What had to be done …
Anasûrimbor Kellhus smiled as a toadstool of fire and pitch boiled to the very arch of Heaven behind him.
What did I do? Tell me!
The lozenges of flesh so hot as to seem more tongue.
Something unbearable …
Lips mashing lobes, teeth shaking blood from skin and meat.
What? What?
Licking the sewer reek.
You raped and consumed them …
Convulsing upon his wounds.
What? Who?
Sibawûl, called Vaka by those who had come to fear him …
The Scalded … the Rotting Men.
Supping upon his flayed face.
Thinking it tasted more of pig than lamb.
Camp was raised where Fate had mustered them along the eastern rim of the Occlusion. Despite the fears of the Imperial planners, water proved both unpolluted and plentiful. Springs pricked the heights, forming rivulets that wept orange and black down the slopes. The Ordealmen fasted, merely drank that evening. Together they transformed the inner ramps of the Occlusion into a mighty amphitheatre that took Golgotterath as its cancerous stage. Nary a soul among them spoke. The sunset possessed the autumnal clarity that transforms the loss of light into the loss of warmth and life. The Horns burned for embracing the sun, ere its descent became absolute. The intervening leagues seemed no less clear for the quick rising night. Beneath the gold-mirrored immensities they could easily discern the disposition of the bulwarks, no more than glue and paper compared the Horns, but as great as those ramparts belonging to Nenciphon, Carythusal, or any other great city of the Three Seas. They could count the thousands of golden teardrops that fanged the battlements. They could see Domathuz and Corrunc, the hated towers that flanked mighty Gwergiruh, the Gatehouse of Ûbil Maw, which loomed as a blight across so many tales of ancient woe. They could see the stepped fortifications of the Oblitus rising to a monstrous citadel crouched against the inner thigh of the Upright Horn, the High Cwol, barbican of the Intrinsic Gate.
The light receded over the raised edge of the World, faded to a dwindling crimson patina high upon the wrists of the Canted and Upright Horns. Every soul watching thought the stronghold would explode with horrors upon the sun’s final gloaming, but since no soul dared speak, each man assumed he alone suffered this terror, and further despised himself as a coward. They sat and stared in their tens of thousands, bodies buzzing for shame, stomachs churning for fear and incredulity, jaws aching for slow, gnashing teeth.
Perhaps in some dim corner some few realized the perverse thrift of their straits, how only an evil so great could hope to redeem souls so wretched as their own. Even as Fate sharpened the World, their lives had been whittled to a point of private apocalypse. Perhaps a handful understood it well enough to speak it, the murmuring of possibility in their veins, the hope, the prayer, that they had committed those unspeakable crimes to better know the goad that drove them, to better hate the stupefying abomination that so commanded their gaze. And at some level, all of them understood, no matter how dimly, that they must somehow conquer, destroy this ancient and obscene vessel from the Void, or be forever damned. So they sat, they watched, and they took loathing stock of themselves. They prayed as strangers among strangers.
The sun eased against, then melted into the rugged shoulders of the Yimaleti. The burnished rims of the Horns flared brilliant even as their bulk blackened into violet obscurity. The broken circle of their shadow reached out across Shigogli and embraced the multitudes, bore them into the greater arms of the Void, the sky beyond the sky, the Endless Starving.
Night fell without incident, without so much as a faraway flicker of movement. Poised upon various heights about the Occlusion, Schoolmen cast their sorcerous lenses to better see, but nary a soul cried out for some glimpse of their foe. For all anyone knew, the fell stronghold lay abandoned.
The Ordealmen possessed little will to organize, such was their awe and turmoil. Many slept on the ground upon which they sat. The Horns loomed impossible in their fluttering vision as they drowsed and drifted, monuments to the boggling power of the Tekhne, the golden levers that had toppled whole civilizations.
They dreamt unkind dreams.
“Though you lose your soul … you shall gain the World …”
A simple phrase, but Proyas could tell speaking it had broken Drusas Achamian’s breath in twain.
