How could it burn so, matching a child’s gaze?
“You speak as though to absolve,” Mimara said smiling, blinking tears, “to explain … even though you think you deserve neither absolution nor understanding …”
Ringing silence. Numbness.
“Yes …” she said, her heart beating cloth. “Kellhus said the same.”
“But Mother! I see you, Mother—I see you as the almighty God of Gods sees you!”
The Blessed Empress of the Three Seas flinched.
“That’s funny,” she said, reaching out to flatten bedding, “you sound just like Him …”
A smile, crazed and beatific. “Because he pretends to be what I am.”
“I liked you better when you were in pain,” Esmenet said.
Her daughter’s gaze did not so much catch as arrest her, absolutely, as if she only existed so far as Mimara could see her.
“You know …” the beloved face said. “You know what it is I’m going to say … and yet you cannot bear to hear it …”
Esmenet found herself standing, her back turned to her daughter, her whole skin bewildered and afire.
“Perhaps it is best, then,” she said stiffly, her voice nearly cracking on a sob that her breast refused to deliver.
“What is best?”
She turned, but could not bring herself to look directly at her prostrate daughter. She forced a smile.
“That we only have each other.”
Esmenet could do no more than stare at a point to the left of the pregnant woman, the prophetess—the stranger … She could only guess at the pity and adoration upon her face.
“Mother …”
Esmenet knelt, raised a bowl of water to Mimara’s lips, wondered when she had become so numb to the perversities of her lot. So many afflictions—too many, one would think, for any one soul to bear.
And yet here she was.
“Mother …” The woman’s look had a gentle urgency, a maternal conviction in certain things. She was the strong one now. The knowing one. From this moment, the mother would follow the daughter. “You can let it go, now, Mother.”
A narrow smile. “Hmm?”
“Mother …” Gelid brown eyes, seeing what no mortal should. “You are forgiven …”
Life slowed about its most inflamed gear.
“No …” Anasûrimbor Esmenet said on a smile far too honest for her liking. She wiped at her cheeks, expecting tears, found nothing save the grease of exhaustion and worry. Where? she wondered madly. Where had all the weeping gone?
“Not until I say so.”
The Soldiers of the Circumfix were hard Men, as inveterate as any in history. For a great many, the mad trek across Eärwa was but the most recent episode of an entire life spent embroiled in violence and war. They had celebrated triumphs. They had suffered reversals—even wholesale routs. They had ravished, plundered, and butchered innocents. They had made cruel sport of their captive foes. They had trudged through tempests of archery. They had thrown back the glittering charge of Orthodox knights, and they had been scattered, ridden to earth. They had been scorched. Many even bore the puckered and inflamed scars of sorcery.
So it was they suffered no true terror as they watched the wall of the First Riser bow and buckle. Swells of laughter could even be heard as wits called out ribald encouragement. A good number of Men grinned for anticipation as the sheets of masonry fell away. No experience they possessed could prepare them for what followed.
Of all the Inchoroi abominations, none were so unnatural as the Bashrag. They spilled from the cavities, poured like sewage into the gleaming stew of Mannish nations crammed into the Canal, shambling monstrosities, shagged with great black heads of hair, possessed of malformed, tripled limbs, armoured in gowns of iron weighing ten thousand kellics or more. The Men were scarce more than armed and armoured children before them. Even the tallest of the Tydonni stood no higher than their elbows. Only the Nansur Columnaries under General Tarpellas managed to impede their bellowing egress, releasing volleys of javelins in numbers that could bring down mastodons. But the breaches continued discharging the beasts, who leapt and stomped into their midst, squealing and grunting, heaving their shield-sized cleavers. Not a single grin survived that initial onslaught, but there was no shortage of bravery—at least at first. Men stabbed and hacked and speared. But the quarters were too close, the Bashrag too ferocious, too powerful, for them to slow, let alone contain, the rampage. Armour crumpled like foil. Skulls shattered like pottery. Shields were little more than vellum, things swatted and ripped away. The swinging axes halved Men where they stood, tossed whole torsos over the screaming tumult.
