“Were my father one of the Hundred,” she said, resting her cheek upon the forearm she had propped on her knee, “what you pose as manipulation becomes the God’s work … meaning, does it not?”
“What are you saying?”
She turned to regard him, and it seemed mad to be so intimate with any woman so beautiful, let alone an Anasûrimbor.
“That faith, not trust, is the attitude proper to the Anasûrimbor. That to be sacrificed in the name of my father is the greatest glory that this life offers … What higher meaning could there be? You are a Believer-King, Sorweel. The degree of your degradation is the degree of your sacrifice is the degree of your glory!”
This chastened him, reminded him of the perilous stakes. If she were to learn that he, the inconsolable orphan-king of Sakarpus, had been chosen as Narindar—that he was the knife that the dread Mother of Birth herself had raised against her family—then her father would know as much, and he would be put to death before the sun had set upon this endless tomb floor. The fact of his conversion, the fact that Oinaral had convinced him that the end of the World was truly nigh, and that her father, the Holy Aspect-Emperor, had indeed come to save it, would mean nothing. To kill him would be to unwind the machinations of an outraged Heaven; few murders in myth, let alone history, had purchased as much!
Anasûrimbor Serwa, the woman he loved, the daughter of his father’s murderer, would kill him without the least hesitation, just as she had killed her brother no more than a watch before. No matter how utter his adoration, how pure his devotion, she would end him were it not for the Dread Mother’s glamour … Her divine spit upon his recreant face.
How long would that unearned blessing last? Would he carry it to his grave? Or would it be rescinded, the way all things unearned seemed to be rescinded, the instant he needed it most?
He reeled, only now grasping the absurd consequences of his conversion …
How he had fallen in love with his executioner.
“What,” he asked, “do they call women who love fools in your country?”
She did not so much as blink.
“Wives.”
She fell asleep and he remained awake, wondering that things so pale, so barely skinned as they, could be so fierce, so immune to whatever had slapped life from this ground. She had told him how some Nonmen called this land “Unnûrull,” the Trackless Plain, because it swallowed footprints “like the beach between waves.” And indeed, not a track could be seen, though the whitish gravel nearby had the cast of mealed bones. And it seemed proper, the impunity of their love-making, the exposure. To be as children. To exult in what has been given, especially beneath the spectre of Golgotterath.
To wander trackless ground.
“Ware her, my King,” Eskeles had warned him that first day in the Umbilicus. “She walks with the Gods …”
Their next sorcerous leap, he embraced her the way a lover might, breast to breast, pelvis to thigh, and it seemed miraculous, her face tipped back below him, her lids glaring rose, her mouth welling with meaning, spouting truths that blind the eye, that rewrite the Book-of-the-World, her hair fanning out into a silken disc, her skin darkening for glaring brilliance, her voice burrowing through the flesh of Creation, rising out. Her eyes closed molten pools, smiling.
He dared seize her passion, lower his lips to her Metagnostic song.
They stepped clear spinning parabolic lights. He found it disorienting, the way the plain remained unchanged despite spanning the length of horizons. Even the Horns remained fixed—a fact that brought home their distance, and so their lunatic immensity.
She was already scanning the horizon, and Sorweel caught his breath in apprehension.
“There!” she cried, throwing his gaze eastward with a pointing finger. He spied winking light, as though pulverized glass had been sprinkled across the distance. The Believer-King of Sakarpus cursed under his breath, only now realizing the idyll that had thrown them together could not possibly survive the Holy Aspect-Emperor and his Great Ordeal.
They spent the next few watches trudging into their elongated shadows, Serwa silent, entirely absorbed by their destination, or apparently so, Sorweel endlessly peering, squinting, asking what it was the specks in the distance could be doing. The parade of perils about to confront him assured the questions were little more than cover. What was he going to say to Zsoronga? And the Dread Mother—was she simply waiting to punish his treachery? Would she rescind her glamour before the implacable regard of the Holy Aspect-Emperor? He only became genuinely curious about the figures in the distance when he realized Serwa wasn’t so much ignoring him as she was refusing to answer.
