Kelmomas craned his head about to spy his father, and found himself ensnared, by the mad profundity of his Mark, by the crisp glory of his felt vestments and white-silk robes, by the haloes about his hands and his head …
“But the knife itself was not destroyed,” Father said. “Intact, it began leaching its poison. A venomous thorn, thrust deep into the breast of Being, an infected tusk goring ours … the Holiest of Worlds …”
The long tails of the Ekkinû, the ensorcelled arras suspended behind his father’s chair, waxed bright for no explicable reason. The boy glimpsed the mouths of the Decapitants masticating, as if the one murmured into the ear of the other …
Serwa’s palm upon his cheek pressed his face forward.
“For Ages we have bled, pierced, impaled. For millennia we have been sickened, and we have marked the passing of our Ages according to the wheel of our fevers. Whole civilizations have convulsed about its intrusion, first the Nonmen of yore, Cu’jara Cinmoi and his Ishroi, and then the Men of the Ancient North, the fury and might of my forefather, Anasûrimbor Celmomas and his Chieftain-Knights.”
Kelmomas exulted hearing his ancient namesake—of course Father wanted him here! He embodied both home and history. Serwa had spoken true: there was meaning to be found in Father’s dominion. Why had he always hated and feared him so?
Because he could see the game we were playing with Mummy.
“Both those great Kings stood, as we stand now, on these awful plains. Both raised arms and perished in the shadow of this place.”
Because he scared us …
“For want of God,” his father said.
The warlike assembly erupted into a tempest of raw voices. Shouts. Cries. Murderous declarations. Men leapt to their feet across the tiers. And Kelmomas could feel it, the way they each vibrated as strings on his father’s loom. For the first time, it seemed, he understood the beauty, the symmetry between his malformed soul and faith.
Yes! Samarmas exclaimed. Father! Father!
I will give myself to him! I will give myself to him and he will see! See that we’re true!
It was so clear, the fool he’d been. Nothing save Father’s distraction had afforded him his games. Such Strength! This was what these gulls celebrated, though they knew it not. The mastery of their master! Their own enslavement!
“We suffer no such want!” the Most Holy Aspect-Emperor boomed and the Lords of the Ordeal roared their affirmations, stamped their feet and brandished their fists in furious martial display.
“Mog-Pharau awakens—even now the No-God stirs! Even now, the Enemy congregates about His carcass, shriek tongues fallen from the Void, performs rites ancient, lewd, and more evil than any sinner can imagine. Even now the Consult beseeches Him!”
And the little Prince-Imperial fairly cackled for glee. There was fun in this! How could he have been blind to this, the game of games? And what was the difference between saving and pocketing the World?
“Aye, my brothers, we are the bulwark. I stand where Cu’jara Cinmoi stood. I stand where Anasûrimbor Celmomas stood! Ancient, obstinate souls. Proud. Domineering. I gaze upon you, my noble stalwarts, souls grim for slaughter, bright for vicious ardour, the way they gazed upon their most violent champions.”
Father’s voice resonated, thrummed and growled across registers that none save Kelmomas and his sister could hear, tones that plucked each according to how he had been tuned.
“And I say to you … We shall succeed where they faltered! We shall smite the ramparts! Kick down the wicked gates! We shall raze the fell bastions! Crack open the citadels! We shall descend upon the Unholy Consult in righteous fury! For! We! Have! God!”
Men who had been battered blunt now roared on the keen edge of outrage and hatred, their eyes flashing as bright as razors.
“For between us we have gathered a Host unlike any the World has seen! A Host of Hosts for the God of Gods, the Great Ordeal! We shall seize our foe by his throat, cast his corpse from the golden heights!”
The Southron Men swayed and shouted and gesticulated, and the boy’s eyes once again ranged out across the plate of Shigogli, to the Horns soaring into the woolen gullet of the sky. Such a game! he thought, blinking tears.
For once his brother was not cruel.
