Early Autumn, 20 New Imperial Year (4132, Year-of-the-Tusk), Golgotterath.
The madness was lifting, though the taste lingered.
You did it … the Greater Fraction whispered.
Did what?
Carcasses jerked beneath libidinal fury.
What had to be done …
Anasûrimbor Kellhus smiled as a toadstool of fire and pitch boiled to the very arch of Heaven behind him.
What did I do? Tell me!
The lozenges of flesh so hot as to seem more tongue.
Something unbearable …
Lips mashing lobes, teeth shaking blood from skin and meat.
What? What?
Licking the sewer reek.
You raped and consumed them …
What? Who?
Sibawûl, called Vaka by those who had come to fear him …
The Scalded … the Rotting Men.
Supping upon his flayed face.
Thinking it tasted more of pig than lamb.
Camp was raised where Fate had mustered them along the eastern rim of the Occlusion. Despite the fears of the Imperial planners, water proved both unpolluted and plentiful. Springs pricked the heights, forming rivulets that wept orange and black down the slopes. The Ordealmen fasted, merely drank that evening. Together they transformed the inner ramps of the Occlusion into a mighty amphitheatre that took Golgotterath as its cancerous stage. Nary a soul among them spoke. The sunset possessed the autumnal clarity that transforms the loss of light into the loss of warmth and life. The Horns burned for embracing the sun, ere its descent became absolute. The intervening leagues seemed no less clear for the quick rising night. Beneath the gold-mirrored immensities they could easily discern the disposition of the bulwarks, no more than glue and paper compared the Horns, but as great as those ramparts belonging to Nenciphon, Carythusal, or any other great city of the Three Seas. They could count the thousands of golden teardrops that fanged the battlements. They could see Domathuz and Corrunc, the hated towers that flanked mighty Gwergiruh, the Gatehouse of Ûbil Maw, which loomed as a blight across so many tales of ancient woe. They could see the stepped fortifications of the Oblitus rising to a monstrous citadel crouched against the inner thigh of the Upright Horn, the High Cwol, barbican of the Intrinsic Gate.
The light receded over the raised edge of the World, faded to a dwindling crimson patina high upon the wrists of the Canted and Upright Horns. Every soul watching thought the stronghold would explode with horrors upon the sun’s final gloaming, but since no soul dared speak, each man assumed he alone suffered this terror, and further despised himself as a coward. They sat and stared in their tens of thousands, bodies buzzing for shame, stomachs churning for fear and incredulity, jaws aching for slow, gnashing teeth.
Perhaps in some dim corner some few realized the perverse thrift of their straits, how only an evil so great could hope to redeem souls so wretched as their own. Even as Fate sharpened the World, their lives had been whittled to a point of private apocalypse. Perhaps a handful understood it well enough to speak it, the murmuring of possibility in their veins, the hope, the prayer, that they had committed those unspeakable crimes to better know the goad that drove them, to better hate the stupefying abomination that so commanded their gaze. And at some level, all of them understood, no matter how dimly, that they must somehow conquer, destroy this ancient and obscene vessel from the Void, or be forever damned. So they sat, they watched, and they took loathing stock of themselves. They prayed as strangers among strangers.
The sun eased against, then melted into the rugged shoulders of the Yimaleti. The burnished rims of the Horns flared brilliant even as their bulk blackened into violet obscurity. The broken circle of their shadow reached out across Shigogli and embraced the multitudes, bore them into the greater arms of the Void, the sky beyond the sky, the Endless Starving.
Night fell without incident, without so much as a faraway flicker of movement. Poised upon various heights about the Occlusion, Schoolmen cast their sorcerous lenses to better see, but nary a soul cried out for some glimpse of their foe. For all anyone knew, the fell stronghold lay abandoned.
The Ordealmen possessed little will to organize, such was their awe and turmoil. Many slept on the ground upon which they sat. The Horns loomed impossible in their fluttering vision as they drowsed and drifted, monuments to the boggling power of the Tekhne, the golden levers that had toppled whole civilizations.
They dreamt unkind dreams.
“Though you lose your soul … you shall gain the World …”
A simple phrase, but Proyas could tell speaking it had broken Drusas Achamian’s breath in twain.
He had recited the words while walking, as they often did during Instruction, the idyllic wooded ways of the Ke in Aöknyssus. Years afterward, Proyas would come to realize the ancestral reserve was where he was typically the most dismissive of his arcane tutor, the most arrogant, cruel even. For whatever reason, he found license in the wash of wind through bobbing leaves, in the sunlight fracturing about branches, forever flashing in some corner of his eye, forcing the squint he would subsequently take to Akka’s claims and assertions.
