Early Autumn, 20 New Imperial Year (4132, Year-of-the-Tusk), Golgotterath.
Anasûrimbor Kellhus …
The Holy Aspect-Emperor returned at last.
Brilliance, and the corresponding sweep of shadows. Dumbstruck, Proyas watched his Lord-and-Prophet step down the tiers leaving Sorweel and a handful of others astonished in his wake. He did not so much emit light as shed it in skins. Then he was down and among them, dimming to a glower, as if he were a coal drawn from the fire, before the gloom of the interior at last claimed him as one who belonged. Mundane light shone from the flaxen plaits of his beard, made snow and blue shadow of the folds and creases of his robe.
He paused to regard the men bunching like wasps at his feet, then, grinning, at last looked to his Exalt-General … who had yet to fall to his knees.
“M-master …” the Exalt-General stammered.
Fraud.
Kellhus had battered this truth into him the weeks preceding Dagliash. Proyas knew the mad beam of his deception—that even this entrance was mummery—and yet still his heart leapt, his thoughts dissolved into adoring foam. No matter how much his intellect balked, his heart and his bones, it seemed, obstinately continued to believe.
“Aye!” the Holy Aspect-Emperor called across the prone assembly. “Indeed my heart is gladdened!” Simply hearing the pitch and timbre of his beloved voice seemed to ease some long-cramped muscle. “Let no man claim that I bore the Great Ordeal upon my back!”
Proyas could do no more than gaze blinking, his body—no, his being—afire with … with …
“Rise, my brothers!” Kellhus boomed laughing. “Rise and speak! Such occasions suffer no ceremony! We stand upon dread Shigogli—the very threshold of the Place-Most-Wicked!”
The entire shape of what followed, it seemed, lay packed in the subsequent heartbeat of hesitation, set as a spring or a snare. One by one the Lords of the Ordeal climbed to their feet, raising their voices with their frames, calling out in relief and anxious exultation. Soon they were clamouring about their Prophet, boisterous as children about a father missed and not simply returned. Kellhus laughed a hero’s laugh, reached over those near to clasp outstretched hands.
Proyas stood transfixed, scarcely able to breathe.
At last … a voice whispered. At long last.
He felt a sloughing of weights so onerous as to seem celestial—the falling away of dread charges. A tremor passed through him, and for a moment he feared he might swoon for sudden weightlessness. He blinked hot tears, smiled against the imprint of more fraught expressions …
At last … Impostor or not, at last he could follow.
Then he glimpsed Sorweel sitting isolate upon the tiers, shoulders cupped against a chill only he seemed to feel. He glanced at the Imperial siblings standing side-by-side, conspicuous for their reserve.
“But what is this?” the melodious voice of the Holy Aspect-Emperor exclaimed. “Hogrim? Saccarees? Siroyon—brave rider! How can you, the strongest among us, weep so? What is this shadow that so darkens all your hearts?”
Some seventy souls crowded about their Holy Aspect-Emperor’s miraculous return, but they might as well have possessed a single throat for the way these words collectively throttled them.
Silence, save the huff of involuntary sobs, the keen of those biting back shrieks.
The Holy Aspect-Emperor’s scowl faded into a kind of leonine vacancy, as if in recognition, grand and patriarchal, of fears once entertained but long ago dismissed. His stature was his dais, allowing him to search faces across the entire congregation.
“Something happened in my absence. What?”
Proyas glimpsed Kayûtas touching Serwa’s sleeve. Weightlessness became immateriality—smoke. Memories of Kellhus’s carnal strength welled as fire through the Exalt-General. The violating thrust. The lip-gnawing wince. He thought of Cnaiür, the tormented Scylvendi, for what seemed the first time in years. He thought of Achamian upon the Juterum all those years past, wild and blooded, edges singed like a scroll fetched from the flames.
No one dared answer. Everything became as milk and shadow about the Holy Aspect-Emperor.
