Moënghus could almost believe that Cnaiür had loomed invisible above him in sooth, so suddenly was he struck. A yoke-hard forearm pressed his cheek to the lifeless dirt. And he could feel the heat of the legendary warrior, smell the bestial musk, the bull-snorting exhalations.
“You are Anasûrimbor!” the most-violent-of-men grated in his ear. “You have no right to complain of games!”
His spit made black glyphs of the dirt before the Prince-Imperial’s face.
A grunt occasioned each blow across his ear and cheek. It was the place of fathers, beating sons.
He could hear her laughing, his mother.
Cnaiür was watching him when Moënghus regained consciousness, sitting naked in the light showering through the yaksh entrance. The King-of-Tribes slouched forward, his arms hooked about an upright knee. His swazond appeared to scale him—such was the contrast between shadow and the white morning bright—rendering him something crocodilian.
“Scylvendi children,” the man said, eyes as bright as opals held to sky, “are taught to hate but a single thing.” He nodded as if admitting fault in a wisdom that had to be obeyed regardless. “Aye … weakness … Weakness is what sparks the father’s cane! Woe to the child that weeps!”
The most-violent-of-all-men cackled, a sound far too docile, given the grimace accompanying it.
“That’s the cunning of it, boy, for nothing is impervious. All power shits. All power sleeps. Strength must be aimed, and so are all things exposed, all things weak. To despise weakness is to loathe existence itself …”
And Anasûrimbor Moënghus understood what it seemed he had known all along. Cnaiür urs Skiötha rode for Golgotterath, for the Unholy Consult, bent on settling the mortal grudge he bore Anasûrimbor Kellhus. Finding Moënghus en route, the very son his enemy had stolen, here, upon the very threshold of his vengeance … It would be too much for any man to credit, let alone one so rent by spite. How could he not presume some devious conspiracy to overthrow him?
“And so is the World made hateful, boy, transformed into yet another thing to be strangled and beaten.”
“I know hate,” Moënghus said warily.
The King-of-Tribes flinched, spat into the filtered morning glare.
“How could you?” he grated. “You had only mothers.”
“Bah!” the Prince-Imperial scoffed. “All Men ha—!”
The Scylvendi leapt to stand chiselled and rank before his son. “Thiiss!” he roared, swatting palms against his scarred chest, thighs, and abdomen. “This is hate!”
He struck Moënghus full on the mouth, throwing his head back on the arc of the chain, down hard to harder earth.
“You are lettered!” Cnaiür urs Skiötha sneered. “Civilized! You abhor the harm that comes of cruel sport! You are sickened by those who whip horses, murder slaves or beat pretty wives! Something numb cramps within you, and you think it hate! But you do nothing! Nothing! You pule and you ponder, you worry loved ones, beat water and scream at skies! You! Do! Nothing!”
Moënghus could only gawk at the elemental figure before him, cower.
“This!” Cnaiür urs Skiötha boomed on climbing veins. “Read it!” He raked clawed fingers from his abdomen to his chest.
“This! This is the history of Hate!”
It took four bowlegged warriors to pry his stake from the earth. He could not understand the least word of their banter, but he was certain they called him a woman for his unscarred skin. They secured his arms about an ash bough against his back, then he was bound to a train of yaksh-dragging ponies, left to stumble with the chattel and the supplies. They flogged him for sport that evening, tormented him until darkness. And it seemed a relief, compared to what he had suffered at the hands of the ghouls. His hacking laughter unnerved them, as did his sobbing grin. What began with whooping derision soured into silence and grave faces.
He saw no sign of his father or his consort during this time.
