Kelmomas nodded about a gargantuan swallow. How ravenous he had been!
“As quick with child as that tapestry from the Feast Hall.”
Serwa fixed him in her cold gaze.
“Is Father at all concerned?” the boy pressed. “She says she’s come to judge him.”
“Mimara was always mad,” Serwa said, as if pointing out a mountain with no passes on a map.
She terrified him for a premonition of altitude at that moment. Was this what rendered souls inhuman, the hitching of too many cares to things too vast to resemble the particulars of life? Too much resembling God … As Inrilatas had said.
“What do you think Father will do with me? Lock me up like Inri?”
She pursed her lips in thought, or the simulacrum of it.
“I don’t know. Were it not for Mother, he would have had Inrilatas put to death—or so I think. Kayûtas disagrees.”
“So he would kill his own son?”
His sister shrugged. “Why not? Your gifts are too fearsome to be trusted to the whim of passion.”
“So you would have me killed?”
She paused, awaiting his gaze. “Without hesitation.”
Something seized and twisted his innards; something like reality, as if everything had been just another nasty game up to now …
What would death be like, I wonder.
Shut up!
“And Kayûtas? He would have me killed as well?”
“I have no idea. We are rather busy.”
He affected the pose of a glum child. “You resent this, having to attend me?”
“No,” she said in a distracted voice. She set aside the blanket once again, allowing her eyes to linger. “I trust Father.”
“You would trust a father who would murder his own son?”
Her gown whisking, she occupied the position directly before him, glared down in her mild and damning way. Light winked across the golden Kyranean wings—the root of each blooming from the tip of another—embroidered across her billows.
“You imply I shouldn’t trust Father because Father doesn’t love,” she said. “But you forget we are Dûnyain. Common purpose is all that we require. So long as I serve Father’s ends, I need never fear or doubt him.”
Kelmomas tore a mouthful of meat from the cold joint, chewed while staring up at her. “And Proyas?”
The name caught her like a hook. He knew very little of what had transpired upon their arrival—but he had guessed enough, apparently.
“What of Proyas?” she asked.
“Some ends wreck the tools that accomplish them.”
An air of renewed appraisal tainted her look.
You show too much.
Let her see. Let her see how sharp a knife her little brother can be.
“So be it,” the famed Grandmistress of the Swayali said.
“You would die for Father?”
“No. For Father’s end.”
“And what is his end?”
She paused again. Of all his siblings, the little Prince-Imperial had always found Serwa the most inscrutable, even more so than Inri, but not because of the Strength. She saw neither so deep nor so far as he—but she remained fairly impossible to read nonetheless.
“The Thousandfold Thought,” she replied. “The Thousandfold Thought is his end.”
Kelmomas frowned.
“And what is that?”
“The great and terrible design that will deliver the World from this very place.”
“And how can you know this?”
Yes. Be relentless …
“I cannot. I can only know Father, know the peerless glory of his intellect.”
“This is why you would render up your life?” he cried with naked incredulity. “Because Father is smarter?”
She shrugged. “Why not? Who else should guide us, if not he who sees the deepest … farthest?”
“Perhaps,” he said upon a swell of pride, “we should chase our own ends.”
A pained smile. “There is no better way to remain small, little brother.”
Unless, the once-secret voice said, one compelled the very World …
Curiosity darkened her expression.
“Samarmas … He really is there inside you.”
Kelmomas dropped his gaze to his plate.
She was genuinely wary, now, he could tell, though no single sign betrayed it.
“You are mistaken, Kel, if you think you own the ends that impulse brings yo—”
“But I do own my ends! How ca—?”
“Do you now? Why then this interrogation, little brother? What is your end, pray-tell?”
Anasûrimbor Kelmomas stared down at his greasy thumbs, the flecks grey tissue, white fat.
What was he attempting to accomplish?
