Victims. That had been the lesson of the Mutiny: if he failed to provide the Ordeal with victims, it would simply take them.
It would begin feeding upon itself.
“Let us show our Foe! Let us demonstrate the compass of our strength! Our murderous lust! Let him cower, tremble for knowing He will be eaten!” He howled this last in a drawn sing-song that sent vicious gales warbling through the uproar. Even now, staring out across the heaving distances, he could see Ordealmen throwing severed heads.
“Let us garland our arrival in might and horror!”
The Horns gleamed in the clear morning sun behind him, baffling the eyes the way they loomed above the smashed teeth of the Ring Mountains, the famed Occlusion, despite lying miles beyond them—despite being things manufactured.
“Now let them gaze upon us! Let them witness the bottomless extent of our resolve!”
One final repast was all they required.
“Let!”
“Them!”
“Fear!”
He stared across the threshing expanse of madmen. His every glance revealed some depraved vignette: Men shaking, their eyes rolled to white; Men cutting their own limbs, making war-paint of their own blood; Men rutting like dogs, strangling and pummelling, smearing seed upon themselves and their brothers …
“We! We are the Chosen!”
And he could feel It, the Spider that was the God …
“We! We are the Exempt!”
Seizing his voice with tempest lungs, blowing truth as a howling roar.
“The Wicked-that-are-Holy!”
It seemed so obvious … so true …
“And we shall pick of the lowest bough!”
As if his heart had become an unconquerable fist.
“And we shall eat—eat!—of the fruit that He—He!—hath given!”
Hands outstretched over the ravenous multitudes …
“We shall eat what Hell hath cooked for us!” he screamed.
And so led them all into irrevocable damnation.
Hunger had drawn them as a bow. A single word loosed them …
His word.
His pony galloped for the promise of expanse, of fleeing without obstruction from cruel spurs, and for the first time it seemed Proyas could breathe the pallor of the air, the odour of land without pungent life, soil that had been rotted to the mineral nub.
The smell of absolute ground.
He had loved Achamian, the Divided Man. Whatever animus he had borne against him, he had borne out of terror of this love. Out of his own divisions.
As Kellhus had said.
The Scalded shambled across Agongorea, a leprous swarm, their heads hung low, their skin hanging from bodies become wounds. They drank of such rivers that braided the bone-strewn plains. They did not eat. They suffered as few had suffered, rotting while they still lived, becoming putrescent in macabre stages. They lost their hair, their skin, their teeth. They vomited blood upon ancient Ishroi bones.
Went blind.
They had not so much marched from the banks of the River Sursa as stretched themselves across Agongorea, for not a moment passed without another ghastly soul slumping to the ground, sometimes inert, sometimes curling upon final breaths. Lord Sibawûl te Nurwul lurched upon their forward edge, though his stride never slowed and his gaze never sagged from the line of the horizon, the fell image of the Horns. What had happened at Wreoleth still smouldered within him somehow, so that he seemed to char as much as decompose, cook about some infernal, interior fire. In their thousands they followed in his footsteps, trusting the constancy of his image, warring with the misery of their undoing, a wet and wheezing avalanche of leprous humanity. A Leper’s Ordeal.
Not a soul knew what they did, let alone why they did it.
Indeed, this was their revelation.
Not a penitent among them questioned the apparition, or even cared to regard it when it appeared on the northern horizon. Those who thought were those who died. Sibawûl Vaka did not so much as glance across a sodden shoulder. He, like all those who followed him, had found a line that ran diagonal to the lines pursued by the living. So he laboured as before toward the golden Horns, not so much oblivious to the twining Horde descending upon them as utterly indifferent.
The Great Ordeal resolved as a vast, marauding mass on the north, dark and seething, winking as though powdered with diamonds. No shouts, no howls carried on the wind, only the susurrus of thousands trotting across the tomb floor that was Agongorea. The Scalded pilgrims shambled onward heedless, drawn as filings toward the golden terror. The interval dwindled, and those at the fore of the unpoisoned masses broke into a sprint, their countless faces pained amalgams of joy and exertion. Suddenly Men were running, fields of them whooping for exultation, cackling for the festival madness, for the promise of vicious transgression.
Few among the Scalded so much as turned to regard their charging kin and countrymen.
And so did the pure fall upon the defiled. The surging boundaries of the Great Ordeal tumbled through the spare fringe of the leprous train. Wails and shrieks joined the triumph that rifled the starving sky, a chorus that grew in volume and density as the Holy Host of Hosts consumed more and more of the wretched column. The last remaining horsemen had hooked about the westward barrens to corral those Lepers attempting to flee, but the rotted mobs simply stood insensate as the bestial multitudes engulfed them. The air rang human and shrill.
Some few of the rotted drew weapons on the hale, and if they were fortunate, they managed to die for being dangerous.