Finally they hauled him staggering through firelight toward the apparition of the White Yaksh, which wavered as a reflection in water. They wrestled him in, leaned knees upon his head while chaining him to a new stake. Then the reeking brutes were gone, and he lay alone, broken lips against the soothing earth. He cackled for reasons he would never know, and wept for reasons he could not unknow. A lone taper—plunder from some Nansur temple—illuminated the interior. He rubbed his jaw, saw what seemed a helter of baggage across the welter of soiled rugs in the gloom. He noticed furs twined and tangled into a nest no more than two steps from his feet. The taper sputtered, sent light and shadow fluttering across the cone of the weather-stained walls, then everything went black.
Even though it recalled the horror of the Thresholds in Ishterebinth, the darkness seemed to mend him, as if wounds unseen instantly healed. A body is naught but a clouded eye, a vision born into cataracts, pleasure and pain for bright, numbness for dark, everything shapeless and obscure. His skin had seen too much of late, and darkness was his only salve.
He drifted, his body pulsing, alive with aches and flares and winces. His breath pressed a cold spoon against his heart, and he awoke from his doze, realizing he, Anasûrimbor Moënghus, was chained to the foot of an uncouth barbarian’s bed. Like a dog.
This should have occasioned fury, but the limb required had been hacked from him, leaving the fact in the hands of melancholy wonder. He understood why he had fled Serwa. He understood why he had fled here, of all places. He even understood why his true father could do nothing but murder him, in the end. So why did his thoughts reel and stagger so? Why was he perpetually baffled, at a loss to answer some question he could not even ask? Was it simply because he was being beaten? Had his wits, like those of many old soldiers, been forever knocked from him?
The entrance flap snapped back, and Cnaiür urs Skiötha pressed through, bearing a lantern hooked upon a staff. He raised the light high, transferred it to a hook wired to one of the yaksh poles. Muddy illumination swung about the interior, more than enough to awaken Moënghus’s weals.
The most violent of Men peered at the Prince-Imperial in the disconcerting way of those scrutinizing things near as if from afar. And for all his turbulent years, Cnaiür seemed far, far older still, like a barbarian scourge of old, the incarnation of Horiötha, the Scylvendi King-of-Tribes who had sacked Cenei and brought a whole civilization crashing at his feet.
Serwë ducked through the entrance behind him, slunk around stooping beneath the hide walls.
Moënghus pulled himself to his knees, the very limit of the chain’s restraint.
“What do you want of me?” he cried hoarsely.
The barbarian placed his hands on his hips.
“What I always want. What I only want. Vengeance.”
His instinct was to avert his gaze, but there was something naked in his father’s blue-white glare, a famished intensity that demanded an answering stare—a matching exposure …
“So you beat what shreds of him you find in me? Is tha—?”
A concussion snapped his head around, sent his torso swinging about its chain.
“Yes.”
The Prince-Imperial pressed himself from the thatch, his eyes honey beneath fluttering lids.
“Because murdering your own son in fact, murders him in effigy? Becau—?”
A backhand exploded high across his left cheek, and the yaksh interior swung up and about. Links bit into his throat.
“Yes.”
Moënghus whirled back to the roaring figure.
“Fool! Mummer! Who spills their own blood to punish ano—?”
A strike high on his forehead sent him straight down.
The reply was grinding, demonic. “I do.”
Moënghus snorted fresh blood, saw the beautiful waif kneeling nearby, watching him, her back too arched, her eyes dozing for arousal.
Serwë.
He spat blood, bits of teeth, wondered that it had taken so long for him to realize. What was the power of knowledge such that even the chai
ned and battered could be freed?
“Momma?” he called on a grisly laugh.
He wricked his body stiffly about, so that he could apprehend his deranged father.
“So you make like dogs with skin-spies,” he cackled at the shadow. “Is that it?”
Another concussion, this one chasing everything visible into the same tiny corner.
Yes.
Moënghus found himself hanging from the limit of his chain, breathing about an inner vastness, a void that pinned him to the empty air surrounding. It seemed the ground could plummet, and he would remain motionless, hooked to the void. Some time passed before he heard the King-of-Tribes screaming.
