“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 Mo?nghus 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 Anas?rimbor.
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 Mo?nghus 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 intricate 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. Mo?nghus 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 Anas?rimbor 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 D?nyain.”
“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.”