The mutiny itself did not begin until the following morning, soon after the toll of the Interval. Before prayers had even concluded, an Ingraulish knight by the name of Vûgalharsa threw down his great shield and began bellowing the only thing that mattered, the only thing he deserved given the mad deprivations he had endured. “Mich!” he began bellowing. “Mich-mich-mich!”
Meat.
An estimable if not mighty warrior, the Tydonni thane cudgelled the first Judge to seize him, a diminutive Nroni by the curious name of Epithiros. By all accounts, Vûgalharsa and his kinsman began to eat the unfortunate priest, who apparently lived long enough to kindle the lust of thousands, so piercing and effeminate were his screams on the wind. The mutiny proper began when his fellow Ingrauls closed ranks against the company of eighty-three Judges dispatched to recover Epithiros: Men who were likewise murdered, desecrated, and in the case of three, partially consumed.
A contingent of Ainoni—Kishyati for the most part—lay camped adjacent to the Ingraulish mutineers. One could scare imagine a greater gulf between races, and yet the madness leapt between camps with ease. Like the Ingrauls, the swarthy sons of the River Sayut chased away their caste-noble commanders and fell upon the Ministrati encamped among them. They gathered in unruly mobs, their outraged cries falling in and out of unison. The dead they passed across the tips of their spears, exulting in the blood looping across their cheeks and lips.
Souls had become desiccate tinder, and words sparks. Throughout the Great Ordeal, Men threw aside all restraint, and swarmed down the thoroughfares of the encampment, screaming for Meat, and murdering all those who would restrain them. Baron Kemrates Danidas, whose father Shanipal governed Conriya in the Exalt-General’s stead, found himself crossing a camp of Auglishman, a barbaric people hailing from the coasts of Thunyerus, when the mutiny struck. Despite the protestations of his younger brothers (who counselled flight), he attempted to restore order, and so doomed all of Lord Shanipal’s sons. General Inrilil ab Cinganjehoi, another celebrated son of another celebrated warrior from the days of the First Holy War, actually managed to forestall the mutiny among his own Men, only to watch that order dissolve for no reason short the steepening angle of the sun. The General would survive, but only because he, like most other Lords of the Ordeal, refused to raise more than his voice against the growing riot.
Within a watch, the Judges ceased to exist. The manner of their death would soil the heart for hearing.
Despite the profundity of the crisis, the Exalt General’s martial instincts and acumen did not fail him. Even before word of the Kishyati uprising arrived, he understood the mutiny was about to crash about them all and that the Judges would have to be sacrificed. His first decision would be the most crucial: to surrender the bulk of the encampment to the roiling mobs, while rallying those he knew he could most depend upon—the Schoolmen and the caste-nobility. He commanded his retinue—the motley of souls, mostly Pillarians, who happened to be in the vicinity—to lash his family’s standard, the Black Eagle on White, to a second pole so that it might be plainly seen, then led them galloping to the perimeter of the encampment, not because he feared for his safety (the Umbilicus, as it turned out, became a sanctuary for those few Judges who survived) but because he knew this was where the sane were always driven in times of madness—to the margins.
Kayûtas, leading hundreds of his crimson-skirted Kidruhil, added the Horse-and-Circumfix standard to his own. Others joined in sporadic succession, all those who had neither perished nor joined in the rampage, and Proyas eventually found himself with the bulk of the remaining horsemen. Together they watched as the Great Ordeal convulsed about its own members, excised instances of itself from within. That so few Lords of the Ordeal had joined their countrymen was perhaps no surprise. Many had dwelt in the presence of their Lord-and-Prophet for decades, let alone years, and all of them—as vessels of his authority—had been whelmed as Judges. Even maddened by the Meat, even drooling for the reek of fired flesh and possessions, even aching for glimpses of unholy congress, the Lords of the Ordeal remained true to their Most Holy Aspect-Emperor.