His sister nodded. “Desires arise from the darkness, the darkness that comes before. They own you, Brother. To indulge in them is to exult in slavery, to make blind appetite your mas—”
“Better a slave to the Thousandfold Thought?”
“Yes!” she cried, invested at last. “Better a slave to the Logos. Better a slave to that which delivers mastery over life!”
He glared at her, quite dumbfounded.
Clever bitch!
Shut up. Shut up.
“And that is why you would kill me,” he cried heedless, “becau—”
“Because you know no end that is not our Mother.”
He stared at the meat in his hands, the scorched extremities, the pink nearer the bone, layered like torn pudenda. It seemed sorcerous, the way the bone and cartilage gleamed.
“And if I make Father’s end my own?”
He resumed gnawing.
“You have no command of your ends. You are like Inri in that respect.”
He swallowed, sucked at his teeth.
“So I should resign myself to death then?”
The illustrious witch scowled. “I know not what Father intends. Perhaps even he doesn’t know, given Golgotterath and the Great Ordeal. I fear you are the least of his cares, little brother. A mote, merely.”
Apparently the World was about to end.
Yes! Don’t you see? We have time!
Shut up!
Time to make amends!”
“And if you were in my straits, Sister, what would you do?”
Her look harrowed for its indifference. “Fathom our Father.”
And it was a testament to their blood, the fact that she need say no more, for their blood had been the answer all along.
The little Prince-Imperial resumed chewing.
Two triunes of Nuns guarded the Accusatory, one occupying the heights, the other the broken terrain below. Achamian need not conjure another Lens to know the witches observed their approach with great interest.
Rather than approach from below, they climbed into the Occlusion, picking their way through the black basalt ruin of the Arobindant. Her husband’s followers, Esmenet explained, had difficulty enough respecting her when she towered over them, let alone when she called up from gullies. But the climb, which appeared straightforward from below, proved taxing, especially for Mimara. The old Wizard’s heart almost leapt from his mouth glimpsing her totter upon the slopes, her arms dancing out for balance, her belly a great pear.
“Why?” he could hear the Scylvendi snort. “Why have you dragged your bitch across a thousand screaming, rutting leagues?”
The Nuns most certainly knew he was a sorcerer, for his Mark was deep. But they made no sign of preparation as they scaled the final approach. They had cast their own Lens, after all, and so knew full well the Blessed Empress accompanied him.
Achamian hauled Mimara, who still looked miraculous for being clean, onto the gravel shelf with him and her mother. The promontory’s root lay immediately above them.
“Let me do the talking,” Esmenet said, though the old Wizard had no idea why she shot him the warning glare. “If I could have surprised them,” she added, “I’m sure they would have ob—”
br />
A feminine call in the near distance cut her short, followed by a disjoint chorus of sorcerous mutters. The three of them scrambled onto the levelled foundations of the Arobindant’s ancient citadel, saw the Swayali triune arrayed some thirty cubits above the back of the Accusatory, their eyes and mouths flashing white, their billows unfurled, so that curlicues of golden fabric snaked through the open spaces about them …
Esmenet cursed, gawking the same way Achamian and Mimara did.
“So much,” the old Wizard muttered, “for occupying the high ground …”
The image stupefied. The Accusatory pointed exactly as the legend said, not so much to the Canted Horn as to the Upright, vast and gleaming, a great golden axle for the desolation wheeling out about it. The Swayali witches hung as though pinned upon the monstrous tableau, their silk still shining despite months of insult, blooming like stalkless flowers, meaning glowing hot from their mouths and eyes.
Achamian turned to Esmenet, who seemed to be mumbling what she was going to say. He clutched her forearm, saying, “Wait … Esmi …”
She turned to him frowning.
“If Kellhus wished to … to kill you … to kill us …”
“Then what?”
“I … I could think of no better way than this!” Away from the encampment, where he could concoct any exonerating tale.
She smiled as if at his naiveté, drew two fingers from the height of his cheek down through his wiry beard.
“I’ve lived with him for twenty years, Akka. I know my husband.”
