You planned this.
The blue eyes saw as they always saw, a glance that was at once a peering, a terrifying scrutiny.
Then he was raised up. Golgotterath surged and a subsided. Gold sheered against white across wailing skies. And beneath the thundering invective of the Holy Aspect-Emperor, King Nersei Proyas was carried forth to the multitudes …
So they might rejoice in his suffering.
King Sorweel, heir to the Horn-and-Amber Seat, sat unmoved through all of it, tingling for how near the Most Holy Aspect-Emperor had passed. He looked down, saw the Triple-Crescent Pouch laying in his left palm, though he had no memory of pulling the thing from his belt. Three Sickles. Some time passed before he realized what was happening, how his father’s murderer had scaped King Proyas for the Field Appalling. He could only wonder at the spectacle of the man protesting his innocence with dwindling conviction, not in his claim, but in the truth. He could only marvel at the Lords of the Three Seas, their canine eagerness to be cleansed in accusation, to find reprieve in threats and jabbing fingers. Even Zsoronga dissolved into the general uproar heaving across the Umbilicus floor, leaping with pious demands for retribution, shouting to the rhythm of brandished fists, no different than any Three Seas Believer-King.
On it went.
Sorweel looked to the gaping hole in the eastern wall, almost gasped for the premonition of looking down the miles to Min-Uroikas. He clutched the skin-polished wood. Absent direct sunlight, the hairline etching along the waist and length of the vast cylinders seemed clearer, promising symbols to the peering eye, but collapsing into scribbles rather than resolve. The World-Curse, his Siolan brothers had called it, a prayer for our destruction dropped from the stars …
Immiriccas lowered his face, convulsed for disgust … rallied for hatred.
When the youth finally looked up, the last of the backs were vanishing from the Umbilicus—a few so bold as to leap through the hole, loping like boys about the tumult’s eager edge. Then the grand pavilion was empty, save for Anasûrimbor Serwa standing in the middle of the floor with her back toward him.
“Has it winded you at last?” Sorweel asked.
“No,” she replied, turning to face him. Her cheeks shone white for tears. “I merely mourn another sacrifice … A deep one.”
“And when He comes to you,” Sorweel said, standing and stepping down the tiers much as her father had several mad moments before. “When the Holy Aspect-Emperor places you on the altar of the Thousandfold Thought … What then?”
She closed her eyes, lowered her face.
“You know we cannot be together …” she said, “that what happened on the mountain, on the plain—”
“I know that it was beautiful …” Sorweel interrupted, advancing nearer, “that it made me feel, not as a man, but as a boy, something tender, easily broken, something that could leap. I know that our fire burned within a single pit, that we could not be told apart, you and I …”
She gazed stupefied, retreated from him one step.
He followed. “I know that you, an Anasûrimbor, love me.”
The Triple-Crescent Pouch puzzled his left palm.
When?
“That look upon your face!” she suddenly cried. “Sorweel, you must make it go away! If Father sees it—if he sees me like this! I am too important to him. He will end you, Sorweel, the way he will end any and all liabilities before assaulting Golgotterath! Do you und—”
Thudding feet yanked their gazes to the entrance. Suddenly Zsoronga was seizing his shoulders, huffing for breath, his eyes wild with panic. “Sorweel! Sorweel! Something has gone wrong!” The Successor-Prince glanced wildly at Serwa, pulled his friend toward the great rent in the eastern wall.
Sorweel fought to disengage himself. “What is it?”
Zsoronga stood rapt before the image of Golgotterath, his great chest heaving, his eyes clicking between him and the Swayali Grandmistress. He licked his lips.
“Her-her father …” he said, swallowing for want of wind. “Her father claims”—a grimace of incredulity—“claims that my-my father has violated the-the terms of their treaty …” He closed his eyes as if waiting out some pain. “That-that he sent an emissary to help the Fanim attack Momemn!”
“So what does this mean?” Sorweel asked.
Zsoronga stared only at Serwa now, his expression crumpling for the remorselessness he found there.
“It means,” the Princess-Imperial said without inflection, “that we all make sacrifices this day.”
