If not Law, then custom. If not Custom, then manner. If not Manner, then moderation. If not Moderation, then dissolution.
—The First Analytic of Men, AJENCIS
The teeth come alive when you are starving, so anxious are they to chew and chew, as if convinced they need only bite to find gratification. Simplicity becomes ferocious when bare survival becomes the matter. I fear I will have no more vellum to write you after this (supposing you receive anything). It shall all be eaten. Along with the boots, the harnesses, the belts, and our honour.
—Lord Nisht Galgota, Letter to his Wife
Early Autumn, 20 New Imperial Year (4132, Year-of-the-Tusk), Agongorea.
Light like an eggshell shattering against novel ground, chips and flecks bouncing incandescent. This time she fell to her hands and knees, Anasûrimbor Serwa, the Saviour’s daughter.
Sorweel stood above her, reeling for the significance as much as the sorcery of what had just happened. “You …” he began, eyes wide with the recognition of truths that could blind. “You-you knew …”
She pressed herself to her knees, gazing. “What did I know, Sorweel?”
“Tha-that he would see my-my …”
He. Moënghus. Her eldest brother.
“Yes.”
“That he would … would leap!”
She closed her eyes as though to savour the eastward blaze of the sun. “Yes,” she said, breathing deep, as if confessing something to herself.
“Why?” the Believer-King of Sakarpus cried.
“To save him.”
He fairly sputtered for incredulity. “Spoken like a tru—!”
“Anasûrimbor, yes!”
Her effortless ouster of his voice chagrined, an unwelcome reminder of all the countless ways she transcended him.
“My father submits all things to the Thousandfold Thought,” she said, “and it decides who’s loved, who’s healed, who’s forgotten, who’s murdered in the dead of night. And it cares only for the destruction of Golgotterath … the Salvation of the World.”
She pressed herself to her feet.
“You did not love him,” he heard himself say.
“My brother was broken,” she said, “unpredictable …”
He gazed at her witless.
“You did not love him.”
Was there injury in her eyes? And if there was, how could he trust it?
“Sacrifice has always been the toll, Son of Harweel. Is it so strange that Salvation would arrive decked as horror?”
The uncanny character of the land finally secured his attention. Dead flats, piling on and on. He found himself glancing about, searching for some evidence of life.
“Only we Anasûrimbor can see the Apocalypse,” Serwa continued, “so only we Anasûrimbor can see how murder saves, how cruelty shelters, even though it can only appear as evil grasped within a human span. Sacrifices that boggle hearts are paltry to us, simply because we can see the dead stacked about us all, the dead we will become, should we fail to make the proper sacrifices.”
The soil was lifeless … exactly as he remembered it.
“And so Moënghus is your sacrifice?”
“Ishterebinth broke him,” she said, her tone declaring an end to the matter. “Frailty is a luxury we children of the Aspect-Emperor are denied everywhere, let alone here, on the dead plains. The Great Ordeal can probably see the Horns of Golgotterath …” She raised her index finger to the horizon. “Much as we can.”
Sorweel turned to follow her gesture … folded upon his knees.
“And I,” she said, now behind him, “am my Father’s daughter.”
Min-Uroikas.
Absurdly small—golden antlers set as a pin upon the horizon’s seam—as well as perversely immense, something so mountainous as to peer over the World’s very edge. Fragmentary memory swamped his thoughts, shadows charging void, horns signalling ranks of smoke, Wracu dissolving into wraiths. Dismay. Exultation. And it thrashed within him, the stumps of what had once wrestled that gilded apparition, that horrid, despicable, wicked place! Incû-Holoinas! Unholy Ark!
She brought her lips close to his ear. “You feel it … you who have worn the Amiolas, who can remember the outrages suffered there. You feel it the same as I!”
He gazed, riven by a horror far more ancient than his own … a hatred he could scarcely fathom.
Ciogli! Cu’jara Cinmoi!
“Yes,” he murmured.
Her breath fell moist upon his neck. “Then you know.”
He turned, swiveling up to seize her lips with his own.
The Horns of Golgotterath gleamed soundless for distance, airless. And it seemed an incomparable miracle, to discover himself stone inside her, the daughter of the Holy Aspect-Emperor, to feel her tremble, shudder for enclosing the root of him, for sucking the breath from his mouth, the incredulity from his veins. They cried out in unison, voices drenched, delirious for the thrust and grind of youth amid such ageless desolation.
“Why make love to me?” he asked afterward. They had fashioned a mattress of their clothing, and now they sat naked upon it together, he not so much wrapped as spangled about her. He dragged his boy-bearded chin along her neck to the outside of her shoulder. “Does the Thousandfold Thought decree it?”
“Then why?”
She craned about within the gangly circuit of his knees, gazed into his eyes for what seemed like a long while. Her observation, her otherworldly intellect, was no longer divided by Moënghus, the youth realized. He was the sole object of her scrutiny now.
“Because I see only love when I stare into your face. Impossible love.”
“And that doesn’t weaken you?”
Her look darkened, but he plunged forward regardless, chasing the idiot impulse that was the undoing of so many young men in the hot tumble of passion—the will to know regardless.
“Why love anyone at all?”
She radiated a density so profound that he felt like a kerchief wrapped about a stone. “You want to know how you can trust an Anasûrimbor,” she said, looking to the wasteland, abdominal stretches rising to ribbed heights. “You want to know how you could trust me, so long as I lay every soul at the foot of the Thousandfold Thought.”
He did not so much kiss her shoulder as press his lips to her skin, and a sad part of him was amazed at the innumerable ways of connection, the fact the tethers could never be counted.
“Your father …” he said, expending a breath that made him feel far older than his sixteen summers, ancient even. “He chose me because he knew I loved you. He told you to seduce your brother, reasoning that jealousy and shame would rekindle my hatred of him, so that I might satisfy the conditions of the Niom …”
“Were my father one of the Hundred,” she said, resting her cheek upon the forearm she had propped on her knee, “what you pose as manipulation becomes the God’s work … meaning, does it not?”