The reason for her refusal became obvious when they came upon the first of the blood-drenched Ordealmen, Karyoti by the look of them, severed heads impaled upon their manhood …
Human heads.
Serwa pulled him to his feet. He followed her in a stupor, wending between scenes of carnivorous languor and crimson squalor, his jaw slack. He understood that this was an occasion for horror, for raving shouts. But the most he could do was shrink into the shadow of wilful incomprehension.
How. How could such a thing be? Just yesterday, it seemed, they had left an Ordeal of grim and pious Men, a host that paraded as much as marched, bustling with symbol and insignia, stacked across the distance with ponderous discipline; only to return today to find …
Abomination.
Every step had become a lever, a kind of effortless toil. He looked, even as his soul averted its gaze, saw them congregated like vultures about the blasted dead, feeding, caressing, rutting with wounds … man after man, their hair matted, their beards wild and frayed, their armour scabbed with rust, mired with filth and gore, on and on, rocking about body after mutilated body, on and on, doing … things … things too ghastly to be … possible, let alone witnessed. He thought he recognized several of the faces, but could not summon the will to defile names. The tickle in his gut unsheathed feline claws. Nausea scratched through him. He vomited. It was only in the burning, coughing aftermath that the horror finally managed to squeeze whole into him—and with it, a kind of crazed, moral outrage, a sense of disgust so raw as to be excruciating …
Even Serwa, for all the reptilian serenity of her Dûnyain blood, had blanched. Even the Grandmistress of the Swayali walked, pallid and shaking, her eyes pinned on the blessed abstraction of forward.
A myriad of faces turned to their passage, their beards slicked in blood, their eyes hollow with a kind of incredulity, their mouths taut with swollen bliss. Sorweel’s gaze fastened upon a man, an unkempt Ainoni, who had pulled the head and shoulders of a corpse across his lap. He watched him seal his lips about the breathless mouth, hover in a prolonged and grisly kiss … before seizing the deadman’s bottom lip in his teeth, jerking and tearing with the ferocity of a battling dog.
Madness. Anomie unlike any he had ever experienced.
This place … Where there were no tracks to follow.
A shadow caught his eye, a patch of raggish black blown like something ethereal across the ground. He looked up, saw a stork wheel white and pristine where vultures should have been.
Yes … something whispered. And it seemed he had known all along.
“Recall,” Serwa said from his side, “our destination …”
He turned to look in the direction she nodded, saw Golgotterath, the great golden idol that somehow made all this holy …
“Father understood …” she said, and he could almost believe that she spoke to fortify her own resolve. “Father knew. He realized that this must happen.”
“This?” Sorweel cried. “This?”
An unknown part of him had intended his tone to be a rebuke, a slap, but she had retreated into her old, implacable manner. He would be the one to flinch …
He was always the one who flinched.
“The Shortest Path,” the Princess-Imperial said.
He followed her even though he suspected that she wandered aimlessly. They
picked their way between the camps congregated about fire pits of maimed flesh. Men eating. Men languid in their obscenities, almost as if they seduced the corpses they desecrated. And Men frenzied, hooting and cheering the brutal fury of their kinsmen, falling upon their victims in gangs. The plain resounded, but the voices were scattered across so many registers—from grunts to shrieks (for some victims still lived) to sobs to laughs to murmurs to faraway calls—that the silence that rendered them distinct loomed over all, creating a crazed and contradictory din. The stench was unbearable, so much so that he breathed through pursed lips.
The thought came to him quite unbidden. He is a demon …
Ciphrang.
And she said, “It is good that you believe.”
Despite everything, her cool gaze added.
Despite. Even. This.
He did not believe. But then, neither had he disbelieved. He had vacillated, dangled from the words, the exhortations of other souls. Porsparian. Eskeles. Zsoronga. Oinaral … and now this woman. He had staggered reeling from conviction to conviction—worse than a court buffoon!
And now … now …
What greater testimony could there be?
Evil.
