The Unholy Consult

  Every tent a hollow, vacant, derelict. Every surface bearing some indecipherable stain.

  He wandered aghast, quickly despaired finding anyone or anything. The Circumfix hung everywhere, as before, but bled of colour and frayed about the margins, the symbol of some vestigial God. It occurred to Sorweel that the lunacy on the plains might very well be fatal, that the diabolical compulsion commanding the Men of the Circumfix might refuse to relinquish them …

  Perhaps this was the shameful end of the Great Ordeal. Perhaps the Host would die discovering it had been its own enemy all along.

  The first verse he heard he deemed a senseless trick of the wind, the low howl of air drawn through wrack. But he needed only wander several footsteps toward the sound, it seemed, for the true source to rise clear. Men, their voices bowed in communal prayer.

  Sweet God of Gods,

  Who walk among us,

  Many are thine names …

  The King of Sakarpus passed a series of three pavilions, canted and slack, sad with faded colour, and saw a knoll rise from the bristle of crammed shelters surrounding. Kneeling Men encrusted the slopes, all facing the summit, where a savage-looking Judge led them (one of the few yet living, he would later discover), dark face uplifted, hands held to the scalped heavens.

  A congregation of those who had refused to eat.

  The prayer concluded, and all souls lowered their heads in silence, Sorweel found himself fending shame for standing so indifferent, so conspicuous. Despite their harrowed and deranged appearance, he knew these once illustrious Men of the Three Seas. He knew the Ainoni from the Conriyan, the Shigeki from the Enathpanean. He could even distinguish the Agmundrmen from the Kurigalders, such was his familiarity. He knew their great cities, and the names of their kings, their heroes …

  “Return him to us!” the anonymous Judge suddenly howled to the heavens. Passion cracked his voice as violently as his face. “Please, God of Gods, send us our King of Kings!”

  And suddenly all of them were crying out, wailing to the vacant sky, lamenting, cursing, and appealing, begging most of all …

  For Anasûrimbor Kellhus.

  The Demon.

  “Horse-King!” a voice bawled, so cracked for incredulity that the whole congregation fell silent. And it seemed to Sorweel that he saw him before his eyes managed to pick him from the helter of sun-blackened faces … his friend …

  His only friend.

  Zsoronga, standing gaunt and astounded.

  They embraced and then, quite without shame, wept into each other’s arms.

  Night fell steep on the Field Appalling.

  Zsoronga no longer cast his pavilion whole, but rather lived within the space afforded by a single pole. What had been spacious, even sumptuous, had been folded into oblivion by hewn canvas. He had lost all that remained of his retinue. “They never returned from Dagliash,” the Successor-Prince of Zeum said without making eye contact. “The Scald took them. After you left, Kayûtas kept me as a runner, so …”

  Sorweel stared at him like someone realizing they had been deafened. The Scald?

  “Zsoronga … What happens here, brother?”

  Hesitation. A look with a volatility wandering beneath.

  “Such things … Such things I have seen, Sorwa …” The man dropped his head inexplicably. “Done.”

  “What things?”

  Zsoronga meditated upon his thumbs for several heartbeats.

  “You look grown,” he said, affecting a mischievious glance. “Nukbaru. You have flint in your eye, now.”

  Sorweel set his jaw.

  “How do you fare, brother?”

  A look of hunted perplexity, one that would have been comical absent knowledge of its history.

  “Hungry like everyone …” he muttered. Something murderous flashed through his gaze. “Strong.”

  Sorweel watched him carefully. “You hunger because you starve.”

  “Tell that to your poor horse! I didn’t promise to save him, did I?”

  Sorweel was undeterred. “I’m speaking of the Sranc.”

  A queer grimace, followed by a croaking groan. “What do you think has fattened us so?”

  “The skinnies nourish only the body … the appetite …”

  The Sakarpi knew the perils of consuming Sranc. Life on the Pale was too hard. Scarce a winter passed without some debauched tale reaching Sogga Halls. But tales had been all that he had ever heard.