Zsoronga leapt for the image of Min-Uroikas, only to be caught on a gaseous shout, pulled spread-eagled by interlocking circlets of light about his wrists and ankles. Sorweel found himself rushing the girl, not to assail but to importune. The white eyes and sun-brilliant mouth turned to him, and something shattered across the length of his body, sent him whumping backward. He fell as a thing connected to limbs merely.
He did not so much kneel before the blackness as trip into it.
Scripture, the Great Kyranean once observed, is history inked in madness.
The Lament had not been confined to the Lords of the Ordeal. Far from it. Not a soul among the Host of Hosts had escaped unscathed, for fairly all had consumed the Meat of necessity. Nevertheless, not all had joined in the obscenities visited upon the Scalded. Those righteous few who had somehow held fast crossing the wastes of Agongorea now found themselves perplexed by the shame of their fellows.
A Host uncannily divided received word of the Holy Aspect-Emperor’s return. Those in the clutches of the Lament became wary, and many skulked aimlessly rather than make display, fearing the judgment of their Lord-and-Prophet. Those few still in the thrall of the Meat, however, made loutish demonstration, howling in exaltation, proclaiming a joy that was more mercenary than pious, for Golgotterath had become a granary in their eyes, and their Lord-and-Prophet’s return an occasion to finally seize the Meat sheltering within. They formed wild, unruly mobs, made lewd celebratory displays. They scoffed at those in the throes of the Lament, took umbrage at their condemning gazes. More than sixty souls would perish in brawls.
A crazed night followed. Throughout the encampment, innumerable thousands huddled in vertiginous remorse, unable to sleep for horror and the sound of intemperate revels on the air.
The Interval sounded upon the desolate dawn. The Men of the Ordeal crawled from their blankets and tents, milled about the messes and latrines, wondering. Then, for the first time in weeks, the prayer-horns blared deep and elephantine, calling all souls to Temple. Men gazed about, wondering. On the southern outskirts of the encampment, a band of Nangaels spied the Holy Aspect-Emperor walking alone in the shadow of Occlusion. They turned to one another in astonishment, realizing their Lord-and-Prophet had beckoned them with a waving arm. Helical lights consumed the mirage utterly, and deposited the holy figure more than a mile to the south. “He bids us!” the longbeard warriors began bawling. “Our Lord-and-Prophet bids us follow Him!” The cry reproduced like mosquitos, leaping from throat to throat, and soon, clouds of Ordealmen were trekking southward.
Hours passed before they had fully assembled. The skies were woolen, the sun obscure. Golgotterath lay sullen in the distance, the golden Horns thrust into what seemed a high-hanging fog. The Holy Aspect-Emperor stood immobile upon a promontory jutting from the foundations of the Occlusion, a ramp of stone like a thumb, famed in legend. Himonirsil, the Nonmen had called it, the Accusatory, and evidence of their ancient works encrusted the terrain above and about its root, basalt wrack marbling the slopes, streaking and staining the whole formation from a distance. The Accusatory had once graced the Arobindant, the legendary Siolan fortress that had anchored (albeit in different incarnations) both the First and the Second Watch, in days older than old, when the exhausted Nonmen had whiled away centuries guarding the Ark. The ramparts had long been razed, and the Accusatory, which had once pointed from the fortress’s heart, now jabbed out of its grave.
So did Anasûrimbor Kellhus, Asp
ect-Emperor of the Three Seas, stand upon the self-same precipice as Cû-jara Cinmoi, King of the House Primordial, only now, the Sons of Men packed the broken slopes below. They choked the ravines, then spread and spread, a vast and soiled blanket, across the dead plain. To a man they looked to their Holy Aspect-Emperor on the Accusatory, thronged with their backs to the dread spectacle behind them, knowing it was enough that He could see.
Though only those on the pitch of the Occlusion could see the number of those still trekking from the camp taper, the entire host fell silent of its own accord, somehow knowing the assembly was complete. Their Lord and Prophet was little more than a speck against the heaped wreckage of the Occlusion, yet even the farthest afield understood He was about to speak.