“But what does the World matter?” Proyas had snapped.
Achamian shot him a shrewd and disapproving look, the one he reserved for childish answers to mannish questions—the one that never failed to remind the young prince of his king father. Proyas would punish the Schoolman for this imposture as well.
“If the World were shut against the Outside,” the rotund man said, “what would happen then?”
“Pfah! You and your Apocaly—”
“If, Prosha. I said if …”
A scowl … the very one that would be aged into his face.
“‘If,’ you say, ‘then’! What does it matter, if such a thing can never come to pass?”
How he had hated the man’s knowing smirk. The strength it betrayed. The pity.
“I see,” Achamian replied. “So you are a miser, then.”
“Miser? Because I observe the Tusk? Because I commit hand and breath to the God?”
“No. Because you see only gold, and nothing of what makes it precious.”
Derision. “So gold is no longer gold, now? Spare me your riddles!”
“Would you throw gold to sailors wrecked at sea?”
There is such heat in the boyish soul, such need to declare for and against. To be a child is to be heard as a child, and so to be sealed in, to have no way of invading the World with your voice. So he, like so many other proud unto arrogant boys, defended his meagre circuit with zeal—at the cost of smaller truths if need be.
“Never! I’m a miser, remember!”
And that would be the first time …
The first time he would glimpse genuine worry in Drusas Achamian’s eyes. And with it the question …
What kind of King will you be?
The World’s shadow retreated across the rolling face of the World.
Night drained from the rising ground of day, receding across the horizon implacable and soundless, and where trapped, evaporating into oblivion. The pinnacle of the Horns caught the sun before anything and lorded it over the nations of slumbering Men, jaundiced the gloom in the shadowy lee of the Occlusion. No birds sang. No dogs barked.
Some had found reprieve in work. The previous evening, a company of Shrial Knights discovered the wain bearing the Interval abandoned on the Agongorean side of the Occlusion. They dismantled the cart and its contrivances and carried them through the passes—some twelve men and ropes were required to drag the great iron cylinder and its skin of etched benedictions. They worked through the entire night reassembling it. Unable to find the Prayer Hammer, they sounded the thing with a battleaxe, marring the Invitic inscription. And so the Interval tolled for the first time in three days, its far-ranging hum eerily resonant in the desolation, its ring, some would swear, sharpened for the Horns.
Men wept in the thousands.
The fire of dawn ignited the mighty golden hulks, slowly burned downward, even as the shadow of the Occlusion retreated across the Furnace Plain. The long-suffering Men of the Ordeal roused, climbed stupefied to their feet, not so much more themselves than less what they had been. Once subsumed in the bestial morass, the old facts of individual character seemed to stir and reassert.
So it was that the most irrepressible among them, Halas Siroyon, spurred Phiolos out across the crazed earth of Shigogli. He rode as if to outrun the broken glass in his breast, the shame that so lacerated his heart. He rode the Famiri way, his nut-brown chest bared to both wind and foe, his ravaged Circumfix standard raised high in his right hand. He passed beyond the shouts of his brothers, dwindled into a speck against the waste. He found peace in the interval, felt the ghost of his galloping youth. He rode until the gold-hanging immensity became palpable, and he had to arch his back and set his shoulders against the urge to cringe.
The fortifications stacked beneath the unholy Ark loomed large upon the cliffs of the Scab, the great black tumour that served as the Horns’ pedestal. The General tacked to the south, calling, “Do you see it, old friend?” to his steed. “The stopper of the World!” The stoneworks were, for all that he could see, devoid of life. They were titanic by any measure, black bastions like Shigeki ziggurats, black walls whose height dwarfed those encircling Carythusal or Aöknyssus.
Clinging to Phiolos, he plunged feckless into their shadow, then veered to pace their circuit, then, as was the custom of heroes on the Famiri Plain, he leaned back against his cantle, raised high his arms, and offered his naked chest as a flying target for his foe. Not a shaft fell from the brutal heights. He laughed and he wept. He followed the circuit marvelling, peered into the recesses between the gold-fanged battlements. He felt like a runaway child. He felt daring, reckless with what was holy. He would be remembered for this! He would be inked in scripture! He came to the famed Field of Ûgorrior, the plate of dust where the scarps failed, and the fortifications stood knuckled directly upon the plain. He rode about the stumped immensity of Corrunc, then pulled Phiolos toward the legendary Iron Gate of Ûbil Maw.
He would be redeemed!
