His voice fell upon them as rain, windless and warm.
“The souls most guilty.”
And something in his voice—a resonance or an inflection—pricked the ears of each and every one of them. Many of the weepers caught their hitching sobs, arranged their shoulders and stood erect, squeezed away tears with the balls of their thumbs, peered blinking in feigned weariness. But the vigilance of their neighbours was such that it did not matter. They had been branded by their lamentation.
“They lay as shadows across failing light …”
Screeching was rekindled within the rumble. Many of those marked by their wanton displays cast about, either bewildered or seeking lines of flight.
“They pollute … They foul …”
But some even welcomed their degradation, called out sobbing and smiling, beckoned the mortal judgment about to crash upon them.
“Seize them!”
The masses, which were too raucous with detail to be anything other than homogeneous, instantly bloomed into thousands of flowers large and small as myriad regions set upon the weepers in their midst.
“Seize them! Raise them so that I might see!”
Flowers of concentrated violence, bending ingrown, then leaning out and back, offering countless figures to the scrutiny of the sky, some writhing, some battling, some limp …
“Make a spigot of their throats!”
And the flowers contracted, shrank from whitening extremities, scored by the radial striations of thousands reaching …
“Drink! Drink deep their iniquity! Bathe your heart in the heat of their damnation!”
Men battling forward, holding forth cups cut from scripture. Men shrinking away, hunched over their crimson wages. Men throwing their heads back …
“And prepare! Set aside all that is weak!”
And he flared radiant from the very point of the Accusatory, pure before the noxious gold immensity of the Unholy Ark.
“For behind you lies your only hope of redemption! The Holy Task that the God of Gods has set before you! And you! Shall! Spend! All! Every pain! Every fury! Maimed you shall crawl, stab the stomping maul, gore the groin, pierce the thigh! Blind you shall grope and grapple, knife the squealing black! Dying you shall spit, bellow curses!”
The bodies of the weepers were tossed as rags upon them, grisly flotsam in the tempest.
“You have battled across the World! Witnessed what no Man has seen in an age!”
The flowers dissolved like figures of sand beneath waves.
“And now you stand upon the very cusp of Redemption! Glory everlasting!”
The Host of Hosts clenched and surged in all its miles, for at last it had turned, away from the tossed ramps and precipices of the Occlusion—away from the cruel judgment of its Holy Aspect-Emperor.
“Golgotterath!”
Away from itself.
“Golgotterath!”
And toward.
“All fathers beat their sons!” the Holy Aspect-Emperor cried, his voice scoring the vault of creation.
“All fathers beat their sons!”
CHAPTER
TEN
The Great Letting
To be false is sane when the truth will get you killed. To be false is insane when only the truth can save you. Thus is Reason is the father of Glory, and Truth little more than a pompous sibling.
—Antitheses, PORSA OF TRYSË
Early Autumn, 20 New Imperial Year (4132, Year-of-the-Tusk), Golgotterath.
Days of bodiless terror, fury, and lamentation. Days of moaning without voice, shrieking without breath, gnashing without teeth.
Days of floating … drifting as smoke in the black.
The great and terrible Anasûrimbor Kellhus had pursed Malowebi’s soul. Nothing was left for him save to watch the pageant of dangling glimpses. The wastes crossed. The wrecked Empress, her gaze forever chasing the outlines of things. The son always skulking the camp’s margins. And now the commotion and fury of returning to the Ordeal … All glanced rolling from the thigh of the Aspect-Emperor.
The Thought-dancer …
He could scarce contemplate it: though bodiless, the passionate tumult poets so often blamed on the flesh remained, burned as fierce as he could remember, the terror, the fury, remorse lashed to the eye-gouging limit. Likaro, wherever he cringed, should have been reduced to cinders for the curses heaped upon him!
Like all wreck survivors, Malowebi had taken account of his supplies, what might sustain him. He could feel. He could see. He could think and reason. And he could remember what he had once been … before … before …
He could still curse Likaro.