“What have you done?”
And Proyas glimpsed it, then, in the hole where his terror should have been. He saw the way power coupled with adoration cleaved, set each soul apart from the others. Despite everything they had suffered together, for all the bonds between them, nothing mattered save the judgment of Anasûrimbor Kellhus.
There he stood, the point of focus, the hook that snagged every thought, every eye. Tall. Imperial. Decked in the regalia of his ancient Kûniüric ancestors. Pale and golden …
“Will no one answer me?”
There he stood, the Dûnyain who had usurped everything that had once existed between Men. He had raised them the way mathematicians raised temples, lines of force parsed and suspended, loads summed, conserved and redirected, until everything hung from the shoulders of a single post … One inscrutable intellect.
“What?” Kellhus exclaimed. “Do you forget where you stand? The accursed ground beneath your feet?”
The nearest of the Lords shrank from Him, answering to some cue too subtle to perceive. Some even scrambled.
“Must I remind you?” Anasûrimbor Kellhus thundered. His eyes flared white. A voice, inverted and unintelligible, traversed alien planes of comprehension. He swept his right arm on a grand arc … The air itself snapped, a concussion that blooded noses, and the westward wall of the Umbilicus vanished, a flake of ash blown from a bonfire. Fresh air laved them, bore some portion of their stench away. Men squinted against the sudden, grey-blue glare, gazed out.
Overcast skies …
The slums of the encampment, descending on a vast curve.
And in the distance, soaring from fortifications like insect excretions, the Horns of Golgotterath.
Soundless. Stationary. Two golden fists raised to the height of cloud and mountain, a tantrum frozen, endlessly preparing to crack the chalk spine of the earth. The monstrous Incû-Holoinas.
“Damnation!” the Holy Aspect-Emperor railed. “Extinction!”
How, King Nersei Proyas wondered … How could relief and terror be so conjoined?
“The line of your fathers hangs upon the very end of the World! We stand upon Apocalypse!”
The Holy Aspect-Emperor’s attention, so effortlessly divided among those immediately about him, suddenly yawned wide then clapped shut about the Exalt-General.
“Proyas!”
He leapt within his own skin.
“Y-yes … God-of-Men.”
The Lords of the Ordeal heaved and parted about their beloved Prophet’s advance. The fury of his aspect fairly beat them from his path. Proyas resisted the sudden urge to retreat … run.
“What happened, Proyas? What could so soil so many hearts?”
For all the years he had served him, the Exalt-General had wondered at the intensity of his presence, the way he could swell, somehow baring your every nerve, or shrink until he was no more than a fellow traveller. Kellhus’s eyes fixed him with hooks of ethereal iron. His voice trilled, strummed the unthought rhythms of his heart.
“I … I did as you charged.”
Something must be eaten …
“And what was that?”
Do you understand me?
“You … You said …”
A frown, as if at a pain inflicted.
“Proyas? You have no call to fear me. Please … speak.”
His heart yanked his breath short. A sense of stampeding injustices. How? How could events conspire against?
“Th-the Meat. It ran out just as you feared … S-so I c-commanded what you … What you said I must.”
The blue-eyed gaze did not so much pierce as plummet through him.
“What did you command?”
Proyas glanced at the encircling carnival of expressions, some of them wilfully blank, others already rehearsing passions to come.
“That … that we-we …” His bottom lip twitched, refused to relent. He swallowed. “That we march upon those sickened by Daglias—”
“March upon them?” the Holy Aspect-Emperor snapped. It was peculiar, even nightmarish, for Proyas to find himself inside the crushing circuit of his scrutiny and interrogation. How many? How many proud Men had he watched Kellhus reduce to stammering impotence with this very look, this very tone?
“You told-told me …”
He stood utterly alone, blinking the overlong blinks of a cornered child.