“What are you saying?”
She turned to regard him, and it seemed mad to be so intimate with any woman so beautiful, let alone an Anasûrimbor.
“That faith, not trust, is the attitude proper to the Anasûrimbor. That to be sacrificed in the name of my father is the greatest glory that this life offers … What higher meaning could there be? You are a Believer-King, Sorweel. The degree of your degradation is the degree of your sacrifice is the degree of your glory!”
This chastened him, reminded him of the perilous stakes. If she were to learn that he, the inconsolable orphan-king of Sakarpus, had been chosen as Narindar—that he was the knife that the dread Mother of Birth herself had raised against her family—then her father would know as much, and he would be put to death before the sun had set upon this endless tomb floor. The fact of his conversion, the fact that Oinaral had convinced him that the end of the World was truly nigh, and that her father, the Holy Aspect-Emperor, had indeed come to save it, would mean nothing. To kill him would be to unwind the machinations of an outraged Heaven; few murders in myth, let alone history, had purchased as much!
Anasûrimbor Serwa, the woman he loved, the daughter of his father’s murderer, would kill him without the least hesitation, just as she had killed her brother no more than a watch before. No matter how utter his adoration, how pure his devotion, she would end him were it not for the Dread Mother’s glamour … Her divine spit upon his recreant face.
How long would that unearned blessing last? Would he carry it to his grave? Or would it be rescinded, the way all things unearned seemed to be rescinded, the instant he needed it most?
He reeled, only now grasping the absurd consequences of his conversion …
How he had fallen in love with his executioner.
“What,” he asked, “do they call women who love fools in your country?”
She did not so much as blink.
“Wives.”
She fell asleep and he remained awake, wondering that things so pale, so barely skinned as they, could be so fierce, so immune to whatever had slapped life from this ground. She had told him how some Nonmen called this land “Unnûrull,” the Trackless Plain, because it swallowed footprints “like the beach between waves.” And indeed, not a track could be seen, though the whitish gravel nearby had the cast of mealed bones. And it seemed proper, the impunity of their love-making, the exposure. To be as children. To exult in what has been given, especially beneath the spectre of Golgotterath.
To wander trackless ground.
“Ware her, my King,” Eskeles had warned him that first day in the Umbilicus. “She walks with the Gods …”
Their next sorcerous leap, he embraced her the way a lover might, breast to breast, pelvis to thigh, and it seemed miraculous, her face tipped back below him, her lids glaring rose, her mouth welling with meaning, spouting truths that blind the eye, that rewrite the Book-of-the-World, her hair fanning out into a silken disc, her skin darkening for glaring brilliance, her voice burrowing through the flesh of Creation, rising out. Her eyes closed molten pools, smiling.
He dared seize her passion, lower his lips to her Metagnostic song.
They stepped clear spinning parabolic lights. He found it disorienting, the way the plain remained unchanged despite spanning the length of horizons. Even the Horns remained fixed—a fact that brought home their distance, and so their lunatic immensity.
She was already scanning the horizon, and Sorweel caught his breath in apprehension.
“There!” she cried, throwing his gaze eastward with a pointing finger. He spied winking light, as though pulverized glass had been sprinkled across the distance. The Believer-King of Sakarpus cursed under his breath, only now realizing the idyll that had thrown them together could not possibly survive the Holy Aspect-Emperor and his Great Ordeal.
They spent the next few watches trudging into their elongated shadows, Serwa silent, entirely absorbed by their destination, or apparently so, Sorweel endlessly peering, squinting, asking what it was the specks in the distance could be doing. The parade of perils about to confront him assured the questions were little more than cover. What was he going to say to Zsoronga? And the Dread Mother—was she simply waiting to punish his treachery? Would she rescind her glamour before the implacable regard of the Holy Aspect-Emperor? He only became genuinely curious about the figures in the distance when he realized Serwa wasn’t so much ignoring him as she was refusing to answer.
The reason for her refusal became obvious when they came upon the first of the blood-drenched Ordealmen, Karyoti by the look of them, severed heads impaled upon their manhood …
Human heads.
Serwa pulled him to his feet. He followed her in a stupor, wending between scenes of carnivorous languor and crimson squalor, his jaw slack. He understood that this was an occasion for horror, for raving shouts. But the most he could do was shrink into the shadow of wilful incomprehension.
How. How could such a thing be? Just yesterday, it seemed, they had left an Ordeal of grim and pious Men, a host that paraded as much as marched, bustling with symbol and insignia, stacked across the distance with ponderous discipline; only to return today to find …
Abomination.
Every step had become a lever, a kind of effortless toil. He looked, even as his soul averted its gaze, saw them congregated like vultures about the blasted dead, feeding, caressing, rutting with wounds … man after man, their hair matted, their beards wild and frayed, their armour scabbed with rust, mired with filth and gore, on and on, rocking about body after mutilated body, on and on, doing … things … things too ghastly to be … possible, let alone witnessed. He thought he recognized several of the faces, but could not summon the will to defile names. The tickle in his gut unsheathed feline claws. Nausea scratched through him. He vomited. It was only in the burning, coughing aftermath that the horror finally managed to squeeze whole into him—and with it, a kind of crazed, moral outrage, a sense of disgust so raw as to be excruciating …
Even Serwa, for all the reptilian serenity of her Dûnyain blood, had blanched. Even the Grandmistress of the Swayali walked, pallid and shaking, her eyes pinned on the blessed abstraction of forward.