Father stood immobile, not so much basking in the fanatical adulation as somehow measuring it, somehow urging the Lords of the Ordeal to redouble their howling demonstrations without the least perceptible sign. And then, somehow, he was waiting, and the chorus dwindled and sputtered, before trailing into silence altogether.
“You …” he said, his voice at once cryptic and conversational. “It all lies with you.”
He clasped his hands before him—a curiously disarming gesture.
“Last night I wandered among you. Many of you greeted me, enjoined me to partake of the comforts of your abode … such as they were …”
The rumble of laughter from the tiers. Father had trained them thus, the young Prince-Imperial realized.
“But I did not seek out the company of the great alone. I also walked among the camps of our vassals, those with mighty will, if not blood. I came upon an Ainoni, a youth named Mirshoa”—he turned the Believer-King of High Ainon—“one of your brave boys, Soter.”
“That depends on what he said!” the Holy Veteran cried in reply.
Another swell of deep-chested laughter.
The Holy Aspect-Emperor wagged a finger and smiled. “He told me the story of his cousin, Hatturidas …” He looked from face to face.
“You see, Mirshoa joined the Ordeal out faith as Zaudunyani, to save the World, where his cousin had joined to keep Mirshoa safe …” The Aspect-Emperor trailed, seemed to hold his breath for every soul in the Umbilicus. “And as far as he was able, Hatturidas fulfilled his charge, battling at Mirshoa’s side every encounter, risking his pulse time and again to save his beloved cousin’s softer skin. And Mirshoa would wonder at his ferocity, for he thought himself righteous, the way all souls think themselves righteous, believed that he warred for the God, that he fought for me …
“And yet, here was his cousin fighting harder … for him …”
He allowed the concrete of this to set in the hearts of his audience.
“So I asked him why he thought that was.” A rueful grin. “Verily, it’s not often that an Ainoni is at a loss for speech …” Another prolonged rumble of laughter. “But finally, Mirshoa told me how his cousin, Hatturidas, had died at Dagliash, felled by a javelin in the Battle of the Shore. Losing his cousin, he said, had halved his heart, showed him how he had been fighting for Hatturidas all this time, and not me …”
His father turned as if envisioning young Mirshoa standing next to him. “Bold,” he said, beaming admiration. “The way he stood. The way he spoke! Daring me—aye, challenging me, to deny him …”
An interval of suspense, exquisitely timed to the syncopations of a hundred hearts.
“I did not,” the Holy Aspect-Emperor conceded. “I could not. For he had spoken the truest words I heard last night … Indeed …”
His father looked down to his palms, and the haloes burnished the Kyranean intricacies of his beard. The boy could swear he heard the collective heartbeat of the congregation slow.
“The truest words I have heard in a long time.”
The Lords of the Ordeal growled solemn affirmation, sobbed for their own fallen kin.
Serwa inexplicably squeezed his shoulder, and he craned his face back and upward, following her gaze to the shadowy spaces about the entrance … where he saw Mother, her hair pinned severely back, wearing a priest’s white occasion hemmed to her diminutive form. Kayûtas held her by the arms, but the new Exalt-General proved no match for the Blessed Empress of the Three Seas, who simply barged past her eldest son, whispering furiously as she did so. Kelmomas fairly chortled. Mimara followed in Mother’s wake, looking preposterous for her girth, scanning the booming interior with anxious eyes. An ancient beggar hobbled immediately behind her
, one blasted by the Mark. Kelmomas wriggled against his sister’s grip in an attempt to follow his mother’s passage after the intervening throngs engulfed her, but his sister conceded him nothing.
What happens?
More madness …
As if to confirm his appraisal, Father abruptly folded his legs upon the bench, and floated … a mere hand above the cushion at first, and then a cubit forward, so that he hung as something iron in the open air … and using no sorcery that Kelmomas could see! All shadow steamed from him, so that he was perfectly illuminated, an image impossibly crisp, save for the two black smears hanging from his waist. Suddenly the reality surrounding seemed a bruised fruit.