Otherwise, the night would be unending …
When darkness finally wedded abomination on the Field Appalling.
If Nersei Proyas, Believer-King of Conriya, Exalt-General of the Great Ordeal, rode at the fore, he did not lead. It was just him perched upon a gallop, the parallax grinding the dead earth into immobility with distance. Agongorea clutched the whole of what could be seen, save the Horns pricking the horizon. The Great Ordeal loomed unseen behind him, a dread rumble that fell like hair about his neck and shoulders.
The first figures shocked him, so abhorrent was their appearance, so indifferent was their gait, slouching to Golgotterath, falling forward, catching themselves step by wretched step.
The Scalded.
Hairless wraiths, stripped, each flayed to the degree they were diseased, plagued by flies, scribbling shadows. Proyas hurtled as something armoured and merciless among them, riding for the head of the wretched mob. He laughed for piteous looks that accompanied his passage.
He found Sibawûl te Nurwul standing alone upon a knoll that reared like a capping wave, scarcely recognizable save for his antique cuirass and fur-rimmed boots. The man faced west, his gaze fixed on the twin golden nails that pinned the horizon.
Proyas leapt from his horse, savoured the sudden immovability of the earth beneath his feet. His groin ached, buzzed in a manner that set his whole being afire. The rotting Chieftain-Prince turned to him, a vision so horrific he polluted all breath for simply breathing. He was hairless, save for errant blond wires. Ulcers did not so much adorn as clothe him, a raiment of septic flesh, here mottled and woolen, there slicked with effluent, shining like greased silk. His ears were missing, leaving only muddy holes. But for some reason, his eyes and the skin about them had been spared, so that he seemed to wear himself as a mask, the edges red with inflammation, curled like burnt papyrus, running high upon his cheeks across the bridge of his nose, and pinned to blond brows.
Words should have been exchanged.
Proyas strode into him fists balled, hammered the putrid horror to his knees. The arch of him thrashed for violent bliss. He clasped the Chieftain-Prince’s pestilent cheeks, licked the ulcerations across his forehead.
The taste of soil and salt and bitter. The sum of his sweetness lay in his infection.
Sibawûl Vaka’s gaze drifted back toward the Horns of Golgotterath.
Proyas stared at his fingertips, his soul roiling in horror and glee. His
hands were shaking. His heart bobbled about his breast. His breath was nowhere to be found …
He had not even begun his feast!
He joined in the man’s westward vigil, peering at what had been their common destination ere this day had come, the fabled Horns, points of burnished gold, scorching the surrounding barrens for their brilliance. For so long they had seemed illusory, a trick on the horizon, golden and malicious. There was no denying their mountainous reality now.
And it seemed that together they understood, the King and the Leper, for what sparks of meaning that were struck from the stone of grief and the iron of ardour were the most profound of all. The Horns were watching. He punched the polluted Chieftain-Prince once again, forced his eyes east, so that he might see the Great Ordeal devour his fell parade of corpses. Together, they watched floods of limber shadows streaming about and between the ailing forms. Together, they heard the screaming grow into a tidal din.
As brothers, they watched brother revelling in the blood of brother.
“We … walk … together …” the Scalded Lord of the Ordeal rasped. “The … Shortest … Path.”
Proyas stared at him, eyes weeping … mouth watering.
“We … pace … the beam … of Hell … togeth—”
The Exalt-General struck the Chieftain-Prince of Cepalor to ground once again, convulsed about the bliss that exploded from his loins.
He sucked drool …
Pulled his knife.
What Hell hath cooked, he would eat.
Honour … Honour was …?
And grace … What was grace?
The mortification of what obstructed, what flinched, what bled and heaved and murdered, what quivered and throbbed, what dripped and cut and abraded.
What was grace if not the suffocation of what screamed?
And honour … What was it, if not the sacrifice that best served the gluttony of your masters?
Perhaps it is you I should fear then …
The Greater Proyas dwelt in the bloom of blind abandon … and he saw that he was free … that nothing in Creation could be more beautiful than ravaging the soul with the body.
“So am I made whole,” he whispered to the twitching form. He huffed and grunted for the gush of fluids about his delirious centre.
“So I … overcome … my division.”
Even our weeping is broken.
Even our misery.
We lay siege to what is nearest.
Sap our own walls.
Eat our own hopes.
We chew our dignity to gristle.
And chew.
Until we become creatures that move, merely.
The counterfeit sons of rumoured fathers.
Souls needled into skin, across nakedness.
Murals where there should be Men.
Shades.
Holes filled with meat.
Gaps between faces, between stars.
Shadows in skulls.
Holes …
In our hearts …
Our bellies …
Our knowledge—our speech!
Endless holes …
Filled with meat.
CHAPTER
SIX
The Field Appalling
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, shu
dder 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?”
She smiled. “No.”
“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 …”