A myriad of faces turned to their passage, their beards slicked in blood, their eyes hollow with a kind of incredulity, their mouths taut with swollen bliss. Sorweel’s gaze fastened upon a man, an unkempt Ainoni, who had pulled the head and shoulders of a corpse across his lap. He watched him seal his lips about the breathless mouth, hover in a prolonged and grisly kiss … before seizing the deadman’s bottom lip in his teeth, jerking and tearing with the ferocity of a battling dog.
Madness. Anomie unlike any he had ever experienced.
This place … Where there were no tracks to follow.
A shadow caught his eye, a patch of raggish black blown like something ethereal across the ground. He looked up, saw a stork wheel white and pristine where vultures should have been.
Yes … something whispered. And it seemed he had known all along.
“Recall,” Serwa said from his side, “our destination …”
He turned to look in the direction she nodded, saw Golgotterath, the great golden idol that somehow made all this holy …
“Father understood …” she said, and he could almost believe that she spoke to fortify her own resolve. “Father knew. He realized that this must happen.”
“This?” Sorweel cried. “This?”
An unknown part of him had intended his tone to be a rebuke, a slap, but she had retreated into her old, implacable manner. He would be the one to flinch …
He was always the one who flinched.
“The Shortest Path,” the Princess-Imperial said.
He followed her even though he suspected that she wandered aimlessly. They picked their way between the camps congregated about fire pits of maimed flesh. Men eating. Men languid in their obscenities, almost as if they seduced the corpses they desecrated. And Men frenzied, hooting and cheering the brutal fury of their kinsmen, falling upon their victims in gangs. The plain resounded, but the voices were scattered across so many registers—from grunts to shrieks (for some victims still lived) to sobs to laughs to murmurs to faraway calls—that the silence that rendered them distinct loomed over all, creating a crazed and contradictory din. The stench was unbearable, so much so that he breathed through pursed lips.
The thought came to him quite unbidden. He is a demon …
Ciphrang.
And she said, “It is good that you believe.”
Despite everything, her cool gaze added.
Despite. Even. This.
He did not believe. But then, neither had he disbelieved. He had vacillated, dangled from the words, the exhortations of other souls. Porsparian. Eskeles. Zsoronga. Oinaral … and now this woman. He had staggered reeling from conviction to conviction—worse than a court buffoon!
And now … now …
What greater testimony could there be?
Evil.
At long last he understood the power of enigma, the reason why priests and gods were so jealous of their mysteries. The unknown was immovable. So long as doubt and confusion draped the Aspect-Emperor, he belonged to the doubt and confusion that shrouded the Whole. Short of genuine knowledge, he could not be sorted from the blackness that framed all things. He had to seem elemental, even divine, for the simple want of some mortal interval, some fact that bound him to the midden heaps of what was known.
But this … This was knowledge. Had he possessed the most fanatic, contrarian will, Sorweel would have been unable to deny it. For here it was … Before his very eyes … Here. It. Was.
Evil.
Evil.
A wickedness so unthinkable that mere witness courted damnation.
The viscous glide of penetrations. The tremulous kiss of tongue tips. The masticating teeth. The savaged carcasses. The bowel grunt, the seizure of seed jetting across skin and crimson meat.
Yesss … a voice cooed through a shuddering gasp. Sooo lovely. Sooo-sooo-sooo lovely.
These things stamped him with bodily force. They blew through the flimsy sheets of his soul and set upon the raw things, making snakes of his innards, knives of air … He need only open his lips to gag. He need only blink to loose the tidal outrage swelling within, a fury indistinguishable from judgment, a violence that was justice distilled—the very essence of holy retribution! It seemed he need only raise his fists to the sky, cry out the wrath and disgust shaking him apart from within, and the skies would answer with cleansing lightning …
It seemed … so it seemed ….
But he had learned enough to know that the Gods could do little more than whisper in this World, that they were diminished by their interventions—that they required instruments to enact their eternal designs, tools …
Like Prophets. Like Narindar.
The stork still lingered in the far sky, wings hooked about unseen rivers of air, slowly circling the degeneracy that dimpled the sepulchral plains.
The Believer-King of Sakarpus stumbled to his knees, senseless of Serwa’s alarmed glare. He huddled over his retching.
Welling dismay.
I understand, Mother …
Anguished repentance.
At last I see.
They made their way to a knoll that rose as if upon the back of an earthen wave. A single man occupied the hunched summit, sitting crouched above a lone corpse. Sorweel was several blinks in recognizing him, such was the transformation of his appearance: his once-impeccable beard a matted morass, his skin nearly as black as Zsoronga’s for filth and dried blood, his brown eyes bright and wild—so very wild.
It was the legendary Exalt-General … King Nersei Proyas.
Serwa stood above him, leaning across the sun so that he glanced up at her, blinking. The bestial cacophony hung upon the breeze, the sounds of the living plumbing the dead.
“Where are my sisters?” she finally asked.
Proyas flinched as if stung upon the neck. Sorweel glimpsed hair lashing a gob of scalp upon his Circumfix pendant as it swung over his shoulder.
“B-back—” the Exalt-General stammered, only to be choked by his own throat. He coughed, spit a shining web across the dirt. “Back in the encampment …” The man’s canny brown eyes, which had only ever emanated confidence before, clicked earthward for a heartbeat, before returning as an outraged glare. “Going mad.”
She pitched high a skeptical brow.
“And what do you call this?”
A drunkard’s smile. His look became heavy-lidded, even flirtatious.
“Necessity.”
The once-regal man affected a laugh, but the truth sat unconcealed in his eyes, begging openly.
Tell me this is a dream.
“Where is Father?” the Grandmistress snapped.
His gaze sagged, his chin dipped.
“Gone …” the man replied on a blink. “No one knows where.”
Sorweel found himself upon one knee, gasping, tripping backwards for his nearness to the carcass mire. What was this? Relief?
“And my brother …” Serwa snapped after a heartbeat. “Kayûtas … Where is he?”
The Exalt-General cast a senile glance over his shoulder.
