He remembered their hallowed vessel faltering upon the shoals of the Promised World, and the Fall, the Inertial Inversion Field piercing the crust to the pith, gouging the landscape, heaving it out upon a cataclysmic hoop, raising mountains to retard their descent … just not enough.
He remembered the Weal that followed, how Sil had rallied the Holy Swarm from the brink, taught them how to prosecute war with the remnants of their once-dread Arsenal. Sil had been the one to show them how they might still save their eternal souls!
He remembered enough.
So many incarnations, so many ages labouring upon the brink! And now it happened … at last, after uncounted millennia, the piling of years so numerous, the past could only be crushed into Law. So very soon!
Even from such heights, he could smell the shit of Men on the wind. He could see them plainly enough, smeared across the rim of the Occlusion, another Ordeal, come to break tooth and claw upon their Sacred Ark.
And he knew the sweet, sweet fruit they would pluck. He had wandered far over the plains and mountains of this World prosecuting Resumption. His soul had flitted through all the greatest cities of Men; aye, he knew well the pig fatted for the feast. The humid brothels, where the oils were both scented and bewitched. The temples, gilded and immense. The vast babble of the markets. The slums and alleyways, where gold was daubed in blood. The teeming streets. The cultivated plains. The soft-skinned millions awaiting their delicious ministry. The squirming. The screaming …
The whirlwind walking, vast and black.
And his phallus hooked high across his strapped abdomen, a bow strung for war …
And glory.
Each clasping an arm, Achamian and her mother hustle her from the uproar of the assassination into the partitioned rear of the Umbilicus. Appalled and appalling faces slide by, some gawking, others turning aside. Thighs she cannot see are slicked. Her feet skid and squish in their sandals.
No-no-no-please-please-please-no!
“What happens?” Achamian cries under his breath.
“The baby comes,” Mother says, intent on steering them clear the looming Lords of the Ordeal.
This is the answer Mimara can tell he expects, yet he sputters in disbelief.
“No. No! It must be something—food, maybe. Rancid horseflesh, per—”
“Your baby comes!” her mother snaps.
They trot through flaps, down a gloomy corridor. Mimara can feel them like straps so very deep within, muscles cinching, cramping, screaming …
“Mimara …” Achamian cries, genuine panic in his voice. “Perhaps if you vomit?”
“Fool!” her mother curses.
But if anything, Mimara shares the old Wizard’s incredulity. It cannot be. Not now. It was too early! This couldn’t be happening now! Not on the stoop of the Incû-Holoinas—Golgotterath! Not with Proyas hanging from the Accusatory, leaking like a waterskin. Not when they stand within a toss of completing what they had set out to do!
Judging him, Anasûrimbor Kellhus, the Dûnyain who had conquered half the World …
She does want to vomit, but for the idea of delivering a newborn soul—her first child!—to such straits, to such an evil time and place! Had any cradle been more ill-omened, more terrifically malformed? But it happens nonetheless, and as appalled as she is—cannot but be—an invincible calm dwells within her, a corporeal conviction that this one thing is true …
A life lies within her … and it must out.
They cross the antechamber where she had first found Mother, press into the bedchamber beyond.
Must and gloom.
“Per-perhaps …” the old Wizard stammers as they ease her onto the mattress. “Perhaps we-we could try … try …”
“No …” Mimara gasps, grimacing in an attempt to smile. “Mother is right, Akka.”
He leans stooped over her, his face slack and ashen. Despite everything they have endured, never has she seen him more terrified, more broken.
She clasps his hand instinctively. “This too is part of what happens …”
It has to be.
“Think of it as a Cant,” Esmenet snaps, fussing over pillows. Mother fends her own dismay and horror, Mimara realizes … over the murder they had just witnessed.
And the fate of her mad little son.
“Only blood instead of light,” the Blessed Empress huffs, raising a cool, dry palm to her forehead. “Life instead of ruin.”
There was violence to his Translocations—Malowebi could tell as much by the flurry of light and shadow—and yet experience insisted that he had not moved at all, that the very World had been torn down and reassembled around him, plank by plank, in the twinkling of an eye.
