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. Anas?rimbor…” He leaned forward to cast a thigh-bone of wood into the fire. “D?nyain.”
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 Kay?tas 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, Anas?rimbor Kellhus had given his children Mo?nghus. 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!” Mo?nghus 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 Ilculc? 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 Anas?rimbor 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 Anas?rimbor before him. Where Ishterebinth had sundered Mo?nghus 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 D?nyain.”
Sorweel’s smile felt crooked for crawling out from his arm. His heart hammered in his ears. The sound of Mo?nghus 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,” Mo?nghus 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 …”