“Here …” he said in the distracted way of someone engaged in a different conversation. “Somewhere.”
The Swayali Grandmistress turned away, leapt skidding down the knoll’s defilade.
“Please! Niece, I beg you!” Proyas cried, rolling his head while staring at the stripped corpse before him: some other savage Three Seas lord, only puckered and hairless, like something boiled for too long.
“What?” the Princess-Imperial cried, her cheeks silvered for tears.
The sight caught Sorweel’s throat in a toddler grip.
“Should I—?” the Exalt-General began.
He paused to swallow, made a sound like a speared dog.
“Should I … eat … him?”
Both the Grandmistress and the Believer-King stared at the man dumbstruck.
“You have no choice,” a familiar voice called from behind them.
They whirled to see Kayûtas—or a barbarous incarnation of him—on the opposite incline, grinning, leaning against a knee. Blood and gore, Sorweel could not but notice, soaked his Kidruhil underkilt about his groin.
“Something must be eaten.”
“I am rarely …”
Sorweel fled, abandoned the brother and sister, revulsion scraping his thudding bones, his breath stabbing …
“I am rarely what my enemies expect …”
All along, the Son of Harweel realized. He had fled across this very plain all along.
This place. The Field Appalling.
He lurched more than walked across the degenerate landscape, so numb had he become.
To be a Man was to be a Son, and to be a Son was to shoulder the burden of kin and race and history—history most of all. To be a Man was to be true to who you were … Sakarpi, Conriyan, Zeumi—it did not matter.
Who … Not what.
For this was what the Aspect-Emperor had wrought with his mass murder and machinations. He had bent their myriad ways into one way. He had struck the shackles that made Men men … and loosed the beast within.
The what.
Foul gluttony, to eat and to couple without restraint or remorse. To pin screaming.
This … This was the Shortest Path.
The way of Ciphrang.
Hunger without scruple or constraint.
He had hoped to escape the ravenous throngs, but he found himself wandering galleries even more congested with cannibalistic furor. He slumped to his knees on the lifeless earth. Brutality lay as thick as milk on the wind … as viscous.
The thought of battle crossed his soul, the fervent hope that the Consult would pick this occasion to unleash their long-hidden might. Thoughts of doom. And for a time, it seemed (as it always seemed with thoughts of calamity) that it had to come to pass, that he hunched his shoulders against some groundswell of retribution. For no matter how indifferent the Gods, surely sins such as these must arouse them …
But nothing happened.
He looked back across the debauched fields to the Horns, sun-bright above the simmering heights of the Occlusion. He could obscure them with his thumb, yet he still trembled for understanding—remembering—their inhuman dimensions. They possessed a derelict sterility, a silence, and he flinched for the premonition that they were dead. Had they marched Eärwa’s brutal length to besiege nothing? Had they, like woebegone Isholom, undertaken the most epic of trials in vain?
He stumbled onward. The passage of time, normally an empty frame, had become a rushing sewer, a channel clotted with filth. Pollution sloshed and soaked. He could scarce blink without glimpsing some unspeakable tableau. Corruption steamed. Mere breathing had become repugnance. He wept tears he could not understand, let alone claim as his own.
Shush, my Sweetling.
He found himself upon a floor. A stork stood before him, a vase lobed in dulcet white, still as beauty, silent as purity. It cast the shadow of a scythe across the hard earth.
“Mother?” he rasped.
It regarded him, the yellow knife of its bill pressed against its serpentine neck. Blood, he realized, fell in crimson beads from the orange tip.
Do you see, Sorwa?
No, my child … What you are.
The countless banners marking the difference of tongue and nation had been reduced to a spare fraction. What had been crisp ranks of tents and many-coloured pavilions, now sprawled like rubbish kicked from a heap, congested here, scattered there. The encampment was a foul shambles, scarcely a mockery of its former glory. It was also abandoned.
In a peculiar way, Sorweel found wandering the chaos almost as heartbreaking as the lunacy of the plain. The light was failing. The shadows were dark and drawn, throwing the discord of tent and belonging into sharp relief. Disregard littered his every glimpse. Discarded horse bones. Sagging canvas. Impromptu latrines. Soiled blankets. He could almost believe the camp had been overrun by a fleet and barbarous race, for things raised in haste and neglect speak of ruin as surely as things gutted and plundered.
Every tent a hollow, vacant, derelict. Every surface bearing some indecipherable stain.
He wandered aghast, quickly despaired finding anyone or anything. The Circumfix hung everywhere, as before, but bled of colour and frayed about the margins, the symbol of some vestigial God. It occurred to Sorweel that the lunacy on the plains might very well be fatal, that the diabolical compulsion commanding the Men of the Circumfix might refuse to relinquish them …
Perhaps this was the shameful end of the Great Ordeal. Perhaps the Host would die discovering it had been its own enemy all along.
The first verse he heard he deemed a senseless trick of the wind, the low howl of air drawn through wrack. But he needed only wander several footsteps toward the sound, it seemed, for the true source to rise clear. Men, their voices bowed in communal prayer.
Sweet God of Gods,
Who walk among us,
Many are thine names …
The King of Sakarpus passed a series of three pavilions, canted and slack, sad with faded colour, and saw a knoll rise from the bristle of crammed shelters surrounding. Kneeling Men encrusted the slopes, all facing the summit, where a savage-looking Judge led them (one of the few yet living, he would later discover), dark face uplifted, hands held to the scalped heavens.
A congregation of those who had refused to eat.
The prayer concluded, and all souls lowered their heads in silence, Sorweel found himself fending shame for standing so indifferent, so conspicuous. Despite their harrowed and deranged appearance, he knew these once illustrious Men of the Three Seas. He knew the Ainoni from the Conriyan, the Shigeki from the Enathpanean. He could even distinguish the Agmundrmen from the Kurigalders, such was his familiarity. He knew their great cities, and the names of their kings, their heroes …
“Return him to us!” the anonymous Judge suddenly howled to the heavens. Passion cracked his voice as violently as his face. “Please, God of Gods, send us our King of Kings!”
