With a start he remembered his father telling him that owls did this, regurgitated the hair and bones of their prey. All along he had known it was a mouse, but he had believed otherwise. He looked up, peered between the oak’s raised arms searching for some sign of the nocturnal predator.
Nothing.
Nothing, he had thought in a haze of inexplicable alarm, for it no longer seemed that he was playing. Nothing had devoured the mouse.
Digesting all that lived.
Spitting out all that mattered.
One could tell them apart by midmorning, the Upright Horn soaring on a curve pulled erect, and the Canted Horn leaning out over unseen tracts. Both arms climbed ever higher, balled into feminine fists, parting clouds as golden oars might part murky waters, rising above the hanging cliffs and gorges of the vast crater rim the Nonmen had called Vilursis.
The Occlusion.
Sorweel and Zsoronga laboured with their packs, wandered with the others in endless roping chains, Men in their tens of thousands, freighted with arms, rancid and grim, drawn as fish to flashing silver. All hearts sloshed in same cold dark water, it seemed. There was no prayer, no hymns, no cries of relief or exultation. Some looked as though they could not so much as blink, let alone speak. He and Zsoronga scaled the slopes of the Occlusion, peered in wonder at the ruins of the Akeokinoi upon the summits, beacon towers from Far Antiquity. They crowded through the canine slots, then joined the myriads stumping down the dusty gravel ramps on the far side, gazing mute and agog as they fanned across the interior waste.
Their bowels quailed. Their thoughts seized. Their hearts kicked as roped foals.
“Such a thing …” the Zeumi murmured.
Sorweel had no reply.
They skidded down the gravel slopes, two upon a conveyor of descending thousands, mostly Conriyans above and below, and thousands of others, on and on, all transfixed by the image … the insane image.
The Incû-Holoinas.
Rearing monstrous from the mathematical heart of the Ring, reaching up to dwarf the crimson setting sun …
The Ark.
Aching for leaning. Blinding where it was burnished, great tracts of mirror-gold ablaze hoisted ever higher, casting leagues of crimson across the lifeless plain—across the appalled nations of Men.
Blood etched their toiling shadows.
How … How could such a thing be? Ishterebinth was but a crude totem in comparison. How could mere intellect raise such arms, great and golden, to the very clouds? How could a contrivance, a mighty city encased in swan-curved hulls, crash from the limit of the sky, crack the very ground asunder, and still remain intact?
A chill shimmied through Sorweel’s bones, mounted his heart, his soul. It was the Amiolas, he realized. He knew this place, not as anything he could recall or relate, but as the boot-print knows the heel. Though he had lost all that had belonged to Immiriccas, he had not lost his memory of plumbing those abyssal memories, nor the bent of having once been twisted about such a life. He knew this place! The way an orphan knows his father. The way the dead know life.
This place … this accursed place! It had stolen everything.
A cancer. A blight. An evil that eclipsed imagination!
Fields of gawking Men descended about him, bearding the slopes with dust.
Immensity has a way of exposing silence, pulling it nude from the immeasurable background. For all the thousands tramping and murmuring about him, Sorweel could hear it, as surely as if he sat perched upon the cloud-wreathed summit, the hush of transcendence, of looming beyond the compass of human comprehension, and sharing bones with the very World.
The Unholy Ark. The great terror of legend, fallen from the Void, gleaming mountainous above a great network of fortifications, squat towers and black-curtain walls. Min-Uroikas.
Golgotterath.
“Real …” Zsoronga gasped.
Sorweel understood, well enough to whiten his knuckles about the realization. The name had always been there—since before King Harweel’s fiery murder, the name of this place had crouched above all. The pretext. The rationale of innumerable atrocities. For all the bluster of the Sakarpi Horselords, for all their vainglorious conceit, he knew they had all asked themselves the same question gazing across the stupendous host that had gathered to throw down their walls …
How? How could wife-tales and nursery rhymes deliver us to destruction?
How could the whole Three Seas go mad?
