“Mother!” Mimara cried, bolting forward to catch a second eye-scratching blow.
“You have no inkling!” The Blessed Empress shrieked at her wayward daughter. “No idea what he has done!”
He savoured the sting where her nails had notched him, the welling.
“Viper!”
A thread of blood spilled hot from his nose. He grinned at the taste.
“Abomination!”
Mimara pulled Mother away, wrestled her wrists to her breast. A moment passed between them, or a look—a recognition of something. Sanctuary? Permission?
Mother went slack, slumped weeping into her daughter’s arms.
“D-deeeead …” she keened. “All deeeead …”
Inconsolable sobbing. She clutched Mimara’s shoulders, violently, suddenly, then screamed into her breast, breaking, at long last, about the savagery of all she had suffered.
Anasûrimbor Kelmomas retreated from the grotesque spectacle, slipped from chamber to chamber, gloom to gloom.
“He killed them, Mim … murdered …”
The little boy gazed at the portal that now lay between them, leather for iron. He saw his father upon the Circumfix, etched across what had once been living, bleeding skin.
Nobody … it whispered on an airless, inner breath.
Nobody loves us.
“Enough,” the Grandmaster of the Mandate resolved on an exhalation. “He would not approve.”
“There are things I must tell you,” Achamian said.
“You have told me quite enough.”
A croak of laughter. “Your Dreams … Have they been changing?”
This arrested the Schoolman’s attention, if only momentarily.
“My Dreams have …” Achamian continued. “Utterly.”
Saccarees held his gaze a long instant, sighed audibly. “You are no longer Mandati, Wizard.”
“And neither are my Dreams.”
Apperens Saccarees pressed himself to his feet with a scowl, affecting the manner of someone disgusted for misspent generosity. Achamian reeled. The old desperation fumbled for his heart, the one he had all but forgotten, so long had it been: the wild need to be believed.
“Saccarees! Saccarees! All the World’s wheels grind about this place—this moment! And you choose ignorance ove—?”
“Over what?” the Grandmaster snapped. “Blasphemy? Deceit?”
“I no longer suffer the past through Seswa—!”
“Enough, Wizard.”
“I know the truth of Him! Saccarees, I know what He is! I know what He—!”
“I said, enough!” the Mandate Grandmaster cried, slapping both hands hard across the camp table.
The old Wizard glared up, matched the ferocity of his gaze. The fool!
“Why?” the Grandmaster exclaimed. “Why do you think He’s suffered you all these long years?”
The question obliterated the horde of scathing retorts rising within, for it was one that had plagued him throughout the entirety of his Exile: Why he had been spared?
“Why do you think I have suffered you?” Saccarees continued. “A Gnostic Wizard?”
Achamian had always counted his life a bargain—but a sufferance?
“Because,” he replied, his voice far more frail than he wished, “I always lose at benjuka?”
An old joke belonging to Xinemus.
Apperens Saccarees did not so much as blink. “The Empress …” he said. “The Blessed Empress is the only reason you live, Drusas Achamian. Count yourself lucky she is here.”
The Grandmaster drew out a crimson-clad arm, gestured to the sagging exit. But Achamian had already lurched to his feet, only to discover he needed to pause to recall the brute facts of breathing, walking …
Yes-yes! a fraction reassured.
Mimara had the Qirri.
Such a lonely little flute he had been, an isolate soul twisting in the black, wicks of wane smoke on the Void.
Such a chorus he had become.
Standing with a stork upon his shoulder, and sitting alone in his tent, looking up, seeing Harweel, his expression rent between outrage and fear for his son, saying, “My priests call him a demon …”
A cataract that transcended all glory …
The White-Luck Warrior.