So it was the shouting turmoil of the Umbilicus fell away as a page turned, revealing the nocturnal barrens of the Shigogli, which also fell away as leaf bound to a common spine, returning to the encampment, only higher on the slopes, before the entrance of a sagging pavilion, one with panels like leopard skins for mouldering discolouration.
The little Prince-Imperial wailed as they plunged into the black interior. The Anasûrimbor conjured light with an indecipherable murmur, inking the evacuated interior in blue and white.
“His face, Father! I could see it on his face! He w-was going to-to assassinate, assassinate you.”
Malowebi spied a great screw hook anchoring a set of rust-pitted shackles to the barren centre of the floor.
“No, Kel,” the ever-hanging shadow said, pinning the child to the ground next to the plate. “He loved me the same as the others—more than many, in fact.”
The cherubic face was swollen for injustice and incredulity. “No-no … the hate … You had to see it, Father! Why do you pretend?”
The Holy Aspect-Emperor had crouched such that Malowebi could see little more than his hands deftly manacling his son’s ankles and wrists. It almost seemed he caressed fluttering shadows, so intense and artificial was the contrast between light and dark. Great veins inked across tendons. Tiny hairs aglow.
“So much raw ability,” the occluded presence said. “All of it yoked to darkness.”
“It was there! The hate was there!”
Anasûrimbor Kellhus stood erect, and Malowebi watched the boy bolt back in his shackles, his innocence too pale, too raw for a demonstration so bestial.
“You are a fascinating child.”
“You’re going to kill me …” A wild, flaxen maul about a face of anguished rose and sniffling pink. Wet blue eyes sparking for the dismay of the unloved and betrayed. “You’re talking the way you would if you were going to kill me!”
“You believe the one speaking is Kelmomas,” the Holy Aspect-Emperor said, “and that the one whispering is Samarmas, not realizing the two of you continually trade places.”
The boy watched as blank as a thing of sugar—and as fragile.
“You are!” he gurgled as much as screamed or wheezed. “You are! You’re go-going to kill me!”
The occluded presence stood inscrutable. A clenching in the passage of time.
“I’m not convinced there’s anyone to kill.”
The Anasûrimbor stepped into a wider stance, rolling Malowebi along his thigh.
“Look-into-my-my-face!” the little Prince-Imperial cried, reaching out as if to catch a slamming portal.
Metagnostic singing—still pinching the Iswazi sorcerer despite the absence of living ears. Reality vibrated like sand on a drum-skin, a sound that blew through the drooped ceilings, echoed as rain through shuttered windows.
“My-my face! Pleasssee. Daddy. Look into my face, please-Daddy-please! You can-can seeee! Serwa convinced me! I serve yo—!”
The Cant of Translocation cut the darkness along a different set of angles, made a shadowless plate of the little boy’s face, glutinous for remorse, bright for sneering—
Then the page turned and everything was different, and Malowebi alone remained unmoved.
Drusas Achamian mooned about the entrance to the leather-walled
chamber, fear clenched like an anxious fist in his breast. He found breathing difficult. His heart had become rot and slurry—something beaten for merely beating.
Simple being, it seemed, had become a question.
How had it all come to this?
Agony seized the beloved voice, held it high upon a screech, then smashed it into hacking shards.
“It hurts …” Mimara gasped from the mattress. “It huuurts!”
She shrieked again.
She lay naked and gleaming, a soiled sheet across her mountainous abdomen. Her shadow writhed as she writhed, drawn long across the chamber … like a spider, Achamian could not help but think, black, elongated limbs flexing about a black, bulbous thorax.
“Too much!” she cried in the spasm’s wake. “Some-some-something is wrong, Momma! It hurts too-too much!”
Esmenet sat cross-legged at her side, daubed her forehead with a wetted rag.
“Nothing’s wrong, my Sweet,” she said, smiling as best as she could manage. “The first is always the most painful.”
She drew the cloth down either cheek, and the image caught the old Wizard’s breath, for on certain angles in certain casts of shadow and light, only their ages distinguished them, as if one and the same woman had been divided between times.