Immaculate from several paces back, the Holy Aspect-Emperor’s appearance now betrayed the toll of whatever it was he had suffered during his absence. Broken filaments jutting from the plaits of his beard. Bruised crescents beneath his eyes. Scorching about his sleeves.
“Told you what?”
“You told me to … to … feed them.”
Incredulity, dawning betrayal … so meticulous, so exact, that fractions within Proyas roiled and recoiled, all but convinced that he himself was the deceiver here!
“Feed them? Proyas … What else would you do?”
“N-n-no. Feed them … to … to themselves.”
Until this point, Kellhus had assumed the attitude and manner of a father reaching out to his youngest son, the one most bullied, and so most beloved. But the forgiving air of entreaty vanished, first in scowling confusion, then in outraged comprehension—and lastly, resolution … Judgment.
Futility crashed through Proyas then, crown to root. A farce. A mummer’s travesty … all of it. He could almost cackle, let his eyes roll after floating hands …
Madness … All of it … From the very beginning.
“I fed them! I did what you charged!”
He could traipse and cartwheel …
“You think this”—an inhuman glint in his gaze—“amusing, Proyas?”
The Lords of the Ordeal crowed in outrage. A place had been prepared, and they fairly fell over themselves in their rush to occupy it. Proyas would have wept had not the capacity been scraped from him. So he smiled a false monkey smile instead, the one persecuted children use to incite yet more persecution, and consigned his grimace to the organs about his heart. Thus he gazed at them, his brothers, the illustrious Believer-Kings of the Middle-North and the Three Seas.
One need only ponder cowardice to unravel the complexities of Men—the reflex, like gagging, to forever be the one aggrieved. Who had suffered more than them (save the Scalded)? Who had endured more (save the murdered, the raped, the eaten)? In the absence of their beacon, they had wandered and then they had erred. They had turned to the one who dared claim the light of their Holy Prophet as his own …
They had trusted.
So it was their Exalt-General had led them into depravity, commanded the commission of acts so foul, so wicked, they could scarce be imagined. He had exploited their confusion, preyed upon their hunger, anguish and disarray. He had made a feast of their honest and open hearts …
And betrayed all that was sacred and holy.
“How long?” the Holy Aspect-Emperor cried in tones of heart-cracking defeat. Twin rivulets, silver for the shining blank of the sky, slipped across his cheeks, so profound was his staged grief.
Proyas could summon no more than a wild look in reply.
“Tell me!” the face that had been his temple cried. “Traitor! Miscreant! False”—a breath breaking about convulsive passion—“friend!” Anasûrimbor Kellhus raised the blade of a gold-rimmed hand, held it shaking in the simulacrum of scarce-restrained violence. “Tell me, Nersei Proyas! How long have you served Golgotterath?”
And there it was in his periphery, dominating the barren tracts of Shigogli—gold knifing skyward from leprous foundations—the threat that was to redeem all evil.
“When did you first cast your number-sticks with the Unholy Consult?”
And Proyas understood then, the truth of the altar that had owned his every aspiration, so greedily consumed his every sacrifice. He saw what it was Achamian had seen, so very many years ago …
The False Prophet.
It was, a fraction of him realized, his first true revelation, the way light piled upon light, begetting ever more profound understandings. He saw that Kayûtus had known and that Serwa had not. He saw that all the World was oblivious otherwise—though oh-so many suspected. He realized, even though he lacked the words to voice it, that he stood upon Conditioned Ground.
That a place had been prepared.
All was riot and confusion, the queer, celebratory outrage that accompanies the undoing of truly catastrophic crimes. Hands struck him, seized him. He was borne off his feet, a doll rendered in human skin and human hair. The faces of his beloved brothers, his fellow Zaudunyani, floated about him, bobbed like inflated bladders jamming the surface of white rushing waters—some, like that of King Narnol, pale for pity and confusion, others, like Lord Soter, demented for outrage. He need not see his Lord-and-Prophet to know he waded through the commotion immediately behind, for it was the rare Lord of the Ordeal who did not continually, and quite unwittingly, glance at Him, so intent were they to express his will as their own. Proyas kicked back savagely, surprising the hands clamped about him, and he glimpsed the man, Anasûrimbor Kellhus standing upon an upside-down ground, in the thick of his Believer-Kings, yet somehow remote, untouchable. Their gazes locked for the merest of moments, Prophet and Disciple …
You planned this.