He had recited the words while walking, as they often did during Instruction, the idyllic wooded ways of the Ke in Aöknyssus. Years afterward, Proyas would come to realize the ancestral reserve was where he was typically the most dismissive of his arcane tutor, the most arrogant, cruel even. For whatever reason, he found license in the wash of wind through bobbing leaves, in the sunlight fracturing about branches, forever flashing in some corner of his eye, forcing the squint he would subsequently take to Akka’s claims and assertions.
“But what does the World matter?” Proyas had snapped.
Achamian shot him a shrewd and disapproving look, the one he reserved for childish answers to mannish questions—the one that never failed to remind the young prince of his king father. Proyas would punish the Schoolman for this imposture as well.
“If the World were shut against the Outside,” the rotund man said, “what would happen then?”
“Pfah! You and your Apocaly—”
“If, Prosha. I said if …”
A scowl … the very one that would be aged into his face.
“‘If,’ you say, ‘then’! What does it matter, if such a thing can never come to pass?”
How he had hated the man’s knowing smirk. The strength it betrayed. The pity.
“I see,” Achamian replied. “So you are a miser, then.”
“Miser? Because I observe the Tusk? Because I commit hand and breath to the God?”
“No. Because you see only gold, and nothing of what makes it precious.”
Derision. “So gold is no longer gold, now? Spare me your riddles!”
“Would you throw gold to sailors wrecked at sea?”
There is such heat in the boyish soul, such need to declare for and against. To be a child is to be heard as a child, and so to be sealed in, to have no way of invading the World with your voice. So he, like so many other proud unto arrogant boys, defended his meagre circuit with zeal—at the cost of smaller truths if need be.
“Never! I’m a miser, remember!”
And that would be the first time …
The first time he would glimpse genuine worry in Drusas Achamian’s eyes. And with it the question …
What kind of King will you be?
The World’s shadow retreated across the rolling face of the World.
Night drained from the rising ground of day, receding across the horizon implacable and soundless, and where trapped, evaporating into oblivion. The pinnacle of the Horns caught the sun before anything and lorded it over the nations of slumbering Men, jaundiced the gloom in the shadowy lee of the Occlusion. No birds sang. No dogs barked.
Some had found reprieve in work. The previous evening, a company of Shrial Knights discovered the wain bearing the Interval abandoned on the Agongorean side of the Occlusion. They dismantled the cart and its contrivances and carried them through the passes—some twelve men and ropes were required to drag the great iron cylinder and its skin of etched benedictions. They worked through the entire night reassembling it. Unable to find the Prayer Hammer, they sounded the thing with a battleaxe, marring the Invitic inscription. And so the Interval tolled for the first time in three days, its far-ranging hum eerily resonant in the desolation, its ring, some would swear, sharpened for the Horns.
Men wept in the thousands.
The fire of dawn ignited the mighty golden hulks, slowly burned downward, even as the shadow of the Occlusion retreated across the Furnace Plain. The long-suffering Men of the Ordeal roused, climbed stupefied to their feet, not so much more themselves than less what they had been. Once subsumed
in the bestial morass, the old facts of individual character seemed to stir and reassert.
So it was that the most irrepressible among them, Halas Siroyon, spurred Phiolos out across the crazed earth of Shigogli. He rode as if to outrun the broken glass in his breast, the shame that so lacerated his heart. He rode the Famiri way, his nut-brown chest bared to both wind and foe, his ravaged Circumfix standard raised high in his right hand. He passed beyond the shouts of his brothers, dwindled into a speck against the waste. He found peace in the interval, felt the ghost of his galloping youth. He rode until the gold-hanging immensity became palpable, and he had to arch his back and set his shoulders against the urge to cringe.
The fortifications stacked beneath the unholy Ark loomed large upon the cliffs of the Scab, the great black tumour that served as the Horns’ pedestal. The General tacked to the south, calling, “Do you see it, old friend?” to his steed. “The stopper of the World!” The stoneworks were, for all that he could see, devoid of life. They were titanic by any measure, black bastions like Shigeki ziggurats, black walls whose height dwarfed those encircling Carythusal or Aöknyssus.