He still possessed all his faculties—he remained Malowebi, only shorn of his every physical connection, and locked into one of the Decapitants bound to the Aspect-Emperor’s waist—or so he told himself in the beginning. The more he rehearsed the cataclysmic occasion of his imprisonment the more he realized no such transfer had taken place. He clearly remembered the Aspect-Emperor affixing one of the Decapitants to the spouting stump of his neck. If the man had imprisoned his soul in the remaining demon, then he should be bouncing alone across his thigh—he should be in the thing, not staring at its blasted mien.
Which meant the Anasûrimbor hadn’t so much stolen his soul as his head.
The greater horror of this lay in the finality it betokened. If a demon possessed his body, then repossession remained a possibility … He had been stolen, yes, but he had not been destroyed. No matter how pathetic, he could still plot escape, he could still take aim. But realizing his very own head swung from the Anasûrimbor’s hip transformed what had been a prison into a trophy, a probing soul into a mummified gaze.
What was he going to do? He couldn’t entertain this question without lapsing into tirades of disembodied fury, cursing Fanayal for his crazed conceit, Meppa for his heresy, and Likaro for his pulse, his criminal ability to breathe.
The prophetic irony wasn’t lost on him. It seemed he could see the Yatwerian witch as clear as sunlight in his soul’s eye, Psatma Nannaferi, watching him from her mirror, daubing lamp-black across almost closed eyes, young lips communicating an old and wicked grin.
“And now you wish to know your part in this?”
If anything, he had obsessed over this encounter even more than the one with the Anasûrimbor, realizing—with greater assurance as the days passed—that he suffered the very doom the accursed witch had prophesied: to watch, to witness as a reader might, unable to touch, unable to save.
And only now, swinging from the Aspect-Emperor’s hip as he exhorted the debased multitudes from the pulpit heights, did Malowebi fathom the mad object of his curse.
Only now … gazing upon Golgotterath.
He had no heart but the heart he felt was cinder and ash.
Not even the sudden appearance of Zsoronga upon the Accusatory could knock him from his horror. Of course the boy had survived this far. Of course his life was forfeit, given that his father had commanded Malowebi to conspire with his captor’s enemies. Whatever he might have felt for the Successor-Prince was blotted, suffocated by the golden abominations rearing lucent into the clouds beyond his ailing form …
Golgotterath! Golgotterath was real. Woe to those who are fool enough to deny it! And woe to those who throw their sons as number-sticks against it.
“All things abhor you!” the battered youth cried, cringing for the hovering menace of the Pillarians, all but blind to the violations goring the shroud of Heaven beyond. The insult to dimension, artifice become blasphemy for unthinkable scale. The sense of cataclysm hanging in perpetual arrest, like golden knives endlessly falling into the breast of the World.
And Men sheeted the earth before it—Men!—stamped and shouted from across Shigogli.
Zsoronga was bound into a ceremonial posture of submission then summarily kicked from the side of the Accusatory. Malowebi saw it all quite clearly, given the angle the Whore afforded him, every wince and grimace, all the folds and cr
eases that token anguish and outrage. But the Horns pillared the very Heavens behind the sobbing boy, the Incû-Holoinas …
And Malowebi could only think, All along … He spoke true.
Implication blew as void through him, opened cavities once shut by ignorance, hollows once choked with hope and conceit and ancient fancy.
Anasûrimbor Kellhus had spoken true.
Now the whole World had be rewritten—beginning with the Satakhan’s eldest son.
How long had it been since Achamian had last seen them? How many centuries past?
Crossing the Leash had been more a matter of poling than paddling, forcing the crude raft he had wrought through the soaked dead. They had turned away from what was deep … what was beneath. It was enough to feel the sponge-sodden carcasses roll like apples beneath their strokes, break like bread. So they had studied different points on the opposite shore as they continued toiling, their gazes fixed, lustreless, the look of souls wandering outside resignation.