Man and horse slowed as they came to the storied ground immediately below the breastworks of Gwergiruh—the hated Grinning Gatehouse. Siroyon drew Phiolos to a halt not five paces from where, in days of Far Antiquity, General Sag-Marmau had issued his final ultimatum to Shauriatas, and where foul Sil, the Inchoroi King, had struck down Im’inaral Lightbringer, Hero of Siol, in days more ancient still …
So young! Halas Siroyon was naught but a child—could be nothing but in the malevolent shadow of such a place. How bold must Men be! To raise pride and defiance against such a spectacle! Such a place!
Mortal. Skin so soft as to welt for the hurling of stones.
Gwergiruh towered only half so high as Corrunc to the north or Domathuz, her monstrous sister to the south. Even still it dwarfed both for its breadth and depth. The whole took the accursed shape of a pentagon, with Ûbil Maw lying at its mathematical heart, doors of ensorcelled iron opening into a murderous gorge some thirty paces deep. Siroyon’s daring ended at the mouth of this gorge. Peering, the overawed man could see the wicked portal, doors as tall as a carrack’s mast, stamped with oil-shining reliefs, figures bound to one another in poses of anguish and abjection, the misery of one becoming the frame for the lament of the other …
Just as described in the Holy Sagas.
He warred with scarred Phiolos, managing only to pull him into stomping circles. He gazed across the soaring scarps of masonry, felt a sudden prick of nude vulnerability.
“Show yourselves!” he cried out to the black heights.
The great steed wagged its mane and settled.
Silence.
Faraway water trailed from the outer curve of the Canted Horn, which hung like a mountain’s belly above. The rising sun had set the rims of the Horns afire: an eerie light jaundiced everything that could be seen.
The grasswives claimed that Halas Siroyon had been born the same day and watch as the great Niz-Hû, and that the ancient Famiri hero haunted his bones as a result. The General himself scoffed at such rumours, even as he affected an archaic manner to promote it—for he understood that mystique, as much as glory, raised a man in the jealous estimation of Men. His innards quailed for being dwarfed in so many ways, and yet he laughed, howled the way Niz-Hû had once laughed at the ancient King of Shir.
“Throw open your granaries!” he bellowed. “Send forth your Sranc—your skinnies!—so that we might dine on them!”
There is power in base savagery, in the desire, let alone will and capacity, to commit monstrous acts. All violence is equally ancient. To match a wicked foe abomination for abomination was to whisper in his ear while he slumbered—for the righteous were no more potent than when they were ruthless also.
“Anasûrimbor Kellhus!” Siroyon cried, craning his head as if to toss his defiance over the soaring parapets. “The Holy Aspect-Emperor has come!”
Monumental silence. Vacant heights. A murder of crows screeched from some unseen distance. The air stagnated for want of wind.
“To conquer!” he roared, at last feeling the weight of his own fury. “To consume!”
He thrust his makeshift banner into the earth, and at last gave Phiolos license to peel away in pursuit of their mutual terror. From the rim of the Occlusion, the Men of the Ordeal watched astounded. They made a choir of Shigogli with their cries, roaring with an exultation that unmanned them, so fevered was its wonder and fury.
And it was a thing of desolate glory, the Men thundering across the plain as Golgotterath hoarded darkness against the climbing sun. Swords hammered shields. Spears pricked the sky.
Siroyon’s leaning banner—a Circumfix stitched black on white, tattered and gore-stained—leaned like a dead yeoman’s scarecrow for the length of the day, ere night fell …
And it was never seen again.
Prosha … the pious and precocious little boy, the beautiful one, who had inherited the face and eye of his mother—just as the poets said. The pompous boy. The ridiculous boy, who had brought his father joy only when observing him unseen.
For Seju knew his tongue had brought the man only grief otherwise!
“Where, Father?” he had asked after hearing the last of House Nersei’s ancestral rivals, the Nejati, had been executed. “Where lies the honour in murdering children?”
The long look of a father afflicted by the very thing that made him most proud. “In sparing my sons and my people war ten years hence.”
“You think you will be forgiven this?”
“Prosha …” The tone of a father long resigned to the condemnation of those he loved. “Prosha, please. You will understand soon enough.”
“Understand what, Father? Atrocity?”
A fist hammering the table.
“That power is damnation!”
He flinched for the force of that memory no matter what occasioned it.
