“We march for life!” she cried, her tone as absolute as prophecy. “For hope!”
He would remember nothing else until dawn gilded the wild rim of the East, save laughing at her declaration.
The vista seemed colder than he had remembered—in his Dreams at least.
No matter how carefully wrought, maps always misled. So on surviving maps of the Ancient North in the Three Seas, the estuary Achamian and Mimara peered across was invariably called the “Straits of Aögus,” a title befitting the dignity of the names surrounding. But outside those schooled in the cartographic traditions of Sauglish, no High Norsirai of Seswatha’s day had called the waters thus. They called it, rather, Ogni, a Condic slang term for “Leash.”
The great estuary heaved chill and black before them, crashed into foam along the stunted shore. Gulls, terns, and a great many other birds seemed to have gone mad for the waters, some hanging upon unseen sheets of breeze, others buzzing the surface, descending in constellations, spooking in flurries. Scavenging cries harrowed the wind, pricked the autumnal emptiness ever deeper as Mimara and the old Wizard laboured near, becoming a shrill racket.
Scalloped for exhaustion, the companions wondered at the avian horde without any will to puzzle or resolve. Wind runnelled the grasses about them, flapped scrub and sumac like blankets.
Achamian was the first to cry out, for once his eye registered them, he saw them everywhere, congesting the straits. Sranc. Innumerable carcasses tangled the shallows, putrid rafts bending about swells, larding the waters with corruption. On and on the mass extended, out across the deeps, drawn into eddies the size of cities, monstrous wheels of sodden and blasted meat.
The old Wizard tripped back onto his rump, eyes fluttering. Mimara was slow to kneel at his side. Even hovering over him, her gaze lingered upon the spectacle. An errant cloud smothered the sun, and a sudden translucence revealed the tattered face of the drowning, as well as the rare Men bobbing among the fish-white masses, their limbs clothed, their jaws bearded.
Achamian gawked at the girl, stammering, “Kellhus … he … he found a way … a way to destroy the Horde.” He combed his scalp, his eyes darting. “At-at Dagliash … Yes-yes! Remember that black cloud we spied on the horizon leaving Ishual? That could have been Dagliash … the cause of this.”
She blinked, finally focussing. “I don’t understand.”
The old cogitations came to him quickly. “The River Sursa empties on the north shore of the Misty Sea … It would catch the Sranc as the Ordeal marched on Dagliash. Kellhus would have no choice but to grapple with the Horde in its entirety … to somehow overcome it!”
Mimara looked back to the carrion expanse. At some point she had started clicking the scales of her Sheära hauberk with her fingertips when rubbing her belly.
“So this is the Horde …”
“What else could it be?”
She regarded him more narrowly than he liked.
“So my stepfather already marches on Golgotterath.”
Teeth set, he nodded. They needed Qirri, he thought. Haste.
The World was ending.
“I can carry you across …” he said with the tentative air of broaching old and unresolved feuds. He could weep for the sight of her, gowned in rotted hides and cloth, her cropped hair matted, her eyes shining mad from the stained oval of her face …
Immense with child—his child!
“But you must relinquish your accursed Trinkets.”
The injury these words occasioned shocked him.
“They only appear such,” she said, “because you are accursed.”
CHAPTER
FIVE
Agongorea
Men are ever the edge of Men, the plummet most near, and the fall most fatal. Rhetoric consists in the artful use of ropes and ladders.
—The First Analytic of Men, AJENCIS
As flint they fracture,
As flint they sharpen,
Men only cut for breaking.
—Scalper shanty
Early Autumn, 20 New Imperial Year (4132, Year-of-the-Tusk), Golgotterath.