Like a wolf about a trapper’s fire, they paced the outskirts of the encampment, a bolus of thousands drawn the length of a mile. They leaned upon their pommels agog, aspiration and appetite waging open warfare across their look and manner. Some gasped for ardour, or the throttling shame that followed. Some wept softly. Others aired their lament—for none could deny that the end was upon them. Far quarters smoked. Near quarters shivered for scenes of carnage, appalled for glimpses of porcine obscenity. Castle-noble blood lay trammelled. The Judges shrieked for torments and degradations that at once stoked and battered souls. Thousands grunted and roared, smeared their faces and armour with the blood and filth of their victims.
“How many?” the Grandmaster of the Shrial Knights, Lord Sampë Ussiliar, was overheard crying. “Sweet-sweet Seju! How many are damned this day?”
Living, breathing Men were hammered into mewling worms, things that twisted in slicks of blood. They thought of wives, children, caught a lifetime of worry into a single anguished pang. They sputtered about smashed teeth, perpetually tried to clamber free of the serial assaults but only managed to inflame them. The Agmundrmen took to hoisting mutilated Judges upon Circumfix standards, binding them upside down in grisly mockery of the symbol that had once made them weep. The Massentian Columnaries were nowhere near so generous, stashing their victims away in pavilions that could be easily identified for the mobs crowing and cheering about them. A company of Moserothi scavenged a great sheet of canvas from some pavilion (that belonging to Sirpal Onyarapû, their Lord Palatine, it would turn out), which they used to toss carcasses high into the air.
The multitudes roared and danced, arm clasping arm, throat joining throat, legs leaping for the purity of their transgressions, the beauteous simplicity that is the wage of atrocity. The Ordealmen gloried in their excision, cast their seed across the fell earth of Agongorea. The near-dead lay like sacks of quivering burlap, bald skin scored with crimson, so moist, so vulnerable as to burn as beacons, wanton as Temple whores. Judgment had been cut from the heart of the Holy Host of Hosts.
No sign could be seen of the Schoolmen, who had evidently recused themselves from the matter. Their canvas enclaves remained aloof, shadowy pools of calm in thrashing waters—even that of Swayali, who had been the lodestone of so many base and lascivious desires. They had no stake in mundane grudges, and for all their reckless abandon, the mutineers took care not to cede them any.
The Lords of the Ordeal urged their Exalt-General to call on the Schools to end the riots, and none with such violence as Lord Grimmel, the Tydonni Earl of Cuärweth. “Command them to strike!” he snarled. “Let them burn the sin from these sinners. Let fire be their redemption!”
The Exalt-General was outraged. “So you would blot those who act upon your own obscene hungers?” he cried in retort. “Why? To better set yourself apart in the eyes of your fellows? I know of no other soul, Grimmel, whose eyes are so reddened for leering—whose lips are so cracked for licking!”
“Then burn me with them!” the Earl cried, his voice cracking for passion … for admission.
“And what of the Ordeal?” Proyas snapped. “What of Golgotterath?”
The caste-noble could do no more than sputter in the rabid gaze of his fellows.
“Fool!” Proyas continued. “Our Lord-and-Prophet foresaw this event …”
Some witnesses report that he paused to survey the shock these words occasioned in the Lords of the Ordeal. Others claim that he paused not all, that it only seemed such for the shadow of a cloud that encompassed the blasted plains. A handful would claim to have seen a halo about his wild, Ketyai-black mane.
“Aye, my brothers … He told me this would happen.”
At Proyas’s behest, Anasûrimbor Kayûtas commanded the Kidruhil to dismount and strip their ponies. The half-starved mounts were gathered on the western perimeter, some five hundred of them,
chins pitching, heads ducking to shake manes, before being whipped into the encampment, into the once rampaging, but now eerily quiet, belly of the mutiny. The outcome was not so miraculous as it seemed: all mutinies outran their occasions, stranding those who had merely aped their brothers’ outrage with the cold ashes of fury, searching for excuses, eager to appease their betters. Save for those most responsible, the Ordealmen required only some excuse to set aside their grievances and resume the charade of pious resolve they had been so quick to overthrow mere watches previous. Wary, the Lords of the Ordeal dispersed through the camp in the wake of the Kidruhil horses, each making their way to their own nations and tribes. Equine screams serrated the air about them, compounding into an eerie, unnerving chorus that slipped as oil across the plains. The horses themselves were not so much butchered, as their capacity to suffer was dissected, sorted into strings the most cruel among them might play as a lute. For all their declarations of hunger, the Ordealmen were all but indifferent to horseflesh. Only transgression, it seemed, could replace the Meat, the vicious glee that belonged to wickedness. Only torment could nourish them …
Sin.