All of them upon the ramparts, King and Boonsmen alike, had resigned themselves to die defending their city. And all of them had marvelled and lamented that madness and fancy could seal their fate …
A fantasy that had been real.
A hammer struck his heart, and he gasped, reeled upon liquified limbs. Zsoronga seized him before he pitched headlong, steadied him, drew him forward as though he were a little brother or a wife.
Nothing. Harweel had died for pride and folly … for nothing.
Exactly as Proyas had said he would.
The ground levelled. The ghastly masses floated into the limits of his periphery about him, a silent, mortal tide. The desolation of the plain encompassed them, and Sorweel squinted out across its tracts, near and far, puzzled that it should be pale rather than black. But the horror that was Golgotterath did not brook distraction—the eye could no sooner deny it than it could an upraised fist. It compelled, even as its vast proportions boggled, rumbled with dire possibilities if not sound, premonitions of doom and infection, of pollution without compare. It seemed something catastrophic had to happen, that at any moment a new Horde would disgorge from the black iron gates, that Consult sorcerers would step singing from the gold-fanged barbicans, howling wicked lights, that Dragons would explode swooping down from the Horns, tossing them in fire and teeth …
He was not alone. All Men stood as if strangled for expectation. But moment followed moment, heartbeat replaced heartbeat, and nothing happened—save that his gaze was drawn ever higher …
The Horns. Two great golden arms raised to the clouds and reaching them, fists frosted for altitude.
The sun shimmered across the monstrous, vertical surfaces, drawing out light and pattern and colour like an overlay of foils, precious and complicated. Script haunted the soaring, the apparition of alien figure and symbol, somehow etched without grooves, somehow iridescent without wink or glitter, almost as if their shadow dwelt within the otherworldly metal.
Crows flocked about the Horns’ lower regions, issuing from points across the black fortifications. Otherwise, no life could be spied apart from their own.
“Real …” Zsoronga repeated in a harrowed voice, one close enough to a sob to kick Sorweel’s own throat.
Everything. Hailing all the way back to the Scions. All the words they had shared during the long watches of the march, all the bitter recriminations, the declarations both pompous and shrewd, all the spasms of conviction and doubt, bone-rotting incredulity …
All of it ended here. Caught upon the teeth of this place. Now they stood before the bald righteousness of their Enemy’s cause …
And the penury of their own.
The Men of the Ordeal drifted to a halt before the spectre. Rot hung pulverized in the air. Innards quavered for standing in the shadow of things too vast, too precarious.
How?
How could such a thing be?
Sorweel stood in the dust, transfixed for the apprehension of what transcended human apprehension. For awe, the inkling that flattened Men upon their bellies, that saw bulls twist as smoke into the heavens. What was spectacle if not unconscious worship?
His right hand clutched the Trysean pouch the way others clasped Circumfixes and other fetishes: as a soundless cry for rescue. Beside him, Zsoronga held hands to either temple, bawled out in Zeumi, his voice among the first to perforate the astounded rumble. Cacophony followed. The lowing of cattle. The howling of apes.
Sorweel didn’t know when he had dropped to his knees, but he understood why as c
learly as anything in his murky, misbegotten life. Evil. Where before he had thought, endlessly questioned and interrogated the fact of this place, at long last he could feel. Evil, burnished and monolithic. Evil stacked upon evil, until the very ground bowed against the beam of Hell. All the wickedness he had witnessed, let alone the abominations of the past days and nights, was but a narcotic lapse compared to this place, a doting drunkard’s indiscretion …
He could feel it.
In their surviving tens of thousands, the Men of the Ordeal cried out in wonder and horror and, yes, even jubilation, for they had marched to the very ends of the World. Their Holy Aspect-Emperor had spoken true.
They began falling to their knees in violent remonstration. And the Believer-King of Sakarpus rocked and sobbed among them, wept for so very many things … Shames. Regrets. Losses.
And the dread fact that was Golgotterath.