Wandering, following his own back through weltered alleys, across fields of slumbering human garbage, scavenge for the Ciphrang, turning to an insistent prod, seeing–as it happened–Porsparian standing upon mounds of dead Sranc, smiling as he dropped, the spearhead slipping into his glottis like a hand into a pocket. Only to crouch in the grass with Eskeles, squinting–as it happened–at the pottery shattered into shark teeth, the obese Schoolman saying, “Our God … the God, is broken into innumerable pieces …” rolling across the pinch of filth, hearing–as it happened–Serwa’s hooked cries, seeing her buck and heave upon Moënghus, as Zsoronga squeezes tight his throat, feeling–as it happened–his iron thrust making delirium of his own, the Princess-Imperial saying, “we can see the dead stacked about us all,” as Nin’ciljiras ladled chill oil upon his scalp, gleaming like something furnace-glazed, heavy-lidded, pretending to be anything other than wrecked, saying, “Do you think this is why the Anasûrimbor sent him to us?” and he was there… as it happened…
Walking. Sleeping. Murdering. Making love.
Rushing in fathomless cataracts. Now and now and now and now …
The White-Luck Warrior.
Alone on the edge of the encampment, looking out across the darkling plain at the carcass of a long dead evil, the pretext that would make a glutton of Hell.
Do you see? the stork whispered.
Harweel clasped his son’s shoulder, grinned in paternal affirmation.
Ever has it been.
Shut the World? How, when all the future was drawn upon the same skin as the past … Stamped. Written. When beauty and horror were bottomless.
And the ground so thin.
Esmenet!
The sensation of falling plagued the old Wizard’s nocturnal trek to the Umbilicus. Neither he nor Mimara had known what they would do upon reaching the Great Ordeal. Achamian had gone to Saccarees primarily out of what seemed an absence of alternatives but could have been a simple matter of self-preservation. It was only while imploring Saccarees that he understood the deranged extent of his fear, how the years of obsessive pondering had rendered Anasûrimbor Kellhus the sum of all horror.
He had imagined their arrival often enough, but in the vague way of hopes not quite believed. In his soul’s fancy, he always stood beside Mimara as she delivered the Judgment of the Eye, the Holy Aspect-Emperor and his Imperial Court looking on … and …
What a fool he had been!
The fact of Proyas howled as much, but heartbreak had stoppered his ears, allowed him to prolong his daft sense of impunity. They had the Eye. The Whore herself was bound to what was about to happen here! Or so they had assumed in their exhausted fancies. Despite everything, Achamian had assumed the simplicity of conclusions, the clarity of scripture and myth, would occasion their arrival. Fate awaited them!
But Fate, as Protathis so famously declared, relieved only the augur’s toil. It was a slaver’s chain, not a king’s litter—at least for the likes of him and Mimara. Fortune only sneered at souls such their own.
And what was more, Anasûrimbor Kellhus was Dûnyain. Complication was his accursed birthright. Of course the Great Ordeal was naught but a crossroad, a turn to a far more lethal and onerous toil. They tarried upon the very threshold of Golgotterath …
Of course they lay in the jaws of mortal peril!
Of course no one would believe them, no matter what Judgment the Eye rendered …
So Drusas Achamian walked, fulminating and cursing in the old way, as honestly perplexed by his oversights and failures now as he had been as a young man. He knew not what to do, only that he loved, and he was wise enough to take this as cause for terror instead of hope.
Question crowded upon question ?
??
“We have come to judge him, Mother. Kellhus.”
Esmenet gazed incredulous.
“We?”
“Akka and I.”
They sat upon the matted floor, knee to knee, each slicked in contrasts of light and dark. Mimara had supped on water and roasted horse while Esmenet related all that had happened in Momemn since her flight, a tale that quickly turned into a hollow recounting of Kelmomas’s horrific crimes and machinations. She had taken care with the words and the details, fearing they might trigger more paroxysms of grief and outrage. But like footsteps, they had borne her away instead, wandering from the walls and gutters and temples of the Capital to the wondrous fact of her eldest daughter. Alive!
It had wracked her, her sorcerous flight with her husband and her monstrous son across the Wild. The misery of it blotted any suffering she had known, and she had welcomed it. Losses were no different than luxuries. Heap them upon any one soul long enough, and that soul will come to see them as wages earned—aye, even as justice.
And then … Mimara. This unaccountable gift, taken then returned …
Herself a mother! Or almost one … Bearing word not of losses, but gifts …
That were also losses.