And suddenly all of them were crying out, wailing to the vacant sky, lamenting, cursing, and appealing, begging most of all …
For Anasûrimbor Kellhus.
The Demon.
“Horse-King!” a voice bawled, so cracked for incredulity that the whole congregation fell silent. And it seemed to Sorweel that he saw him before his eyes managed to pick him from the helter of sun-blackened faces … his friend …
His only friend.
Zsoronga, standing gaunt and astounded.
They embraced and then, quite without shame, wept into each other’s arms.
Night fell steep on the Field Appalling.
Zsoronga no longer cast his pavilion whole, but rather lived within the space afforded by a single pole. What had been spacious, even sumptuous, had been folded into oblivion by hewn canvas. He had lost all that remained of his retinue. “They never returned from Dagliash,” the Successor-Prince of Zeum said without making eye contact. “The Scald took them. After you left, Kayûtas kept me as a runner, so …”
Sorweel stared at him like someone realizing they had been deafened. The Scald?
“Zsoronga … What happens here, brother?”
Hesitation. A look with a volatility wandering beneath.
“Such things … Such things I have seen, Sorwa …” The man dropped his head inexplicably. “Done.”
“What things?”
Zsoronga meditated upon his thumbs for several heartbeats.
“You look grown,” he said, affecting a mischievious glance. “Nukbaru. You have flint in your eye, now.”
Sorweel set his jaw.
“How do you fare, brother?”
A look of hunted perplexity, one that would have been comical absent knowledge of its history.
“Hungry like everyone …” he muttered. Something murderous flashed through his gaze. “Strong.”
Sorweel watched him carefully. “You hunger because you starve.”
“Tell that to your poor horse! I didn’t promise to save him, did I?”
Sorweel was undeterred. “I’m speaking of the Sranc.”
A queer grimace, followed by a croaking groan. “What do you think has fattened us so?”
“The skinnies nourish only the body … the appetite …”
The Sakarpi knew the perils of consuming Sranc. Life on the Pale was too hard. Scarce a winter passed without some debauched tale reaching Sogga Halls. But tales had been all that he had ever heard.
“The soul starves …” Sorweel continued, “perishes. Those who subsist on them too long become raving beasts.”
Zsoronga was watching him intently now. A hard moment passed between the two young men.
“They taste like fish,” Zsoronga said, drawing his chin from his clavicle to his shoulder. “And lamb … My mouth waters for merely mentioning it.”
“There is a cure,” Sorweel murmured.
“I am not sick,” Zsoronga said. “The sick ones went out … followed the Exalt-General to their damnation.”
Then, with an exaggerated air of recalling something momentous he popped to his feet and began rooting through the tent, seized upon his matins satchel.
Sorweel sat reeling, the pinprick of Zsoronga’s dismissal lost in the stab of a far more momentous realization. For the first time he understood the mad straits of the Great Ordeal, how these blasted lands meant they had nothing to eat …
Aside from their horses … their foes …
Themselves.
For several heartbeats it seemed he could not breathe, the dread logic was so clear.
The Shortest Path …
All of it, he realized, even these sins, as deranged and abyssal as they were, had a place. They were naught but sacrifices exacted by circumstance, lunatic in proportion to the dire ends they subserved …
Could it be? Could what he had witnessed—acts so loathsome as too strike vomit from righteous bellies—simply be … an unavoidable expenditure?
The greatest sacrifice …
His heartbeat counted out the span of his breathlessness.
Had the Aspect-Emperor known that their souls would have to be abandoned on the trail?
“Yes!” Zsoronga cried in savage jubilation. “Yes!”
And what did that say about his enemy? The Consult … and the boiling rumble of ancient half memories.
“Here it is!”
Could they be so wicked, so vile—could anything be? An evil so great as to warrant any crime, any atrocity contributing to its destruction …
“You can feel it … you who have worn the Amiolas …”
Sorweel stared numbly at the pouch Zsoronga had pressed into his palm, stiff as a dead man’s tongue, the pale pattern as intricate as he could remember it, crescents within crescents, like Circumfixes shattered and heaped into spilling piles. The Triple-Crescent, Serwa had called it. The ancient symbol of the Anasûrimbor.
His face scrunched about sudden tears, and he squeezed tight the Chorae within the ancient leather. He was High Keeper of the Hoard once again!
“Some say the Aspect-Emperor is dead,” Zsoronga fiercely murmured, his eyes wild and wondrous with violent imagining. “But I know he’ll return. I know it, because I know you are Narindar! That the Mother of Birth has chosen you! He will return because you have returned. And you have returned because he is not yet dead!”
Suddenly it seemed absurd, the weightlessness of the thing and the iron Chorae within it, like fluff …
He knew nothing in that moment, save that he wanted to weep.
What do I do?
Thick black fingers closed about his pale hand, then tightened, forcing him to grip the pouch.
A sluggish heat leapt into the air between them.
“This is how I know …” Zsoronga exhaled.
His body, long and sinuous, trembled, much as Sorweel’s own.
“Know what?” the youth murmured.
A wooer’s smile.
“That we dwell in a land without sin.”
Sorweel did not shrink in his shadow—and that was as much cause for terror as anything he had seen or thought this day. His gaze wandered across his friend’s scalding aspect, taking a numb inventory.
“What do you mean?”
A glimpse of something dead in his brown eyes.
Mu’miorn?
“I mean we have but one rule to constrain us, but one sacrifice to make! Kill the Aspect-Emperor!”
A long gaze, one urgent, the other pretending not to see.
I weep because I missed you.
“All else is holy …” Zsoronga gasped with thrilling fury. And it truly seemed that all things had been decided. The Zeumi Prince pinched the lantern light into oblivion.
