loins—an Inchoroi battle stance.
“You! Will! Face! Me! Feal!”
He nodded to the black shining eyes.
“Face me!” Titirga thundered, his voice booming so raw that spiders seemed to scuttle across Shaeönanra’s spine and back. “Need I show you the fact of your Damnation!”
A sorcerous word sizzled across the corners of everything. Aurang’s eyes flared crimson.
“Face me or di—!”
A crack of wood and stone, beam and joist. Shaeönanra whirled just in time to see it happen: the floor dropping, the brushed rug sucked down, folding into ravines about the falling Hero-Mage, the tripods tipping outward, fires bursting into sparks, the whole slipping into the plummet, a great white iris dropping into deeper stages of gloom—
Gone.
Shaeönanra finds the Nonman thus, sprawled unconscious before the Barricades—or what remains of them. He kneels at his side, lays fingers on his cheek. Warm. He looks to the shattered portal, to the hanging plates, the mangle of the Stain. His immobility shocks him as much as his terror shames. He has always been proud with power, Shaeönanra, knowing that even the Quya wonder at his subtlety. But now he is simply a Man, a lowly mortal, and he can smell his own stink taint the aura of burning.
The true sun is rising behind him.
The shadow of the Threshold arcs across the soaring cylinder of gold. He sees his frail silhouette hunched atop it. And he watches it descend, as inexorable as the rising dawn, sinking into the maw of the broken Barricades.
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. Shaeönanra 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.