The blue eyes saw as they always saw, a glance that was at once a peering, a terrifying scrutiny.
Then he was raised up. Golgotterath surged and a subsided. Gold sheered against white across wailing skies. And beneath the thundering invective of the Holy Aspect-Emperor, King Nersei Proyas was carried forth to the multitudes …
So they might rejoice in his suffering.
King Sorweel, heir to the Horn-and-Amber Seat, sat unmoved through all of it, tingling for how near the Most Holy Aspect-Emperor had passed. He looked down, saw the Triple-Crescent Pouch laying in his left palm, though he had no memory of pulling the thing from his belt. Three Sickles. Some time passed before he realized what was happening, how his father’s murderer had scaped King Proyas for the Field Appalling. He could only wonder at the spectacle of the man protesting his innocence with dwindling conviction, not in his claim, but in the truth. He could only marvel at the Lords of the Three Seas, their canine eagerness to be cleansed in accusation, to find reprieve in threats and jabbing fingers. Even Zsoronga dissolved into the general uproar heaving across the Umbilicus floor, leaping with pious demands for retribution, shouting to the rhythm of brandished fists, no different than any Three Seas Believer-King.
On it went.
Sorweel looked to the gaping hole in the eastern wall, almost gasped for the premonition of looking down the miles to Min-Uroikas. He clutched the skin-polished wood. Absent direct sunlight, the hairline etching along the waist and length of the vast cylinders seemed clearer, promising symbols to the peering eye, but collapsing into scribbles rather than resolve. The World-Curse, his Siolan brothers had called it, a prayer for our destruction dropped from the stars …
Immiriccas lowered his face, convulsed for disgust … rallied for hatred.
When the youth finally looked up, the last of the backs were vanishing from the Umbilicus—a few so bold as to leap through the hole, loping like boys about the tumult’s eager edge. Then the grand pavilion was empty, save for Anasûrimbor Serwa standing in the middle of the floor with her back toward him.
“Has it winded you at last?” Sorweel asked.
“No,” she replied, turning to face him. Her cheeks shone white for tears. “I merely mourn another sacrifice … A deep one.”
“And when He comes to you,” Sorweel said, standing and stepping down the tiers much as her father had several mad moments before. “When the Holy Aspect-Emperor places you on the altar of the Thousandfold Thought … What then?”
She closed her eyes, lowered her face.
“You know we cannot be together …” she said, “that what happened on the mountain, on the plain—”
“I know that it was beautiful …” Sorweel interrupted, advancing nearer, “that it made me feel, not as a man, but as a boy, something tender, easily broken, something that could leap. I know that our fire burned within a single pit, that we could not be told apart, you and I …”
She gazed stupefied, retreated from him one step.
He followed. “I know that you, an Anasûrimbor, love me.”
The Triple-Crescent Pouch puzzled his left palm.
When?
“That look upon your face!” she suddenly cried. “Sorweel, you must make it go away! If Father sees it—if he sees me like this! I am too important to him. He will end you, Sorweel, the way he will end any and all liabilities before assaulting Golgotterath! Do you und—”
Thudding feet yanked their gazes to the entrance. Suddenly Zsoronga was seizing his shoulders, huffing for breath, his eyes wild with panic. “Sorweel! Sorweel! Something has gone wrong!” The Successor-Prince glanced wildly at Serwa, pulled his friend toward the great rent in the eastern wall.
Sorweel fought to disengage himself. “What is it?”
