Teus Eskeles, the Schoolman who had condemned him to hell.
He nodded, even smiled, though grief and horror yawed within him still. These Men, these Lords and Grandmasters, noble and ruthless, learned and base—these Zaudunyani were his family. They always had been, for twenty long years.
“We are Men of war!” he cried out by way of exhausting admission. “We cut down what we call wicked … call ourselves Men of God.”
He snorted in what seemed the old way. He would never know where the monumental indignation came from, or how it came to own him so absolutely, only that this would be the most fierce moment in what had been a relentlessly ferocious life. He could see it kindling the rapt eyes about him, expressions igniting, as if his words had become sparks.
He was not who he was. He was stronger.
“We are bred to destroy what we have become.”
His eye happened upon King Sorweel, who remained seated high on the uppermost tier. Rigid. Eyes dull and sharp, like flint.
“What? Did you think the God would come to you, miserable, mortal wretch that you are, as another spoil—as flattery? Horror! Horror is your revelation! Shame is your revelation!”
He was not who he was.
“Dwell within it, and you dwell in the very presence of the God!”
He was something greater, the Proyas that perpetually outran his soul, that forever dwelt in the darkness that came before. Here, with these grim and battered Men, his brothers, beloved companions in the ways of wickedness and war. Here in this place.
“You have been your Enemy! You know Him as even the Gods cannot! Now you, alone of all Men living, know the value of salvation! The beauteous miracle that is honour! The breathtaking gift that is justice! As warriors understand peace, so you understand evil! You know it as you know yourselves, and you hate it as you hate yourselves!”
The Lords of the Ordeal erupted, not in acclaim or any bellicose affirmation, but in recognition. They hollered as orphaned brothers conjoined in the paternity of Death, as those who knew only each other, and so despised and feared all other things. Serwa and Kayûtas looked about, remote as always, but also gladdened.
They had feared him lost—that much was plain. And somehow Proyas knew their father had instructed them to seize power should he succumb—should he fail. Proyas, the one most pious … and least aware.
The caste-noble assembly roiled. The very extremity of their passion, wailing as old women one moment, whooping as young boys the next, oppressed them, and for all their frantic gratitude the Lords of the Ordeal found themselves turning, as all manly souls turn, to anger and contempt. He had imbued their terror and despair with holy meaning, offered it up as a mathematician offers up equations, a ledger where wrath could suffice for redemption. Holiness is never so cheap as when bartered for lives, and they were, in the end, violent, hateful Men.
Sinners.
So they began baying for the blood of their foe. Proyas could feel it as much as they, the need to affix their sin to more disposable souls.
“Brothers!” he called, hoping to gather them once again within the harness of his voice. “Broth—!”
I feared what I might find …
A voice spoken through the cracks between spaces, making a million mouths of the pores in their skin. It literally plucked air, strummed hearts. Eskeles was so startled he tripped and crashed backward, bearing Saccarees tumbling with him to the ground. Petals of luminance emanated from the back of the tented chamber. As one they whirled—save Proyas, who had been facing the proper direction all along, and had seen the light kindle from nothing. As one they saw Him step down from the highest of the nearly vacant tiers, near enough for Sorweel to lean out and touch. It seemed the sun itself descended upon its own ray, a beam bearing the twin ink stains of the Decapitants. Golden hair flowing, draped in one of the bejewelled vestments Proyas had seen in the baggage room weeks previous.
“How my heart is gladdened,” the shining figure said.
The Lords of the Ordeal slumped to astounded knees, dropped their faces to the ashen earth of Shigogli.
Only Proyas and the Imperial siblings remained standing.
“Sound the Interval. Let the faithful rejoice, and the unfaithful fear.”
CHAPTER
NINE
The Great Letting
So they cast down the innocent with the guilty, not out of folly, but for the stern wisdom of knowing what cannot be sorted.
—Journals and Dialogues, TRIAMIS THE GREAT
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 dismis
sed. 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 …