The Unholy Consult

  Achamian saw this as surely as if he were Dûnyain.

  “Where is Kelmomas?” she asked in the crisp, caste-noble Sheyic of the Andiamine Heights, with only the merest burr betraying her caste-menial blood. She referred to the boy, the old Wizard realized, her boy, the one behind the furor that had occasioned Mimara’s labour.

  “Chained,” Kellhus said, “to a stake in Lord Shorathises’ pavilion.”

  She searched the implacable face. An air of defeat had already crept into her manner. For all her matronly sturdiness, she suddenly seemed willowy, frail, standing in the shadow of her godlike Emperor.

  “What happened?”

  “You saw. He murdered Sorweel, Son of Harweel, the Believer-King of Sakarpus.”

  He could feel it then, the enervation of dwelling overlong in the shadow of such inhuman vacancy. And he understood how profoundly it had mangled her, being the human portal for the emergence of inhuman souls, loving what could only manipulate her in turn. Another Whale-mother. A clamour to save her inflamed him, to rescue not so much their present as their past, to pluck her from the catastrophic consequences of decisions entirely his own. He would do anything, in that moment, to go back, to yield to her beseeching, to stay and make love to her on the sweaty banks of the River Sempis all those years ago …

  Anything but abandon her for the Library of the Sareots.

  “But why? Did he even know him?”

  “He thought him an assassin. He says that he could see murder in his face, and he believes what he says.”

  There was tenderness in Kellhus’s voice, even affection, but it was muted, dulled by the years, and careful as well, like all lies crafted in awareness of ineluctable disbelief.

  “And was there?” she asked, her voice tight. “Was there … murder in his face?”

  “No. He was a Believer … Among the most devout.”

  The Blessed Empress simply stared at him, inscrutable save for the anguish bruising her eyes.

  “So Kel just … he just …”

  “There is no reclaiming him, Esmi.”

  She looked down in thought. Then she turned on her heel and strode back toward the Umbilicus.

  “Leave him be,” Kellhus called after her.

  She paused, did not so much look at him as turn her chin to her shoulder.

  “I cannot,” she said in hollow reply.

  “Then ware him, Esmi, attend to the limit of his chain. He is more hunger than human.” His voice welled for a wisdom indistinguishable from compassion. “The son you loved never existed.”

  Her eyes scraped the image of her Lord-and-Prophet. “Then I shall ware him,” she said, “as I ware my husband.” The Blessed Empress turned and vanished into the great tent of her husband.

  Kellhus and Achamian stared after her, and for a heartbeat, it seemed not a day had passed, and they stood as they stood in the First Holy War, boon companions on a murky trail, and the old Wizard found that no courage was required to speak.

  “In Ishuäl we saw where you kept your women … how the Dûnyain kept their women.”

  The haloed face nodded—more to the recollection than the words, it seemed. “And you assume this is how I have used Esmi. As another Dûnyain woman, a means to multiply my power through my issue.”

  The old Wizard shrugged. “She assumes as much.”

  “And what of you, old teacher? As Mandate Schoolman, you saw souls as tools as well, instruments of your ends. How many innocents have you placed on the balance opposite this wicked place?”

  The old Wizard swallowed.

  “Not those I loved.”

  A smile that was both sad and exhausted.

  “Tell me, Akka … What was the penalty for harbouring a sorcerer in Sumna during the Ikurei Dynasty?”

  “What do you mean?”

  Now the Aspect-Emperor shrugged. “If the Shrial Knights or the Collegians had discovered you all those years ago, what would they have done to Esmi?”

  The old Wizard fought to purge the injury from his glare. This was what Kellhus always did, a mad part of him recalled. Always exhuming shallow graves. Always murdering what piety you hoped to raise against him.

  “Dif-different times!” he stammered. “Different days!”

  Anasûrimbor Kellhus, Holy Aspect-Emperor of the Three Seas, loomed as the incarnation of tempest, as drought and plague. “I am a tyrant, Akka, the most terrible soul to walk this World in an Age. I have butchered whole nations merely to terrorize their neighbours. I have authored the death of a thousand thousand souls, glutted the Outside with the fat of the living. Never has a mortal been so feared, so hated, so adored as I …

  “The Hundred themselves raise arms against me!”

