Soon He stood stranded, hanging above an earth whose every ground had been overrun by white screams and raving appetites.
The Shroud engulfed first the Holy Aspect-Emperor, then his miraculous light in billowing obscurity. And for all his divine might, the Horde descended upon Golgotterath as if unhindered.
There are regions, places, gloaming tracts between the cruel edges and the mists—between the living and the dead. Hooks allowing the soul to linger beyond the moist endurance of the body.
Proyas lies breathing, naked and limbs askew upon the tiers, showered in the light of the very images that compel him.
The Horns soaring high as lightning. The black crab of Golgotterath, smoking.
The Shroud of another Horde, vast rags of ash roiling sunlit about gloom and darkness … nearing.
A silhouette appears below the spectacle, at the base of the breach in the leather wall—a physically powerful man, a warrior, sporting a Kianene helm. Even though he stands outside the Umbilicus, Proyas somehow knows the man belongs to the shadow play within, understands that he has always belonged, despite the madness and mayhem shouting the contrary.
The figure strides into the airy gloom, accumulating menace with warlike visibility. An entourage of armed wraiths follow, but they are obscured by his approach. Wild black mane. Stooped carriage. Scars upon scars upon scars—swazond without number. High cheekbones … and the eyes. His eyes. His unravelling look.
Cnaiür urs Skiotha strides up the tiers, rises to blot the smoke-roped vista of Min-Uroikas. His corded chest and torso lay bare in ritual display. Swazond are stacked in puckered sheaves across his entire skin, the record of his murderous life, shelling him. They encase his neck, a corded filigree that climbs the gunwale of his jaw, and reaches no higher than his lower lip … as if he were about to drown in his homicidal trophies.
The most violent of all Men.
Proyas gazes, blinking, but not for want of faith in his eyes. He lies beyond incredulity. Were it not for his anguish, he would have laughed.
He feels the thud of the man through the timber stringers. Cnaiür halts his climb upon him, as though he plans to prod him with his boot. Proyas could have been either blank earth or a murdered loved one, so titanic is the man’s gaze, so numb.
“I asked …” Proyas pants upon a grimace. “I-I asked … Him …”
The same eyes, irises blue unto white, pupils as bottomless as Carythusali greed. The same wild, ransacking gaze.
“Asked what?”
Even his voice has aged savage.
Proyas blinks, tries to swallow.
“How you died.”
The eyes narrow.
“And what did he say?”
“With glory.”
Another man would have balked at such a cryptic answer. Another man would have pressed, asked for details, laying out the entrails of the encounter, seeking to isolate some clear meaning. Not the most violent of all Men.
“He did this to you?”
A meeting of cracked lips. “Yes.”
There was something stronger than iron in their mutual regard, something heavier than ground.
The Scylvendi King-of-Tribes turned his head and spat.
“I was never such a fool as you.”
Again Proyas smiles, somehow anguished and serene.
“So … the argument … unfolds.”
The savage mien winced. “Aye. My feud is ongoing. But yours, Outland King, leaks from your insides.”
Proyas does laugh then, and weep. “Give it … time.”
The World is grey now, spaced in blurs of looming light … His mother giggles, teases him for having such lustrous curls … and there, clear as linen warming in sunlight, stands the Scylvendi barbarian who had delivered Anasûrimbor Kellhus to the Three Seas. Somehow stronger, the violence of his intensity more keen, for the leathery ruts about his eyes, the hide of beaded swazond, and the intervening decades of atrocity.
“From the beginning,” Cnaiür growls, “I hated.”
“And so … you were known …”
“He is the coal that kindles my wrath,” the Scylvendi retorts, “the knife that compels my will. Do you think I do not see this? Do you think I am numb to his depraved yoke? From the beginning! From the beginning he has ruled my obsession … And knowing this, I have thrown my own number-sticks. Knowing this, I have raised myself—by my own hair I have wrenched myself!—from his innumerable snares.”
And Proyas sees it, not so much the truth of the Scylvendi as the truth of tragedy, the doom of all doomed souls. To believe themselves set apart. To think all floods subside at their feet.
“He told me … He told me … you were coming …”
A look of sullen thoughtfulness.
“He is no God,” Cnaiür urs Skiotha said.
“And what is … he?”
A scowl.
“The same as me.”
Proyas understands the imperative to be wary, to measure the potential offense of each and every word in his savage presence. Malice flexes beneath his every movement, his every expression, a serpent awaiting the merest provocation to strike. His hulking stature and iron-strapped arms merely assure the outcome.
The Believer-King understands these threats, but feels nothing of their urgent clamour. It is a measure, he realizes, of where he stands on the circuit of death.
Proyas swallows, gasps against the plucking of something deep within his chest. “Do you truly … think … all this … is a ruse?”
Cnaiür drops as if to grapple or throttle, his teeth clenched, the pouched skin of his neck taut about flaring tendons.
“He!”
A granitic fist cracks the wood next to Proyas’s right ear.
