“Akka.”
Though it knifed his chest doing so.
Then the apparition was gone, and only his conclusion remained.
He found bliss in dozing.
Then he was being hauled upward. He had no awareness of it until he saw his companion below, the Zeumi youth, the friend of Harweel’s son. Remorse skewered him to the pommel. Then he was spinning in the orange glare of evening, drawn relentlessly upward, grip by grip. It dawned on him as he was heaved across the promontory’s lip that the man’s strength had shouted his treachery all along …
The fact that he was inhuman.
The white clad image spiralled about him, luminous for the haloes about his head and hands, stained for the cadaverous contradiction of the Decapitants. Then serrated ground … warm water rinsing his face with cool, slaking his thirst.
“Gaze …” the beloved voice said—for even after everything, it was still beloved.
“Gaze upon Golgotterath.”
And Proyas saw them out across the Shigogli, the Horns rising colossal on a tangent to the furnace orb of the sun, black burnished in smoldering gold.
“Why?” he croaked. “Why do you show me this?”
He did not need to turn to see the Aspect-Emperor hesitate. Golgotterath had become his face.
“I’m not sure … The closer I come, the greater the darkness grows.”
Swallowing had become laceration, but Proyas grimaced more for confusion. His entire life, it seemed, had been apportioned equally between this very day, and all that had gone before.
“You bid me … bid me commit those abominations.”
“Yes. To accomplish the impossible you had to commit the unthinkable.
To bring such a host this far through lands so perilous … You have wrought a miracle, Proyas.”
The Exalt-General wept for a time.
“I needed you weak …” his Master explained. “If you had been strong, you would have sought alternatives, you would have gambled on some way, any way, to avoid taking the monstrous actions you took.”
“No! No! If I-I were strong … you need only command me! I would have committed any atrocity in your name!”
A rueful breath. “That is the universal vanity of Men, is it not? To presume they can know all their decisions, past and future …
“No, old friend. I see more of you than you can fathom. You would have balked, assumed that I had to be testing you somehow. If you did not question me, if you assumed me good, then you would have questioned my command. This is why I tore down your conviction. To be uncertain is to embrace the expedient. By trammelling your faith I assured you always reached for the nearer club, that you always found for hunger when you cast your sticks.”
Golgotterath … Even so distant, it nevertheless managed to loom, to stir some kernel of primeval alarm.
“Then … why denounce me?”
The beloved face did not flinch. “Because your life is worth the lives of millions … the lives of Miramis, Thaila, and Xinemus.”
Proyas closed his eyes about hot tears, sputtered for relief and outrage both.
“How then? How does … denouncing me … change … anything?”
“By healing the hearts of those who continue the battle. By giving me Men who fight as Men reborn.”
A line of southward-bound geese crossed the intervening sky, drawn into a cryptic rune.
“So am I saved? Or have I … have-have I … damned myself?” Anasûrimbor Kellhus shrugged.
“I am no prophet.”
The other Proyas hissed between clenched teeth. Affront blotted all distinctions.
“False!”
“The seeds are cast and I say which grains will grow, no different than any Prophet.”
“Lies! Deceit and deception—all of it!”
“Truth,” the shadow of the Holy Aspect-Emperor said in a voice that was also a shrug. “Lies … For the Dûnyain, these things are naught but tools, two keys to two different arenas of the World. Tell me which is greater: The truth that sees Men extinct, or the lie that sees them saved?”
The deposed Exalt-General spat blood. “Then why not lie now? Why not say, Proyas, yours is the lot most blessed? You shall sup with Heroes, lay with virgins in Holy Chalahall!”
“Because if I were to lie to you, I would not know what I was lying for … The darkness all but owns me here … The darkness that comes before. Any lie I might utter would serve ends I cannot know … I speak the truth to you, Proyas, because truth is all I have left to speak.”
Heat cupped the fallen Believer-King’s eyes, a sting he could not swat away.