  He actually seemed to swell as he spoke, bloat across dimensions of dark import.

  “I am the very thing I must be, if this World is to survive.”

  What had happened? How had his cause—his righteous cause!—become smoke and conceit?

  “For I know, Akka. I know as a father knows. And so knowing, I compel sacrifice, I punish those children who stray, forbid those games that corrupt, and aye … I take what survival requires.”

  Be it lives or wives.

  Futility crashed upon Drusas Achamian then, all the more agonizing for its inevitability. He was nothing but an old madman, a crank who had nursed too many grudges for too many years to hope to see beyond them. Where? Where was Mimara? It wasn’t supposed to happen this way. Not like this! How? Why? Why deliver her to the Ordeal, only to chain her to her body? Why shackle her to her womb at the moment of their greatest need?

  Why? Why would the God pluck his own Eye now, on the very eve of the Second Apocalypse?

  All the years Dreaming, fretting, reliving the greatest Terror the World had known, toiling without sanction or purpose, drinking, raging, whoring, laying in mortal dread of slumber. And now … now …

  “Yes,” the Aspect-Emperor of the Three Seas said.

  It wasn’t supposed to happen this way.

  “But it happens nonetheless, Akka. A reckoning like no other.”

  Trembling. Shaking about an old man’s entrails, about the shame of being seen shaking.

  The blasted figure nodded. “You gave me the Gnosis because you believed I was the answer …”

  “I believed you were a Prophet!”

  “And you saw through that guise, saw that I was Dûnyain …”

  “Yes! Yes!”

  “So you recanted, repudiated, thinking me false …”

  “You are false! Even here! Even now!”

  “No. Merely ruthless. Only what I need to be …”

  “More lies!”

  A look of exquisite pity.

  “Did you think justice would save the World?”

  “If not ju—”

  “Did justice deliver the Nonmen? Did justice deliver the Ancient North? Look! Look about you. We stand before the very gates of Min-Uroikas. Look. Regard the Host I have assembled, the Factions and the Schools I have recruited, the might and glory that I have led across the desolate breadth of Eärwa, across innumerable leagues of screaming, rutting Sranc. Do you think goodness could have accomplished this? Do you think honesty could have compelled so many fractious souls? That fear of myth and legend alone could have served as my goad?”

  And he had looked—how could he not, knowing where he stood. His whole life he could only cry “Golgotterath!” and stamp his feet, knowing what was for him ages of history and horror was but an absurd word for others, a chit belonging to a lost game. And now here Achamian stood, hearing his very own cry on another’s lips, and turning …

  And seeing …

  “The Gods are witless,” Kellhus pressed, “blind for seeing all. The God of Gods is naught but their bewildered sum.”

  The nocturnal immensity, menace soaring to the stars, gleaming sterile beneath the Nail of Heaven.

  “No,” Achamian gasped.

  “Only a mortal can conceive what lies outside the sum of all, Akk
a. Only a Man can raise eyes to, let alone arms against, the No-God …”

  “But you are no Man!”

  So uncanny, his haloes, so impossible.

  “I am the Harbinger,” the glowing vision said, “a direct descendant of Anasûrimbor Celmomas. Perhaps, old friend, I am just human enough …”

  Achamian raised hands to either side of his head, staring so that the Holy Aspect-Emperor and the Incû-Holoinas complicated either edge of his vision, opposing augurs of woe, each shining as if oiled, each noxious as much for their Mark as for their hated memory.

  “Then show it!” he cried, throwing his hands out in sudden inspiration. “Cut Proyas down! Show mercy, Kellhus! Demonstrate the very salvation you have promised!”

  Each inhuman.

  “Proyas is already dead.”

  “Liar! He lives! and you know he lives! for you intended it! So show it! Suffer one snarl, one loose thread, in your accursed weave! Act as a human would! Out of love!”

  A bereaved smile, twisted into something leering by the Nail of Heaven.

  “And what are you, Holy Tutor, but a snarl, a loose thread that I suffer?”

