Don’t leave me.
The child was defective, as the Assessor had predicted. A fraction gloated for the fact of Ishuäl’s undoing, knowing that the child had been saved … for … for …
For what?
Bestial and inhuman, grunting as they loped through the black, lost and starving, endless thousands of them, snorting the air, shrieking for the scent of vulnerability. In the early days, the surviving Brethren had set out pots of their own blood and excrement as lures, and the creatures swarmed to their own destruction—though the toll proved too high: one Dûnyain for a thousand Shriekers. Scent hooked one, perhaps two, and the caterwauling seized the rest, the legions scattered through the chambered deep …
So it was always easy at first, fending them off, raising barricades of carcasses. Easy at first, impossible after. The Brethren abandoned the strategy, elected to flee, following the parse of fork and junction, using their intellect as their eyes, dividing their pursuers again and again—until the beasts were fractured into meagre bands. The boy had been suckled on such sounds, hearing his kind hunted to extinction beneath the very roots of the earth.
They would have cracked open his skull, had Ishuäl not fallen. The boy would have been pinned as all other Defectives were pinned to the subtlety of some forbidden affect, strapped for the scrutiny of others, nailed as if a drying hide to the outer expression of some inner frailty.
It was always easy at first.
I cannot breathe …
He danced through pitch blindness, climbed through the threshing of cleavers, climbed until he could climb no more.
Is this fear?
Sometimes he would pause and make a place, raise twitching ramparts. And sometimes he would run … not so much from as with the creatures, for he had learned to mimic them, the cadence of their galloping stride, the labial quaver of their snorts, their peeling screeches—everything save their stench. And it would drive them to the very pitch of frenzy, the scent of something almost human in their roiling midst, set them hacking the vacant black, killing one another …
Yes. Tell me what you feel.
Even then he had understood.
I shake. I cannot breathe.
Even then he had known that Cause had never been the Dûnyain’s First Principle.
And what else?
And Logos even less.
My eyes weep … weep for want of light!
They had settled upon these things simply because they could be seen. Even then he had understood this.
Yes … This is fear.
Darkness was their ground, their foe and foundation.
What is it?
The shrieking black.
The most simple rule.
Cuts …
And cuts …
And cuts …
There was a place high on the shoulder of a mountain where a boy, an old man, and a pregnant woman knelt and observed as another man, a scarred grotesquerie, convulsed and voided his bowel.
Perhaps it was real—a real place—but the fractions, who were legion, who rutted and rampaged through the black, did not care, could not.
Too many cuts. Too many divisions of skin.
Run was a rule.
Hide was a rule.
Know was a rule.
Desire was a following.
Existence was a heap.
One hundred stones, too round to lock one into the other. Rounded like thumbs. Those on top warm for sunlight, like lobes or lozenges of living meat between the fingers. Those below chill, like the lips of the dead. Eyes scanning the coniferous gloom, isolating the ink of avian shadows. One hundred throws, arm snapping, sleeve popping, hand flicking … A buzzing line, comprehended more in after-image than seen, spearing through the seams between branches.
Ninety-nine birds struck dead. Numerous sparrows, doves, and more crows than anything else. Two falcons, a stork, and three vultures.
“Killing,” a fraction explains to the wondering boy. “Killing connects me to what I am.”
And what are you?
“The Survivor,” another fraction replies, and yet another registers the network of scar tissue across his face, the tug and tension of unnatural compromises.
“The Heaper of the Dead.”
There was more horror than concern in their faces when his eyes fluttered open. The boy especially.
The Survivor drew a sleeve across his hideousness, looked to him, his son. The Legion-within howled and clamoured, stamped and spit. Only now did he understand …
Ignorance. Only ignorance had sealed the interval between them. Only blindness, the wilful idiocy that was worldborn love. A fraction relives the flight of the Brethren before the thunderous onslaught of the Singers. Dûnyain leaping before billowing geometries of light, fleeing into the mazed gut of the World, hunted by stone-cracking words, utterances, the violation of everything they held to be true. Dûnyain do not panic. Dûnyain do not reel, broken and bewildered. And he yet he had found himself in the nursery without thought, scooping up this very babe without thought, the one that smelled of him, of Anasûrimbor, the most promising of the Twelve Germs. He clutched this wailing burden to his breast, this impediment, without thought, as if it were no less a fraction of his own soul, a part that had wandered …
Zero. The difference that is not a difference. Zero made One.
He had survived. He, the one burdened, the one tasked, the one who refused to illuminate the interval between him and his son. The fractions of the Dûnyain had been sorted, and he, the least able, the most encumbered, had been the one Selected … the Survivor.
He who had refused to know … who had embraced the darkness that comes before.
The boy clutches his tunic with both hands, hale and halved. He cannot help himself. He is defective.
And so it was with the Absolute. Surrender. Forfeiture. Loss … At last he understood what made these things holy. Loss was advantage. Blindness was insight, revelation. At last he could see it—the sideways step that gave lie to Logos.
Zero. Zero made One.
The Eye watches. Approves.
He gestures to the boy, who obediently comes to him.