Why? Why was he the one to fear damnation so? It all seemed so clear, no matter how much confusion Achamian had poured into his ear. This life was but a flicker, a vista glimpsed in a flash of summer lightning, then gone. There were a thousand Hells for a hundred Heavens—so many more ways to drown in fire and anguish than to wander meadows in paradise. How? How could anyone be so low, so base, as to willingly sacrifice their very souls to monstrous Eternity?
How could anyone embrace wickedness?
But his father had been right. He had come to understand given the fullness of time. Piety was simple, and the World, woefully complex. What was virtuous, what was holy: these were verities that only the simple and the enslaved could know with certainty. For the Lords of Men, they were riddles beyond fathoming, perils that gnawed souls into the deepest watches of the night. If his father had spared the sons of Nejata, what then? Vengeance would have been their inheritance, discord and rebellion the consequence. The piety that would have spared them was the piety that would have put other, nameless innocents on the altar.
Piety was simple, too simple to not amputate life.
The taste of salts—human salts—licked from carcass skin.
The Interval tolled, calling the Lords of the Ordeal to the Umbilicus—to reckon the unthinkable. Awaiting them, Nersei Proyas, Believer-King of Conriya, Exalt-General of the Great Ordeal, spat memory across the carpets below the Holy Aspect-Emperor’s bench. He bent forward, elbows on his knees, warring against the urge to wretch. He raised his head to the gloom of the Umbilicus, wondered that for all their debility, enough men could summon enough routine, to drag let alone assemble the monstrous pavilion, mallet the tiers, hang the banners, unfurl and hoist the Ekkinû. He wondered even though he was one of those men, souls inclined to express adoration in simple labours. Somehow he had dragged the Great Ordeal across Agongorea and assembled it upon the porch of Golgotterath.
It still reeked, he decided, of the corrupt smoke of Dagliash.
The glint of his dead father’s signet ring hooked his gaze.
The madness, a fraction observed, impassive. The madness of the Meat was lifting.
The memories were not.
He sat gnawing on his knuckles, which ached. He hunched gagging, his mouth shedding spit about rhythmic convulsions. He wept, for shame that his son should have such a father. He even cackled for a time, as it seemed an evil man should. He had succeeded! He had discharged the dread task of his Aspect-Emperor! And the glory of it was such that he could only laugh—claw his beard and hair sobbing, shrieking.
Eating Sranc. Lying with Men. Cannibalism. Rutting with corpses …
No-no-no! The mere inkling of these things made chill knives of his lungs, maggots of his heart. What? some fraction shrieked and shrieked. What have you done? His lips parted, his teeth clamped, and his limbs waved like a corpse tumbling in surf. Something like a worm twisted from his gut to his skull, something hateful and weak, snivelling and blubbering … No! No!
His lips, plush and cold, releasing threads of blood and spit bowing in the wind.
Wishing it all back … Railing. Shrieking.
The hair of his cadaverous pubis trembling. Skin so pale beneath the haze. The taste … so …
What was this wretched instinct? This will to blot out all existence in the name of undoing the irrevocable?
Like something boneless and amphibian, cold against the hot curl of his tongue.
How? How? How had such a thing come to pass? How could …
Coughing, vomiting for convulsive violence, so intense was the insertion, hot and bulbous, thrusting aside the chill paste of viscera. Grunting, blowing air, bull-huffing, bellowing—
How—
Sibawûl … drowsy and almost dead, slack beneath his monstrous exertions, his head rocking to the pelvic violence, bobbing like a drunkard fending oblivion.
Sejenus says …
What? What was happening? Just the day previous, it seemed, he had gloated over these selfsame acts, abused himself while wallowing in their miscreant memory, laughed at the horror of his blackened seed … exulted.
And now? Now?
Now he sat upon the throne of a far mightier father …
And the madness of the Meat was lifting.
He slumped from the seat to his knees. A great fist clenched within his breast, yanking his every tendon, every ligament, from the muck of his flesh. He rocked to and fro, keening, spit whistling from his teeth, air pinching his gums. A God seized the nape of his neck, thrust him forward. He convulsed about spittle, choked on threads of burning mucous. Obscenities wheeled, glimpses through smoke. Taking. Touching. Tasting …
“No!” he croaked, his expression alive and jerking, as if hooked by strings to battling birds.
“Noooo!”
Yes.
The premonition struck him with the force of a physical blow. He looked about wildly, blinking rheum from his eyes … peering … was it? Yes?
A form in the Umbilicus gloom, a golden, gliding apparition, hands outstretched, fingers spread between luminous rings …
Yes.