“Then you know this could be a trap!”
She shook her head in gentle negation, seeming to see too much, the way she always had, of the desperate contradictions within him.
“No, old fool. I know that he needs no traps to murder the likes of you and me.”
And then she was off, matronly in the white silk occasion that had been hemmed to fit her frame. He began shaking, understanding … at last, that Esmenet, far from taking the easy road, had suffered more losses, that out of all their souls, hers was the most numb—the most capable. And he continued shaking, even after Mimara clutched his shoulders and waist, for it seemed nothing less than a miracle watching Esmenet stride thus, beneath the flowering threat of the Swayali, into the deeper lunacy of Min-Uroikas, walking as though she were the World’s only terror …
“They will not harm her,” Mimara said, her voice hollow, her eyes as rapt upon the Blessed Empress as his own. “But neither will they heed … We have come all this way for nothing.”
“How can you know?”
Lightning sparked between the cerulean clouds snared upon the Horns’ heights, and they stiffened, the old man and the woman.
“Because that’s what she believes.”
To live is to starve for want of the eternal.
The black sails of the Umbilicus swallow them, but the crowd does not abate within the Eleven-Pole Chamber. And the Son of Harweel can see it in every harrowed face about them, the famine.
“I’m sorry,” Eskeles begins, “about … about Zsoronga …”
“We have all thrown love upon the funeral pyre …” the young King of Sakarpus replies. “We have all made sacrifices.”
The Schoolman looks uncertain. “You understand then …”
“He was his father’s wager.”
Eskeles bows his face, acknowledging the wisdom. “As are we all, my young King.”
“Indeed.”
To live is to witness the rotting of instants and nothing else. To be the decay of presence, the forever failing light. Life is the damnation that anticipates damnation.
And now that he has outrun life?
“Such times!” Eskeles exclaims. “I can scarce believe …”
He has become he who follows his following.
“How do you mean?”
The coming after that comes before …
“To dream of the Apocalypse as we in the Mandate do, then to wake up and … and witness the selfsame horror …”
His every breath the most miraculous throw …
“Golgotterath.”
The White-Luck.
Terror. Servitude. Worship.
These were the wages of the Strength.
Anasûrimor Kelmomas stood some five paces to his Father’s left, Serwa behind him, her hands resting on his shoulders in the simulacrum of comfort. The Lords of the Ordeal filed through the entrance to their right, fanned across the earthen floors to take their place on the tiers. They had the look of bandits, soiled to the pore and long-hunted by vengeful authority, cutthroats dressed in the plunder of more subtle castes and nations. Almost all of them gawked at the sight of him upon entering, and many continued glancing in his direction long after sitting. Some nodded and smiled in recognition. Others scowled in worry. And still more gazed at him in lingering horror, or worse yet, yearning. He found the attention oppressive, even terrifying—enough to weld his gaze to the cancerous image of Golgotterath through the broad rent in the western wall.
He understood why they stared. He was the first child any of them had seen in a year of arduous travel. What was more, he tokened their own children and grandchildren, the home they had thrown so far over the horizon. This was why Father had commanded his presence: to example what these Men had come to save—to make meat of what they had forgotten.
Kelmomas marvelled at the machination. He had almost forgotten how absolutely his father commanded these Men—the fathomless depths of his dominion. The Believer-Kings had come to make display of their fidelity and devotion, to secure their oh-so-mighty Lord-and-Prophet’s blessing before the assault upon Golgotterath. They had come to be fortified and fortified they would be. But not a soul among them could hope to fathom the primary end of this gathering. If the Holy Aspect-Emperor harangued them, he scrutinized them more, assessed their reliability, so that he might know where best to use, to exploit … the way Kelmomas himself was being used, exploited.
The hard work was about to begin. The tools must be inspected.
Kelmomas clutched opposite folds of his white-silk tunic, stricken for insight. All this time he had thought his father merely a stronger version of himself, someone who could do more of what he could do. Not once had he considered that Father could do things he could never hope to, things he couldn’t even think.