“You carry …” Esmenet said over the buzzing in her ears. “You carry Akka’s child?”
Downcast eyes, but no remorse or repentance whatsoever.
“I was the one,” her daughter said to her thumbs. “I-I … seduced him … I wanted him to tea—!”
“Seduced?” the Blessed Empress heard herself snap. “So he is that simple? Or did you hold a knife to his throat? Coerce his seed?”
An angry glare, one that seemed to collapse the interval of unfamiliarity between them. All the old feuds had been renewed.
No-no-no-no …
“Perhaps I did,” Mimara said coldly.
“Perhaps you did what?”
“Bully his seed!”
“So you did use a knife then?”
No-no-no-no …
“Yes!” her daughter cried on a hot gasp. “You! You were my knife! I used my resemblance to you to seduce him!” She even leaned forward, smiled as if warming to her old facility for cruel and cutting claims.
“He even cried your name!”
Too much. Too many insults. Too many hopes broken. The Blessed Empress was on her feet, barging past flaps, reeling through the leather-panelled gloom, glaring murder at any who dared accost her.
Too much. Too much. Enclosed spaces. Seams like stitched veins. The cloying regalia of an Empire crashing into ruin a world away. She fairly shrieked at the Pillarians who made to block her passage. Then she was out, free of the Umbilicus, stumbling to her knees beneath the vacant bowl of the night. At last!
Free—
The sight did not arrest her all at once. She became stationary in sliding, jarring pieces, it seemed. First her hands, drawn up, then her spine, arched back. It cut the strings of her expression, hooked her eyes, then pinioned everything else—thought, breath, heartbeat—against the granitic immobility of her form.
The black shadow of Golgotterath, rising serene and cancerous from the great grey bowl of the Occlusion.
She hung for what seemed a desolate season, thinking, Is this what it feels like?
She convulsed about a scraping inhalation.
Is this how it happens?
The end of the World.
The Ordeal barnacled the intervening terrain, canvas shanties clustered about the Occlusion’s roots, fanning like spackle out across the flat tracts of the Shigogli. She could see Schoolmen stalk the heights about the perimeter. Across the desolation beyond, she could see the plumes of war-parties encircling the monstrous fortifications …
And the Horns … She could see the Horns … the eldritch gleam.
Just as she had read.
“We have come to judge him, Mother.”
Initially, she overlooked the figure stumping up through the dark below the malevolent vista. She instantly recognized him when she did spy him, though heartbeats would pass before she could countenance her recognition.
He had grown old and skinny after all. So very different from the plump fool she had loved.
He recognized her as well, slowing. He stumbled as if besotted.
The smile came unbidden, like something older and wiser. She came to her feet, brushed her gown out of some numb need for dignity. She wiped her eyes out of fury.
He advanced, but slowly, as if dreading the detail the Nail of Heaven would add to his wild outline. With every step, he more resembled the madman her spies had described to her.
Drusas Achamian …
The Wizard.
He hobbled close, his face inscrutable. The reek of him tainted the air.
She struck him, bloodied the lips hidden beneath the wire excesses of his mustache and beard. She raised her arm to strike him again, but he caught her wrist in a hermit fist, wrestled her into his embrace. They slumped together into the dust. He smelled of earth. He smelled of smoke and shit and decay. He reeked of things both whole and frail, of everything the Andiamine Heights had stolen. She wailed into the stink of him, somehow knowing that after this night, she would never weep again.
She heard Mimara shouting—at the Pillarians, she realized.
Her daughter’s arms slipped about her shoulders. Jasmine. Myrrh. Her belly pressed warm and taut across her back …
Esmenet, Accursed Empress of the Three Seas, wondered at the prod of a fetal kick. And she understood … With a clarity and finality she never would have thought possible, she understood.
She belonged to them. She belonged to them now.
The ones that could love.
CHAPTER
TWELVE
The Last Whelming
Not all arrows miss an enemy unseen, but no arrow hits an enemy unknown.
