So, I reread this passage it there are a number of curious things I hadn't thought about:
But the boy clutched his father’s sword, crying, “So long as men live, there are crimes!”
The man’s eyes filled with wonder. “No, child,” he said. “Only so long as men are deceived.”
For a moment, the young Anasûrimbor could only stare at him. Then solemnly, he set aside his father’s sword and took the stranger’s hand. “I was a prince,” he mumbled.
The stranger brought him to the others, and together they celebrated their strange fortune. They cried out—not to the Gods they had repudiated but to one another—that here was evident a great correspondence of cause. Here awareness most holy could be tended. In Ishuäl, they had found shelter against the end of the world.
Still emaciated but wearing the furs of kings, the Dûnyain chiselled the sorcerous runes from the walls and burned the Grand Vizier’s books. The jewels, the chalcedony, the silk and cloth-of-gold, they buried with the corpses of a dynasty.
First, why would his "eyes fill with wonder" at what the Prince says to him?
Second, it seems to be saying that them finding Ishuäl was fortunate. That it proved "correspondence of cause" but then again, framed as it is, the passage could well be saying that finding an
Anasûrimbor was the fortunate part.
Aside from that, I took to wonder about Ishuäl. Odd facts about it:
Despite it being an alleged product of Celemomas, the name Ishuäl is Ihrimsû for "Exalted Grotto" not Kûniüric, or Dûnyanic (which is Kûniüric in origin). Why would it have a Nonman name, if it was human built? Further more, when Kellhus first enters a Nonman mansion, he remarks:
So like the Thousand Thousand Halls … So like Ishuäl.
...
The work of Nonmen.
Indeed, I find it highly plausible that Ishuäl is a Nonman mansion, which led me to think, why was it made, yet uninhabited. Sticking with the thread of the name though, I curiously looked up what "grotto" would mean.
The word comes from Italian grotta, Vulgar Latin grupta, Latin crypta, (from the Greek κρύπτη krýptē "hidden vault").
This was interesting to me, but I felt it too tenuous to really be much. Then I happened to be rereading WLW, and I came across this:
For his part, Achamian did not know what to believe. All he knew was that the Mop was no ordinary forest and that the encircling trees were no ordinary trees.
Crypts, Pokwas had called them.
...
Aside from his one nightmarish dream of the finding the No-God, he had dreamed of naught but the same episode since climbing free of Cil-Aujas: the High-King Celmomas giving Seswatha the map detailing the location of Ishuäl—the birthplace of Anasûrimbor Kellhus—telling him to secure it beneath the Library of Sauglish... In the Coffers, no less.
"Keep it, old friend. Make it your deepest secret..."
Here is a reference to "crypts," the trees of the Mop, and this triggers Akka to dream of Ishuäl. Coincidence, possibly, but I doubt it.
It has occurred to me before that Akka's insistence that the dreams are essentially random is absolutely false. They may have been at one time, when all the souls of all the Mandate sorcerers seemed essentially "the same" but not now, not for Akka who walks a very different path.
So, is Ishuäl a crypt? Is so, then for who? If it is a "hidden vault" then what was necessary to hide?
Considering it's location, it seems like it would a creation of Injor-Niyas, made by Nil'giccas and afterwards forgotten?
The last resting place of their Nonmen women perhaps?