Perhaps anything …
The Holy Aspect-Emperor of the Three Seas strode from blackness to light, stepped before his bench. A golden nimbus hung miraculous about his head—and about each of his hands as well, which he raised in benediction and prayer. Despite the gloom of the Umbilicus and the overcast sky, he was some how bathed in the light, his white-and-gold vestments bright unto squinting, the folds scored by shadows angled to an unseen, mid-morning sun.
“Fathom our Father …” Serwa had told them.
The collected Believer-Kings and their vassals fell to their knees across the tiers. After a pinch from his sister, Kelmomas lowered his eyes to his feet. The Umbilicus rumbled to the chorus of warlike voices, a sound as deep and ancient as the sea. And they all seemed apes in the shadows, carnival wags, compared to their Holy Aspect-Emperor—even Serwa. All of them groped and thrashed in the black—save Him.
Save Father.
We were overweening … Sammi whispered.
Yes. Greedy.
They had always been overmatched. He could see it so clearly now.
“Praise,” his father boomed into the high-sagging hollows.
“Praise be the Meta-God.”
Toying with the worldborn was no measure of his Strength. Any fool could command a kennel. The episode with Inrilatas had shouted as much, especially the ease with which his brother had seen through him—seen through them.
No. He would do what he should have done from the very beginning, what his elder siblings had done: transform himself into a tool. He would make himself useful …
To survive, at first. Then to thrive … perhaps even conquer.
And Mother? She
had squandered her utility (as her absence now argued), fumbled whatever confidence Father might have had in her. Even her womb was barren! Let her fawn over her whore-daughter. Let her mewl and cling! She had become cheap. An aging bauble, something to be forgotten—traded for drink and song! Or even given away, should her wits grow addled …
We will accomplish something mighty! Prove our Strength!
Yes … Yes!
Then she would learn—the stupid bitch! Errant cunt! When even the slaves balked for cupping her drool, bathing her delicious secrets, for washing the rank shit out of her sheets! Then she would see, and she would love—love as she should—and caress and hold and say, “Oh, Sweetling, please-please-please forgive me!”
Yes. It seemed so clear watching the caste-noble cattle low about Father’s long knife.
She will be our prize.
“Ishma tha serara …”
The menacing congregation rose at their Lord-and-Prophet’s bidding, forming a bowl of expectant faces across the back of the Eleven-Pole Chamber. The contradiction of it tugged the child, the pathos of once strong souls frantic to recover decorum, dignity, and the grim aura of invincibility belonging to those who have survived unspeakable trials. They seemed at once ghosts, creatures of smoke and rumour, and an assembly of iron ingots, indestructible. The Eleven-Pole Chamber had suffered parallel indignities, what given the rent western wall, the scavenged lanterns, scabbed leather and rotted canvas. He recognized the two carpets banding the interval between them and the Lords of the Ordeal, for he had cartwheeled their length many times when they had lined the galleries of the Imperial Audience Hall. He knew they had been ornamental once, a lavish pictorial retelling of the First Holy War—the story of how Father became holy—but now they seemed of a piece with the blasted ground, the dirt of Golgotterath, their vivid imagery trammelled into stains.
“You …” Father began. “Embattled. Weary.”
The Sons of the Three Seas watched rapt as children.
“I ask you … What miracle has brought us to this place?”
Absorbing even the questions.
“What miracle has brought us to the very end of Men?”
Proyas! Kelmomas silently japed.
“Ages past a knife was cast,” Father said upon inaudible, yet palpable, thunder. “A knife was cast across the Void, tossed glittering in the black, sailing gulfs we cannot imagine before finally striking here. Here. It cracked the underworld spine of Viri, great among the ancient Nonmen Mansions. It threw up the mountains of the Occlusion, and cast out a fire that ignited the very sky above us, and all the skies surrounding …”