—Scylvendi Proverb
Before birth there is conception, and before conception there is maturation, and before maturation there is birth. Thus the light passes from brand to brand. For souls are naught but torches that burn as time and place.
—Five Apprehensions, HILIAPOS
Early Autumn, 20 New Imperial Year (4132, Year-of-the-Tusk), Golgotterath.
All nations differ in their prosperity. The zenith of every people is a thing distinct, the product of custom, belief, and expression imperious to the degree it contradicts those of its neighbours. It is ruin that divests them of luxury, ruin that strips away the florid dividends of power and ingenuity. Suffering, be it war or famine or pestilence, grinds nations into a common meal. The lamentations of the one are the wails of the other.
Thus they had come, the nations and peoples of the Three Seas, bound by common prayer and insignia, yes, but taking haughty pride in their distinction all the same, what set them apart from their fellows. So the Ainoni lords painted their faces white and scoffed at the silver masks donned by their Conriyan counterparts. So the Galeoth laughed at the beards of the Tydonni, who ridiculed the Nansur for their smooth cheeks, who derided the Thunyeri for their unruliness, and so on. Thus they had come, the Southron Kings of the Three Seas and the Middle-North, each the Son of an ancient and elaborate heritage, each hailing from cities fat with artifice and decadent age. Thus they had come, proud and debauched, their origins flashing brilliant in their carriage, their garb, and their armaments, each the distinct flower of a different soil.
Thus they had marched beyond the Pale of Men, across the trackless leagues, wandering so very far from home—in all ways.
A nightmarish transit … as much descent as crossing.
And so they had reached the Furnace Plain having passed through the furnace of Eärwa, a kind of human plunder, an assemblage of ancient relics, heirlooms, broken up and melted down, re-forged into something unlike anything the World had ever seen—recast. Accursed, where they had been blessed. Damned where they had been saved. And one where they had been many.
A new people, grim for witness, fierce f
or desperation, pious for hunger, their ornament cast away, their garments stained by the soils of a thousand lands, their armaments scavenged from dead kinsmen. A monochrome nation, born of demented months instead of placid ages.
The night following the Great Letting, the Holy Aspect-Emperor went to each of his most illustrious commanders, sounding their hearts in seclusion. He offered no pardon for the atrocities they had committed, nothing that might dull the horror in their hearts. He spurned their protestations, begrudged them their beseeching. He had come to them in fury, harsh in edict and impatient in audience. According to rumour, he even struck Earl Shilka Grimmel, who could not cease his lamentations. Of all the sins, unmanliness had become the most egregious.
Tomorrow, he told them, the Schools would be loosed, and the Ark would be stoked as an oven!
“And when it is naught but a gutted hulk,” he grated, luminous beneath sagging canvas, “we shall take what remains of our blasted hearts … and return home.”
And in the breathless aftermath of his visitations, the Southron caste-nobles wondered at the strangeness of that word … wept for it.
All Men yearn for home.
Mother and daughter led Achamian to the Empress’s chamber in the Umbilicus. Their reunion was fraught, as charged with disbelief and gratitude as apprehension and injury. Reuniting souls once bound together amounts to the coupling of interlocking wounds, the pressing of scar to scar, scab to scab. So when Esmenet first refused to intercede on behalf of Proyas, Achamian presumed she nursed some grudge that only understanding and patient explanation could overcome. His every glimpse of Mimara heavy with child stabbed him, after all. He reasoned the same glimpses afflicted Esmenet with the outrage corresponding to his shame.
But the more he implored her, the more the fact of Proyas’s straits clawed bubbles from the mud of his belly. Esmenet affected an attitude of forbearance reminiscent of their arguments in Sumna: the wilder his worry for Proyas, the more profound her pity for Akka. She had seen thousands “slung,” she said, especially in Nilnamesh after Akirapita’s first successes fomented rebellion. Men so bound and suspended never lasted more than several hours, strangled from within by the weight of their own bodies. “He’s beyond everyone, now,” she said, her cruelty as sharp as her glare. “You can’t save him, Akka. No more than you could save Inrau.”