He does not speak for a time, electing instead to gaze across the crumpled condensations of earth, dark beneath the silvering arch of the sky. They have finally come to the end of the mountainous throw and steep, the terminus of tyrannical ground. The trackless forests below were just that, trackless, demanding judgment, decision, for being so permissive. Only one scarp remains, one last perilous descent.
The wind is warm with the dank rot that promises life, with the taste of surging green.
It will be better there.
“What is it?”
“Things …” he murmurs to the panorama, “are simple.”
“The madness worsens?”
He looks back to the boy. “Yes.”
He draws the hundredth stone from the waist of his tunic.
“This is yours now.”
The boy, the most blessed fraction, looks to him in alarm. He would deny the interval between them, if he could.
He cannot.
The Survivors stands, begins sprinting. He marvels at the magic that joins will to flexing limbs.
A cry, spoken in a tongue that even animals know.
The Survivor does not so much move as the ground runs out. But the leap … Yes. That is his.
That is his …
As is the yawning plummet, the drop …
Into the most empty arms.
So quickly …
The events that transform us slip …
So quickly.
The face, cut into all expressions, all faces.
Eyes gazing wet from mutilation.
Fixed upon something that runs as he runs, a place he can only pursue, never reach …
Unless he leaps.
The Eye understood, even if the woman did not.
Achamian could see the Dûnyain’s body about thirty cubits below, a motionless swa
tch of skin and fabric draining crimson across fractured stone. He struggled to breathe. It seemed impossible … that a being so formidable … so unnerving … could break so easily.
“Sweet Seju!” he cried, retreating from the dizzy edge. “I told you! I told you not to give any to him!”
Mimara knelt beside the crab-clawed boy, held his blank face against her breast, a hand splayed across his scalp. “Told who?” she snapped, glaring. It belonged to her infuriating genius, the ability to condemn one instant then console the next.
The old Wizard grabbed his beard in frustration and fury. What was happening? When had this damaged girl, this waif, become a Prophet of the Tusk?
She began rocking the boy, who continued gazing at nothing from nowhere—witless.
Achamian cursed under his breath, turned from her glare, understanding, in a turbulent, horrified way, that the futility of arguing with her had become the futility of arguing with the God. He wanted nothing more than to call her on the rank contradiction of mourning a death she had clamoured for mere days previous. But all he could do was fume instead …
And shake.
The wisdom, as always, came after. And with it the wonder.
The Eye had always been a source of worry, ever since learning of it. But now …
Now it had become a terror.
There was her knowledge, for one. He could scarcely look at her without seeing the fact of his damnation in her look, the sluggish blank of someone wracked with guilt and pity for another. Between a woman’s scorn and her truth, the look of the latter was by far the most unmanning.
There was the monolithic immobility of her judgment, for another, the bottomless certitude that he had once attributed to impending motherhood. It was pondering this that he gained some purchase on his newfound fear. Before coming to Ishuäl, he had lacked any measure external to his exasperation, and so had the luxury of attributing her rigidity to obstinance or some other defect of character. But what he had witnessed these past few days … The madness of making—once again—a travelling companion of a Dûnyain, only to watch him shatter like pottery against the iron of the Judging Eye … A Dûnyain! A son of Anasûrimbor Kellhus, no less!
“The eye,” he had told her in the chill aftermath of Cil-Aujas, “that watches from the God’s own vantage.” But he had spoken without understanding.
Now he had no choice. He could no longer feign ignorance of the fact that in some mad, unfathomable manner, he walked—quite literally—with the God … with the very Judgment that would see him damned. Henceforth, he realized, his every step would be haunted by the shadow of his sacrifice.
“Do you know why?” he asked Mimara when they resumed their descent, the mute boy in stumbling tow.
“Why he killed himself?” she asked, either preoccupied with her downward footing or pretending to be. She was genuinely great with child now, and even with the Qirri, she seemed to find steep descents labourious in particular.
The old Wizard grunted his affirmation.
“Because the God demanded it,” she offered after several huffing moments.
“No,” he said. “What were his reasons?”
Mimara graced him with a fleeting glance, shrugged. “Do they matter?”
“Where do we go?” the boy interrupted from above and behind them, his Sheyic inflected with Mimara’s Ainoni burr.
“That way,” the startled sorcerer replied, nodding to the north. What did a Dûnyain child feel, he wondered, in the watches following his father’s death?
“The world ends that way, boy …”
He hung upon that final word, gawking …
Mimara followed his scowl to the horizon—the cerulean haze.
The three of them stood transfixed, gazed with numb incomprehension. The forests of Kûniüri swept out from the crumpled gum-line of the Demua mountains, green daubed across ancient and trackless black. Several heartbeats passed before Achamian, cursing his failing eyes, conjured a sorcerous Lens. And so they saw it, an impossibility painted across an impossibility, a vast plume, spewing its fell innards outward and upward, far above the reach of mountain or even cloud …
Like the noxious shadow of a toadstool, bulging to the arch of Heaven, drawn across the curve of the very World.
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
The River Sursa
No bravery is possible in Hell, and in Heaven, none is needed. Only Heroes wholly belong to this World.