The Schoolmen watched from on high, dismayed for the mayhem, paralysed for want of any course of action. The cunning of their Foe was obvious, as was the objective. Attack the beasts from above, and they killed their own. Attack them from the ground, and they risked their own lives, for hundreds of the creatures bore Chorae. The ambush’s immediate objective was nothing more than to inflict losses, to murder as much of the Great Ordeal as possible on the doorstep of Golgotterath. Then Anasûrimbor Serwa, either succumbing to womanish fear or savvy to some other threat, commanded the Schools retreat …
Those who could looked up, saw the Grandmistress, her billows soiled with soot and violet, lead her Swayali back out over Ûgorrior. For all their hardness, panic seized the Men of the Ordeal.
Within heartbeats, it seemed, the Nasueret, Selial, and Circumfix Columns all but ceased to exist. The hallowed Nansur standard—the legendary breastplate of Kuxophus II, the last of the ancient Kyranean High Kings—was overthrown. Tarpellas, who stood upon the debris heaped against the rear of Gwergiruh bawling futile commands, was struck from the shoulder to the pelvis. Death came swirling down.
Maranjehoi, Grandee of Piralm and companion to Prince Inrilil, lost his right arm nearly at the shoulder, on a blow so swift that the dismemberment left him standing. He simply stumbled backward, fell onto his rump and back across the corpses of his kinsmen, gazed unblinking at the sky-hooking enormity of the Horns until he could do nothing else.
Bansipitas of Sepa-Gielgath fell. As did Orsuwick of Kalt and Wustamitas of Nangaelsa, both undone by anvil-sized hammers.
Death and more death, sweeping down and away …
Men began fleeing, or attempting to do so, for thousands found themselves trapped in the scrum about the breaches. Exultant, the Bashrag loosed a sinusoidal roar and stampeded into them, worked a great and grisly slaughter.
The surviving Believer-Kings in the Canal lamented, began crying out to heavens, calling for their Holy Aspect-Emperor …
A cry of masculine agony, muffled, yet near enough to hear the raw of it, the crack and gurgle of phlegm.
It yanked the Blessed Empress from her nodding reverie, sent her leaping to her feet. She stood blinking, listening, knowing in her bones that it had come from within the Umbilicus. She cursed Achamian, suddenly understanding that this was what had made his presence mandatory. No soul was more vulnerable than the birthing mother’s—save the infant she delivered.
She clasped the knife she had set aside for the birth-cord, crept to the threshold, pulled aside the image-panelled flaps.
“Mumma?” Mimara sobbed after her. Another seizure was nearing.
She shot an annoyed look at her daughter, raised a finger to her lips …
Then pressed through.
She crossed the antechamber. Her ears pricked, she strained to discern any sound over and above the background cataract, the distant chorus of killing and dying.
She slunk into the corridor, crept down its length, holding the knife point directly out before her.
She heard muttering voices … then a cough, apparently grievous for the pain it inflicted.
She slipped into the Eleven-Pole Chamber, crouched low behind her husband’s bench and dais, waited for her eyes to adjust. She crinkled her nose at the smell, noticed the Ekkinû Arras was missing …
“Here? A
re you sure?”
She nearly cried out for recognition, but stifled her voice out of fugitive habit.
“I need … to keep … watching …”
She peered into the airy interior.
“But there are beds!”
“It is … better … to see …”
Indirect light streamed through the missing fourth wall, the one Kellhus had torn away to reveal the wicked glory of Golgotterath. It fell across the raised wooden tiers, too diffuse to cast shadows, yet concentrated enough to darken the gloom surrounding. With his back to her, Achamian sat high on the arm of tiers opposite the great rip … ministering to someone laying naked and prostrate across the planks, his head across the old Wizard’s folded knee.
“You … you were right … all along … Right about him.”
Proyas?
“No-no … my boy. I was wrong!”
Esmenet fairly convulsed for the intensity of her shame—and relief. Of course he had left—as she had feared. And of course, he had returned …
He was Drusas Achamian.
Even still, she found herself voiceless and immobile, spying upon yet another luminous clearing from yet another murky bower—hiding, as she always hid, loathe to afflict others with her fraudulent presence …
The lesser reality of her soul.
