The Unholy Consult (Aspect-Emperor #4)

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,” Mo?nghus 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 Mo?nghus trailed various distances behind. No one spoke. Heat thickened the spare chill of the early morning air. Movement lubricated aching limbs.

“Oir?nas 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 Oir?nas?”

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, Oir?nas 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 … Oir?nas … 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. Mo?nghus 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 Mo?nghus 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 Mo?nghus 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, Anas?rimbor Serwa, Grandmistress of the Swayali, was still a child.

And what did lies matter so long as love was real?

“Ware yourself!” Mo?nghus 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 Mo?nghus or Serwa, he found this made him more impervious, more thoughtlessly assured.

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