Zsoronga stood rapt before the image of Golgotterath, his great chest heaving, his eyes clicking between him and the Swayali Grandmistress. He licked his lips.
“Her-her father …” he said, swallowing for want of wind. “Her father claims”—a grimace of incredulity—“claims that my-my father has violated the-the terms of their treaty …” He closed his eyes as if waiting out some pain. “That-that he sent an emissary to help the Fanim attack Momemn!”
“So what does this mean?” Sorweel asked.
Zsoronga stared only at Serwa now, his expression crumpling for the remorselessness he found there.
“It means,” the Princess-Imperial said without inflection, “that we all make sacrifices this day.”
Zsoronga leapt for the image of Min-Uroikas, only to be caught on a gaseous shout, pulled spread-eagled by interlocking circlets of light about his wrists and ankles. Sorweel found himself rushing the girl, not to assail but to importune. The white eyes and sun-brilliant mouth turned to him, and something shattered across the length of his body, sent him whumping backward. He fell as a thing connected to limbs merely.
He did not so much kneel before the blackness as trip into it.
Scripture, the Great Kyranean once observed, is history inked in madness.
The Lament had not been confined to the Lords of the Ordeal. Far from it. Not a soul among the Host of Hosts had escaped unscathed, for fairly all had consumed the Meat of necessity. Nevertheless, not all had joined in the obscenities visited upon the Scalded. Those righteous few who had somehow held fast crossing the wastes of Agongorea now found themselves perplexed by the shame of their fellows.
A Host uncannily divided received word of the Holy Aspect-Emperor’s return. Those in the clutches of the Lament became wary, and many skulked aimlessly rather than make display, fearing the judgment of their Lord-and-Prophet. Those few still in the thrall of the Meat, however, made loutish demonstration, howling in exaltation, proclaiming a joy that was more mercenary than pious, for Golgotterath had become a granary in their eyes, and their Lord-and-Prophet’s return an occasion to finally seize the Meat sheltering within. They formed wild, unruly mobs, made lewd celebratory displays. They scoffed at those in the throes of the Lament, took umbrage at their condemning gazes. More than sixty souls would perish in brawls.
A crazed night followed. Throughout the encampment, innumerable thousands huddled in vertiginous remorse, unable to sleep for horror and the sound of intemperate revels on the air.
The Interval sounded upon the desolate dawn. The Men of the Ordeal crawled from their blankets and tents, milled about the messes and latrines, wondering. Then, for the first time in weeks, the prayer-horns blared deep and elephantine, calling all souls to Temple. Men gazed about, wondering. On the southern outskirts of the encampment, a band of Nangaels spied the Holy Aspect-Emperor walking alone in the shadow of Occlusion. They turned to one another in astonishment, realizing their Lord-and-Prophet had beckoned them with a waving arm. Helical lights consumed the mirage utterly, and deposited the holy figure more than a mile to the south. “He bids us!” the longbeard warriors began bawling. “Our Lord-and-Prophet bids us follow Him!” The cry reproduced like mosquitos, leaping from throat to throat, and soon, clouds of Ordealmen were trekking southward.
Hours passed before they had fully assembled. The skies were woolen, the sun obscure. Golgotterath lay sullen in the distance, the golden Horns thrust into what seemed a high-hanging fog. The Holy Aspect-Emperor stood immobile upon a promontory jutting from the foundations of the Occlusion, a ramp of stone like a thumb, famed in legend. Himonirsil, the Nonmen had called it, the Accusatory, and evidence of their ancient works encrusted the terrain above and about its root, basalt wrack marbling the slopes, streaking and staining the whole formation from a distance. The Accusatory had once graced the Arobindant, the legendary Siolan fortress that had anchored (albeit in different incarnations) both the First and the Second Watch, in days older than old, when the exhausted Nonmen had whiled away centuries guarding the Ark. The ramparts had long been razed, and the Accusatory, which had once pointed from the fortress’s heart, now jabbed out of its grave.