“What miracle?” the Holy Aspect-Emperor of the Three Seas asked, his voice tickling the cavities of the ear. “What miracle has delivered us to this place?”
Not a soul among them could say what word their prophet was about to utter, and yet each, the boy realized, had prepared to receive it.
Father shook his head and smiled, blinked tears for these fools he so loved. He held forth his gold shining hands.
“Each other.”
Shouts exploded across them, mouths howling from beards, eyes spilling for tears, faces reddened, fists closed and raised as hammers. Praising. Blessing. Cursing.
“Because of you—you!” his father’s voice cracked godlike through the uproar, “I know Golgotterath shall fall in flames in ruin! Because of you, I know the Unholy Consult shall at long last be broken! That Mog-Pharau, Tsurumah, shall be preempted—stillborn! By your individual will, individual might, the End of Days shall be forestalled!”
This place.
And they shook and they heaved, the lost Southron Men, wild with renewal, with fury and hope … until their apish stink became all but intolerable.
Kelmomas fought in vain for some further glimpse of Mother through the mobbed Lords of the Ordeal. Like dogs overanxious for the touch of their master, they had been slinking forward one by one, abandoning the tiers for hard ground, or the step above for the step below—almost as though they understood without knowing what their beloved Warrior-Prophet would demand of them next. When Father finally called, “Come to me, my brothers, and be Whelmed! Let my hands be the basin that cleanses you!” they fell over one another for naked urgency, imploding into a jostling ball that the little Prince-Imperial found both comic and revolting. Again he peered at the entrance, leaned forward and back in another futile attempt to find Mother, but Serwa flicked his ear—hard—saying, “Decorum!” on a harsh whisper.
But she too was gazing toward the entrance by this point. He studied her meditative profile against the bickering throng of Kings and Grandmasters. Before he could query, she was already kneeling beside him, somehow recalling the doom hanging over his head with a single sharp look. “Stay … put,” she murmured, then left him, withdrawing behind the Ekkinû arras and hastening around to the entrance … So she might assist Kayûtas with Mother?
He could barely suppress his chortling. He quite liked the thrill of occasions such as this, he decided. The untoward always intervened—did it not?—no matter how great the Strength …
No mastery was complete. Every act was a wager, even those belonging to Father.
We were such a wager … the voice whispered.
Yes.
The caste-nobles who yet loitered on the bottommost tiers had taken to singing, some hymn the Prince-Imperial had never before heard. The words caught like sparks on tinder, and soon the whole chamber thundered.
The purple tempest, drowning brown and birthing green,
The darling rumour, revealing love that cannot be …
The eight-year-old turned to regard the hanging emanation that was his mighty father, His Arcane Holiness, Anasûrimbor Kellhus I, Aspect-Emperor of the Three Seas, his shoulders arched back, his knees wide, his wrists balanced on his knees, the whole of him bright with otherworldly light. The boy’s stomach bubbled for the way he simply floated—how he could so effortlessly contravene the shackles that bound the monkeys cavorting about him. That he could so dwarf the Sons of Men!
Even now, he throws the number-sticks.
Yes.
He watched a savage version of Lord Soter kneel then lean forward to kiss Father’s right knee. Kelmomas strained once again for some glimpse of Mother or Mimara, but he could see nothing through the screen of bobbing torsos. He turned back to the pack of noble dogs vying before him, feeling, for the first time, the glum of boredom. And then he saw him …
A balm to my heart, a lamp to my feet,
Guide me, O’ Saviour, to the place I might sleep …
There, naked in their midst, bold unto absurdity.
An Unbeliever.
Any moment is but a snag upon a thread in a boggling weave. This is why the White-Luck Warrior is dead, even though this present moment continued to breathe. This is why the moment-once-called-Sorweel walks to himself the way one might walk toward a door. Life is but a mote compared to what comes after. To be Eternal is to be dead.