And the velvet arms were about him, and he was clinging, clutching with the guileless ferocity of a child plucked from mortal terror. Again and again, the great fist hammered his innards, beating sob after sob from his breast. And with his face buried, Nersei Proyas wept, for all things it seemed, for there was no limit to the dragon roaring, no limit to the injustices endured. He wailed into dulcet cloth, gasped scented, reverend air, and no matter how violent his spasms, the form he clutched remained unperturbed, not so much immovable as fastened to what was necessary and pure. The chest rising beneath his mashed cheeks. The torso broad and buoyant within the desperate circuit of his arms. The beard like crushed silk against his scalp. The arms iron boughs, with palms hot as wonder …
And the voice, humming more than speaking, reciting hymns in tones of warm water, viscid with love and comprehension.
Safe, a shuddering exhalation whispered. Encircled and safe.
“I—” he tried to say, but the crash of remorse was tidal. Wincing shames and biting terrors.
The humming trailed.
You have achieved the impossible …
A breath like dropping through gossamer tunnels. Tears like acid.
Secured a glory that none will know.
“But th-the … the things—!” he croaked. “S-such wicked, wicked … things!”
Necessary things …
“Depravities! Things that cannot be undone!”
No act can be undone.
“But can-can th-they be forgiven?”
What you have surrendered … can never be reclaimed …
He ground his forehead into the delusion’s hallowed shoulder, clenched the fabric of the robe with a will that could not quite tear. An entire life come to this, a numb fraction realized … All of it, the terror-lust-exultation, turbulence concentrated into a fevered tingle, blasting through the bottleneck of this moment, this final …
Revelation.
The tracks you have left … are eternal …
For an instant he was the little boy he had once been, only wrecked and desolate, devoid of the least pious spark. A child, open for the utter absence of wile, as he had to be, given that it was a question Proyas-the-man could never speak.
“Am I damned?”
And he could feel it, the regret and the pity, passing through the glorious form like a relaxation of a breath too long held.
The World is saved.
An opiate air clung to each sounding of the Interval, a sense of not quite awakening. The first Lords of the Ordeal began filing into the gloom of the Umbilicus. Proyas watched them and did not watch them. He cared not what they made of his stooped posture or the rictus of anguish that passed for his expression. Nor did he need to, for they were likewise grim, likewise maniacal, some more, some less.
The madness of the Meat was lifting.
So much must be done!
If the Consult were to attack this very moment, what then?
He heard Siroyon’s name mentioned, but otherwise could not decipher their growling banter. No matter what face his errant attention plucked from the growing assembly, he could see it, the horror of souls reclaiming what was irredeemably polluted. Wringing hands. Eyes darting or downcast or blank for inward peering. Some, like the Earl of Cuarweth, wept openly. A handful even screeched like spurned wives, and so compounded their degradation. Lord Chorgah began sawing away his beard with a knife, plait by rancid plait, staring out as if perpetually hung upon some untoward awakening, tidings of heartbreak delivered in the dead of night. No one embraced—indeed they seemed to cringe from one another, the sensitive shrinking from the proximity of the numb.
But they all looked to him.
So he stood the way an old king jealous of his fading dignity might, with forced bravura. He looked out across the once-magnificent assembly, breathing, it seemed, no deeper than the ache in his throat. He blinked. Tears like razors split his cheeks.
Those that could fell silent.
The madness of the Meat was lifting.
“If …” he began, looking out to the assemblage of poles and wires that pinned the blackness above them. Even as he spoke, he spied the bereaved son of Harweel on the tiers, newly returned from Ishterebinth … bearing tidings no one cared to hear. “If the Consult were to attack this very moment, what then?”
“Then we shall be blotted,” Lord Grimmel screamed, “and justice—justice!—will be done!” Out of all of them, he had always swung furthest from the rope of the Meat, but he was not without sympathizers. The Lords of the Ordeal erupted across the tiers. Wagging fists. Straining fingers. Cries, some outraged, others beseeching, bewailing, urging, resounded through the high-canvas hollows. It did not matter, the violence or the stupor, whether the man was a Grandmaster or a barbarian prince, they all mouthed the same cry …
How?
All of them, that is, save Sorweel. He sat in the violent shadow of the Zeumi Successor-Prince (who stood howling with the others) cringing more for disgust than fear, a kind of hole in the furor, a pocket of incredulous cold.
“Sin! Grievous sin!”
“My own hand did this! My hand!”