So did Anasûrimbor Kellhus, Aspect-Emperor of the Three Seas, stand upon the self-same precipice as Cû-jara Cinmoi, King of the House Primordial, only now, the Sons of Men packed the broken slopes below. They choked the ravines, then spread and spread, a vast and soiled blanket, across the dead plain. To a man they looked to their Holy Aspect-Emperor on the Accusatory, thronged with their backs to the dread spectacle behind them, knowing it was enough that He could see.
Though only those on the pitch of the Occlusion could see the number of those still trekking from the camp taper, the entire host fell silent of its own accord, somehow knowing the assembly was complete. Their Lord and Prophet was little more than a speck against the heaped wreckage of the Occlusion, yet even the farthest afield understood He was about to speak.
The Holy Aspect-Emperor stood monumental before them, garbed in robes of voluminous white, his flaxen hair drawn back into an antique war-braid, his beard squared and woven. Intermittent flashes revealed the halo crowning his head, as if an otherwise invisible plate of gold wobbled beneath some otherworldly sun. A retinue milled behind him, largely obscured by the Accusatory’s rising bulk.
“Who?” his voice cracked across the barren scarps and plains. “Who among you has not returned to find your hearth untended, your home disordered?”
Nearly every soul drew breath.
“And who has not been wroth?” he boomed. “Who has not reached for the rod? Who among you has not laid hands upon those most beloved?”
Individual cries dissolved into a gaseous roar.
“So I have found my hearth! My home!”
Palms waved. Voices wailed in involuntary expostulations of sorrow and shame. What was cacophonous swelled into a singular, thunderous howl …
The Holy Aspect-Emperor’s words dropped through it like iron through sodden tissue.
“I took my leave following the Scald … And I returned home … to the Three Seas …”
The Great Ordeal crashed into miraculous silence. It seized their hearts, that word, home.
“I returned to Momemn and the glory of the Andiamine Heights. I returned to what we would save, and I found that turmoil had claimed my house!”
It clutched their throats, gouged their bellies. How long? How long since they had squeezed their children? How long since their wives had last seen them weep?
“So I took up the rod … I set right what had been overthrown!”
Cheers rose in tepid squalls from various quarters, only to collapse into anxious silence … The night had been fat with rumour.
“And now I have returned to the Host of Hosts to find the same!”
A party of four stone-faced Pillarians resolved from the small crowd behind Him, dragging forward a powerful Zeumi youth, naked with his elbows bound behind his back: Zsoronga ut Nganka’kull, the Successor-Prince of High Holy Zeum, and hostage of the New Empire.
“To do the same!”
The Pillarians brought the Satakhan’s eldest son forth to their Holy Aspect-Emperor, beat him to his knees.
“Accursed be Zeum!” the holy figure thundered above the lacerated boy. “Accursed be Nganka’kull, Great Satakhan of Zeum, for he has cast his sticks with Fanayal and his heretical marauders—and so cast his honour and our treaty into the flames!”
The far-flung assembly roared in outrage, and exultation, a veritable sea of howling mouths and wild gesticulations. Pillarians had been toiling behind the back of the Zeumi youth even as Kellhus spoke. Now the Holy Aspect-Emperor raised a sandalled foot to Zsoronga’s forehead, and the booming trilled with illicit anticipation, as much for those in the throes of the Lament as for those yet in the thrall of the Meat. Men caught their breath for the suddenness of the fall. The Successor-Prince bounced from the limit of the rope, dangled insensate from his elbows, his head down, turning on a slow rotation, first one way, then the other. A stone struck his thigh, and he kicked as if from a dream. Almost immediately a shower of missiles rose from the crowds roiling below. A moment of confusion and consternation followed, as the Pillarians struggled to raise and tie him off higher.