Eskeles is quick to smell the possibility of benediction, so the moment-once-called-Sorweel is already on the floor when the others surge to queue. They stand, singing the same booming hymns as the others. Patience absent all effort. Eskeles is joyous with bloodlust—the soft fronds of his character have been pulled away from his religious barbarism. “I have never forgotten, your Glory. I have never forgotten that it was you who saved me …”
“Neither have I,” the moment-once-called-Sorweel replies.
Time eats the queue’s numbers; they draw closer. The moment insists that his companion precede him in the queue. Eskeles makes fatuous protestations, but is too careless to conceal a kind of miserly glee.
They approach the floating Demon, soul following soul, like beads about to be unstrung. The moment-once-called-Sorweel sings with the others. Eskeles is like a trembling curtain, his hair is so wild. The moment-once-called-Sorweel only stands revealed when the Schoolman kneels.
The Demon regards him.
The air cracks and hisses, such is the intensity of its hunger.
The Demon smiles.
It consumes the offering Eskeles has made, but it is displeased, the way it is always displeased, by the extremities of the man’s passion. It thanks him for the long starvation that has made him thin, counsels as well as blesses, recalls the virtues of intellect, the false power of the Logos.
Then Eskeles is stumbling into nonexistence, and the moment-once-called-Sorweel is kneeling directly before the Ciphrang, breathing deep the sweet scent of myrrh. The infernal Decapitants hang askew, each angled against the other, the Zeumi so low that its stump twirls upon the carpets. The long tails of the Ekkinû frame the Invader, gold braided about black bearing the endless descent of writhing text that no one save he and the Demon can read. The shadow of the Sickle draws over all.
“Blessed be Sakarpus,” the Unclean Spirit intones, its voice pitched so that the others might hear.
“Eternal Bastion of the Wild. Blessed be her Most Heroic King.”
The moment-once-called-Sorweel smiles in gratitude, but not for any word the Abomination has spoken. The pouch slips from the sleeve, falls to the fingertips. His head bows forward as his hands raise to grasp the infernal knee, gently, the way a warlike uncle might touch the cheeks of a weeping niece. The Lords of the Ordeal sing and make bellicose demonstration. The pouch is tipped. The lips rise to the kiss. The Chorae slips into the right palm.
The Demon is aware—an irrevocable heartbeat.
The right hand closes about the knee.
The World is light.
The moment-once-called-Sorweel is blown back into his astounded peers.
The Demon is salt.
The Mother shrieks, “Yatwer ku’angshir ciphrangi!”
The Lords of the Ordeal are screaming, and the daughter sees him, sees what the Blessed Mother hath wrought. Her gift to Men.
At last the sorcerous fire combs him free.
Anas
ûrimbor Kelmomas scowled for peering. The man stood at the milling root of the impromptu line that had formed to receive their Holy Aspect-Emperor’s blessing. Tall. Fine-featured. Blond hair once cropped for battle, but now grown into a greasy tangle. Beard and mustache thickening from juvenile haze. Eyes every bit as blue as Father’s, and more so than his own.
The boy turned to Father, searching for some reassurance, some sign that he too had seen, but he was preoccupied, muttering low words of encouragement to King Narnol, who had just kissed his knee. Kelmomas could see nothing of Serwa or Kayûtas, but through the singing he heard some old man cry “Proyas dies!” from the quarter where he had glimpsed Mother.
Even though Father did not so much as glance in the direction, the boy imagined He tracked it with a precision that eclipsed his own.
Kelmomas stood rigid, followed the Unbeliever’s progress with naked incredulity. The man was of an age with Inrilatas, even though he looked older for the onerous toll exacted by the trail. He wore the raggish remnants of a Kidruhil uniform emblazoned with the insignia of a Field-Captain, but he bore himself with the posture and bearing of a caste-noble. He sang with the others, acknowledged all their looks and pious asides, but in shabby token only, like a mummer who had come to despise his craft.
The little hand that does not doubt the great,
The sweaty brow that does not flinch for hate.
The Prince-Imperial began jumping, so desperate was he for some sign of his sister or brother.
A balm to my heart, a lamp to my feet,
Teach me, O’ Saviour, so that I might weep.