At long last he understood the power of enigma, the reason why priests and gods were so jealous of their mysteries. The unknown was immovable. So long as doubt and confusion draped the Aspect-Emperor, he belonged to the doubt and confusion that shrouded the Whole. Short of genuine knowledge, he could not be sorted from the blackness that framed all things. He had to seem elemental, even divine, for the simple want of some mortal interval, some fact that bound him to the midden heaps of what was known.
But this … This was knowledge. Had he possessed the most fanatic, contrarian will, Sorweel would have been unable to deny it. For here it was … Before his very eyes … Here. It. Was.
Evil.
Evil.
A wickedness so unthinkable that mere witness courted damnation.
The viscous glide of penetrations. The tremulous kiss of tongue tips. The masticating teeth. The savaged carcasses. The bowel grunt, the seizure of seed jetting across skin and crimson meat.
Yesss … a voice cooed through a shuddering gasp. Sooo lovely. Sooo-sooo-sooo lovely.
These things stamped him with bodily force. They blew through the flimsy sheets of his soul and set upon the raw things, making snakes of his innards, knives of air … He need only open his lips to gag. He need only blink to loose the tidal outrage swelling within, a fury indistinguishable from judgment, a violence that was justice distilled—the very essence of holy retribution! It seemed he need only raise his fists to the sky, cry out the wrath and disgust shaking him apart from within, and the skies would answer with cleansing lightning …
It seemed … so it seemed ….
But he had learned enough to know that the Gods could do little more than whisper in this World, that they were diminished by their interventions—that they required instruments to enact their eternal designs, tools …
Like Prophets. Like Narindar.
The stork still lingered in the far sky, wings hooked about unseen rivers of air, slowly circling the degeneracy that dimpled the sepulchral plains.
The Believer-King of Sakarpus stumbled to his knees, senseless of Serwa’s alarmed glare. He huddled over his retching.
Welling dismay.
I understand, Mother …
Anguished repentance.
At last I see.
They made their way to a knoll that rose as if upon the back of an earthen wave. A single man occupied the hunched summit, sitting crouched above a lone corpse. Sorweel was several blinks in recognizing him, such was the transformation of his appearance: his once-impeccable beard a matted morass, his skin nearly as black as Zsoronga’s for filth and dried blood, his brown eyes bright and wild—so very wild.
It was the legendary Exalt-General … King Nersei Proyas.
Serwa stood above him, leaning across the sun so that he glanced up at her, blinking. The bestial cacophony hung upon the breeze, the sounds of the living plumbing the dead.
“Where are my sisters?” she finally asked.
Proyas flinched as if stung upon the neck. Sorweel glimpsed hair lashing a gob of scalp upon his Circumfix pendant as it swung over his shoulder.
“B-back—” the Exalt-General stammered, only to be choked by his own throat. He coughed, spit a shining web across the dirt. “Back in the encampment …” The man’s canny brown eyes, which had only ever emanated confidence before, clicked earthward for a heartbeat, before returning as an outraged glare. “Going mad.”
She pitched high a skeptical brow.
“And what do you call this?”
A drunkard’s smile. His look became heavy-lidded, even flirtatious.
“Necessity.”
The once-regal man affected a laugh, but the truth sat unconcealed in his eyes, begging openly.
Tell me this is a dream.
“Where is Father?” the Grandmistress snapped.
His gaze sagged, his chin dipped.
“Gone …” the man replied on a blink. “No one knows where.”
Sorweel found himself upon one knee, gasping, tripping backwards for his nearness to the carcass mire. What was this? Relief?
“And my brother …” Serwa snapped after a heartbeat. “Kayûtas … Where is he?”
The Exalt-General cast a senile glance over his shoulder.
“Here …” he said in the distracted way of someone engaged in a different conversation. “Somewhere.”
The Swayali Grandmistress turned away, leapt skidding down the knoll’s defilade.
“Please! Niece, I beg you!” Proyas cried, rolling his head while staring at the stripped corpse before him: some other savage Three Seas lord, only puckered and hairless, like something boiled for too long.
