He smiled, and they smiled, finding levity in his wry humour, wisdom in his sober heart. He sighed, and they shook their heads at their juvenile foolishness.
“Fret not about the absence of our foe,” he admonished. “So long as the horizon remains empty, our way is secure.”
Grassland roamed the horizon, drying beneath a succession of cool spring suns. The rivers dwindled, and the dust rose to shroud the farther pageants. The Priests and Judges organized mass prayers, fields of warlike men abasing themselves for want of rain. But the Gangan-naru continued to blow. At night, the plains twinkling with innumerable fires, the Men of the Three Seas began to murmur about thirst—and rumours of discord back home.
The horizon remained empty, and yet their way no longer seemed secure.
The Holy Aspect-Emperor declared a day of rest and consultation.
The quartermasters became ever more stingy. The Men of the Circumfix had exhausted the bulk of their supplies, and they had outrun the supply-trains that chased them from the south. The rivers they tramped across had become too slight to readily fill their skins with clean water. They had come as far as their beasts and their backs could take them, which meant they had indeed passed beyond the limits of civilization. From this point, they had to fend for themselves.
The time had come for the Great Ordeal to break into foraging columns.
Stark.
That was the only way to describe the Aspect-Emperor’s bed chamber. A simple cot for sleeping, no different than those issued to low-ranking officers. A knee-high work table, without so much as a single cushion to sit upon. Even the room’s leather walls, which were swagged with decoration elsewhere throughout the Umbilicus, were bare. No gold could be seen. No ornament. The only symbols visible were those inscribed, column after meticulous column, about the octagonal circuit of the small iron hearth set in the room’s heart.
King Nersei Proyas had known and served Anasûrimbor Kellhus for more than twenty years, and still he found himself regularly perplexed by the man. As a youth he had often watched his tutor, Achamian, and his sword master, Xinemus, play benjuka—an ancient game, famed for the way the pieces determined the rules. Those had been sunny days, as the days of privileged youth often are. The two men would draw a table over to one of the seaside porticos and call out curses across the Meneanorean wind. Careful to be quiet, for tempers would flare more often than not, Proyas would watch them contest the plate, a winking partisan of whoever happened to be losing—Achamian usually. And he would wonder at decisions he could rarely understand.
This, he had come to learn, was what it meant to serve the Holy Aspect-Emperor: to be a witness to incomprehensible decisions. The difference was that Anasûrimbor Kellhus took the World as his benjuka plate.
The World and the Heavens.
To act without understanding. This, this he had decided, was the essential kernel, the spark that made worship worship. In High Ainon, during the fevered height of the Unification Wars, he had overseen the Sack of Sarneveh, an act of brutality that still jarred him from sleep from time to time. Afterward, when the Mathematicians reported that more than five thousand children had been counted among the dead, Proyas began shaking, a flutter that began with his fingers and bowel but soon climbed through his every bone. He dismissed his staff and vomited, wept, only to find him standing in the gloom of his pavilion, watching. “You should grieve,” the Aspect-Emperor said, his figure etched in a faint glow. “But do not think you have sinned. The World overmatches us, Proyas, so we make simple what we cannot otherwise comprehend. Nothing is more complicated than virtue and sin. All the atrocities you have committed in my name—all of them have their place. Do you understand this, Proyas? Do you understand why you will never understand?”
“You are our father,” he had sobbed. “And we are your headstrong sons.”
Zaudunyani.
The chamber was vacant. Even still, Proyas fell to his knees and lowered his face to the simple reed mats. He suffered a pang of shame, realizing that his own quarters possessed at least four times the baggage and so exacted four times the burden on the collective host. That would change, he resolved. And he would challenge all his officers to follow his parsimonious example.
“My Lord and Salvation?” he called to the empty air. The wheeze and pop of the hearth’s fire filled the silence. Its light mottled the hanging walls with wavering patterns of light and dark. It almost seemed he could glimpse images in the dancing blur. Cities burning. Faces.