  “The soul starves …” Sorweel continued, “perishes. Those who subsist on them too long become raving beasts.”

  Zsoronga was watching him intently now. A hard moment passed between the two young men.

  “They taste like fish,” Zsoronga said, drawing his chin from his clavicle to his shoulder. “And lamb … My mouth waters for merely mentioning it.”

  “There is a cure,” Sorweel murmured.

  “I am not sick,” Zsoronga said. “The sick ones went out … followed the Exalt-General to their damnation.”

  Then, with an exaggerated air of recalling something momentous he popped to his feet and began rooting through the tent, seized upon his matins satchel.

  Sorweel sat reeling, the pinprick of Zsoronga’s dismissal lost in the stab of a far more momentous realization. For the first time he understood the mad straits of the Great Ordeal, how these blasted lands meant they had nothing to eat …

  Aside from their horses … their foes …

  Themselves.

  For several heartbeats it seemed he could not breathe, the dread logic was so clear.

  The Shortest Path …

  All of it, he realized, even these sins, as deranged and abyssal as they were, had a place. They were naught but sacrifices exacted by circumstance, lunatic in proportion to the dire ends they subserved …

  Could it be? Could what he had witnessed—acts so loathsome as too strike vomit from righteous bellies—simply be … an unavoidable expenditure?

  The greatest sacrifice …

  His heartbeat counted out the span of his breathlessness.

  Had the Aspect-Emperor known that their souls would have to be abandoned on the trail?

  “Yes!” Zsoronga cried in savage jubilation. “Yes!”

  And what did that say about his enemy? The Consult … and the boiling rumble of ancient half memories.

  “Here it is!”

  Could they be so wicked, so vile—could anything be? An evil so great as to warrant any crime, any atrocity contributing to its destruction …

  “You can feel it … you who have worn the Amiolas …”

  Sorweel stared numbly at the pouch Zsoronga had pressed into his palm, stiff as a dead man’s tongue, the pale pattern as intricate as he could remember it, crescents within crescents, like Circumfixes shattered and heaped into spilling piles. The Triple-Crescent, Serwa had called it. The ancient symbol of the Anasûrimbor.

  His face scrunched about sudden tears, and he squeezed tight the Chorae within the ancient leather. He was High Keeper of the Hoard once again!

  “Some say the Aspect-Emperor is dead,” Zsoronga fiercely murmured, his eyes wild and wondrous with violent imagining. “But I know he’ll return. I know it, because I know you are Narindar! That the Mother of Birth has chosen you! He will return because you have returned. And you have returned because he is not yet dead!”

  Suddenly it seemed absurd, the weightlessness of the thing and the iron Chorae within it, like fluff …

  He knew nothing in that moment, save that he wanted to weep.

  What do I do?

  Thick black fingers closed about his pale hand, then tightened, forcing him to grip the pouch.

  A sluggish heat leapt into the air between them.

  “This is how I know …” Zsoronga exhaled.

  His body, long and sinuous, trembled, much as Sorweel’s own.

  “Know what?” the youth murmured.

  A wooer’s smile.

  “That we dwell in a land without sin.”

  Sorweel did not s
hrink in his shadow—and that was as much cause for terror as anything he had seen or thought this day. His gaze wandered across his friend’s scalding aspect, taking a numb inventory.

  “What do you mean?”

  A glimpse of something dead in his brown eyes.

  Mu’miorn?

  “I mean we have but one rule to constrain us, but one sacrifice to make! Kill the Aspect-Emperor!”

  A long gaze, one urgent, the other pretending not to see.

  I weep because I missed you.

  “All else is holy …” Zsoronga gasped with thrilling fury. And it truly seemed that all things had been decided. The Zeumi Prince pinched the lantern light into oblivion.

  Strong hands in the dark.

  Naked in the tented gloom, sweating despite the chill.

  Even when they finished, it was not done.