“What?” the Princess-Imperial cried, her cheeks silvered for tears.
The sight caught Sorweel’s throat in a toddler grip.
“Should I—?” the Exalt-General began.
He paused to swallow, made a sound like a speared dog.
“Should I … eat … him?”
Both the Grandmistress and the Believer-King stared at the man dumbstruck.
“You have no choice,” a familiar voice called from behind them.
They whirled to see Kayûtas—or a barbarous incarnation of him—on the opposite incline, grinning, leaning against a knee. Blood and gore, Sorweel could not but notice, soaked his Kidruhil underkilt about his groin.
“Something must be eaten.”
“I am rarely …”
Sorweel fled, abandoned the brother and sister, revulsion scraping his thudding bones, his breath stabbing …
“I am rarely what my enemies expect …”
All along, the Son of Harweel realized. He had fled across this very plain all along.
This place. The Field Appalling.
He lurched more than walked across the degenerate landscape, so numb had he become.
To be a Man was to be a Son, and to be a Son was to shoulder the burden of kin and race and history—history most of all. To be a Man was to be true to who you were … Sakarpi, Conriyan, Zeumi—it did not matter.
Who … Not what.
For this was what the Aspect-Emperor had wrought with his mass murder and machinations. He had bent their myriad ways into one way. He had struck the shackles that made Men men … and loosed the beast within.
The what.
Foul gluttony, to eat and to couple without restraint or remorse. To pin screaming.
This … This was the Shortest Path.
The way of Ciphrang.
Hunger without scruple or constraint.
He had hoped to escape the ravenous throngs, but he found himself wandering galleries even more congested with cannibalistic furor. He slumped to his knees on the lifeless earth. Brutality lay as thick as milk on the wind … as viscous.
The thought of battle crossed his soul,
the fervent hope that the Consult would pick this occasion to unleash their long-hidden might. Thoughts of doom. And for a time, it seemed (as it always seemed with thoughts of calamity) that it had to come to pass, that he hunched his shoulders against some groundswell of retribution. For no matter how indifferent the Gods, surely sins such as these must arouse them …
But nothing happened.
He looked back across the debauched fields to the Horns, sun-bright above the simmering heights of the Occlusion. He could obscure them with his thumb, yet he still trembled for understanding—remembering—their inhuman dimensions. They possessed a derelict sterility, a silence, and he flinched for the premonition that they were dead. Had they marched Eärwa’s brutal length to besiege nothing? Had they, like woebegone Isholom, undertaken the most epic of trials in vain?
He stumbled onward. The passage of time, normally an empty frame, had become a rushing sewer, a channel clotted with filth. Pollution sloshed and soaked. He could scarce blink without glimpsing some unspeakable tableau. Corruption steamed. Mere breathing had become repugnance. He wept tears he could not understand, let alone claim as his own.
Shush, my Sweetling.
He found himself upon a floor. A stork stood before him, a vase lobed in dulcet white, still as beauty, silent as purity. It cast the shadow of a scythe across the hard earth.
“Mother?” he rasped.
It regarded him, the yellow knife of its bill pressed against its serpentine neck. Blood, he realized, fell in crimson beads from the orange tip.
Do you see, Sorwa?
“Wha-what I must do?”
No, my child … What you are.
The countless banners marking the difference of tongue and nation had been reduced to a spare fraction. What had been crisp ranks of tents and many-coloured pavilions, now sprawled like rubbish kicked from a heap, congested here, scattered there. The encampment was a foul shambles, scarcely a mockery of its former glory. It was also abandoned.
In a peculiar way, Sorweel found wandering the chaos almost as heartbreaking as the lunacy of the plain. The light was failing. The shadows were dark and drawn, throwing the discord of tent and belonging into sharp relief. Disregard littered his every glimpse. Discarded horse bones. Sagging canvas. Impromptu latrines. Soiled blankets. He could almost believe the camp had been overrun by a fleet and barbarous race, for things raised in haste and neglect speak of ruin as surely as things gutted and plundered.