Upon reaching the far shore, they had done much the same, cleaving directly north into the lap of the Yimaleti, rather than northeast to the wasted abdomen of Agongorea. At every juncture they encountered, Achamian elected what he deemed the most secretive route, the path that revealed them to no horizons, and so revealed no horizons to them. They had turned away from what was far, what lay in the future, and had looked to their feet, following ravine after ravine, never climbing, never daring any height that might lay their wicked destination plain on the horizon, the dread golden vision … Anochirwa. The Horns of Golgotterath.
And now, at long last, he, Drusas Achamian, stood upon the foot of the Ring Mountains, the Occlusion. Climbing was all that remained, all that lay between him and the dreaded sight.
“Come, Akka,” Mimara said, her gaze worried, searching.
“Yes—yes,” he said, not moving from where he stood.
For all the torment Mandate Schoolmen inherited for reliving Seswatha’s tumultuous and tragic life, there was respite to be found in reliving his frailties and failures. Men are ever stranded with their own cowardice, the implacable facts of their petty schemes and deceptions. They were quick to play the game of silent accusation, of course, to charge others for crimes wholly their own. But for every sentence meted, the implicit measure of their own guilt grew—and with it the terror that only they were so weak. Mandate Schoolmen knew otherwise, thanks to their Dreams, knew that even the greatest heroes among Men harboured terrors all their own …
That courage was the work of flawed tools.
“More rest, little ones,” Mimara murmured to her gold-scaled belly. “Your father’s heart is winded …”
The old Wizard fumed, but remained just as rooted.
“He hauls too much history to climb ways so steep.”
Rather than find passage between the Occlusion’s shattered teeth, Achamian insisted they climb an ancient switchback stair leading to one of the ruined Akeokinoi. Mimara asked for no explanations, even though the climb was far more onerous for her given her condition than for him. Had she asked, he would have muttered something about prudence, of needing to observe the Great Ordeal before daring it, all the while knowing she wouldn’t believe a single mumbled word.
The wind harboured the promise of wider and wilder spaces as they gained the heights. The sky extended its vacant span. The Nonman watchtower was little more than a wrack-strewn podium. The ancient craftsmen had used basalt quarried from elsewhere, a dense black stone that still, after thousands of years, stood in stark contrast to the high-heaped sandstone and granite comprising the Ring Mountains. Evidence of its destruction lay scattered about a shallow peak, as dark as coal in dirty snow.
Pressing hands against knees, Achamian surmounted the final steps, strode gasping into the ancient shell. He saw the Horns immediately, though his soul pretended otherwise for several heartbeats. He stood swaying, blinking away what seemed an immovable stupor.
He could hear Mimara at his side, sobbing, and aye … laughing.
For there they were …
Canted and golden. Opposing swan necks, heads thrust high into the blank.
The old Wizard slumped to the cracked floor. And she was there, Mimara, the image of Esmenet, the Judging Eye of the God, kneeling at his side, clasping him, weeping, laughing …
Gazing at her, he could feel them give way, all the small terrors, and he coughed for violence of passion, blinked hot tears. He could swear he bled, so violent was his smile. He croaked in laughter, a crooning cough that became a lunatic cackle …
For there it was … The dread image. The wicked emblem that had summed Evil for what seemed the entirety of his life. The horror that had supped upon his tender heart, feasted upon his compassion. The malignancy that had corrupted every breath he had ever drawn.
Incû-Holoinas, the Ark-of-the-Skies …
Min-Uroikas, the Pit of Obscenities …
Golgotterath.
Golgotterath! The Fell Stronghold of the Unholy Consult …
Cradle of the No-God.
TELL ME …
Breathlessness seized his heart, tore it from his laughter.
WHAT DO YOU SEE?
Mimara slipped his grasp, her look anguished and alarmed. He could see her murmur, Akka?
WHAT AM I?
He had clutched his temples. He had never laughed, it seemed. Only shrieked …
Tsurumah! Mog-Pharau!
But she was clinging to him, shushing, and smoothing, weeping new tears, his tears, knowing, believing, with and for …
Understanding.