“So these are my wages?” he cried on the welling edge of anguish. “These are my wages? Betrayal? Damnation?”
The white-robed figure stood without reply, or perhaps replied by standing.
Proyas looked back to Golgotterath, the tyrant that had commanded this final betrayal in sooth. And it seemed the most mad thing, both in and of itself, and relative to him and his yearning. At long last he could scry the distance, pace the cubits, between here and the dread end that had given meaning to every instant of his life.
To come so close.
All that Malowebi knew of Nersei Proyas was the residue of what passed through the Satakhanic Court, rumours of politic melancholy, godlike appearance, and ferocious conviction, the very image of the great man bound to a legendary vocation—not much, but more than enough to know it was no small murder the Holy Aspect-Emperor committed here at the very ends of the earth.
“Let me die,” the man begged. “Please, Kellhus.”
The Anasûrimbor’s voice fell as edict from the overarching oblivion, as it always did given Malowebi’s skewed vantage.
“No, Proyas … The World holds no torment that can compare to what awaits you. I have seen. I know.”
“Then … be done with it!” Proyas sobbed. “If I am … to be your witness … tell me … tell me your truth so that I might condemn! Curse you in turn!”
Blood and swelling had made a horrid smear of what looked to be handsome features, but the nobility of the ruin was indisputable.
“But you know my truth as well as you know my lie,” the occluded presence said. “I have come to save the World.”
Broken lips grimaced about missing and broken teeth. A grisly smile. “And that is why … the Gods themselves hunt you!”
Malowebi cringed. Images of Psatma Nannaferi drowned his soul’s eye, an old crone flooding nubile fields.
The Holy Aspect-Emperor replied as if this were the very clay to be cracked and sifted. “As they have to! The thing—the most horrific thing to understand, Proyas, is that at some point the Inchoroi must win. At some point, perhaps this year or ages hence, the whole of humanity will be butchered. Think on it! Why did Momas strike Momemn, his namesake city, and not this infernal place? Why is Eternity blind to Golgotterath? Because it stands outside Eternity, outside what the Gods can see. And that blindness is nothing short of breathtaking, Proyas! Our actions, our Great Ordeal, follows a doom outside of doom! We undertake a pilgrimage that rewrites the Hundred with every step!”
And Malowebi reeled hearing this, both for the turmoil of unwelcome understanding, and for the realization that the Yatwerian witch, despite her absolute contempt for the future, did not know it …
“When they attack me,” the Anasûrimbor continued, “their assassins are doomed since Creation to succeed, and then they fail as they were always doomed to fail. Eternity is transformed and the Hundred with it, oblivious to the transformation. The Unholy Ark is the disfiguring absence, the pit that consumes all trace of its consumption! To the degree it moves us, we pursue a Fate the Gods can never see …
“Do you see, Proyas? We act outside Eternity, here … in this place.”
Lacking any body immune to convulsions of understanding and passion, Malowebi floundered. A doom outside of dooms?
“Aye, if the Absolute is anywhere to be found, it is here.”
Dizzied, th
e Mbimayu Schoolman clung to the macabre image of the man lying broken upon the Accusatory, the peril of the Horns conjoining the sky and plain beyond him. The Believer-King of Conriya seemed curiously unconstrained, despite the cruel way his elbows were trussed behind his back. His eyes followed random tracks across the distance.
“And the God of Gods?” the battered face gasped.
The view pitched and rolled to the left as the Holy Aspect-Emperor set a sandalled foot upon his beloved disciple’s shoulder. Malowebi’s view rolled with his severed head; the barren arc of the Occlusion replaced the captive, towering heaps of wrack veering across the distance with compass precision.
“As blind to His Creation,” the Anasûrimbor said, “as we are blind to ourselves.”
Malowebi heard hot skin scuffing across stone. The scene dangled back to the Accusatory and distant terror of the Horns—absent Nersei Proyas. The hemp rope snapped tight across the rock.