“Heed me!” Proyas shouted, trying in vain to secure their attention, or at the very least their silence. “Heed!” He stood before the clamour, the theatre of gesticulating arms and anguished faces rising across the tiers … mouths open … hungry …
Again he glimpsed Sorweel … and he fairly threw out his arms out in warding, so sharp was the accusation in the youth’s look. Yes-yes—the Sakarpi Believer-King had been there, had witnessed what he … what he … Proyas’s eyes rolled of their own volition across the Circumfix banners, black fabric and emptiness. His voice caught upon a nail of agony in his throat.
The insertion. The welling blood. The wheeze of other incisions. The heat …
Sweet Seju …What have I done?
For several heartbeats, he floated upon the anguished clamour, bobbed thoughtless on bubbling images of unthinkable deeds … commissions … acts beyond the pale of redemption. He heard, but did not register, the sorcerous murmur …
“ENOUGH!”
All eyes found Anasûrimbor Serwa standing with her brother, Kayûtas, just within the entrance of the Umbilicus. The Swayali Grandmistress had recovered her wardrobe and now stood decked in a jet-black billows twined into tentacles about her slight form. And it was nightmarish, the sight of unsullied dress—the gleam of Imperial magnificence—in this polluted and depraved place.
Proyas gawked, astonished as any. She too had survived something, he realized, something more than whatever had blackened her left eye. A trial of some kind had been stamped into her once-immaculate beauty, sucking what had been rounded with youth into stern lines. She looked hard—pitiless.
“Recall yourselves!” she cried in her mundane voice.
She too had witnessed, Proyas realized, recoiling at the memory. She had been there … on the Field Appalling. Shame seized him by the glottis, and he nearly doubled over for gagging.
Cruel old Lord Soter rushed her, crashed to his knees at her feet, crying, “Sweet Doya! Please! What happens to us?” in his lilting Ainoni accent.
She looked sharply at Apperens Saccarees, whose eyes fairly bounced in horror.
“The Nonmen speak …” the Mandate Grandmaster began, his voice fluted and frail. “The-the Nonmen speak of this …” The Schoolman trailed. He had raised two fingers as he spoke, the way a man lost in memory is prone to comb his beard while lost in rumination, only left hanging in indecision before his face. He now gnawed on them, hunched and apprehensive.
“You have been beasts!” Serwa snapped in irritation. “You have floundered in the muck of animal desire, choked on your own most destructive appetites, unable to do anything save gloat and exult. And now, absent the Meat, your soul is rekindled, you finally recall who you were … You awaken from your rutting nightmares … and lament.”
The assembled Lords of the Ordeal gazed aghast. Even the weepers fell silent.
“No …”
All eyes turned to Proyas, who stood baffled, not knowing from whence his words or voice arose aside from some perverse will to truth.
“This … this is no-no awakening,” he stammered, scowling, perhaps even sobbing. “The … the beast that committed … those—those atrocities—I am that monster! What I-I recall …”—a grimace—“I re-recall not as though from some dream, but as clearly as I remember any day I would call my own. I committed those deeds! I chose! And that”—a swallow to unscrew a rictus grin—“that is the horror, m-my Niece. That is the origin or our lament: the fact that we hang upon these foul-foul, heart-cracking deeds … that we, and not the Meat, are the author of our lunatic sins!”
Cries and moans of recognition. “Yes!” King Hoga Hogrim bellowed above the chorus. “We did this! We did! Not the Meat!” The Swayali Grandmistress glanced toward her brother, who shook his head in warning. She strode to the foot of her father’s throne, sparing the Exalt-General a hard look as she did so.
Don’t be a fool, Uncle …
She smelled of mountains, somehow … places far more clean than this.
And then, spontaneously it seemed, the assembled Lords of the Ordeal began calling out for Him, Anasûrimbor Kellhus, their beloved Holy Aspect-Emperor, clutching for some connection between his absence and their malfeasance.
“Father cannot help you!” Serwa cried out to the Believer-Kings. And then, in tones closer to a shriek, “Father cannot cleanse you!”
A chastised hush eventually overpowered them.
“This! This is the toll!”
How many times? How many times had they hung upon their Holy Aspect-Emperor’s words thinking they had understood his warning … Had the circumstances been different, it would have sparked laughter rather than the wringing of hands or hair, the stupefaction of finding oneself oblivious to what was known all along. It was not for nothing their expedition had been named Ordeal. The assembled Believer-Kings, the battered glory of the Three Seas, gazed at the Princess-Imperial aghast.
“What? Did you think Golgotterath—Golgotterath!—could be purchased with cuts and sore feet?”
“Uturu memkirrus, jawinna!” Kayûtas cried out to her.