Strong hands in the dark.
Naked in the tented gloom, sweating despite the chill.
Even when they finished, it was not done.
It was all a sham, living a life. Forever stumbling, lurching, chasing resolutions that you name as your own, forever coming after what you are. Difference spews from the oblivion of the same, and events forever tumble, delivering twists, turns, surprises that are in no way surprising, and there you are, suffocating in the aching heart of it, ducking across the numb perimeter, coming to be only in the lee of your questions, that ghost fools call reflection.
You awaken with a start, gasp about a missing heartbeat, and find yourself … doing … things.
You wonder if you ever had a father.
Zsoronga’s body seemed endless, vast and hot in the tangled dark, feverish with vigour, humming, pulsing. A greater hand enclosed his wrist, drew senseless fingers to the stubborn, granite arch of his phallus. The mere act of clutching made the World buzz and roar—even spin with languor and impossibility. Zsoronga tensed yet again, groaned and coughed through clenched teeth. He discharged his heat yet again, pulsing strings that looped through the black, pinning him, binding him, with nameless and unspeakable passions.
“Mu’miorn …” he whispered, dragged through Ages as dense as water.
They lay. For a time all Sorweel could hear was his friend’s breathing. His throat ached. Beyond the canvas planes, all creation slumped and toppled in slow silence.
“It is a thing of shame for you sausages,” Zsoronga finally said.
It was not a question, but Sorweel elected to treat it as such.
“Yes. A great shame.”
“In Zeum it is thought holy for the strong to embrace the strong.”
Sorweel attempted to snort in the old way—to make light of what could not be lifted.
Something diabolical hemmed the man’s laughter.
“When our wives are quick with children, warriors turn to one another, so that we may fight as lovers upon the field …”
These words left the Sakarpi King gasping.
“One need not think, dying for one’s lover.”
Sorweel relinquished his grip, but the greater hand clamped his wrist, forced his fingertips to trawl the length of the turgid horn, from root to summit. And he knew—understood with a philosopher’s profundity—that his will was unwelcome here, that he lay in the jaws of an appetite that had devoured his own.
That he had been and would be ravished, as certainly as a daughter of a conquered race.
“You are strong …” the ebony man said to the pale.
That he would rise to, even celebrate, his repeated violation, as certainly as any temple whore.
“And you are weak …”
That shame would devour him whole.
“I am here, Sorweel,” Zsoronga said, raising a thick-fingered hand to his breast. “Here, beneath the madness of what … what we have eaten …” He paused as if to secure evidence of his victim’s belief. “And I will die to protect you …”
He angrily wiped at tears the Son of Harweel could not see.
“To shield what is weak.”
There is a clarity to ancient things that all Men seek to emulate. To read about one’s forefathers is to read about Men who possessed fewer words, and so lived more concentrated lives, following codes that were ruthless for the brute fact of simplicity.
Clarity. Clarity was the gift of their innocence—their ignorance. Clarity was what made them the envy of their seed. What was, for them, was, something there to be seized, not something to be groped for behind curtains of disputation. Good and evil shouted from their worlds, their acts. Their judgment was as harsh as that belonging to the Gods. Punishment was without exception and cruel, even sadistic, for it could only be good to bring down evil upon evil, corruption upon corruption. No time was allotted for appeal, for no time was needed. Guilt was axiomatic, indistinguishable from accusation …
So did they seem Godlike, as well as Godly.
And so did the Ordealmen turn away from their ancestors with the compounding of their crimes. To a soul they had either lost or stowed their ancestor lists following Swaranûl and the fateful decree to eat their foes. If asked why, they would cite “bother,” but the truth was they could no longer at once bear the weight of their past and breathe. Where their forefathers had derived clarity from genuine ignorance, they relied on numbness and distraction.
One by one the Men of the Three Seas fled their abominable deeds, stealing as thieves across the night plain. They pawed at gore-caked faces with slicked hands, sought to cleanse filth with pollution. The meat they had bolted, the blood they had sucked, wrenched their guts as violently as their commissions wracked their hearts. Many found themselves on their hands and knees hooked about vomit that would not come, gagging on misery and horror, thinking, Sweet Seju … What have I done?
And it crackled as lightning through them, this question which sorts all beasts from all Men, stopping hearts, clenching teeth and eyes.
What have I done?
Anxious horror passed for sleep, and the following day found their souls too far from their legs to march the last miles remaining. The day was given over to an awakening like no other, a coming to see themselves, lighting voices as timbre stacked for the pyre, a growing chorus of shrieks and lamentations. They gaped about the fact of their atrocities. And their shame divided them as they had never been divided, rendered them each the butcher of their own hearts, the one most hated, most loathed and feared. How? How could such memories be? Of those who could not bear to live and remember, most refused to remember, but more than six hundred Ordealmen would refuse to live, casting themselves into damnation’s maw. The rest shrank into the shadows of their rangy shelters, where they warred with despair and incredulity and terror—all who had eaten of human flesh.
The Umbilicus remained abandoned, the avenues and alleyways deserted. Cries rose as if from beneath thousands of pillows, as things too sharp to be smothered. And beyond it all, the Horns reared as mountainous ghosts from the rotted teeth of the Occlusion, glinting in the pitiless sun, laughing it seemed, gloating …
The second morning, they awoke from such sleep as anguish afforded to find the horror that had paralysed now pursued, hunting them with a lunatic terror of place. None could bear the ground that bore them. Fleeing the Field Appalling had become the only way to breathe. The Horns caught the morning before the sun had even risen, smoldering with diurnal gold above the ragged summits of the Occlusion. It was inevitable that all eyes turn toward it, that all souls gaze agog.
No hymns were raised, no prayers called … Scarce a wonder was voiced.