They gathered upon the inner rim of the Occlusion, the Sons of the Race of Men. Humanity, whose lives wilted so soon after budding, whose generations passed as storms and gentle rains. Ephemeral, yet fertile, and so forever new, casting nations like mantles, as ignorant of their origin as they were terrified of their demise. Humanity had arrived in all its turbulent, amnesiac might, come to obliterate Golgotterath. Thunyeri dwarfing Shigeki, their skin jaundiced for being so fair. Galeoth cowing Scarlet Schoolmen for the violence of their demonstration. Nansur Columnaries standing immobile, deaf to any officer’s cry. Ainoni caste-nobles pawing white upon their cheeks. Thousands upon thousands gazing, witless for incredulity, paralytic for shame and horror, alien gold pricking their eyes …
Men, the cracked vessel from which the Gods drank most deep.
Some had been petty unto murder in their past lives, knifing brothers for the merest slight, while others had been generous unto folly, abiding faithless wives, starving to carry witless parents. It did not matter. Gluttons and ascetics, cowards and champions, reavers and healers, adulterers and celibates—they had been all of these things ere they had taken up their Holy Aspect-Emperor’s Great Ordeal. And for all their numberless differences, they need only look to fathom one another, to know whether they would be greeted or ignored or attacked. To be a Man is to understand and be understood as a Man, to blindly honour expectation so that others might gamble accordingly. For it was the way they repeated one another that made them Sons of Men. Despite their numberless feuds and grudges—for all their divisions—they stood as one before the heinous image.
The Great Ordeal … nay …
Humanity, horrid and beatific, frail and astounding, come to collect their future from wicked debtors.
One race, come to fathom the Ark with sword and fire, and to at long last exterminate the Unholy Consult.
CHAPTER
SEVEN
The Leash
To speak truth to another is to set aside interest and ambition, to either possess faith in another’s estimations or be indifferent to them. The honour of truth is indistinguishable from the horror.
—The Third Analytic of Men, AJENCIS
Early Autumn, 20 New Imperial Year (4132, Year-of-the-Tusk), The Leash.
The face rises from the depths of a pool, pale through the greenish cast of the water. Throughout the surrounding darkness, caverns intertwine, like the thin tunnels one finds beneath large stones pulled from the grass. Just beneath the surface, the turquoise-eyed youth pauses as though tugged by some deep restraint, smiles, and raises his mouth. With horror, the King-of-Tribes watches as an earthworm presses through the smiling lips and pierces the water. It feels the air like a blind finger. Watery and obscene, the bland pink of hidden places.
And always, his own inarticulate hand drifts over the pool and, in a quiet moment of insanity, touches it.
The pop of axes hewing wood, so many as to sound like corn thrown upon a fire. The deep shouts of men, voices upbraiding, teasing, declaring in some incomprehensible tongue.
Anasûrimbor Moënghus awoke to the bite of chains, the prickle of blood-starved extremities, and further pains too numerous to warrant complaint. He blinked against filtered light, saw greased hides rising on wooden ribs. He was naked … bound. His feet had been shackled at the ankles, and his hands at the wrists. A chain girdled his torso, crude iron links looped his white-skinned torso, pinning his elbows to his gullet, and leashing him to a birch that had been shorn of all its branches, hacked into a prisoner’s post.
The day was summer-hot with the bright and arid vacancy of autumn. The yaksh should have been stifling, but something, the dust in the leather and wooden crevices, perhaps, or the vent in the conical ceiling, lifted all breath and odour from the air. He felt … clean, he decided, the cleanest he had been since Ishterebinth. The claustrophobic shriek and clamour persisted, but buried in the blackness beneath his feet. The Scylvendi had him—the People of War!—and despite all the atrocities history had shovelled about their feet, he had no fear. What pain could they inflict upon one who had survived the Ghouls, endured Harapior? And what could they take when life hung like lead ingots from him? The Scylvendi had him, the Sons of his father’s race, and even if they refused to acknowledge his kinship, he had been born knowing theirs. No matter what fate they visited upon him, no matter what degradation, he would die knowing it had been clean and fair.