“We sit upon the stoop of the Consult,” she said in cool retort to her brother. “The Consult, Podi! The Incû-Holoinas—the horror of horrors!—squats upon the very earth beneath our feet! I fear wallowing is a luxury we can ill-afford!”
“What?” Proyas heard a ghastly voice croak—his own. “What … toll?”
She seemed impossible, the woman who turned to him … the little girl he had once swung in his arms. These children, a fraction of him realized, these Anasûrimbor … He had fathered them more than he had fathered his own.
And they had seen … Witnessed his transgressions.
Who was this? Who was this shaking fool?
“Uncle …” she said, her manner suddenly vacant, as if about the whinge of some remorse.
“What toll?” he heard his old voice ask.
Her gaze failed her. It seemed the greatest terror he had ever endured—watching her turn away.
“Saccarees?” she said, her face averted.
“I-I …” the Mandate Grandmaster said, speaking as if otherwise absorbed in some tome. He turned scowling to the emaciated, yet well-groomed sorcerer standing at his side—Eskeles.
“You have paid …” the once-portly sorcerer said with blank apprehension, “with your immortal souls.”
Damnation.
They had known it. All along they had known it. For this very reason, they filled the black-canvas hollows with shrieks and bellows.
The madness of the Meat was lifting.
They stood upon bottomless earth, yet it seemed the Umbilicus rocked and heaved like the hold of a ship foundering in some tempest.
King Nersei Proyas wept alone in their raucous midst, for himself and no other. For where his brothers had yielded their souls for their shared God, he had done so for … something unknown.
“The World is granary, Proyas …
Images of his wife sleeping, negligent curls crushed against her cheek, arms about a child he would no longer recognize.
“And we are the bread.”
And again he found his gaze, like a thing plucked from a fire, lingering upon the boy-become-a-man, the Sakarpi Horse-King … Sorweel. The Exalt-General sobbed, smiled through the ache and snot and snivel, for he seemed so blessed, so pure … for the mere fact of his prolonged absence …
For the fact of his own damnation.
King Sorweel remained motionless, save for when his gesticulating and shouting Zeumi companion yanked at him, demanding an attention that he would not, perhaps could not, yield. The youth did not notice the Exalt-General’s scrutiny, staring instead at Serwa with something that could have been malice, were it not so obviously love …
Love.
The thing King Nersei Proyas would miss most of all …
After certainty.
Once again he looked to the skeleton of ash poles, iron joints, and hemp suspending the airy void above them, and once again he wondered that Men could ache as he ached, sob as he sobbed, yet carry on. And that wondering nudged him away somehow, as if his soul had been a skiff run aground. The skein of horror remained, as did the images of obscenity, like a frenzied chewing, at once sharp and glutinous, but somehow he was able to breathe about the latter and laugh through the first, a crazed kind of cackle, but so raw with sincerity as to draw the eyes of several. These would be the first to join him in his unconscious recitation …
Sweet God of Gods, who walk among us,
Numberless be thy many names.
More looks found him, including that of the Swayali Grandmistress and her Prince-Imperial brother. Proyas raised his hands as if to seize their divided attention …
May your bread silence our daily hunger.
May your rains quicken our deathless land.
Words they had known before they had known words.
May our submission be answered with dominion,
So we may prosper in your glorious name.
Those watching began mumbling and murmuring in unison, a sound scarcely audible for the surrounding cacophony at first, but a rut so deeply worn that the wheels of thought could not but fall into it. Soon even those most immured in terror and self-pity found themselves gasping about the absence of their lamentations. And, in the crazed manner of all unexpected reversals, the Lords of the Ordeal began reaching out, one to another, and clasping tight their neighbour’s hand, drawing solace from the pull of manly strength against strength. And descending from aching throats to hoarse lungs, their voices began to climb …
Judge us not according to our trespasses,
But according to our temptations.
Nersei Proyas, the Exalt-General of the Great Ordeal, stood upon the dais of a far, far greater father, and smiled about the booming crescendo that had gathered within the roof of his voice. He spoke to them, spoke the verses, the simple labours, that had miraculously made their souls one.
For thine name is Truth …
And the words seemed all the more profound for the fact that he did not believe them.
The Lords of the Ordeal stood breathing, gazing upon their Exalt-General with countless confusions. For the first time, it seemed, Proyas noticed their reek, his own reek, a smell so human his stomach hitched. He looked out across the expectant Believer-Kings and their vassals, scooped spittle from his lip on a knuckle.
“He-he told me this would happen … But I didn’t listen … I didn’t … understand.”