The Holy Aspect-Emperor stood monumental before them, garbed in robes of voluminous white, his flaxen hair drawn back into an antique war-braid, his beard squared and woven. Intermittent flashes revealed the halo crowning his head, as if an otherwise invisible plate of gold wobbled beneath some otherworldly sun. A retinue milled behind him, largely obscured by the Accusatory’s rising bulk.
“Who?” his voice cracked across the barren scarps and plains. “Who among you has not returned to find your hearth untended, your home disordered?”
Nearly every soul drew breath.
“And who has not been wroth?” he boomed. “Who has not reached for the rod? Who among you has not laid hands upon those most beloved?”
Individual cries dissolved into a gaseous roar.
“So I have found my hearth! My home!”
Palms waved. Voices wailed in involuntary expostulations of sorrow and shame. What was cacophonous swelled into a singular, thunderous howl …
The Holy Aspect-Emperor’s words dropped through it like iron through sodden tissue.
“I took my leave following the Scald … And I returned home … to the Three Seas …”
The Great Ordeal crashed into miraculous silence. It seized their hearts, that word, home.
“I returned to Momemn and the glory of the Andiamine Heights. I returned to what we would save, and I found that turmoil had claimed my house!”
It clutched their throats, gouged their bellies. How long? How long since they had squeezed their children? How long since their wives had last seen them weep?
“So I took up the rod … I set right what had been overthrown!”
Cheers rose in tepid squalls from various quarters, only to collapse into anxious silence … The night had been fat with rumour.
“And now I have returned to the Host of Hosts to find the same!”
A party of four stone-faced Pillarians resolved from the small crowd behind Him, dragging forward a powerful Zeumi youth, naked with his elbows bound behind his back: Zsoronga ut Nganka’kull, the Successor-Prince of High Holy Zeum, and hostage of the New Empire.
“To do the same!”
The Pillarians brought the Satakhan’s eldest son forth to their Holy Aspect-Emperor, beat him to his knees.
“Accursed be Zeum!” the holy figure thundered above the lacerated boy. “Accursed be Nganka’kull, Great Satakhan of Zeum, for he has cast his sticks with Fanayal and his heretical marauders—and so cast his honour and our treaty into the flames!”
The far-flung assembly roared in outrage, and exultation, a veritable sea of howling mouths and wild gesticulations. Pillarians had been toiling behind the back of the Zeumi youth even as Kellhus spoke. Now the Holy Aspect-Emperor raised a sandalled foot to Zsoronga’s forehead, and the booming trilled with illicit anticipation, as much for those in the throes of the Lament as for those yet in the thrall of the Meat. Men caught their breath for the suddenness of the fall. The Successor-Prince bounced from the limit of the rope, dangled insensate from his elbows, his head down, turning on a slow rotation, first one way, then the other. A stone struck his thigh, and he kicked as if from a dream. Almost immediately a shower of missiles rose from the crowds roiling below. A moment of confusion and consternation followed, as the Pillarians struggled to raise and tie him off higher.
But the Holy Aspect-Emperor gestured, and another nude figure—this one pale and olive—was brought forward. He was carried then violently thrust upon the gravel and stone where the Zeumi prince had grovelled but moments before. The hail of stones trailed, and a hush clipped the Great Ordeal’s indignant roar. Men bid one another to be silent, to the point of cuffing fools if need be, and they gazed in wonder at their Lord and Prophet, who stood erect and glorious before the cringing figure.
“Accursed—!” he began only to stumble upon the crack in his sacred voice …
“Accursed be Nersei Proyas!” he boomed with a savagery none had ever heard, a bark that seemed to pluck hairs from arms, the injury and incredulity belonging to fathers betrayed by beloved sons. An avalanche of cries rose from the Great Ordeal, roars that were at once snarls, building into a crescendo that nearly matched the hellish clamour of the Horde. But the din in no way diminished or hindered the Aspect-Emperor’s thunderous voice.
“Accursed be my brother! My companion in faith and arms! For his treachery has thrown the pall of damnation upon you all!”
The countless thousands seethed, stamped feet and brandished fists, scratched at skin, scalp, and beards.