—KORACALES, Nine Songs Heroic
Late Summer, 20 New Imperial Year (4132, Year-of-the-Tusk), the Urokkas
The monstrous plume sailed into dissolution above the Sea.
It seemed Hell itself had taken Dagliash.
Saccarees greeted Proyas upon the summit of Mantigol, his manner blank with incredulity. The eyrie resembled a scene embroidered across some heroic tapestry: survivors milling in the aftermath of catastrophe, damaged souls who would have been illustrious, were it not for the toll exacted. This was what Men did in the wake of disaster, be it the loss of a battle, the death of a loved one, or anything that knocked their lives from the pins of workaday assumption: they communed, if not with words then with looks or simple breathing.
Turning from the mute Exalt-Magus, Proyas gazed out over what seemed perfect circles of obliteration, rings burnt into the very frame of the Urokkas, flung outward across the floodplains. The earth itself burned where Dagliash had stood. Pelts of viscous smoke streamed upward, as if an upside-down World dangled its innards in ashen skies. The ground about this boiling centre had been burnt to chalk and obsidian. The first of the visible dead began some distance away, fields of char, little more than stumped torsos that became recognizable as remains in the shelter of ravines or depressions, which were choked with dead like gutters with rotted leaves. Farther still, near the rutted foundations of Oloreg, he glimpsed survivors crawling or shambling across otherwise lifeless slopes …
Naked souls stumbling, hands out.
Agongorea burned beyond the far shore, smoking like sodden rags thrown over a fire. The River Sursa spilled black as ink into the Sea. Great clots of Sranc clotted its course, rafts of interlocked carcasses bumping and rolling like scum across the surface of a sewer. This, at least, relaxed one of the many fists clenched within Proyas’s breast. The Ordeal had suffered, certainly, but the Horde was no more.
Cataclysm.
Lights that scratch blind. Cracks that swat deaf. Concussions that slap hale bodies into pulp and mist …
Cataclysm shows Men the truth of their pitiful proportion, how their pulse hangs upon the sufferance of more monstrous things.
If Golgotterath had such weapons or allies, what did it matter, the zeal of Men?
Proyas turned to the blanched faces about him, his dismay plain.
No one seemed capable of asking the obvious.
“Has anyone seen Him?” he called, sorting between them with his gaze.
Not a soul answered.
“Anyone!” he cried, his voice cracking.
“I-I saw him …” a feminine voice stammered. “M-moments be-be”—an eye-fluttering wince—“before it … it-it happened.” One of the Swayali regarded him, teetering, her gowns burnt to a fluted husk, her once luxurious hair scorched to a shag.
Somehow he knew she would not live out the night.
“He-he … was w-warning us! Telling us to—”
Coughs battered her, spilling blood as bright as poppies across her chin.
“And since?” Proyas snapped, looking from face to face. “Has anyone seen Him since … since …” He raised a slack hand to the mountainous plume behind him.
Not a soul among them possessed words for what they had witnessed.
Dread silence. Someone on the periphery of the small crowd began sobbing. A twist in the wind swept the summit with the reek of ash and copper filings.
No, a small voice whispered within him.
Proyas swayed, took a numb step to recover, then fairly swooned for vertigo. Far more than his balance seemed
to swing off the hooks and fly. Hopes. Nations. Someone—Saccarees?—caught his elbow, and he could feel his own obstinate weight yank against the grip, as if willing some kind of plummet. But the hand that held him was too strong—impossibly and thoughtlessly strong, like the clasp of a father retrieving his son from peril.
“I am here,” the glorious voice murmured.
And Proyas looked up into the beloved eyes of his Holy Aspect-Emperor.
A tattered chorus scratched the gaping spaces—gratitude and relief punched from stomach and lungs. In his periphery, Proyas saw the others fall to their faces, and, for an endless heartbeat, he longed only to join them, to fall and weep, to release the horror whose silent claws had so girdled his heart.
But Anasûrimbor Kellhus spoke world-consuming sorcery instead, not so much embracing as engulfing his disciple …
Proyas found himself elsewhere, tripping across different stones, different ground, hunching over his own vomit, grey puddles of Meat. He crouched hacking and trembling. When the nausea subsided, he looked up, swatting tears from his eyes. His Holy Aspect-Emperor stood several paces away with his back turned to him, staring out across the degrees of obliteration …
He spat at the taste of bile, realized they stood upon one of Oloreg’s precarious crowns.
“A great and tragic victory has been won here this day,” Kellhus declared, turning to him.
Proyas stared witlessly.
“But the land is polluted …” his Lord-and-Prophet continued. “Accursed. Viri has at last answered for her King’s ancient treachery.”
Bracing his palms against his knees, the Exalt-General pressed himself upright, battled to keep both his balance and the remaining contents of his stomach.
“Let no man stray upon it,” Kellhus commanded. “Let no man breathe the air that blows across it. Stay to the north, old friend.”
Kellhus stood before him, his white robes impossibly immaculate, his mane silk ribbons in the breeze. The vista yawned deep and necrose beyond him, pillared in tar-smoke, floored with ash, cinder, and innumerable dead.