“… so you had not the least inkling! There you dwelt—my blood! seed of my loins!—in His very House! and you had not the merest whiff of the abomination dandling you upon his knee. No. You loved him, adored him as your father even as your heart balked. You wondered that you could be so fortunate to be his son, a Prince-Imperial, struck from the bones of a living God! You gloated as all children gloat, that you yourself were divine, that Kings and Generals and Grandmasters had knelt and kissed your knee!”
A father’s face should be a thoughtless thing, something too near to be seen, or at least studied, but for all the glory Kellhus had afforded him, Moënghus was no more than a foundling in the end. The mien before him was a stranger’s, even more alien for the ways it resembled his own, and not for the grills of swazond planking his forehead and cheeks.
“I have memories …” he said to the visage, smiling heedless at the homicidal glare. “Memories that would crack your heart … Never has the World seen such a family—such a court!”
A manic grin, savage for the carnivorous precision of his teeth.
“And this is supposed to surprise me? Overthrow my conceit? Nay, boy, it merely confirms me in my outrage, rekindles my conviction. Of course you loved him—worshipped, fawned and adored him. He gave you meaning, and meaning, boy, is the gold that he tosses in the air. And you are just another beggar, another mewling cripple, scratching dust at his feet!”
“And yet, here you are!” Moënghus shouted in incredulous retort. “Here you stand wedded to the selfsame goad! Soiling sheets with a Consult abomination! Bedding Apocalypse! The only gold that Kellhus throws!”
A growling cackle.
“Apocalypse? That is my end. Not his.”
Moënghus tried to smirk through the thick of swelling.
“So what is his end?”
The powerful shoulders hitched in a shrug. “The Absolute.”
The Prince-Imperial frowned.
“The Absolute? What’s that supposed to mean?”
The plainsman spat to his right. “To know as the God knows.”
“More madness!” Moënghus cried. “What foo—?”
“The Nonman seek the Absolute,” the thing-called-Serwë said unbidden from across the yaksh. “They practice Elision, thinking they can hide themselves from Judgment, and so pass into Oblivion unseen, find absolution in the Absolute. The Dûnyain use the same word the Kûniüri inherited from the Nonmen, but enamoured of intellect and reason, they believe it to be a goal …”
Moënghus snorted derision. “First you play my mother, and now you play my sister!”
Cnaiür’s eyes whitened about cruel inspiration.
He strode to where his concubine loitered and clapped great, scarred hands about her throat. He hauled the slack-limbed beauty to a point immediately above the sagging Prince-Imperial. “I know your family, boy. My spies have never stopped watching! You speak of Serwa … the witchqueen …”
He brandished his consort’s face as though she were a bulb ripped from a grandmother’s garden, growling, “Yessss!” Sinew leapt from his banded arms, and thumbs burrowed into her pigeon-breast throat. Despite the crimped lines of anguish, her beauty arrested the Prince-Imperial, her face became a world where he might live, a place where strife yet suffered innocence—that is, until the visage unravelled into arachnid fingers, becoming a series of spastic clutches.
“She is every bit as inhuman as her namesake!”
Moënghus kicked back and around in involuntary terror. “Madness!” he cried. “You! You’re the one who lies with monsters! With beasts!”
Cnaiür threw the thing-called-Serwë to bald ground, spat as it scuttled to the safety of leather walls.
“But what of you and your monsters, boy?” he replied with a malicious grin. “What of the lone piglet in a brood of Anasûrimbor wolves?”
“I-I don’t understand …”
“Pfah! I see the knowledge in you, the knowledge you would deny to preserve your golden life. How could you not feel the gulf between their souls and our own? So quick as to prick your hackles. So canny as to make you forever fear the treacheries dwelling in your face. Never forgetting, so greedy are they for munition! They cozened you with soft words and embraces, draped you in the bangles of their glory, so that you might caper as one of them, and still you knew their defect, what made them more abomination than human!”
The old Scylvendi Hero-King spat again, raised arms to the conical ceiling and its morning-glowing seams.