But the Holy Aspect-Emperor gestured, and another nude figure—this one pale and olive—was brought forward. He was carried then violently thrust upon the gravel and stone where the Zeumi prince had grovelled but moments before. The hail of stones trailed, and a hush clipped the Great Ordeal’s indignant roar. Men bid one another to be silent, to the point of cuffing fools if need be, and they gazed in wonder at their Lord and Prophet, who stood erect and glorious before the cringing figure.
“Accursed—!” he began only to stumble upon the crack in his sacred voice …
“Accursed be Nersei Proyas!” he boomed with a savagery none had ever heard, a bark that seemed to pluck hairs from arms, the injury and incredulity belonging to fathers betrayed by beloved sons. An avalanche of cries rose from the Great Ordeal, roars that were at once snarls, building into a crescendo that nearly matched the hellish clamour of the Horde. But the din in no way diminished or hindered the Aspect-Emperor’s thunderous voice.
“Accursed be my brother! My companion in faith and arms! For his treachery has thrown the pall of damnation upon you all!”
The countless thousands seethed, stamped feet and brandished fists, scratched at skin, scalp, and beards.
“Accursed be he …” the Holy Aspect-Emperor cried upon a failing breath, “who has broken my heart!”
And what had been tumult and uproar surged into riot, the violence of Men so maddened they must punish what was near to exact vengeance upon what lay far.
The Pillarians once again laid hands upon the disgraced Exalt-General. He slumped against their brutal ministrations, his head lolling like a murdered maiden’s. They trussed him the way they had Zsoronga, then cast him from the Accusatory ledge. The hemp jerked him short, swung him hard into the chapped stone faces. He hung swaying by his elbows above the howling masses.
Occupying the point between the two criminals, the Holy Aspect-Emperor stood upon the thumbnail precipice, his gold-shining hands outstretched. The Great Ordeal answered in what seemed a vast, collective paroxysm, the rabid fury of those who had fallen upon the Scalded, and the wild lust of those who yet starved in the clutches of the Meat. Men wept and raged, screamed flecks of spittle at either of the two hanging figures, or howled adoration at the God who had condemned them.
The very World screamed, a sound so loud that the sky itself smelled of teeth. And the miraculous voice—His voice—somehow passed through all clamour and struck their ears to the quick …
“Accursed be the Great Ordeal!”
A voice so mighty as to transcend sound, to make a cavern ceiling of void, a croak that made a throat of Creation, and a tongue of each and every listener. The Host’s roar faltered, trailed into the whisk of dust-devils. The Men of the Ordeal stood dumbstruck, stupefied, as if the sheer loudness of their Lord and Prophet’s declaration had cracked the words and made mud of their meaning.
“For the commission of acts obscene and unspeakable—transgressions that beggar the heart, the intellect!”
And in their tens of thousands, they stood naked and hanging. Wails began poking the astonished silence …
Not a soul spared any thought of Golgotterath behind them.
“For the iniquity of brother raping brother! Of kin slaying kin!”
Others cried out in shame and grief, rocking, tearing hair and scratching skin, gnashing teeth.
“Aye, accursed! Damned! Damned to the eternal furnaces of Hell!”
And what was a broken chorus of lamentation swelled into a thunderous furor, whole nations, peoples, races, beseeching …
“Cannibal treachery! Unholy congress!”
“What outrage!”
“What abomination!”
To a man they convulsed or wept or shrieked or cast out warding hands. Admission, denial, it did not matter. Like inconsolable children they threw themselves against their neighbours, thrashed as if against the grip of the very World.
How? How had such a thing happened? How had these hands …
How could …
High upon the rock, the Holy Aspect-Emperor gazed down upon them, white and golden, a shining aperture. The chalk scarps of the Occlusion soared about him, flecked with black. And though he was little more than a mote to endless outer thousands, it seemed they could see the scowl of incredulity and indignation, feel the cudgel of divine judgment, the knife of fraternal disappointment …
How? How had his children wandered so far?