That evening, innumerable thousands gathered to watch the execution of those accused of inciting the mutiny—some twenty men, who, apart from Vûgalharsa, had been picked more or less randomly. Proyas had prepared for more trouble, to the point of deploying the Schools about the accused. As much as he feared the prospect of martyrs, he feared the perception of impotence even more. Someone had to die—if only to reignite the communal fear that all authority requires.
In accordance with the Law, the “leaders” of the mutiny were flayed in public, their skin shaved from them a thumb’s breadth at a time. Between shrieks the wretches called out to their kinsmen, either urging them to rise up, or begging them to set an arrow in their hearts. But far from inciting outrage at some common oppressor, they provoked only paralysis and terror or ridicule and uproarious merriment—the laughter of crazed fools. Most howled and pointed, scooped tears with thumbs and clutched cramping ribs, cheered the tortured shrieks of those they had celebrated, raised upon their shoulders, mere watches before. But others gazed without expression, their eyes as wide as their lips were narrow, like souls incredulous of the horror that awakened them. And the Exalt-General watched, compelled. He could not but ponder the possibility that this demonstration, which was meant to instill as much terror as respect, was far more a reward than a punishment …
That out of some blind, bestial instinct the Ordeal had begun volunteering portions of itself to feed itself.
Of the four hundred and thirty-eight dead Judges recovered, nearly four hundred of them had been partially consumed. According to the mathematician Tusullian, the Lords of the Ordeal could assume that at least ten thousand of their Zaudunyani brothers had engaged in some form of cannibalism …
In addition to whatever other obscenities they had committed.
Proyas bid the Pillarians set his chair upon a knoll just beyond the southern limit of the encampment, and there he sat in full battle-dress, his posture more that of a Seto-Annarian Emperor than a Conriyan King. Kayûtas stood to his right, gazing as he gazed. “We will ponder Golgotterath together,” he had told his nephew, “from a place all souls can see.”
So they peered out across Agongorea’s pewter desolation, the barrens inked in the strokes and curls of deep evening shadow, and meditated upon the image of the Horns rising from a chapped rim. Anochirwa, the ancient Kûniüri had called them, particularly when viewed from this distance, “Horns Reaching.” Sitting high across the cadaverous plain, the gleam resembled nothing more than a whore’s golden piercing, the fetish of some unlawful Cult threading a corpse’s puckered skin …
The Incû-Holoinas.
Golgotterath.
Horror pricked his innards.
His mouth watered.
Years ago Kellhus had bid him to imagine this moment, spying Golgotterath from the Field Appalling, and Proyas could remember his throat tightening at the fancy, the presentiment of standing upon this very spot, only upright, brimming with both fury and humility … to have been delivered so far … to come so near Salvation.
And now here he sat bent, a deformed angle of himself, a shadow thrown across accursed ground.
He was the Steersman!
The one chosen above all others, not for the strength or purity of his conviction, but for the loss of these things—for the bloody socket where the limb of his heart had been.
The sun slipped behind a crimson veil, and slivers of the Horns blazed like uncanny torches, like beacons, either beckoning or warning away, unnerving for the premonition of raw immensity they conveyed—to stand so tall as to bathe in a younger day, a brighter sun.
“Will it be enough?” he heard himself ask Kayûtas.
The Prince-Imperial gazed at him for a long moment, as if willing away urges as fundamental as his own. The crimson upon the Horns limned his cheek and temple in rose, flecked his pupils. “No,” he eventually said, turning back to Anochirwa.
“So how does a general pilot insanity?”
It horrified him, the way the Horns continued to smolder bright after the purple extinction of the sun.
“I fear that power is reserved for prophets, Uncle.”
“Aren’t you afraid of the Hells?” Proyas had once asked Achamian as a child.