Four hundred horses were butchered, many of them cruelly, so that for watch after watch, equine screams lacerated the night. Many Men danced besotted, mimicked the screams in grotesque parody, especially those that had sacrificed their own steed. Sorcerous fire alone burned that night, for even as fratricide passed unmentioned, the burning of belongings had been forbidden. The Judges stamped through their midst, demanding worship, urging celebration. The Horns lay on the horizon, an evil Nail bent and jutting into Eärwa’s scarred bosom, the thorn infecting the whole of history and legend—and what they themselves must draw. But for all their fanatic ardour, the Judges themselves seemed half-hearted—even false. The horseflesh provided no sustenance, tasted cold even when sizzling, and swallowed like clay. Stomachs cramped for outrage. Throughout the night thousands arose to vomit their repast, all in terror of those who observed.
But few would be assaulted that night. Though the dark hungers of the Ordealmen had waxed more keenly if anything, they had become more difficult to aim. Even as the watches dwindled, so their yearning to consume came to blot the greater host of wicked desire. The recitals and ceremonial rites crumbled as bread, dissolved as sand. Sickened for horseflesh, the greater number of Ordealmen retired rather than pursue congress, huddled riven in the black, oppressed by growling, rending thoughts of the Meat, reliving the ecstasy, the horror …
The Nail of Heaven gleamed in the clarion void above them, wetting their ruined tents and pavilions with luminance, a gloaming across the endless crypt that was the Field Appalling.
The Horns flashed mercurial on the darkling horizon, the hook upon which all lines converged.
Shimmered as an earthbound twin.
“Can’t you see, Uncle? This hunger is naught but the Shortest Path …”
The Exalt-General stared up at Kayûtas, stunned. The scriptural panels hung indistinct in the shadows about the man, a congregation of spies. When had the gardened, sanctuary air of his Lord-and-Prophet succumb to the reek and lather of a catamite lair?
“Why do we trade gods as we trade spices?” the Prince-Imperial pressed. “Why do philosophers endlessly dispute the abstract? The flesh, Uncle”—he spanked his bare thigh—“meat anchors our every measure. The bliss that indulges versus the bliss that denies—both reside within the flesh! Don’t you see? The hermit is naught but an insane libertine, a soul that has confused war for empire, and so must twist its way to dominion.”
The things … the things he had witnessed, the bloody harems, strung in grinding tangles throughout the encampment, blood-slicked beauty convulsing in the pit of each.
He had fractured at some point, become someone who watched without touching as the Greater Proyas seethed unbridled … romped unchecked. It had occurred to him that perhaps he held his face pressed into some higher flame, that he merely watched in a manner more profound, more entrenched—that life was nothing more than grovelling in flame. Either way, the moments where he watched and lived as one were becoming progressively more rare …
And unendurable.
“Enough!” he erupted. “What are you saying?”
He was missing something. There was more to this …
“What you already know, Uncle.”
“And what is that?”
The Prince-Imperial loomed pale and flaxen and carnivorous.
“That something must be eaten.”
The artful general, Triamis the Great famously wrote, must keep slack looped within a cruel fist.
“Sweet God of Gods, who walks among us,” the caste-noble chorus intoned, voices deep with majesty, clipped with harried inattention, a need to dispense with mere ceremonial mummery …
“Innumerable are your holy names …”
To be commanded, Men must always feel the constraint of their commander, the firm hand that perpetually threatened to choke each warrior individually. Individuals could be culled, whipp
ed or even executed. So long as there was reason in it, the ranks conceded this to their commanders. A disciplined host was a victorious host, and the punishment of malcontents was preferable to slaughter on the field. But if there was no reason or proportion to the punishment meted, or if the crimes punished were collectively viewed as spoils—as due exchange for grievous sacrifices made, say—then woe to the general who dared yank the leash too hard. Great generals, Triamis believed, had to be as much augur as orator and tactician; among all the traits and abilities that conspired to create battlefield brilliance, none was so crucial as the ability to read the ranks, to look into the amorphous rumble and see when the leash need be jerked, slackened, or even altogether released.
The simple fact of the matter, after all, was that armies went where they willed. By divining that destination, the general could command what had already been decreed, dispense the inevitable as wages, and so transform mutiny into adulation. The great general always owned the acts of his army.
No matter how depraved or criminal.