“Shhh …” the Blessed Empress continued. “Pray this one isn’t so stubborn as you were, Dewdrop … I screamed for two days!”
Mimara grimaced—a smile, he realized. “Don’t …” she said about a huff. “Don’t call me that!”
“Dewdrop-Dewdrop-Dewdrop …” the Blessed Empress chimed. “I called you that when yo—”
“Don’t call me that!” Mimara shrieked in abrupt fury.
It was her third such mercurial outburst, but Achamian started as violently as he had at the first.
Esmenet, however, scarcely blinked, continued smiling after catching her lips in a firm line, continued her soothing ministrations.
“Shush … shush … Let it pass. Let it fade.”
“I’m s-sorry, Momma.”
Something within him clawed and clamoured for escape. Esmi had demanded that he stay, that he assist, even though he had yet to do anything but wring his hands. “This is your doing!” she had accused. And he knew from her look and tone that she had only nominally forgiven him for loving her daughter. So he had stayed, and he had stood, watching mute, feeling for all the world like an earthen jug filled with ever more insects, his insides crawling as palpably as his skin. This was no place for any man, let alone one so old and as put upon as himself. These were womanish mysteries, too fraught, too pungent with truth, too raw and wet for the odourless, arid heart of a man.
Besides, this wasn’t even supposed to be happening.
Mimara’s breathing eased, then became inaudible altogether. Another long lull in the spasms had begun.
“See?” Esmenet murmured. “See?”
With the relaxation of suffering came the easing of obligation. Perhaps that was why it overcame him at that moment, the eye-rolling aversion, the irresistible urge to shirk …
He fled, though he would never admit as much, batted aside the stamped leather flaps that passed for doors. The air was too close, he told himself. The sights were too delicate … for a stomach so … so wet as his.
He found himself outside, dizzy with guilt and confusion. The Horns climbed impossible in the nocturnal distance, the northernmost trailing a skein of clouds the way a stick might trail foam in a river.
Curse Esmenet and her sentence! Who was she to judge?
He leaned against his knees, breathing as if he really required the open air he had used to justify his cowardice. He need not see the two Pillarians to know they stood behind him—given the Chorae bound to their navels. They were omnipresent around the Umbilicus otherwise, garrisoned as they were adjacent to the grand pavilion and stationed throughout. It was the premonition of the Mark that drew his eyes upward, one deeper and more limned in errant peculiarities than any he had ever apprehended—including that of the Nonman King.
He saw a figure striding directly toward him from the shadowy mouth of an avenue. The old Wizard loosed a long, shuddering exhalation, warred with a far different urge to flee … knowing. He stood upright, his breast a beehive for terror and incredulity, and watched Anasûrimbor Kellhus resolve from obscurity …
The Holy Aspect-Emperor of the Middle-North and the Three Seas.
How long had it been?
He had seen the man thrice during the benediction and the subsequent uproar—three glimpses, merely, each a cold knife, so sharp were the pangs they sparked. For most souls, there’s no arrangement, no clarification of charges, no enumerating of the accused or apportioning of the guilt. For most, gall is a kind of dwelling, a place where pangs and images resolve from the inarticulate gyre of outrage that has outlived its season. Most souls are illiterate, and so cannot hope to use words to pin the shadows racing across their hearts. And even when they can, they loathe framing their resentments with any clarity that might make them disputable.
Not so Drusas Achamian. For twenty long years he had practiced and prepared for this very moment: the words he would say, the pose he would strike, the stratagems that would reclaim his trammelled honour … his … his …
Instead he found himself batting at his ringing ears.
No. No. Not like this.
Haloes, every bit as miraculous as Shimeh, like gold-glowing plates serving a sewage head and sewage hands. Achamian could scarce see the mundane fact of the man, so hideous was his Mark, so corrupt. He was taller than he remembered, dressed in the same white vestments as earlier, his golden beard squared and braided in the manner of the Far Antique Kyranean High-Kings. The peculiar pommel of his blade, Enshoiya, jutted above his left shoulder. The legendary Decapitants swayed gangrenous from his hip, bound to his nimil-scaled girdle by their hair. Eyelids twitched in deep sockets, revealing glimpses of glass, oiled and black. Ingrown lips masticated about teeth like black nails, as if murmuring.