  The Harbinger turned away, began striding toward the warren of beaten pavilions fencing the slope immediately below. Achamian opened his mouth in idiot protest, once, twice, like a fish left gasping in the dust. His voice, when it came, cut for desperation.

  “Please!”

  Drusas Achamian fell to his knees upon wicked Shigogli, old and wrecked and more confounded than he had ever been. He opened his arms, tears spilling hot, beseeching …

  “Kellhus!”

  The Holy Aspect-Emperor paused to regard him, an inked apparition, wrenching for the carrion profundity of his Mark. For the first time Achamian noticed all the faces peering from the shadowy slots about them, men squinting at the dark, wondering at the truth beneath the ancient tongue Kellhus had used to conceal their exchange.

  “This one thing …” Achamian cried. “Please … Kellhus … I beg.” Sobs shook him. Tears spilled. “This one thing …”

  A single heartbeat. Piteous. Impotent.

  “Tend to your women, Akka.”

  The old Wizard flinched, coughed for the pang in his breast, flew to his feet upon bursting rage. “Murderer!”

  Never had a word seemed so small.

  Anasûrimbor Kellhus looked to the Horns rearing into the firmament, the vast and malevolent gleam.

  “Something,” the monstrous entity said, glancing back, “must be eaten.”

  “Mummy?” the little blot of blackness called.

  Esmenet lifted the hood from her lantern, held the light out and away more to spare her eyes than to probe pavilion’s interior. She glimpsed bare corners, bellied seams, hanging swales of canvas bleached and mottled for long months on the trail. She smelled must and dank, the melancholy residue of some dead owner.

  There was something nightmarish about the way his image simply materialized from her blinking, bright against the bare dust floors, avid of expression, keen in the way of children newly awakened. He fairly radiated need and contrition. But the look repelled far more than beckoned, attached, as it was, to the hip of so many atrocities—so many outrageous crimes and deceptions.

  What was she doing? Why had she come?

  She had always found joy in the smallness of her children, their compact, wagging, wriggling bodies. The reckless, careless dancing. The heedless running. With Serwa, in particular, she had marvelled over the calm she found simply watching the girl traipse through the Sacral Enclosure. A kind of profound contentment, the comfort that bodies take in the apprehension of bodies they have made. But as much as Kelmomas’s appearance summoned the memory of that joy, it was also freighted by the insanity of everything she had since discovered—bloated, as if his image were a bulge of some kind, an evil cyst on the neck of the World. The little boy before her, the form she had so cherished and adored, had become a living receptacle, a philter brimming with chaos and poison.

  She exhaled, fixed him with a resolute gaze.

  “Mummee-mummee please-please-please liste—”

  “You will never know …” she interrupted, calling as if she were at market. “Ne-never understand what it is to have a child.”

  He was bawling now.

  “He-he was going to kill Father! I-I wa—”

  “Cease your blubbering!” she shrieked, bending, elbows to her waist, fists clenched. “Enough! I have had enough of your deceit!”

  “But it’s true! It’s true! I saved Father’s li—!”

  “No!” she cried. “No! Cease pretending to be my child!”

  This struck him as surely as a man’s fist.

  “I am your mother. But you-you, Kel, are no one’s child.”

  There it was … the same blank look that she had learned to see as wariness in her other children. How was it she had never seen it before?

  He was as mangled as the others. More, for his ability to appear otherwise … to mimic the living, the human. And it returned to her, then, the enormity of all that had happened. The deaths. The destruction. The bestial truth of the child before her.

  She fell to all fours on the dust, retched what little horseflesh she had been able to eat. She blinked tears, but she did not cry. She half expected him to seize upon this weakness, to cajole or to berate or to wheedle and insinuate—or even, as Kellhus had warned, to murder her.

  “Attend to the limit of his chain …”

  But he merely observed, as indifferent as any truth.

  She spat into the dust, noticed what seemed to be a finger bone breaching the powder. She looked up to him, raised a sleeve to wipe spittle from her chin and lower lip. Her white sleeve was stained yellow.

  “Why would he pretend?” he asked in a small voice. “Why would Father pretend that I lie?”