Proyas—who had first read the famed Journals and Dialogues when he was eleven, who had presided over as many victories as Triamis himself!—knew this lesson as well as any soul breathing.
He must own what was happening …
He must bid his Men eat … lest he be consumed.
He stood panting at his place to the right of his Lord-and-Prophet’s vacant bench. The Lords of the Ordeal stacked the tiers before him, intoning the Prayer, each a feral slick of pollution—the new Unclean. Once meticulous beards now hung loose and slovenly, strung into rat-tails for negligence and grease. Once polished armour now reflected nothing more than shape and shadow. Once groomed hair now lay matted or leapt crazed …
“May your bread silence our daily hunger …”
But nothing attested to their transformation so much as their eyes, too bright and over-wide, the one point where their savagery lay raw, exposed to the open air. Proyas could feel them paw at his surfaces, simmering gazes, peering with the hostile incredulity of those who know they hunger too much to warrant feeding.
“Judge us not by our trespasses
but according to our tempta—”
“We should go back!” someone erupted from the gloom of the far tiers—Lord Grimmel. Cries of hoarse assent followed, a cascade that tumbled into thunder. As Kayûtas had predicted, the Temple Prayer crashed into ruin at the feet of their impatience. They lacked the will to sustain even this.
“Back to the skinny fields!” Lord Ettwë Cundulkas cried, eyes fairly rolling.
Yes! the Greater Proyas whispered. Yes … We should return to Dagliash!
Others joined the chorus, an upswell that terrified for its fury as much as its unanimity.
“There is no returning!” Proyas screamed, cutting into the uproar as decisively as he could.
“Our Lord-and-Prophet commands this … Not me.”
It seemed miraculous that invoking Him yet possessed any weight whatsoever, so profoundly had the scales been overthrown. He need only look at them, his brother Believer-Kings, to apprehend the throttling truth. What had once been an assembly of glory had become a council of fiends.
Madness ruled the Great Ordeal.
But not one was so demented as to contradict their Holy Aspect-Emperor—at least not yet. The Eleven-Pole Chamber rumbled with indecision. It was almost comical watching them digest the paradox, how they hung as beasts on the very limit of their Lord-and-Prophet’s leash, trembling for the equipoise of lust and terror. One by one, a wariness stole over their looks, the scoffing manner of those frightened by what they had revealed. To eat your enemy was to need him. And to eat Sranc, they were now learning, was to be enslaved.
The Believer-Prince of Erras, Halas Siroyon, would be the first to crack the stone silence.
“No one has seen so much as a track,” he said, his tone plain. “The earth is dead in this accursed country. Dead all the way down.”
The meaning was clear. They had all assumed, given the Holy Sagas, that Agongorea would be teeming with Sranc—with sustenance. “More rotted hide than earth,” the Book of Generals famously described it, “a mire of baying mouths.” Perhaps this had been the case in Far Antiquity, when the High Norsirai had kept the creatures penned to the west of the River Sursa. It was not the case now.
“Siroyon speaks true!” Lord Grimmel cried, his face hot with blood, his jugular a skinned cord on his neck. “There’s nary a scrap to be found on this accursed table!”
“He’s starving!” Lord Ikkorl cried, stabbing the Earl’s image with a thick finger. “Look! You can even see his rib through his breeches!”
The Umbilicus at once chortled and raged. Proyas glanced to Kayûtas, who stood upon his immediate right, the youthful image of the ghost that somehow yet commanded them. Nimil did not sully easily and tarnished not at all, so his Ishroi armour gleamed with rivulets of light and pools of concentrated image. He had managed to maintain his appearances otherwise, braiding his golden beard, combing oil and order into his flowing hair. As a result, he stood before the assembly as a visual rebuke, an unwanted measure of how far their debauchery had cast them from grace.
“Impertinent Holca dog!” Lord Grimmel roared, fumbling for his sword.
“Dagliash!” Nuharlal Shukla, the normally reserved Grandee of Saw’a-jowat screeched. “We mus—!”