Clinging to Phiolos, he plunged feckless into their shadow, then veered to pace their circuit, then, as was the custom of heroes on the Famiri Plain, he leaned back against his cantle, raised high his arms, and offered his naked chest as a flying target for his foe. Not a shaft fell from the brutal heights. He laughed and he wept. He followed the circuit marvelling, peered into the recesses between the gold-fanged battlements. He felt like a runaway child. He felt daring, reckless with what was holy. He would be remembered for this! He would be inked in scripture! He came to the famed Field of Ûgorrior, the plate of dust where the scarps failed, and the fortifications stood knuckled directly upon the plain. He rode about the stumped immensity of Corrunc, then pulled Phiolos toward the legendary Iron Gate of Ûbil Maw.
He would be redeemed!
Man and horse slowed as they came to the storied ground immediately below the breastworks of Gwergiruh—the hated Grinning Gatehouse. Siroyon drew Phiolos to a halt not five paces from where, in days of Far Antiquity, General Sag-Marmau had issued his final ultimatum to Shauriatas, and where foul Sil, the Inchoroi King, had struck down Im’inaral Lightbringer, Hero of Siol, in days more ancient still …
So young! Halas Siroyon was naught but a child—could be nothing but in the malevolent shadow of such a place. How bold must Men be! To raise pride and defiance against such a spectacle! Such a place!
Mortal. Skin so soft as to welt for the hurling of stones.
Gwergiruh towered only half so high as Corrunc to the north or Domathuz, her monstrous sister to the south. Even still it dwarfed both for its breadth and depth. The whole took the accursed shape of a pentagon, with Ûbil Maw lying at its mathematical heart, doors of ensorcelled iron opening into a murderous gorge some thirty paces deep. Siroyon’s daring ended at the mouth of this gorge. Peering, the overawed man could see the wicked portal, doors as tall as a carrack’s mast, stamped with oil-shining reliefs, figures bound to one another in poses of anguish and abjection, the misery of one becoming the frame for the lament of the other …
Just as described in the Holy Sagas.
He warred with scarred Phiolos, managing only to pull him into stomping circles. He gazed across the soaring scarps of masonry, felt a sudden prick of nude vulnerability.
“Show yourselves!” he cried out to the black heights.
The great steed wagged its mane and settled.
Silence.
Faraway water trailed from the outer curve of the Canted Horn, which hung like a mountain’s belly above. The rising sun had set the rims of the Horns afire: an eerie light jaundiced everything that could be seen.
The grasswives claimed that Halas Siroyon had been born the same day and watch as the great Niz-Hû, and that the ancient Famiri hero haunted his bones as a result. The General himself scoffed at such rumours, even as he affected an archaic manner to promote it—for he understood that mystique, as much as glory, raised a man in the jealous estimation of Men. His innards quailed for being dwarfed in so many ways, and yet he laughed, howled the way Niz-Hû had once laughed at the ancient King of Shir.
“Throw open your granaries!” he bellowed. “Send forth your Sranc—your skinnies!—so that we might dine on them!”
There is power in base savagery, in the desire, let alone will and capacity, to commit monstrous acts. All violence is equally ancient. To match a wicked foe abomination for abomination was to whisper in his ear while he slumbered—for the righteous were no more potent than when they were ruthless also.
“Anasûrimbor Kellhus!” Siroyon cried, craning his head as if to toss his defiance over the soaring parapets. “The Holy Aspect-Emperor has come!”
Monumental silence. Vacant heights. A murder of crows screeched from some unseen distance. The air stagnated for want of wind.
“To conquer!” he roared, at last feeling the weight of his own fury. “To consume!”
He thrust his makeshift banner into the earth, and at last gave Phiolos license to peel away in pursuit of their mutual terror. From the rim of the Occlusion, the Men of the Ordeal watched astounded. They made a choir of Shigogli with their cries, roaring with an exultation that unmanned them, so fevered was its wonder and fury.
And it was a thing of desolate glory, the Men thundering across the plain as Golgotterath hoarded darkness against the climbing sun. Swords hammered shields. Spears pricked the sky.