“Is!”
A second thuds across the fabric spilled next to his left.
“Dûnyain!”
The most-violent-of-all-men arches like a lover over him.
“And I shall dog him! Snap at his heels! Bay through the watches of his sleep! I shall wait upon his outrageous arrogance, cast upon the obscene gluttony of his Mission! And when his diseased tools are spent, when he is battered and bereft, then—then!—I shall reveal the dread beam of my vengeance!”
“You … would risk … al—”
“What? Your great cities? Midden heaps! The fat of Three Seas? The People? Creation? Fool! You appeal to reason where there is none! You would put my hatred upon the balance with my desire—show me the mad wages of my design! But my hatred is my desire! My ribs are teeth, my heart a gut without bottom! I am fury incarnate, outrage become stalking sinew and flesh! My shadow cracks the earth, falls upon Hell itself! I smoke for the murder of innocents! And I shall sup upon his humiliation! I shall put out is eyes! Make adornments of his fingers! his manhood and his teeth! I shall hack him into the worm! the worm that is the truth!—truth!—of his nature! For he is naught but a maggot feasting upon carrion and corruption!
“The meat of you!” he howls, yanking high his knife …
Cnaiür urs Skiotha freezes, hangs as if upon the rawness of his own voice. And Proyas wonders at his own detachment, that he could see his life wobble upon a point, and not care, let alone fear.
The King-of-Tribes stands from his murderous crouch. “And you?” he spits, sheathing his knife. “Who are you to bandy reasons? You who have been trampled, you who have been thrown underfoot! When do the slain argue the righteousness of the slayer?”
The light greys. Proyas feels the empty air in his mouth, the absence of words or spittle. He sees … Serwë … standing two steps down. Unaged. Slight, waifish even, despite the barbarism of her costume. As beautiful as she was the day Sarcellus murdered her in Caraskand.
The mad King-of-Tribes bends his head from side to side in pursuit of a kink. The Sack of Golgotterath plays out in bright miniature against his profile, and Proyas finds his eyes drawn to what now seems a submarine drama. The Shroud of the Horde rears across the background, obscuring the far reaches of the Occlusion, challe
nging the Horns for the Heavens.
The light is dimming.
He glimpses intermittent threads of crimson, then the grilled face blots the spectacle once again, grimacing for perpetual disgust.
“He has used you up.”
And Proyas sees it across the encroaching gloom, images struck in the light of a less jaundiced sun. A different Age. A different Holy War. A Norsirai garbed like a beggar, mannered like a king—and a Scylvendi … “Yesss …”
And it seems impossible, the carelessness of that moment, that he had once held the Holy Aspect-Emperor and the Scylvendi King-of-Tribes within the compass of his mortal judgment. Had he felt it then, youthful fool that he was? Had he sensed the tickle of this mortal instant …
Way back then?
Turquoise scrutiny. Shit escapes the broken body below him, hangs animal. The light is dimming. The madman looks up into the gloom, his eyes counting the Circumfix-entangled insignia hanging from the void of the Eleven-Pole Chamber. He throws out his neck-breaking arms. “Burn it!” he roars, as if darkness and empty air were also his thralls. “Burn this place!”
Cnaiür urs Skiotha turns away, strides down to the grave shadows milling below—becomes a hulking silhouette once again. He barges through them, passes through the breach into swazond sunlight.
And Proyas lies breathing, as before, crafting each inhalation into shapes that might slip unnoticed between the swelling agonies.
He gazes through what seems a darkling glass.
Evil Golgotterath, like a wicked idol, squatting, watching beetles scurry about its horned feet.
Scylvendi throng in the foreground just outside, yelling, running, casting brands at the rotund walls of the Umbilicus … The light dims.
Moments pass before Proyas realizes one of Cnaiür’s spectral entourage has tarried …
Another silhouette. Another neck-breaking physique.
It approaches, parting smoke like ethereal waters. Once again, identity comes in stages. Once again, a familiar mien obscures the epic gleam of the Incû-Holoinas and the whorls of battle beneath. But this face is different, the ware of a more refined potter. The brutality bequeathed by the father has been tamed by the beauty of the mother, drawn into a more aquiline manliness.
“Mo-Moënghus?”
The dark Prince-Imperial nods. Obscurity plumes and bloats about his edges. The Shroud-of-the-Horde has become his halo.
“Uncle.”
And it seems proper, that this too, should be real. Geared in the accoutrements of the People, it is undeniable, the fact of what Moënghus is. So … something whispers within him. All truth shall be out this day …
“How?” he coughs. “What are … you doin—?”
“Shush, Uncle.”
Fire leaps through the Eleven-Pole Chamber. Anasûrimbor Moënghus hesitates, then raises a hand as great as his father’s, clamps it about Proyas’s mouth and nose.
“Shush …” he says with what seems an ancient melancholy. He has pondered this. He has resolved.
Convulsions wrack bloated flesh.