  The Blessed Empress regained her feet, brushed dust from her knees and sleeves, kicked sand across her vomit. Numb. She wondered if she had ever felt this numb.

  “I think—” she started roughly, only to be stymied by a thickness in her throat or tongue. She blinked, cleared her throat. “I-I think he believes that you believe.”

  A single heartbeat of calculation.

  “He thinks me mad, then. Like Inrilatas.”

  She pulled back her hair, spared him an evasive glance.

  “Yes.”

  Another heartbeat.

  “No one found anything in his hand.”

  “He was a believer, Kel … Just like the others.”

  The wide eyes narrowed. The cherubic face lowered.

  Shining from the ground, the lantern transformed the dust floors into a manuscript, every scuff and track a fragment of ink, shreds of some long-lost meaning. Kelmomas stood isolate in this mad sigil, like the last significant thing … Small. Frail.

  Her sweet, murderous little boy.

  He looked up, his expression far too composed for his heart to be anything other than wrecked.

  “Then why have you come?”

  Why had she come? It seemed an act of necessity, as natural as water pooling. She simply had no other choice. To be a mother was to migrate between perspectives, to become a vagrant nation, forever pursuing desires, defending interests, and suffering hurts proper to what were, ultimately, other souls. Sometimes those souls reciprocated, but so much was given in the end, so much surrendered and forgotten, that rank injustice was all but assured.

  Perhaps this was why she had come. To be wronged was the lot of mothers, to dwell with imposters, to give against any hope of recompense, to be deceived and ridiculed and exploited … and to be needed—with a desperation that dwarfed any one skin.

  Perhaps she had come to mother.

  Perhaps—

  “I see …” he said.

  The turmoil fell away, and she gazed at him with unflinching wonder, this child that perfumed slaves had pulled from her loins. She paused before fleeing, reached beneath her robe, withdrew the small file she had pilfered from the U
mbilicus. The sight of her tattoo arrested her hand, but for a heartbeat, merely. She tossed the implement to the ground at his little feet, where it seemed to smoke for tendrils of dust.

  Her final gift …

  Borne of the love most radical.

  Migagurit urs Shanyorta sat perched high on the Occlusion, occasionally glancing out across the plain to Shaita’anairull, the Grave-that-is-Golden, but for the most part studying the camps scabbed below. The fires were few. To an untutored eye, they could only deceive, give the impression of scant numbers spread thin. But Migagurit was an old hand at the ways of war. The Southron host, he knew, had taken to burning its own shelter and accoutrements, much as it had taken to consuming its own horses. All good omens.

  The King-of-Tribes would be pleased.

  As a memorialist, he knew well the lore surrounding this place. He had always believed in Lokung, had always assumed that Shaita’anairull was real. What shocked him was how much his belief depended on the unreality of the thing. For when he set living eye upon the Grave-that-is-Golden, he quailed rather than rejoiced, felt his innards spoil for apprehension. And how could he not gaze upon it, when it proved the horror was real, that he had truly worshipped murder all along? At last he dozed, his dreams troubled by the terrors that steamed up from the rocks …

  Lokung had not died easily.

  He jerked awake sputtering, wincing, rubbing his brow above his left eye. Something, a stone, had struck him while—

  He sat blinking in supernatural dread …

  A little boy crouched at his feet, flaxen hair shining white beneath the Nail of Heaven.

  “Are you Scylvendi?”

  Migagurit smiled harmlessly, then made to seize the apparition. The child vanished. The memorialist rolled to his feet and whirled, his senses afire. He clutched at his knife only to find it missing—

  He fell grunting, his calves flexed into unanchored balls in the crotch of either knee. A warmth in his heels bloomed into agony. He knew he was dead, but his body thought him a fool: everything became grunting panic. He dragged himself back on his elbows. His legs didn’t seem real. The child bounced as a shadow upon a string. Cuts fell as visceral pricks through a fog of bestial misery. Migagurit thrashed and convulsed, wagging hands and crossing forearms that only served to spark more musical laughter. His will finally stranded him upon the scarp’s edge, his back bent across the hump of a downward leaning rock, gasping in immobility.