It was the kind of brusque query young boys were prone to make, particularly when they found themselves alone with those physically or spiritually deformed, questions inappropriate to the degree they were honest. And how keenly he had wanted to know what it was like to wield such miraculous power in the shadow of damnation.
Achamian’s eyebrows alone registered any shock he might have felt. “Why should I be punished?”
“Because you’re a sorcerer. The Gods hate sorcerers.”
Always the laughing wariness in his look. “And you? Do you think I should be punished?”
The previous week his older cousin had begun responding to all his questions by asking him the same question back—a tactic that had flummoxed Proyas enough to warrant adopting.
“The question is, Do you think you should be punished?”
The portly Mandate Schoolman had chuckled and frowned all at once, scratched his beard in that way that would forever make Proyas think of philosophers.
“Of course I do,” Achamian said, his voice on the sly side of lighthearted.
“You do?”
“Of course. I would be punished for saying otherwise!”
“Only if I were to tell anyone!”
His tutor smiled wide.
“Perhaps it is you I should fear then.”
Something must be eaten …
Something stronger than hope.
That night Proyas roamed the encampment the way some general out of legend might, either seeking clues to the tenor of their men or answers to some turmoil lurking in his own heart. The sky could have belonged to the Carathay, the night was so clear. The moon shone from the southeast, bleaching the wreckage white, and inking the shadows. Thrice Proyas found himself surrounded by panting gangs, and without fail they hesitated upon recognizing his station, and he had seized that wonder, that heartbeat of roiling indecision, gesturing to the leering wretch that most obviously hung upon the sufferance of the others, the one they had already raped and defiled in the twilight carcass of their souls, and saying, “The God offers this one in my place.”
It was not so much madness rendering them one of their own to eat, because occasion was all any of them sought, the pretext of being one among others punishing an evil unto bliss. The screams subsequent to his departure cast a wicked glamour upon the night, for they were no different than the cries of his wife, Miramis, naked, shaking, pitching for the bliss of him.
The madness of this troubled him not at all.
The Great Ordeal was his hole to fill, his stomach to feed.
His Horde.
It gaped within him, his hunger, t
ransformed him into a living hole.
Proyas ransacked the Holy Aspect-Emperor’s baggage, pretending to be seeking evidence of his merciless Will. He found nothing that was not ornamental, nothing that expressed any truth of Him.
He absconded from the stores with only a ceremonial shield squared about a curve in the Columnary manner. When leaned properly in a leather-panelled corner, it shattered his reflection across dozens of etched and stamped circumfixes, yet conserved his ghostly aspect all the same, transforming him into a being of luminous threads. He savoured the illusion.
He alone had been divided against himself.
Not Saubon. Not Kayûtas …
He alone was weak enough to be strong, at this time, upon this ground, the Field Appalling.
He alone could see the Sranc standing in his own skin. Pale. Dog-hunched. Porcelain and perfect …
Lecherous for blood.
Proyas was relatively certain that no soul in history had killed so many as Anasûrimbor Kellhus. The cities razed. The captives massacred. The sons and husbands stolen in the gullet of night. The heretics burned en masse. Every atrocity, no matter how miserable or spectacular, was but a wheel in the greatest argument of all: that the World should be saved …
The Holy Thousandfold Thought.
Now morning had come, and he stood flushed and panting before an ocean of faces, the assembled Great Ordeal of Anasûrimbor Kellhus, and the potency of it leapt through him, the primeval knowledge, the surging, stag-stamping vitality, and he knew, for all the ache of demonic expression, that what he did was what must be done, that the finality of what was holy redeemed the madness he was about to commit. He stood upon the summit of all that was wicked, and yet he was holy, steeped in sacred inner light!
“Do you feel it, my brothers? Do you ride your own heart as an unbroken steed?”
The Men of the Great Ordeal danced for righteous frenzy, their arms and faces black for sun. They were the wicked, the low and the base. By eating Sranc they had become Sranc. They were the monsters they had eaten. And now that he knew as much, he understood what was required to lead them, to bend them to Kellhus and his Great Argument …