Foul breath and rotted teeth. Rancid fabric and soiled crotches. Proyas pinched the bridge of his nose, blinked. For a heartbeat the Lords of the Ordeal seemed little more than apes garbed in the plunder of some royal crypt. Diamonds iridescent against frayed embroidery. Pearls gleaming from brown-blooming stains.
“He said that it would come to this …”
Proyas glanced at the Imperial siblings standing expressionless side-by-side. Kayûtas, at least, nodded.
“This … is not simply our toll.”
He looked out to his brothers, Men who marched to the very brink of earth and history—to the very ends of the World. Lord Embas Eswarlû, the Angle-Thane of Scolow, whom he had saved from a Sranc javelin in Illawor. Lord Sumajil, Grandee of Mitirabis, whose hand he had seen struck from his wrist at Dagliash. King Coithus Narnol, Saubon’s elder brother, with whom he had knelt and prayed more times than he could remember.
Teus Eskeles, the Schoolman who had condemned him to hell.
He nodded, even smiled, though grief and horror yawed within him still. These Men, these Lords and Grandmasters, noble and ruthless, learned and base—these Zaudunyani were his family. They always had been, for twenty long years.
“We are Men of war!” he cried out by way of exhausting admission. “We cut down what we call wicked … call ourselves Men of God.”
He snorted in what seemed the old way. He would never know where the monumental indignation came from, or how it came to own him so absolutely, only that this would be the most fierce moment in what had been a relentlessly ferocious life. He could see it kindling the rapt eyes about him, expressions igniting, as if his words had become sparks.
He was not who he was. He was stronger.
“We are bred to destroy what we have become.”
His eye happened upon King Sorweel, who remained seated high on the uppermost tier. Rigid. Eyes dull and sharp, like flint.
“What? Did you think the God would come to you, miserable, mortal wretch that you are, as another spoil—as flattery? Horror! Horror is your revelation! Shame is your revelation!”
He was not who he was.
“Dwell within it, and you dwell in the very presence of the God!”
He was something greater, the Proyas that perpetually outran his soul, that forever dwelt in the darkness that came before. Here, with these grim and battered Men, his brothers, beloved companions in the ways of wickedness and war. Here in this place.
“You have been your Enemy! You know Him as even the Gods cannot! Now you, alone of all Men living, know the value of salvation! The beauteous miracle that is honour! The breathtaking gift that is justice! As warriors understand peace, so you understand evil! You know it as you know yourselves, and you hate it as you hate yourselves!”
The Lords of the Ordeal erupted, not in acclaim or any bellicose affirmation, but in recognition. They hollered as orphaned brothers conjoined in the paternity of Death, as those who knew only each other, and so despised and feared all other things. Serwa and Kayûtas looked about, remote as always, but also gladdened.
They had feared him lost—that much was plain. And somehow Proyas knew their father had instructed them to seize power should he succumb—should he fail. Proyas, the one most pious … and least aware.
The caste-noble assembly roiled. The very extremity of their passion, wailing as old women one moment, whooping as young boys the next, oppressed them, and for all their frantic gratitude the Lords of the Ordeal found themselves turning, as all manly souls turn, to anger and contempt. He had imbued their terror and despair with holy meaning, offered it up as a mathematician offers up equations, a ledger where wrath could suffice for redemption. Holiness is never so cheap as when bartered for lives, and they were, in the end, violent, hateful Men.
Sinners.
So they began baying for the blood of their foe. Proyas could feel it as much as they, the need to affix their sin to more disposable souls.
“Brothers!” he called, hoping to gather them once again within the harness of his voice. “Broth—!”
I feared what I might find …
A voice spoken through the cracks between spaces, making a million mouths of the pores in their skin. It literally plucked air, strummed hearts. Eskeles was so startled he tripped and crashed backward, bearing Saccarees tumbling with him to the ground. Petals of luminance emanated from the back of the tented chamber. As one they whirled—save Proyas, who had been facing the proper direction all along, and had seen the light kindle from nothing. As one they saw Him step down from the highest of the nearly vacant tiers, near enough for Sorweel to lean out and touch. It seemed the sun itself descended upon its own ray, a beam bearing the twin ink stains of the Decapitants. Golden hair flowing, draped in one of the bejewelled vestments Proyas had seen in the baggage room weeks previous.
“How my heart is gladdened,” the shining figure said.
The Lords of the Ordeal slumped to astounded knees, dropped their faces to the ashen earth of Shigogli.
Only Proyas and the Imperial siblings remained standing.
“Sound the Interval. Let the faithful rejoice, and the unfaithful fear.”