  It was all a sham, living a life. Forever stumbling, lurching, chasing resolutions that you name as your own, forever coming after what you are. Difference spews from the oblivion of the same, and events forever tumble, delivering twists, turns, surprises that are in no way surprising, and there you are, suffocating in the aching heart of it, ducking across the numb perimeter, coming to be only in the lee of your questions, that ghost fools call reflection.

  You awaken with a start, gasp about a missing heartbeat, and find yourself … doing … things.

  You wonder if you ever had a father.

  Zsoronga’s body seemed endless, vast and hot in the tangled dark, feverish with vigour, humming, pulsing. A greater hand enclosed his wrist, drew senseless fingers to the stubborn, granite arch of his phallus. The mere act of clutching made the World buzz and roar—even spin with languor and impossibility. Zsoronga tensed yet again, groaned and coughed through clenched teeth. He discharged his heat yet again, pulsing strings that looped through the black, pinning him, binding him, with nameless and unspeakable passions.

  “Mu’miorn …” he whispered, dragged through Ages as dense as water.

  They lay. For a time all Sorweel could hear was his friend’s breathing. His throat ached. Beyond the canvas planes, all creation slumped and toppled in slow silence.

  “It is a thing of shame for you sausages,” Zsoronga finally said.

  It was not a question, but Sorweel elected to treat it as such.

  “Yes. A great shame.”

  “In Zeum it is thought holy for the strong to embrace the strong.”

  Sorweel attempted to snort in the old way—to make light of what could not be lifted.

  Something diabolical hemmed the man’s laughter.

  “When our wives are quick with children, warriors turn to one another, so that we may fight as lovers upon the field …”

  These words left the Sakarpi King gasping.

  “One need not think, dying for one’s lover.”

  Sorweel relinquished his grip, but the greater hand clamped his wrist, forced his fingertips to trawl the length of the turgid horn, from root to summit. And he knew—understood with a philosopher’s profundity—that his will was unwelcome here, that he lay in the jaws of an appetite that had devoured his own.

  That he had been and would be ravished, as certainly as a daughter of a conquered race.

  “You are strong …” the ebony man said to the pale.

  That he would rise to, even celebrate, his repeated violation, as certainly as any temple whore.

  “And you are weak …”

  That shame would devour him whole.

  “I am here, Sorweel,” Zsoronga said, raising a thick-fingered hand to his breast. “Here, beneath the madness of what … what we have eaten …” He paused as if to secure evidence of his victim’s belief. “And I will die to protect you …”

  He angrily wiped at tears the Son of Harweel could not see.

  “To shield what is weak.”

  There is a clarity to ancient things that all Men seek to emulate. To read about one’s forefathers is to read about Men who possessed fewer words, and so lived more concentrated lives, following codes that were ruthless for the brute fact of simplicity.

  Clarity. Clarity was the gift of their innocence—their ignorance. Clarity was what made them the envy of their seed. What was, for them, was, something there to be seized, not something to be groped for behind curtains of disputation. Good and evil shouted from their worlds, their acts. Their judgment was as harsh as that belonging to the Gods. Punishment was without exception and cruel, even sadistic, for it could only be good to bring down evil upon evil, corruption upon corruption. No time was allotted for appeal, for no time was needed. Guilt was axiomatic, indistinguishable from accusation …

  So did they seem Godlike, as well as Godly.

  And so did the Ordealmen turn away from their ancestors with the compounding of their crimes. To a soul they had either lost or stowed their ancestor lists following Swaranûl and the fateful decree to eat their foes. If asked why, they would cite “bother,” but the truth was they could no longer at once bear the weight of their past and breathe. Where their forefathers had derived clarity from genuine ignorance, they relied on numbness and distraction.

  One by one the Men of the Three Seas fled their abominable deeds, stealing as thieves across the night plain. They pawed at gore-caked faces with slicked hands, sought to cleanse filth with pollution. The meat they had bolted, the blood they had sucked, wrenched their guts as violently as their commissions wracked their hearts. Many found themselves on their hands and knees hooked about vomit that would not come, gagging on misery and horror, thinking, Sweet Seju … What have I done?