Anasûrimbor Kellhus stood motionless upon the promontory for a time, as always entirely occluded from view. Still reeling, Malowebi averted his attention from the narcotic emblem, the Ark, followed its wicked shadow, the blackness reaching for the scabrous outskirts of the encampment, the Great Ordeal. He saw the Host of Hosts, and it seemed nothing more than the teeming of insects … beetles scrabbling in circles beneath the gaze of Anasûrimbor Kellhus.
How could such an enterprise be a madman’s errand? Who would enslave a civilization to wage war against mere fables?
Anasûrimbor Kellhus had upended the World for a reason, one wholly as dire as he claimed.
A night. An age.
The second drop has broken things. Cuts murmur and abrasions moan. It will not be long now.
The slow twist reveals his brother, Zsoronga, who hangs dying with him, then takes him away.
The sun breaches the summits rearing behind them, and looking out and up from his meat where it dangles, the Skeptic-King sees it.
Truly sees.
A golden crown for a head greater than any mountain, a laurel, set upon negligent earth …
An infinite abdication.
Breathing hurts. Breathing is difficult.
He swings, the hemp creaking like wood. He swings seeing …
He knows impossible things, dying. He understands that his father had understood all along. On his deathbed, proud Onoyas had called for his son knowing he would not come … And yes, even hoping … Because it mattered not at all, what a life makes of a soul.
Not at all.
Proyas can see it now, though he must raise mountains to lift his brow.
The World is more real, parsed into light and shadow. The distances are more distant …
And we are less embroiled.
Impunity leaps from the cracks between us …
And we punish whom we will.
CHAPTER
ELEVEN
The Occlusion
Inked the heart’s verses,
on the peak, in the light;
stole a lover’s breath,
in the deep, in the night;
caught a child’s tumble,
on the peak, in the light;
dried a mother’s cheek,
in the deep, in the night;
blinded an ally’s children,
on the peak, in the light;
murdered a brother’s wife,
in the deep, in the night;
choked a mansion’s hope,
on the peak, in the light;
grasping to seize, merely,
in the deep, in the night;
So are my hands more accursed,
than blessed,
more violet than white.
—Song of the Violet Ishroi
Early Autumn, 20 New Imperial Year (4132, Year-of-the-Tusk), Golgotterath.
There was a feeling to the sand, a sterility that made meat of other earth.
The Son of Harweel sat without ceremony, his boots and legs askew, his shoulders slumped, his hands insensate. The Occlusion ramped before him, piling into the cracked joists that raised the bulk of the Promontory like the tip of an accusing finger.
His friend hung dying above. Mu’miorn …
His solitary Boonsman.
He understood that he wasn’t thinking clearly. He understood, in a sideways manner, that he had endured too much: too many uncertainties, too many indignities, too many maddening, ingrown anxieties—and now, at last, too many losses.
All of this was clear to him.
What he couldn’t fathom was what he was doing. Did he mourn? Did he plot or ponder? Disintegrate?
Did he wait?
The cramped shrieks, the blood beneath his fingernails … these were clues.
And Mu’miorn, the adorable fool, refused to shut-up. Natter, natter, natter.
Yatwer, Yatwer, Yatwer …
“Why did you love me!” he heard his lungs bellow in reply. “Why?”
Couldn’t he see? To love him was to die. That was his curse …
But no, his friend insisted. Stupid sausage! To love him was to be murdered …
True, that.
The sun at last outran the woolen shield of clouds. It fell as a hot breath across his back. The blood trickling from his friend gleamed crimson across the stones.
An old Ketyai draped in rotted pelts stood near him for a time, staring up at the deposed Exalt-General—a man whose name Sorweel could no longer remember.
“What happened?” he asked in a voice like bark.
“Innocents …” the Son of Harweel replied on a gurgle. “Innocents were sacrificed.”
The old man studied him, his gaze bald enough to beg hostility.