They dismantled the camp, such as it was, and resumed marching, migrating toward the impossible spectre climbing the horizon before them. Not a soul had uttered an order. Not a tribe, cohort, or column marched together, let alone in formation. Not a man understood what he was doing, aside from getting away.
And so the Great Ordeal of Anasûrimbor Kellhus did not so much march toward Golgotterath as flee.
Sorweel would have whooped through the wood, had not his father taught him the ways of Husyelt the Hunter. So he crept across the dappled floors instead, mimicking the grim expression of his father’s Boonsmen. This was the only reason he found the thing: a ball of grey fur, no larger than a walnut, laying at the base of a cleft oak. Though the incident itself would be lost to him, the fascination he would never forget, discovering, as he had, what seemed some magic residuum of life.
How he had cherished those solitary expeditions—especially after the death of his mother. There was a laziness in that wood—at least during those summers the Sranc shunned the Pale. He could sprawl across the leaves and be so reckless as to doze, daydream while rotating his gaze between high craning limbs, ponder the fork of the great and singular into the frail and many. He could listen to things creak and coo through the hollow chorus of the canopy. His body, as slight as it was, would seem strong enough, hale enough, and he would feel as hidden without as obvious within. And it would seem that nothing could be more common and more holy than a boy alone with his wonder in the sunny wood.
So he deemed the small ball of fur a gift, nothing less than a puzzle-box left by the Gods. He marvelled at its weightlessness, the way the breeze could tug it on his palm. He held it even to his eyes and stroked it with a fingertip. The fleece was marred by something poking from within.
The ball pulled apart with the ease of bread drawn from the oven, and bundled within he found bones, as white as a child’s teeth, a motley the size of leaf stems and insect legs. He drew out a skull smaller than the nail of his pinky, held it between thumb and forefinger …
For several slow and thick heartbeats, he felt like a God, an eye rendered pitiless for mad disproportion.
He cleared a patch of earth, arranged the contents across it. Children are forever inventing diverse tasks and the imaginary worlds that give them meaning. He was a priest in that moment, ruthless and old, scrying telltale traces of the future in the debris of the past. Fur and bones, as crucial to life as pole and canvas were to shelter. A whip-poor-will called out from the forest deep.
With a start he remembered his father telling him that owls did this, regurgitated the hair and bones of their prey. All along he had known it was a mouse, but he had believed otherwise. He looked up, peered between the oak’s raised arms searching for some sign of the nocturnal predator.
Nothing.
Nothing, he had thought in a haze of inexplicable alarm, for it no longer seemed that he was playing. Nothing had devoured the mouse.
Digesting all that lived.
Spitting out all that mattered.
One could tell them apart by midmorning, the Upright Horn soaring on a curve pulled erect, and the Canted Horn leaning out over unseen tracts. Both arms climbed ever higher, balled into feminine fists, parting clouds as golden oars might part murky waters, rising above the hanging cliffs and gorges of the vast crater rim the Nonmen had called Vilursis.
The Occlusion.
Sorweel and Zsoronga laboured with their packs, wandered with the others in endless roping chains, Men in their tens of thousands, freighted with arms, rancid and grim, drawn as fish to flashing silver. All hearts sloshed in same cold dark water, it seemed. There was no prayer, no hymns, no cries of relief or exultation. Some looked as though they could not so much as blink, let alone speak. He and Zsoronga scaled the slopes of the Occlusion, peered in wonder at the ruins of the Akeokinoi upon the summits, beacon towers from Far Antiquity. They crowded through the canine slots, then joined the myriads stumping down the dusty gravel ramps on the far side, gazing mute and agog as they fanned across the interior waste.
Their bowels quailed. Their thoughts seized. Their hearts kicked as roped foals.
“Such a thing …” the Zeumi murmured.
Sorweel had no reply.
They skidded down the gravel slopes, two upon a conveyor of descending thousands, mostly Conriyans above and below, and thousands of others, on and on, all transfixed by the image … the insane image.
The Incû-Holoinas.
Rearing monstrous from the mathematical heart of the Ring, reaching up to dwarf the crimson setting sun …
The Ark.
Aching for leaning. Blinding where it was burnished, great tracts of mirror-gold ablaze hoisted ever higher, casting leagues of crimson across the lifeless plain—across the appalled nations of Men.
Blood etched their toiling shadows.
How … How could such a thing be? Ishterebinth was but a crude totem in comparison. How could mere intellect raise such arms, great and golden, to the very clouds? How could a contrivance, a mighty city encased in swan-curved hulls, crash from the limit of the sky, crack the very ground asunder, and still remain intact?
A chill shimmied through Sorweel’s bones, mounted his heart, his soul. It was the Amiolas, he realized. He knew this place, not as anything he could recall or relate, but as the boot-print knows the heel. Though he had lost all that had belonged to Immiriccas, he had not lost his memory of plumbing those abyssal memories, nor the bent of having once been twisted about such a life. He knew this place! The way an orphan knows his father. The way the dead know life.
This place … this accursed place! It had stolen everything.
A cancer. A blight. An evil that eclipsed imagination!
Fields of gawking Men descended about him, bearding the slopes with dust.
Immensity has a way of exposing silence, pulling it nude from the immeasurable background. For all the thousands tramping and murmuring about him, Sorweel could hear it, as surely as if he sat perched upon the cloud-wreathed summit, the hush of transcendence, of looming beyond the compass of human comprehension, and sharing bones with the very World.
The Unholy Ark. The great terror of legend, fallen from the Void, gleaming mountainous above a great network of fortifications, squat towers and black-curtain walls. Min-Uroikas.
Golgotterath.
“Real …” Zsoronga gasped.
Sorweel understood, well enough to whiten his knuckles about the realization. The name had always been there—since before King Harweel’s fiery murder, the name of this place had crouched above all. The pretext. The rationale of innumerable atrocities. For all the bluster of the Sakarpi Horselords, for all their vainglorious conceit, he knew they had all asked themselves the same question gazing across the stupendous host that had gathered to throw down their walls …
How? How could wife-tales and nursery rhymes deliver us to destruction?