Siroyon’s leaning banner—a Circumfix stitched black on white, tattered and gore-stained—leaned like a dead yeoman’s scarecrow for the length of the day, ere night fell …
And it was never seen again.
Prosha … the pious and precocious little boy, the beautiful one, who had inherited the face and eye of his mother—just as the poets said. The pompous boy. The ridiculous boy, who had brought his father joy only when observing him unseen.
For Seju knew his tongue had brought the man only grief otherwise!
“Where, Father?” he had asked after hearing the last of House Nersei’s ancestral rivals, the Nejati, had been executed. “Where lies the honour in murdering children?”
The long look of a father afflicted by the very thing that made him most proud. “In sparing my sons and my people war ten years hence.”
“You think you will be forgiven this?”
“Prosha …” The tone of a father long resigned to the condemnation of those he loved. “Prosha, please. You will understand soon enough.”
“Understand what, Father? Atrocity?”
A fist hammering the table.
“That power is damnation!”
He flinched for the force of that memory no matter what occasioned it.
Why? Why was he the one to fear damnation so? It all seemed so clear, no matter how much confusion Achamian had poured into his ear. This life was but a flicker, a vista glimpsed in a flash of summer lightning, then gone. There were a thousand Hells for a hundred Heavens—so many more ways to drown in fire and anguish than to wander meadows in paradise. How? How could anyone be so low, so base, as to willingly sacrifice their very souls to monstrous Eternity?
How could anyone embrace wickedness?
But his father had been right. He had come to understand given the fullness of time. Piety was simple, and the World, woefully complex. What was virtuous, what was holy: these were verities that only the simple and the enslaved could know with certainty. For the Lords of Men, they were riddles beyond fathoming, perils that gnawed souls into the deepest watches of the night. If his father had spared the sons of Nejata, what then? Vengeance would have been their inheritance, discord and rebellion the consequence. The piety that would have spared them was the piety that would have put other, nameless innocents on the altar.
Piety was simple, too simple to not amputate life.
The taste of salts—human salts—licked from carcass skin.
The Interval tolled, calling the Lords of the Ord
eal to the Umbilicus—to reckon the unthinkable. Awaiting them, Nersei Proyas, Believer-King of Conriya, Exalt-General of the Great Ordeal, spat memory across the carpets below the Holy Aspect-Emperor’s bench. He bent forward, elbows on his knees, warring against the urge to wretch. He raised his head to the gloom of the Umbilicus, wondered that for all their debility, enough men could summon enough routine, to drag let alone assemble the monstrous pavilion, mallet the tiers, hang the banners, unfurl and hoist the Ekkinû. He wondered even though he was one of those men, souls inclined to express adoration in simple labours. Somehow he had dragged the Great Ordeal across Agongorea and assembled it upon the porch of Golgotterath.
It still reeked, he decided, of the corrupt smoke of Dagliash.
The glint of his dead father’s signet ring hooked his gaze.
The madness, a fraction observed, impassive. The madness of the Meat was lifting.
The memories were not.
He sat gnawing on his knuckles, which ached. He hunched gagging, his mouth shedding spit about rhythmic convulsions. He wept, for shame that his son should have such a father. He even cackled for a time, as it seemed an evil man should. He had succeeded! He had discharged the dread task of his Aspect-Emperor! And the glory of it was such that he could only laugh—claw his beard and hair sobbing, shrieking.
Eating Sranc. Lying with Men. Cannibalism. Rutting with corpses …
No-no-no! The mere inkling of these things made chill knives of his lungs, maggots of his heart. What? some fraction shrieked and shrieked. What have you done? His lips parted, his teeth clamped, and his limbs waved like a corpse tumbling in surf. Something like a worm twisted from his gut to his skull, something hateful and weak, snivelling and blubbering … No! No!
His lips, plush and cold, releasing threads of blood and spit bowing in the wind.
Wishing it all back … Railing. Shrieking.
The hair of his cadaverous pubis trembling. Skin so pale beneath the haze. The taste … so …
What was this wretched instinct? This will to blot out all existence in the name of undoing the irrevocable?