High upon the Rock of Accusation, their Lord-and-Prophet watched, waited, becoming as inscrutable as the overcast heavens. And one by one the Men of the Ordeal exhausted not so much their grief or loathing as the absolute license they had yielded to it. Soon they stood silent save for the mewling of those too far broken to be retrieved. They stood dead of heart, thought and limb, begrudging even the bare need to breathe. They stood awaiting the judgment of the beacon shining before them.
Yes. Let it end.
Even damnation, it seemed, could be blessed, if the past were blotted.
Though none could say from whence they came, cups appeared among them, small cones cut from papyrus and vellum sheets of scripture. And with the mass compliance peculiar to crowds, each repeated the actions of their fellows, taking one cup and passing the stack along. And it calmed them, this simple, communal act, as much as expectation made them wonder. Many craned their heads to peer across the masses, while others peered at the fragments of text scrawled upon their ad hoc cups. Still others gazed to the promontory, awaiting some sign from their Holy Aspect-Emperor …
Not a soul looked to Golgotterath rising in malignant glory behind them.
Thousands continued to weep, inconsolable. A few called out, while others simply wondered aloud. A conversational rumble swelled across the near tracts. Those who had been injured in the heaving madness were raised up and passed outward upon thickets of upraised hands.
“Many still weep among you …”
His voice fell upon them as rain, windless and warm.
“The souls most guilty.”
And something in his voice—a resonance or an inflection—pricked the ears of each and every one of them. Many of the weepers caught their hitching sobs, arranged their shoulders and stood erect, squeezed away tears with the balls of their thumbs, peered blinking in feigned weariness. But the vigilance of their neighbours was such that it did not matter. They had been branded by their lamentation.
“They lay as shadows across failing light …”
Screeching was rekindled within the rumble. Many of those marked by their wanton displays cast about, either bewildered or seeking lines of flight.
“They pollute … They foul …”
But some even welcomed their degradation, called out sobbing and smiling, beckoned the mortal judgment about to crash upon them.
“Seize them!”
The masses, which were too raucous with detail to be anything other than homogeneous, instantly bloomed into thousands of flowers large and small as myriad regions set upon the weepers in their midst.
“Seize them! Raise them so that I might see!”
Flowers of concentrated violence, bending ingrown, then leaning out and back, offering countless figures to the scrutiny of the sky, some writhing, some battling, some limp …
“Make a spigot of their throats!”
And the flowers contracted, shrank from whitening extremities, scored by the radial striations of thousands reaching …
“Drink! Drink deep their iniquity! Bathe your heart in the heat of their damnation!”
Men battling forward, holding forth cups cut from scripture. Men shrinking away, hunched over their crimson wages. Men throwing their heads back …
“And prepare! Set aside all that is weak!”
And he flared radiant from the very point of the Accusatory, pure before the noxious gold immensity of the Unholy Ark.
“For behind you lies your only hope of redemption! The Holy Task that the God of Gods has set before you! And you! Shall! Spend! All! Every pain! Every fury! Maimed you shall crawl, stab the stomping maul, gore the groin, pierce the thigh! Blind you shall grope and grapple, knife the squealing black! Dying you shall spit, bellow curses!”
The bodies of the weepers were tossed as rags upon them, grisly flotsam in the tempest.
“You have battled across the World! Witnessed what no Man has seen in an age!”
The flowers dissolved like figures of sand beneath waves.
“And now you stand upon the very cusp of Redemption! Glory everlasting!”
The Host of Hosts clenched and surged in all its miles, for at last it had turned, away from the tossed ramps and precipices of the Occlusion—away from the cruel judgment of its Holy Aspect-Emperor.
“Golgotterath!”
Away from itself.
“Golgotterath!”
And toward.
“All fathers beat their sons!” the Holy Aspect-Emperor cried, his voice scoring the vault of creation.
“All fathers beat their sons!”