“Had they faces like fingers, you would cry out for swords and fire. But no, they possess souls like fingers instead. Their perversion can only be guessed, argued, and never seen!” He spoke with savage gesture, arms low and wide, snapping into fists and bladed palms. “My beast has been contrived to listen to secrets, while yours has been fashioned to speak them, bred—bred like fighting cocks!—to wind through the gut of our souls, to eat with our mouths, shit with our anuses! Bred to tangle the chambers of our heart, twine about our pulse, to own us from within, to nest in the pitch black of our follies, our conceits, our hopes, our loves!—all our womanish weaknesses!”
And he stood there, his true father, a mangled soul housed in twists of meat, slicked in sweat, grinning for blood, shining about his edges for the morning bright, scars like silver nails.
“You know of what I speak!”
This little black-haired boy.
This wolf-eyed foundling …
Who was he?
“Do not worry …” the Ghoul-most-hated had said. “You shall be my son, after this.”
So cold, that blackness. So clean.
“Those who call you brother, you shall know not.”
He lay across the dirt, as naked as his father but for his shackles. He lay, starving limbs a tingle, his temple pressed against the cool earth, a sand like the sodden sand on the strand’s limit, only dry. He spoke without tone or intensity of what had happened, how he had come to Ishterebinth, what he had endured, and how that had delivered him to this place. He found it astounding how he could talk of Harapior without raging, how he could recount his grievances the Scylvendi way, with precision and hate. He told them of Serwa’s seduction and their subsequent incest, how she had used him in an attempt to make the King of Sakarpus hate. He told them how she had sang while he had gagged and shrieked. With slow, measured words, he recounted the details of his sister’s monstrosity, her resemblance to her arachnid father, and he found it absurd that he fought Cnaiür urs Skiötha’s argument, mad even, given that it was his own.
“Everything,” he conceded, “is as you say.”
And it seemed nightmarish, the way the world within the yaksh simply snapped back to the mad pantomime he had just stripped away, his true father sitting cross-legged without comment, his attention utterly welded to his son’s voice. His inhuman mother attending to his broken face.
They even kept him chained.
The black-haired boy. The wolf-eyed foundling.
Moënghus awoke in the predawn light, lying perfectly still in the way of animals upon predatory plains. The unseen camp was silent, as mute as the grey light filtering down from above. He knew his father was absent before he looked about simply for the chill in the air. He likewise knew the Consult skin-spy was present, but how, he would never understand. No alarm occasioned finding he
r face in the vapid light. The gloom consumed her body.
They stared at each other for what seemed an immeasurable time, mother and son.
“It surprises you that he knows what I am,” the thing-called-Serwë finally said.
“And what are you?” Moënghus croaked.
“Malleable. What he needs me to be.”
A pause filled with soundless breathing.
“You … You’re the perplexing one …” She smiled angelically. “The Anasûrimbor.”
The Prince-Imperial nodded. “And if he doesn’t kill me, what then, beast?”
“But he will kill you.”
Moënghus rolled onto his side, carried as much of his agony upon his right shoulder as he could.
She could have been a statue, so motionless had she remained. This too was a stratagem.
“I am a child of the House of your enemy,” he said. “I am the very voice he must not hear. You need him to kill me. But you fear that he knows this as well as you … that he’ll keep me simply to deny you.”
An intensity crawled into the disembodied visage.
“Perhaps …” the thing conceded.
Anasûrimbor Moënghus grinned through lacerations.
“You really should kill me now.”
The immaculate face withdrew as if on a stalk in water, vanished into adjacent shadows.
CHAPTER
EIGHT
The Lament
Verily, he stood beneath them, made bold demonstration of his will, and yet still he kneeled, as did his kin, as did all assembled across the plain, for It was too vast not to smite their hearts with knowledge that they were gnats, merely, lice roaring.
—“Third Fathom of Pir Minningial,” ISÛPHIRYAS
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.