“Accursed be he …” the Holy Aspect-Emperor cried upon a failing breath, “who has broken my heart!”
And what had been tumult and uproar surged into riot, the violence of Men so maddened they must punish what was near to exact vengeance upon what lay far.
The Pillarians once again laid hands upon the disgraced Exalt-General. He slumped against their brutal ministrations, his head lolling like a murdered maiden’s. They trussed him the way they had Zsoronga, then cast him from the Accusatory ledge. The hemp jerked him short, swung him hard into the chapped stone faces. He hung swaying by his elbows above the howling masses.
Occupying the point between the two criminals, the Holy Aspect-Emperor stood upon the thumbnail precipice, his gold-shining hands outstretched. The Great Ordeal answered in what seemed a vast, collective paroxysm, the rabid fury of those who had fallen upon the Scalded, and the wild lust of those who yet starved in the clutches of the Meat. Men wept and raged, screamed flecks of spittle at either of the two hanging figures, or howled adoration at the God who had condemned them.
The very World screamed, a sound so loud that the sky itself smelled of teeth. And the miraculous voice—His voice—somehow passed through all clamour and struck their ears to the quick …
“Accursed be the Great Ordeal!”
A voice so mighty as to transcend sound, to make a cavern ceiling of void, a croak that made a throat of Creation, and a tongue of each and every listener. The Host’s roar faltered, trailed into the whisk of dust-devils. The Men of the Ordeal stood dumbstruck, stupefied, as if the sheer loudness of their Lord and Prophet’s declaration had cracked the words and made mud of their meaning.
“For the commission of acts obscene and unspeakable—transgressions that beggar the heart, the intellect!”
And in their tens of thousands, they stood naked and hanging. Wails began poking the astonished silence …
Not a soul spared any thought of Golgotterath behind them.
“For the iniquity of brother raping brother! Of kin slaying kin!”
Others cried out in shame and grief, rocking, tearing hair and scratching skin, gnashing teeth.
“Aye, accursed! Damned! Damned to the eternal furnaces of Hell!”
And what was a broken chorus of lamentation swelled into a thunderous furor, whole nations, peoples, races, beseeching …
“Cannibal treachery! Unholy congress!”
“What outrage!”
“What abomination!”
To a man they convulsed or wept or shrieked or cast out warding hands. Admission, denial, it did not matter. Like inconsolable children they threw themselves against their neighbours, thrashed as if against the grip of the very World.
How? How had such a t
hing happened? How had these hands …
How could …
High upon the rock, the Holy Aspect-Emperor gazed down upon them, white and golden, a shining aperture. The chalk scarps of the Occlusion soared about him, flecked with black. And though he was little more than a mote to endless outer thousands, it seemed they could see the scowl of incredulity and indignation, feel the cudgel of divine judgment, the knife of fraternal disappointment …
How? How had his children wandered so far?
High upon the Rock of Accusation, their Lord-and-Prophet watched, waited, becoming as inscrutable as the overcast heavens. And one by one the Men of the Ordeal exhausted not so much their grief or loathing as the absolute license they had yielded to it. Soon they stood silent save for the mewling of those too far broken to be retrieved. They stood dead of heart, thought and limb, begrudging even the bare need to breathe. They stood awaiting the judgment of the beacon shining before them.
Yes. Let it end.
Even damnation, it seemed, could be blessed, if the past were blotted.
Though none could say from whence they came, cups appeared among them, small cones cut from papyrus and vellum sheets of scripture. And with the mass compliance peculiar to crowds, each repeated the actions of their fellows, taking one cup and passing the stack along. And it calmed them, this simple, communal act, as much as expectation made them wonder. Many craned their heads to peer across the masses, while others peered at the fragments of text scrawled upon their ad hoc cups. Still others gazed to the promontory, awaiting some sign from their Holy Aspect-Emperor …
Not a soul looked to Golgotterath rising in malignant glory behind them.
Thousands continued to weep, inconsolable. A few called out, while others simply wondered aloud. A conversational rumble swelled across the near tracts. Those who had been injured in the heaving madness were raised up and passed outward upon thickets of upraised hands.
“Many still weep among you …”