“But he is false …” the ailing King of Conriya gasped, “He is … Dûnyain … Just as you said!”
Achamian raised an arm to the brightness, revealed his wiry profile for the merest of instants. “Look for yourself … Golgotterath falls!”
She could see nothing of the spectacle, given her angle …
“Does it?” Proyas asked on a heaving shudder.
And it astonished, even appalled, to realize that she had turned her back on the Apocalypse …
“Well it certainly burns …”
Anasûrimbor Kellhus, her accursed husband, played number-sticks for the very World—and she did not care … so long as Mimara remained safe.
“Ah …” Proyas said, his voice regaining, even if only for a heartbeat, something of its old warmth and confidence. “Yes … It must be nectar … for you … Narcotic even … A spectacle … such as this.”
Achamian said nothing, continued daubing his old student’s face. Pallid light showered down upon them, inking their undersides, bleaching them of colour, etching them in the monochrome facts of their mortality. A king dying upon a sorcerer’s lap … as in days of old.
Esmenet swallowed at the ache of her cowardice, her abject inability to either reveal herself or steal away. She remembered spying him unawares in Amoteu so very long ago, after reading The Holy Sagas for the first time … after spurning him for the delirium of Kellhus’s bed. She remembered the heartbreak of finally understanding him, the beauty that was his all-too-human frailty …
And it seemed nothing compared to this.
“Can you—?” Proyas began, only to have his voice stolen by some whistling pain.
“Can I what, dear boy?”
“Can you … you … forgive me … Akka?”
An insincere laugh.
“A wife’s curse is as worthless as a sorcerer’s blessing. Isn’t that what you Conriyans sa—?”
“No!” the King cried, obviously preferring the anguish of violent exclamation to any demurral or making-trite. “My name …” he continued on a grimacing voice, “will be the name … the name … that my children … my children’s children … will curse in their prayers! Don’t you see? He did not simply betray my body! I’m damned, Ak—!”
“As am I!” the old Wizard cried in smiling contradiction. Esmenet saw his shoulders hitch in a helpless shrug. “But … one learns to muddle.”
She understood then what a gift this was, the ability to negotiate terms with death.
“Yes …” Proyas replied, his voice once again wavering about the memory of an easy nature. “But this … Akka … This … is me …”
The old Wizard shook his head in slow incredulity. The two Men laughed, though only Proyas was punished for it. He gasped and wheezed about some pain, arched his back, revealing, for a heartbeat, the black maul of his pubis. The old Wizard clutched his beloved student’s scalp in his right hand, slowly drew his wetted cloth along the man’s chest, neck, and shoulders with his left. He continued doing this until the convulsions subsided—the same as she had done, and would continue to do, with Mimara.
Long moments passed in silence. Esmenet dropped from her crouch to her knees for discomfort.
“Such arrogance …” Proyas eventually said, his tone glassy, and alarming for it.
Achamian’s attention had drifted to what vistas his view afforded. “What?”
“Such … such arrogance … you would tell me … Such reckless, simple arrogance … to make guesses the measure … of worth …”
Achamian sighed, at last resigning himself to Proyas’s need to confess.
“Children often take me for wise. Children and idiots.”
“But I didn’t … I took you … for a fool …”
Achamian said nothing—evidence of some old and unaccounted bruise, Esmenet assumed. Such are the burdens we impose upon one another. Such are the plots we leaved unweeded, untilled.
“Can you …” Proyas asked on a tremulous voice forcefully breathed. “Can you forgive me … Akka?”
The old Wizard cleared his throat …
“Only if you hang on, my boy. Only if you li—”
But Proyas had pushed aside Achamian’s ministrations with the purple grotesquerie of a hand. He arched forward, gazing out to riot on the plain, only to be stalled by agony.
Esmenet caught her breath, loud enough to earn a momentary, backwards glance from Achamian.
Their eyes locked for but a heartbeat—two blank faces.
“Look!” Proyas groaned and gasped, waving an arm at Golgotterath, “Some-something … happens …”
She saw the old Wizard turn to the missing wall—and blanche.
Apart from the Scylvendi occupying the Akeokinoi, the Mysunsai and Saik Schoolmen reforming above Ûgorrior were the first to see … though initially many refused to credit it.