“Yes … Please, Proyas. Share my fire.”
And there he was, sitting cross-legged before the octagonal hearth. Anasûrimbor Kellhus. The Holy Aspect-Emperor.
He sat with the slack repose of someone who had not moved for some time. The outer edges of his plaited beard and shoulder-length hair gleamed in counterpoint to the fire. He wore a simple robe of grey silk embroidered only about the hems. Aside from the faint haze of illumination about his hands, only his eyes seemed extraordinary.
“Is everything—?” Proyas began, only to catch himself in embarrassment.
“Ours has always been a convoluted bond,” Kellhus said smiling. “Clad in ritual armour one moment, naked the next. The time has come for us to recline side by side as simple friends.”
He gestured for Proyas to sit beside him—on his right, the place of honour. “Truth be told,” he said in his old, joking way. “I prefer you clothed.”
“So all is well?” Proyas asked, crouching and crossing his legs.
“I remember when you laughed at my jokes,” the Aspect-Emperor said.
“You were funnier back then.”
“Back when?”
“Before you beat the World to the last laugh.”
The Aspect-Emperor grinned and frowned at once. “That remains to be seen, my friend.”
Proyas often was astonished by the way Kellhus could, utterly and entirely, just be what he needed to be given the demands of circumstance. At this moment, he was simply an old and beloved friend, nothing more or less. Usually Proyas found it difficult—given all the miracles of might and intellect he had witnessed—to think of Kellhus as a creature of flesh and blood, as a man. Not so now.
“So all is not well?”
“Well enough,” Kellhus said, scratching his brow. “The God has allowed me glimpses of the future, the true future, and thus far everything unfolds in accordance with those glimpses. But there are many dark decisions I must make, Proyas. Decisions I would rather not make alone.”
“I’m not sure I understand.”
A twinge of shame accompanied this admission, not for the fact of his ignorance, but for the way he had hedged in confessing. Proyas most certainly did not understand. Even after twenty years of devotion, he still succumbed to the stubborn instinct to raise his pride upon little falsehoods and so manage the impressions of others.
How hard it was to be an absolutely faithful soul.
Kellhus had ceased correcting these petty lapses; he no longer needed to. To stand before him was to stand before yourself, to know the warp and woof of your own soul, and to see all the snags and tears that beggared you.
“You are a king and a general,” Kellhus said. “I would think you know well the peril of guesses.”
Proyas nodded and smiled. “No one likes playing number-sticks alone.”
His Lord-and-God raised his eyebrows. “Not with stakes so mad as these.”
By some trick of timing, the golden flames before them twirled, and again Proyas thought he glimpsed fiery doom flutter across the leather-panelled walls.
“I am yours, as always my Lor … Kellhus. What do you need of me?”
The leonine face nodded toward the fire. “Kneel before my hearth,” the Aspect-Emperor said, the flint of command hardening his voice. “Bow your face into the flame.”
Proyas surprised himself with his lack of hesitation. He came to his knees before the edge of the small iron hearth. The heat of the fire pricked him. He knew the famed story from the Tusk
, where the God Husyelt asked Angeshraël to bow his face into his cooking fire. He knew, verbatim, the Sermon of the Ziggurat, where Kellhus had used this story to reveal his divinity to the First Holy War twenty years previous. He knew that “Bowing into the Fire” had since become a metaphor for Zaudunyani revelation.
And he knew that innumerable madmen wandered the Three Seas, blinded and scarred for taking the metaphor literally.
Even still, he was on his knees, and he was bowing, doing exactly as his Prophet and Emperor commanded. He even managed to keep his eyes open. And a part of him watched and wondered that a devotion, any devotion, could run so deep as to throw a face into the furnace …
Across the crazed bourne of opposites. Into the lapping glitter. Into the needling agony.
Into the light.