Achamian shuddered, realizing that Kellhus truly had fathomed the Hells as rumour said. The floor of the World groaned, the joists of existence creaked, such was the density of his presence. Each advancing step fell upon his breast as much as upon the accursed ground, crushing the breath from his lungs …
So much power so concentrated! Never had the World seen the like …
And he, Drusas Achamian, had been the one responsible, the fool who had betrayed the Gnosis to a Dûnyain!
Twenty long years ago.
Anasûrimbor Kellhus came to a halt a mere four paces before him, a vision throbbing for memory as much as for arcane intensities. The Pillarians stationed at the Umbilicus entrance had fallen to their faces, and when Achamian failed to do the same, the nearer guardsman barked some threat he couldn’t hear for the thunder in his breast and ears …
The old Wizard stood gaping.
“You spoke with Saccarees,” Kellhus said in ancient Kûniüric. No solicitation. No jnan. “You troubled him.”
“Not nearly enough,” Achamian replied in numb kind.
The figure did not so much emanate light as refashion it into something worn at angles orthogonal to the World.
“You told him of your Dreams.”
Achamian nodded warily. “As much as he would listen.”
The pale eyes fixed him the way he remembered, as if he were a bauble hanging upon an abyss, not simply the last thing existing, but the only thing.
“Will you tell me?”
“No.”
Anasûrimbor Kellhus had requested it, thus it must be denied.
“Your hatred has not waned.”
“Cnaiur’s lesson.”
A heartbeat of bottomless regard.
“So he lives.”
Dismay. The old Wizard’s hackles pricked and needled, for he understood the folly of this encounter. There was no way to deceive the man before him, no way to influence or outmanoeuvre. And the longer he stood inside the circuit of
his inquiry, the more he would inevitably betray—even secrets he himself did not know!
It was axiomatic.
“I’ve seen Ishual,” he said out of instinct, whether idiotic or canny he did not know.
The epic being before him paused, and for the space of a breath all the night seemed a glass for his preternatural scrutiny.
“So you know of its destruction.”
Achamian nodded, swallowed, thought of the Qirri stashed with Mimara’s belongings.
“I watched your son leap to his death.”
A nearly imperceptible nod.
“Did anyone else survive?”
“I know what it means to be Dûnyain!”
The transformation was nothing short of miraculous: what was remote became warm and familiar, the smirk of a friend long accustomed to the irksome wiles of a damaged friend.
“To be ruthless?”
“No!” Achamian spat in sudden fury. “Wicked! An abomination in the Eye of God!”
A perplexed frown … one that recalled Xinemus.
“The same as you?”
Achamian stared witless.
Kellhus abruptly turned toward the great pavilion’s entrance, as if keen to something only he could hear. A fraction of the old Wizard balked at following his gaze, convinced this was but another accursed Dûnyain ploy, another way to rattle and misdirect, bewilder and dominate. But he looked regardless, his chin answering to an instinct more decisive than his nattering soul. The Pillarians remained prostrate, hunched like green and gold scarabs to either side of the once-ornate flaps. The flanking braziers lapped and sparked, indifferent. The leather planes of the Umbilicus climbed beyond their meagre light …
And, like some miracle from the Tusk, Esmenet pressed through the shadowy cleft.
Her irked look immediately fastened upon Achamian, the truant soul she sought, only to be waylaid by the sight of her monstrous husband …
Her right hand reflexively clasped her left, covering the bruise that was all that remained of her conjoined-snake tattoo. Achamian could almost weep for how she stiffened, for the way her expression melted into a blank imitation of her Imperial Husband’s own. In that slender moment, it seemed, he saw the very sum of all she had lost and endured in the interval between this moment and Shimeh. Anasûrimbor Kellhus had been the greatest blight, the most onerous yoke she had ever suffered, and she hated him as she hated no other …