He was free! That was all that mattered … The madness of the Ghouls and the Anasûrimbor both were behind him. If his remaining span be brief, then let it be lucid—clean!
He held himself rigid, lest he rouse something, he could not say. A male and female voice warbled through the staccato chopping, and he lowered his head, pricked his ears. They spoke Scylvendi, a lilting version of the barking one heard in the camps. Moënghus understood nothing of what they said, but he somehow knew they were discussing him. He saw wedges of the man squatting outside the entrance flap, drawing two fingers through the earth then raising them to his lips. He glimpsed a scar-grilled forearm.
Then his captor was ducking through, standing upright in the dulcet gloom, a beautiful blond woman in tow. The man was old yet panther-lean, and almost entirely armoured in scars, plaque after plaque wrapped about his arms and neck, climbing his high cheeks. An animus coiled within him, a lethality that prodded hackles and tightened chests, warned of imminent mayhem. His very body was his provocation—his astonishing war-cry. Shoulders stooped to the saddle, arms the density of graven oak, inked in sinew, crossed about hands harder than horn. And swazond without number …
The ground momentarily tipped beneath the chained Prince-Imperial. His shackles chirped for saving his balance.
His captor regarded him, blinking turquoise eyes. He raised the blade of his hand and the woman scuttled to Moënghus’s side, brandishing a crude key to undo his shackles. Her proximity simply confirmed her unearthly beauty.
“Do you know me?” his captor barked in Sheyic.
Moënghus licked lips still broken for Ishterebinth. The woman had become a rattling shadow to his right.
“You …” he coughed, surprised by the pain of speaking. “You are Cnaiür urs Skiötha.”
The most violent of all Men.
The glacial eyes regarded him. “And what did he tell you about me, the Anasûrimbor?”
Moënghus stammered for the enormity of the turn.
“Tha-that you … you were dead.”
“He knows you’re his sire,” the young woman called from Moënghus’s side. “He trembles for it.”
A murderous intensity crept into the man’s glare.
“Do you know who she is?”
“No …” Moënghus muttered, gazing into the girl’s face. “Should I?”
Cnaiür urs Skiötha’s laugh was born of butchery, a deranged, sneering thing.
The woman leaned across the dry light to stroke Moënghus’s cheek, a divine handmaiden.
“You were just a baby,” she said, smiling regret.
The King-of-Tribes kept him hooded during the day, his arms bound behind his back, so he contin
ually lurched in his saddle forever surprised by the ground crossed by his foul-smelling pony. The hood was removed only at day’s end, when he was returned to his yaksh. The shackles were removed only when the Norsirai concubine was present, the young woman, barely in her flower, who claimed to be his mother …
Serwë … A name had forever been a chill breath upon his heart.
Such a mad pantomime they played, night after night. The girl hanging upon the details of his day, showering him with chaste affections. The berserker King-of-Tribes not so much playing his father as watching while such games were played.
“I think you showed wisdom. Restraint. Your father is too quick to anger, to instill fear, so that Men who should confide in him whisper about him instead …”
Moënghus understood what happened. He had seen the sane pandering to the witless or insane enough, arranging beliefs like feathers then strutting according to their false plumage. He just never believed he could ever be party to it, that he would exchange dignity to allay a terrifying eye. And the ease of it dismayed him, answering her maternal curiosities, never condescending to confirm the pretense, but then never daring to contradict them either. How does a soul walk such a line, forever communicate what lies between fact and deception?
His accursed sister, he had no doubt, would ask how a soul could do anything else. But madness was madness because it carried a toll, one catastrophic in proportion to the heights it ascended. Madness in the fields or the agora generally ended with the hurling of stones to bludgeon or the stacking of wood to burn. But madness in the palace usually ended in the ruin of all.
“Cease this lunacy!” he roared the third night after crossing the Leash. “You are not my mother!”
The alluring waif clucked and smiled as if at his naiveté. Perhaps this was when he realized she wasn’t entirely human.
“Why?” he snarled at the shadowy spectre of his father standing arms crossed just inside the threshold. “Why do you play this mad game?”