And it stilled him like nothing he had ever known, understanding that she understood—and with a profundity that eclipsed his own, for what he had lived as Seswatha, she had apprehended through the Eye. A slackness breathed through him, uncoupling every ligament, every organ, and he slipped into what seemed her cradling even though she huddled within his arms. She drew his right hand to her gold-armoured belly … said nothing.
Hearts beating.
They lay like this among the rounded blocks, he upon his rump, she on her knees, curled into him, like a child’s hand cupped within a father’s callused palm. Breathing. Their unborn gestating between them, their world spinning off into desolate irrelevance far about … and their beauty something essential, another ore.
What was it, this union they had been unearthed between them? Too desperate to be love …
Too near … too profound.
They swooned for a time, dozed beneath the rising spectre of Anochirwa.
Hearts beating.
She was the first to hear it, the faraway voice. He heard it the instant her alarm cracked the bliss between them. The warble of a human crying out, baffled by stone scarps and disembowelled by breezy distance. Leaning each against the other, they stood, gazed once again at Golgotterath. Never had Achamian felt so ancient and so young. Together they hobbled the remaining paces to the lip of the black-stone ruin.
The volume of the voice bloated out of disproportion to their advance. It had resounded all along, the old Wizard realized, ringing through the empty air above them. The bruise of sorcery was plain.
“A glamour of some kind,” Achamian muttered, replying to her questioning look.
They crested the heights, stood numb and dizzy, gawking out over the grim reaches. It seemed impossible (as much for the Dreams as in spite of them), the way the mountainous curve of the Occlusion followed a perfect compass line, extending out below brumous skies, the rim of a concavity so vast as to defeat vision. Rising from ulcerated foundations, the Ark lay at its centre, dull-gleaming, miraculously intact given its cataclysmic arrival. The fortifications about its base, even the hulking towers of Domathuz and Corrunc, seemed burnt pastry in comparison, wicked only for the ten thousand little teeth of gold fanging the ten thousand battlements. The plain of Shigogli radiated out from the Horns’ bower, as flat as marble floors, and betraying the meaning of its ancient name, “Inniür,” for it was now more the colour of bone
than the charcoal it had been in previous ages …
High to their left, they saw the greater mountains of the Yimaleti pile into cerulean obscurity to the northwest.
And to their right, in the east, they saw the Great Ordeal strewn along the Occlusion, steaming with dust, sizzling with indistinct activity, its southern flank so near that even Achamian could discern individual figures. The thunder of it lay viscous on the autumn air. The voice they heard somehow floated upon the rumble, a harangue that suffered no deaf ears. They stood numb … gazing more to accustom their souls to the spectacle than to scrutinize or see. And as they watched, pockets of turmoil erupted within the undifferentiated mass, crude rings, as if it were a pool beneath a hail of gravel.
Screams complicated the striate roar.
“What happens?” Mimara asked.
Achamian fought for wind. He spared her a passing squint, nothing more.
“Your stepfather,” he said upon a shuddering exhalation.
To come so close.
Proyas thought of girls with stooped shoulders and bold eyes, peppercorns crushed upon honeyed quail, the dust hanging about the blue-dancing feet of the priests of Jukan. He thought of children discoursing with grand authority in another room, unaware of any parent listening. He thought of clouds bloating above him, crisp white upon hazy blue, soundless and soundless and soundless …
He thought of love.
The pain did not so much subside as swell into something too great to be apprehended. Even the stings had been blunted into spheres.
Only the flies truly plagued him.
The ground below rotated first to the left, then to the right, but for no reason he could fathom, for the air had been gutted of all motion. Some torsion in the rope maybe? Some imperfection …
He could feel the slack weight of it, hanging from his bones … the meat.
So cold to be …
And so hot to touch.
The more he pondered the broken ground below, the more it became a conclusion.
At one point he thought he saw Achamian—or some ancient, crazed version of him, shoulders heaped in rancid furs—standing upon the arc of his rotation, squinting up. Proyas even smiled at the image, croaked …