His beard and hair whooshed into tinder. He expected agony. He expected to scream. But something was tugged from him, sloughed like flesh from overboiled bone … something … essential.
And he was looking out from the fire, into a thousand faces—and a thousand more. Enough to wrench the eyes, dazzle and bewilder the soul. And yet somehow he focused, turned from the battering complexity and took refuge in a single clutch of men, four long-bearded Men of the Ordeal, one gazing directly at him with a child’s thoughtless fixity, the others bickering in Thunyeri … Something about rations. Hunger.
Then he was out, on his rump in Kellhus’s gloomy chamber, blinking and sputtering.
And his Lord-and-God held him, soothed his face with a damp cloth. “The absence of space,” he said with a rueful smile. “Most souls find it difficult.”
Proyas padded his cheeks and forehead with fumbling fingertips, expecting to feel blasted skin, but found himself intact. Embarrassed, he bolted upright, squinting away the last of the fiery brightness. He glanced about and for some unaccountable reason felt surprised that the iron hearth burned exactly as before.
“Does it trouble you that I can watch men from their fires?” Kellhus asked.
“If anything, it heartens me …” he replied. “I marched with you in the First Holy War, remember? I know full well the capricious humour of armies stranded far from home.”
Afterward, he would realize that his Aspect-Emperor had already known this, that Anasûrimbor Kellhus knew his heart better than he himself could ever hope to. Afterward, he would question the whole intent of this intimate meeting.
“Indeed you do.”
“But why show me this? Do they speak of mutiny already?”
“No,” Kellhus replied. “They speak of the thing that preoccupies all stranded men …”
The Aspect-Emperor resumed his position before the hearth, gestured for Proyas to do the same. A moment of silence passed as Kellhus poured him a bowl of wine from the wooden gourd at his side. Gratitude welled through the Exalt-General’s breast. He drank from the bowl, watching Kellhus with questioning eyes.
“You mean home.”
“Home,” the Aspect-Emperor repeated in assent.
“And this is a problem?”
“Indeed. Even now our old enemies muster across the Three Seas. As the days pass they will grow ever more bold. I have always been the rod that held the New Empire together. I fear it will not survive my absence.”
Proyas frowned. “And you think this will lead to desertion and mutiny?”
“I know it will.
“But these men are Zaudunyani … They would die for you! For the truth!”
The Aspect-Emperor lowered his face in the yes-but manner Proyas had seen countless times, though not for several years. They had been far closer, he realized, during the Unification Wars …
When they were killing people.
“The hold of abstractions over Men is slight at best,” Kellhus said, turning to encompass him in his otherworldly scrutiny. “Only the rare, ardent soul—such as yours, Proyas—can throw itself upon the altar of thought. These men march not so much because they believe in me as they believe what I have told them.”
“But they do believe! Mog-Pharau returns to murder the world. They believe this! Enough to follow you to the ends of the World!”
“Even so, would they choose me over their sons? How about you, Proyas? As profoundly as you believe, would you be willing to stake the lives of your son and daughter for my throw of the number-sticks?”
A kind of strange, tingling horror accompanied these words. According to scripture, only Ciphrang, demons, demanded such sacrifices. Proyas could only stare, blinking.
The Aspect-Emperor frowned. “Stow your fears, old friend. I don’t ask this question out of vanity. I do not expect any man to choose me or my windy declarations over their own blood and bones.”
“Then I don’t understand the question.”
“The Men of the Ordeal do not march to save the World, Proyas—at least not first and foremost. They march to save their wives and their children. Their tribes and their nations. If they learn that the world, their world, slips into ruin behind them, that their wives and daughters may perish for want of their shields, their swords, the Host of Hosts would melt about the edges, then collapse.”
And in his soul’s eye Proyas could see them, the Men of the Ordeal, sitting about their innumerable fires, trading rumours of disaster back home. He could see them prod and stoke one another’s fears, for property, for loved ones, for title and prestige. He could hear the arguments, the long grinding to and fro of faith and incessant worry. And as much as it dismayed him, he knew that his Lord-and-God spoke true, that Men truly were so weak.