How could the whole Three Seas go mad?
All of them upon the ramparts, King and Boonsmen alike, had resigned themselves to die defending their city. And all of them had marvelled and lamented that madness and fancy could seal their fate …
A fantasy that had been real.
A hammer struck his heart, and he gasped, reeled upon liquified limbs. Zsoronga seized him before he pitched headlong, steadied him, drew him forward as though he were a little brother or a wife.
Nothing. Harweel had died for pride and folly … for nothing.
Exactly as Proyas had said he would.
The ground levelled. The ghastly masses floated into the limits of his periphery about him, a silent, mortal tide. The desolation of the plain encompassed them, and Sorweel squinted out across its tracts, near and far, puzzled that it should be pale rather than black. But the horror that was Golgotterath did not brook distraction—the eye could no sooner deny it than it could an upraised fist. It compelled, even as its vast proportions boggled, rumbled with dire possibilities if not sound, premonitions of doom and infection, of pollution without compare. It seemed something catastrophic had to happen, that at any moment a new Horde would disgorge from the black iron gates, that Consult sorcerers would step singing from the gold-fanged barbicans, howling wicked lights, that Dragons would explode swooping down from the Horns, tossing them in fire and teeth …
He was not alone. All Men stood as if strangled for expectation. But moment followed moment, heartbeat replaced heartbeat, and nothing happened—save that his gaze was drawn ever higher …
The Horns. Two great golden arms raised to the clouds and reaching them, fists frosted for altitude.
The sun shimmered across the monstrous, vertical surfaces, drawing out light and pattern and colour like an overlay of foils, precious and complicated. Script haunted the soaring, the apparition of alien figure and symbol, somehow etched without grooves, somehow iridescent without wink or glitter, almost as if their shadow dwelt within the otherworldly metal.
Crows flocked about the Horns’ lower regions, issuing from points across the black fortifications. Otherwise, no life could be spied apart from their own.
“Real …” Zsoronga repeated in a harrowed voice, one close enough to a sob to kick Sorweel’s own throat.
Everything. Hailing all the way back to the Scions. All the words they had shared during the long watches of the march, all the bitter recriminations, the declarations both pompous and shrewd, all the spasms of conviction and doubt, bone-rotting incredulity …
All of it ended here. Caught upon the teeth of this place. Now they stood before the bald righteousness of their Enemy’s cause …
And the penury of their own.
The Men of the Ordeal drifted to a halt before the spectre. Rot hung pulverized in the air. Innards quavered for standing in the shadow of things too vast, too precarious.
How?
How could such a thing be?
Sorweel stood in the dust, transfixed for the apprehension of what transcended human apprehension. For awe, the inkling that flattened Men upon their bellies, that saw bulls twist as smoke into the heavens. What was spectacle if not unconscious worship?
His right hand clutched the Trysean pouch the way others clasped Circumfixes and other fetishes: as a soundless cry for rescue. Beside him, Zsoronga held hands to either temple, bawled out in Zeumi, his voice among the first to perforate the astounded rumble. Cacophony followed. The lowing of cattle. The howling of apes.
Sorweel didn’t know when he had dropped to his knees, but he understood why as clearly as anything in his murky, misbegotten life. Evil. Where before he had thought, endlessly questioned and interrogated the fact of this place, at long last he could feel. Evil, burnished and monolithic. Evil stacked upon evil, until the very ground bowed against the beam of Hell. All the wickedness he had witnessed, let alone the abominations of the past days and nights, was but a narcotic lapse compared to this place, a doting drunkard’s indiscretion …
He could feel it.
In their surviving tens of thousands, the Men of the Ordeal cried out in wonder and horror and, yes, even jubilation, for they had marched to the very ends of the World. Their Holy Aspect-Emperor had spoken true.
They began falling to their knees in violent remonstration. And the Believer-King of Sakarpus rocked and sobbed among them, wept for so very many things … Shames. Regrets. Losses.
And the dread fact that was Golgotterath.
They gathered upon the inner rim of the Occlusion, the Sons of the Race of Men. Humanity, whose lives wilted so soon after budding, whose generations passed as storms and gentle rains. Ephemeral, yet fertile, and so forever new, casting nations like mantles, as ignorant of their origin as they were terrified of their demise. Humanity had arrived in all its turbulent, amnesiac might, come to obliterate Golgotterath. Thunyeri dwarfing Shigeki, their skin jaundiced for being so fair. Galeoth cowing Scarlet Schoolmen for the violence of their demonstration. Nansur Columnaries standing immobile, deaf to any officer’s cry. Ainoni caste-nobles pawing white upon their cheeks. Thousands upon thousands gazing, witless for incredulity, paralytic for shame and horror, alien gold pricking their eyes …
Men, the cracked vessel from which the Gods drank most deep.
Some had been petty unto murder in their past lives, knifing brothers for the merest slight, while others had been generous unto folly, abiding faithless wives, starving to carry witless parents. It did not matter. Gluttons and ascetics, cowards and champions, reavers and healers, adulterers and celibates—they had been all of these things ere they had taken up their Holy Aspect-Emperor’s Great Ordeal. And for all their numberless differences, they need only look to fathom one another, to know whether they would be greeted or ignored or attacked. To be a Man is to understand and be understood as a Man, to blindly honour expectation so that others might gamble accordingly. For it was the way they repeated one another that made them Sons of Men. Despite their numberless feuds and grudges—for all their divisions—they stood as one before the heinous image.
The Great Ordeal … nay …
Humanity, horrid and beatific, frail and astounding, come to collect their future from wicked debtors.
One race, come to fathom the Ark with sword and fire, and to at long last exterminate the Unholy Consult.