  And it crackled as lightning through them, this question which sorts all beasts from all Men, stopping hearts, clenching teeth and eyes.

  What have I done?

  Anxious horror passed for sleep, and the following day found their souls too far from their legs to march the last miles remaining. The day was given over to an awakening like no other, a coming to see themselves, lighting voices as timbre stacked for the pyre, a growing chorus of shrieks and lamentations. They gaped about the fact of their atrocities. And their shame divided them as they had never been divided, rendered them each the butcher of their own hearts, the one most hated, most loathed and feared. How? How could such memories be? Of those who could not bear to live and remember, most refused to remember, but more than six hundred Ordealmen would refuse to live, casting themselves into damnation’s maw. The rest shrank into the shadows of their rangy shelters, where they warred with despair and incredulity and terror—all who had eaten of human flesh.

  The Umbilicus remained abandoned, the avenues and alleyways deserted. Cries rose as if from beneath thousands of pillows, as things too sharp to be smothered. And beyond it all, the Horns reared as mountainous ghosts from the rotted teeth of the Occlusion, glinting in the pitiless sun, laughing it seemed, gloating …

  The second morning, they awoke from such sleep as anguish afforded to find the horror that had paralysed now pursued, hunting them with a lunatic terror of place. None could bear the ground that bore them. Fleeing the Field Appalling had become the only way to breathe. The Horns caught the morning before the sun had even risen, smoldering with diurnal gold above the ragged summits of the Occlusion. It was inevitable that all eyes turn toward it, that all souls gaze agog.

  No hymns were raised, no prayers called … Scarce a wonder was voiced.

  They dismantled the camp, such as it was, and resumed marching, migrating toward the impossible spectre climbing the horizon before them. Not a soul had uttered an order. Not a tribe, cohort, or column marched together, let alone in formation. Not a man understood what he was doing, aside from getting away.

  And so the Great Ordeal of Anasûrimbor Kellhus did not so much march toward Golgotterath as flee.

  Sorweel would have whooped through the wood, had not his father taught him the ways of Husyelt the Hunter. So he crept across the dappled floors instead, mimicking the grim expression of his father’s Boonsmen. This was the only reason he found
the thing: a ball of grey fur, no larger than a walnut, laying at the base of a cleft oak. Though the incident itself would be lost to him, the fascination he would never forget, discovering, as he had, what seemed some magic residuum of life.

  How he had cherished those solitary expeditions—especially after the death of his mother. There was a laziness in that wood—at least during those summers the Sranc shunned the Pale. He could sprawl across the leaves and be so reckless as to doze, daydream while rotating his gaze between high craning limbs, ponder the fork of the great and singular into the frail and many. He could listen to things creak and coo through the hollow chorus of the canopy. His body, as slight as it was, would seem strong enough, hale enough, and he would feel as hidden without as obvious within. And it would seem that nothing could be more common and more holy than a boy alone with his wonder in the sunny wood.

  So he deemed the small ball of fur a gift, nothing less than a puzzle-box left by the Gods. He marvelled at its weightlessness, the way the breeze could tug it on his palm. He held it even to his eyes and stroked it with a fingertip. The fleece was marred by something poking from within.

  The ball pulled apart with the ease of bread drawn from the oven, and bundled within he found bones, as white as a child’s teeth, a motley the size of leaf stems and insect legs. He drew out a skull smaller than the nail of his pinky, held it between thumb and forefinger …

  For several slow and thick heartbeats, he felt like a God, an eye rendered pitiless for mad disproportion.

  He cleared a patch of earth, arranged the contents across it. Children are forever inventing diverse tasks and the imaginary worlds that give them meaning. He was a priest in that moment, ruthless and old, scrying telltale traces of the future in the debris of the past. Fur and bones, as crucial to life as pole and canvas were to shelter. A whip-poor-will called out from the forest deep.