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.
Proyas? Proyas Vaka?
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.