“Yes,” he finally rasped in reply, flinching from a glance toward Golgotterath over his shoulder. “So the guilty might prosper.”
He hobbled several steps toward Sorweel, bearing an intensity sharpened ever more into the point of a knife. A nimil hauberk swung between and beneath his pelts, the shimmer of countless herons. The man stopped, braced. Eyes more silver than white glittered from a battered, bearded face—one that could have belonged to an ancient Eskeles.
“Worry not, son … Judgment has come to the Aspect-Emperor.”
With that, the wild stranger turned as a heap and began trudging toward the encampment sprawled below the Occlusion.
“Whose judgment?” the King of the Lonely City had screamed at the retreating figure. “Whoooose?”
But he knew. He had been here before, and the old man and Mother had told him precisely the same thing.
The day waned. The raining blood slowed to a spit, then stopped altogether. Where violet became black, red became brown, and this troubled him not at all. Sunlight trickled down to its dregs, drawing the stork’s shadow ever more gracile upon the stone tumble.
He had noticed the white bird immediately, but for whatever reason a watch passed before it fell within the ambit of his soul’s gyre. When he finally turned to gaze at the thing he had to fend the wild urge to seize its feathered heat, to bury his head beneath one great wing …
To hitch and sob.
Mummy …
Be brave, Little One …
Mimara walks. The Ordealmen gape at her, as much for her unborn child as for her parentage.
Some … a few, remember to fall to their faces. The others follow out of ignorance or exhaustion, and this relieves her more than anyone can know …
Relieves the Eye.
Her memories of fleeing the Andiamine Heights scarce seem real anymore, but they possess more than enough substance for her to worry over the irony: that she had fled the Andiamine Heights, run the compass of the World, to the very shadow of Golgotterath, only to find the Imperial Court awaiting her.
Or its monstrous remnants, anyway.
A kind of stupor fell across her and Achamian trudging across the chalk expanse of the Shigogli. She recalls quarrelling over Qirri. Otherwise, she has no recollection how, only that they parted ways. Traversing Shigogli became its own tria
l, with the Horns boggling her periphery, continually prying at the feeble latch that kept all the screams inside, and with the encampment a growing labyrinth of wreckage before her. Images of her past life confounded any focus she mustered, a thousand little razors, each glimpse another bleeding nick. Slaves buttoning girdles. Dignitaries watching her on the sly. The whole of her life awaited her in those canvas slums—everyone she had fled the previous winter … Serwa … Kayûtas … What would she say? How could she explain? And her stepfather—what would Anasûrimbor Kellhus do with what he saw in her face?
And the Eye. What would it see?
When one is numb enough, terror ceases to exhaust and begins to sustain; if anything her fears quickened her already unnatural gait. Two shadows had accompanied her passage the entire time, hers distinguished for the black orb that was her waist, rippling ever longer across the trampled dust—and then … there was only one. They simply parted, drawn apart on oblivious angles, and she found herself alone, clasping her golden-armoured belly … returning to a place she has never been.
Walking among the Damned.
Her horror of them, and her weeping especially, simply makes it worse, makes them more desperate to inquire, to relieve whatever could be ailing her—not understanding that they are what ails her, they and the dizzying obscenity of what they have done. Not all suffering raises in the Eye of God. Not all sacrifice is holy. She can scarce discern their nations, so potent is the blot of their crimes, and so alike. Conriyan, Galeoth, Nilnameshi—it does not matter. No history, no ageless compact of bone and blood, could mitigate their infernal doom. Their sins had pitched them beyond peoples.
She sees it as if refracted across colourless glass, a shadowy pageant of atrocities, abominations, of Men making as Sranc, not simply with Sranc, but with Men. Orgiastic apparitions, warriors supping upon the living and rutting with the dead, linger like smoke about a hellish glare, light become terror, impossible visions, torture combed into feathers, a thousand thousand strands …
Ciphrang masticating, chewing souls as meat. Sin like naptha. Endless, blistering fire.