Even those who had conquered the known world. Even the Zaudunyani.
“So what are you proposing?” he asked, nodding in sour agreement.
“An embargo,” the Aspect-Emperor replied on a pent breath. “I will forbid, on pain of death, all Cants of Far-calling. Henceforth, the Men of the Ordeal shall march with only memories to warm them.”
Home. This, if anything, was the abstraction for the Exalt-General. There was a place, of course. Even for beggars, there was a place. But Proyas had spent so many years campaigning that home for him possessed a wane and fleeting character, the sense of things attested to by others. For him, home was his wife, Miramis, who still wept whenever he left her bed for the wide world, and his children, Xinemus and Thaila, who had to be reminded he was their father upon his rare returns.
And even they seemed strangers whenever melancholy steered his thoughts toward them.
No. This was his home. Dwelling in the light of Anasûrimbor Kellhus.
Waging his endless war.
The Aspect-Emperor reached out, grasped his shoulder in unspoken acknowledgment. Never, in all their years together, had he promised any reprieve, any respite, from the toil that had so burdened his life. Never had he said, “After this, Proyas … After this …”
Warmth sparked through the Exalt-General, the tingle of grace.
“What will you tell them?” he asked roughly.
“That Golgotterath has the ability to scry our scrying.”
“Do they?”
Kellhus arched his eyebrows. “Perhaps. Twenty centuries have they prepared—who could say? It would terrify you, Proyas, to know how little I know of our enemy.”
A resigned smile. “I have not known terror since I have known you.”
And yet he had known so many things just as difficult.
“Fear not,” Kellhus said sadly. “You will be reacquainted before all this is through.”
The Seeing-Flame fluttered and twirled before them, caught in some inexplicable draft. Even its warmth seemed to spin.
“So,” Proyas said, speaking to ward against the chill falling through him, “the Great Ordeal at last sails beyond sight of shore. I see the wisdom—the necessity. But surely you will maintain contact with the Empire.”
“No …” Kellhus replied with an uncharacteristic glance at his haloed hands. “I will not.”
“But … but why?”
The Warrior-Prophet looked to the dark l
eather panels rising about them, gazed as if seeing shapes and portents in the wavering twine of light and shadow. “Because time is short and all I have are fragmentary visions …”
He turned to his Exalt-General. “I can no longer afford backward glances.”
And Proyas understood that at long last the Great Ordeal had begun in earnest. The time had come to set aside burdens, to shed all complicating baggage.
Including home.
Only death, war, and triumph remained. Only the future.
Anasûrimbor Kellhus, the Holy Aspect-Emperor of the Three Seas, declared the Breaking of the Great Ordeal at the Eleventh Council of Potentates. The same concerns echoed through the ensuing debates, for such is the temper of many men that they must be convinced several times before they can be convinced at all. The Believer-Kings understood the need to disperse: without forage there was no way the Great Ordeal could reach its destination. But even so early in the year, the rivers were languishing, and the new growth of spring still slept beneath the detritus of the old. As the plainsmen among them knew, game followed the rain in times of drought. What use was dividing the host when all the game had fled in search of greener pasture?
But as the Aspect-Emperor and his planners explained, they had no choice but to pursue the route they had embarked upon. Any deviation from their course would force them to winter in the wilds, rather than Golgotterath, and so doom them. Tusullian, the senior Imperial Mathematician, explained how everything was knitted to everything, how forced marches meant more food, which in turn meant diminishing supplies, which in turn meant more foraging, which in turn meant slower progress.
“In all things,” the Aspect-Emperor said, “I urge you to walk the Shortest Path. The road before us is no different, save that it is also the only path. We will be tried, my friends, and many of us will be found wanting. But we will prove worthy of salvation! We shall deliver the World from destruction!”