“Yes!” Prince Charapatha bellowed in affirmation. “We must return to Dag—!”
“But they rot! How ca—?”
“If we flay them! Stretch them out! Dry them out! Turn them into rations!”
“Yes! Yes! We can gnaw on it, suckle the salty swee—!”
“Enough!” their Exalt-General boomed. “Where’s your Reason? Where’s your Faith!”
Kellhus had been preparing him all along—Proyas could see that now. The Holy Aspect-Emperor had known from the very beginning that He would have to abandon the Great Ordeal, that someone else would have to navigate the shoals of Golgotterath …
That he would need a Steersman.
“Reason lies at Dagliash!” Shukla barked in reply. “And we have fled from it!”
Proyas did not need to see it, for he could feel it, the way hunger warped souls to the very frame, so that what was crooked appeared true, and what was mad determined what was sane. And so it was the God of Gods who required they withdraw from Agongorea, who wanted them to sit on polluted plains and grow fat and lecherous on the rotting carcasses of Sranc. What else could be more obvious? More true?
Even he trembled at the prospect … it was so … so … delicious.
“Death lies at Dagliash!” he bellowed, throwing himself against what seemed a thousand needles of inclination. “Death! Disease! And damnation!”
This was why Anasûrimbor Kellhus had broken his heart, why he had broken Proyas in two: so that he might stand apart from the seditious conspiracies within his own soul, and so call them out when uttered by others. To be confident was to be at one with what was believed, to resort to the thoughtless axioms of dogma to solve all things. To be confident was to embrace the blindness that Men called their heart.
The very faith, the very belief that had delivered the Lords of the Ordeal to the Field Appalling, was about to visit them with destruction.
“Any man!” Kayûtas ranted from his side. “No matter what his station! Any man who deserts the Holy Host of Hosts shall be offered up as spoils to the others!”
Kellhus had foreseen this dilemma—of this much, at least, Proyas could be certain. The Holy Aspect-Emperor had known the perils of the Meat, and more importantly, he had known the hash it would make of a believer’s arrogant soul. And so he set about razing the very convictions he had manufactured in his two Exalt-Generals, tearing their certitude to the ground, knowing that it was the weak soul, the heart set against itself, that would prove strongest crossing this contradictory ground.
His Steersman had to be an Unbeliever.
The Exalt-General wept for the reali
zation.
This was Conditioned Ground. His Lord was here …
In him.
The Southron Men roiled in fiendish consternation. Nuharlal Shukla had become the object of sudden, openly predatory attention, and he shrunk back to his place on the tiers, scowling for all the looks that fondled him. An air of communal sorting had fallen across bowled assembly, men rehearsing carnal whims that were no longer notional, counting out those they deemed the most treacherous among them.
As easily as their hunger had united them, it now divided.
“Enough!” Proyas cried with paternal disgust. “Turn aside your foul longing! Turn your gaze forward, to the Horns that daily creep upon the horizon!”
This was Conditioned Ground. Kellhus had chosen him because, unlike Saubon, he possessed a conviction that could be obliterated. And Kayûtas, as His son, Dûnyain, was simply too strong to be weak, to succumb the way the Shortest Path demanded.
“This is the Slog of Slogs, my brothers!”
He stabbed a warrior’s forefinger in the direction of Golgotterath beyond the mottled black walls of the Umbilicus.
“And the skinnies await us there! There!”
Fresh. Alive. Hot with violet blood.
The Lords of the Ordeal erupted, baying as much as cheering. The gloom buzzed.
Only he could do this. Only Proyas … the boy who had never abandoned Achamian’s knee—not wholly.
Only he could feed them.
“Golgotterath is now our granary!”
Riots broke out across the encampment that night. Gangs of men had formed, and with threats and beatings, managed to pursue hundreds of “deserters” into the bone-scattered wastes. The inevitable reprisals devolved into pitched battles—and even more blood for the Judges to celebrate. Screams climbed beauteous beneath the infinite vault of the night, the fluting of distressed life … thrashing meat.