To the west, the Occlusion extended on a perfect arc, reaching out into hazy colourlessness, fencing all that was visible, until dwarfed by the wreckage-of-earth that was the Yimaleti piling white upon cerulean. None other than Obwë Gûswuran, Grandmaster of the Mysunsai, spied them, his eye drawn by a wick of dust or smoke …
Sranc, streaming down a gully in the western face of the Occlusion. More appeared at a different interval fairly a league to the south. More again at a point nearly between.
Then another greater mass to the north. An outpouring of thousands.
The Schoolmen traded shouts of alarm and consternation. Temus Enhorû dispatched triunes of Saik to inform Serwa, Kayûtas, and Saccarees. But it seemed they could already hear it, despite the hellish racket of battle below …
A titanic yammering, howling madness multiplied into a heaven-cracking sum.
The all-encompassing roar of the Horde.
Then, abruptly, like water breaking its bead, Sranc flooded the clefts and slopes of the far Occlusion, a writhing deluge of what seemed maggots in pitch. Teeming figures engulfed all save the most precipitous heights, in many places falling in sheets down cliffs and breakneck slopes, hundreds becoming thousands, thrown to their deaths by the vast surge. The dead and maimed tumbled down the mangled inclines, accumulated and accumulated, choking gullies, matting slopes, forming great ramps of carcasses, until those that toppled began leaping up, rejoining the rush—until the Occlusion became naught more than a collection of isolated summits in a cataract that heaved and rushed across leagues, pooling below and washing outward, a foul seepage of innumerable thousands …
The Schoolmen watched dismayed and incredulous. Some, those with more youthful eyes, sighted a lone figure standing upon Shigogli as if awaiting the torrents. They watched with wonder as the roiling masses advanced on him,
raising plumes and curtains of dust …
Only when the ground beneath the floating figure began belching geysers of ashen sand, flinging Sranc in blooms of white and violet wreckage, did they recognize their Holy Aspect-Emperor …
Standing solitary against the Sranc Horde.
Vile angel.
Its triumphant screech brings down a haze of dust and flaked mortar.
Kakaliol, Reaper-of-Heroes, dandles the thing in its fiery talons. Lolling limbs, head hanging as if from a stocking. Soft skin blistered or abraded or shorn away, a bladder for gelatinous innards and absurd quantities of blood, like an unwrung rag.
But where? Where is the soul?
Cast it aside, the Blind Slaver commands.
I would keep it for my token.
It runs a claw across the porcelain scalp, skinning it like rotted fruit, seeking …
Discharge your task!
The Arch-Ciphrang roars, clacks and stamps in impotent defiance. How? How can it pain him so? A world like bread. Like soap or cake. A world filled with dolls of meat!
And yet impregnated with pins, edged with teeth.
The pleasures I could have rendered thee, mortal … The delights.
I render here.
The Seducer-of-Thieves stalks into vacant blackness, bearing the carcass across a horned shoulder. Its hide sheds a baleful circle of illumination, one that pulses larger upon each bull-huffing exhalation. But nothing more than crude-cobbled floors are revealed, so immense is the chamber. Only as the burning trail of its blood lengthens are the limits—and the purpose—of the great cavity revealed: the cyclopean blocks, the massive square pillars … and the vast wall of gold …
Vile angel.
Kakaliol pauses between two pillars, rakes the gloom with its infernal eyes. It allows its prize to slop sizzling to the floors.
Yes … the Blind Slaver murmurs.
They stand deep in the bowel of the High Cwol, the point where the ponderous stone of Golgotterath marries the impenetrable skin of the Inchoroi Ark. The curve of the High Horn climbs vast before the demon, liquid with reflected crimson and seething, scintillating gold. A great chasm, some thirty paces wide and too deep to be fathomed, separates it from the floors, so that it plummets as deep as it soars high. The surface, however, is far from intact. A bridge spans the abyss, black stone raised across girders of gold, linking the floors to a gigantic rent in the Ark’s shell, one sealed and barricaded by stone bulwarks as mighty as any in Golgotterath, as if masons had bricked shut a rupture in a ship’s hull.