“You have lingered overlong.”
His strength scarcely seems human.
“And I will not let you burn.”
The Skeptic-King of Conriya suffocates. Light and image dissolve. His lungs cramp. A burning flashes from his bones. His flailing astonishes him, for he had counted his body dead.
But then the animal within never ceases battling, never quite abandons hope … Faith.
No soul is so fanatic as the darkness that comes before.
This is the lesson we each take to our grave—and to hell.
None knew who had stacked the great basalt megaliths upon the summit of the Upright Horn. For watches, the Horde-General had crouched beneath the greatest of them, sheltered from the sun under the veined canopy of his wings, gazing down over the burnished rim of the plummet, watching the play of pieces great and small across the immense, circular benjuka plate below. The Canted Horn reared vast to the south, his only companion in the yawning vacancy of the sky, a stooped and stunted sister, hazed more than obscured by the scant clouds breaking upon it.
How long had he waited? Even for a being so deformed, the passage of time seemed no less miraculous. Millennia had become centuries, and centuries had become years … and, now, mere watches remained. The sun would set upon their Salvation … at long last. Resumption.
The ancient Inchoroi terror stood erect upon the summit, heedless of the plummet, little more than a wick against the oceanic onset of the Shroud. His Horde had engulfed the western plains, drawing the dark promise of the Shroud across the western skies. Soon, so very soon, it would put out the cruel eye of the sun. Soon, so very soon, the Derived would fall raving upon the Trespassers, mount their labile corpses, and cleanse their filth from the stoop of the hallowed Ark.
Their chorus inflamed him. Chill wind scoured the golden pitch, knifed at his great lungs. On a whim, he raised his wings, allowed it to buffet him as a kite, raise him to the pinnacle of the massive stone. Looking out, he could see the very curve of the World, and he moaned for a sudden yearning to be raised higher, ever higher—to be pitched into the bosom of the infinite Void …
To walk above and between worlds.
A thread of scintillant crimson yanked his regard back to the beetles beneath him.
Fire consumed the Umbilicus, flames binding like momentary muscle, wrapping and unwrapping liquid bones. Anasûrimbor Moënghus wandered the perimeter of the conflagration, clenching and relaxing hands that would not cease shaking—especially his right, which still tingled for the mash of his Uncle’s beard. And he wondered at the smoking skin of the pavilion, how it heaved upon sheets of clean fire and plumes of noxious black, how it trembled and writhed as a living thing.
It was, he decided, a fitting pyre for King Nersei Proyas.
The Holy King-of-Tribes had led his barbaric entourage higher on the slope, where they now stood fairly encircled by more burning wrack, the rubbish that remained of the Great Ordeal’s belongings. Either custom or madness had granted his father three paces, for he stood encircled as much as accompanied, stripped to the waist save his nimil vest. Only grizzled Harlikarut, eldest living son of Oknai One-Eye, dared stand at his side. His Consult mother, the thing-called-Serwë, stood apart for a change, gesturing toward the very thing tyrannizing their communal barbaric regard: Golgotterath.
The constellation of puzzled squints sparked no curiosity in the Prince-Imperial. He had just suffocated a beloved uncle—a fact that did not so much occupy his thoughts as obviate any need for them. Some fury is simply too great to be perceived, too deep of keel, too broad of beam not to vanish into life. And so Anasûrimbor Moënghus had not the least inkling that he was about to murder his father.
“You would burn him alive?” he heard himself scream as he approached. “The man who saved you twenty-years ago?”
Several faces turned to him, but only those nearest. His father, a beacon of brutality even in such brutal company, made no demonstration of hearing …
His wasn’t the only outrage, Moënghus realized, glimpsing his counterfeit mother gesticulating between the taller Men. The load of gazes blunted, then finally heaved his glare in their direction. He peered over the burning tracts of encampment out to Golgotterath, Horns gleaming beneath the sky-climbing Shroud.
A line of luminous red flickered from the thigh of the Upright Horn to the termite confusion below.
“That is the sign!” his false mother cried—and in Sheyic, no less. The assembled Chieftains scowled for incomprehension.
“The Holy Spear of Sil!”
Even swamped by roaring flame and whooping warbands, her words rang as clarions.
“You are sworn, Son of Skiotha! We must strike!”
The Prince-Imperial climbed among the outermost Chieftains, peering at the preposterous beauty of his mother, wiping his palms against his foul Scylvendi breeches.
The Holy King-of-Tribes loomed before her, banded limb
s taut, hands clenching emptiness.
“You think I believe your nonsense?”
She seemed so slight in his overpowering shadow, so tragically beautiful, an emblem of a world desired, but never possessed … Never enough.
“Everything …” she cried, poised to flinch, to ward. “Everything you promised me! You swore an oath!”
The Holy King-of-Tribes reached out into her trembling aura, pinched an errant lock of her hair between thumb and forefinger.
“You think,” he grated, “your lies reek less? That you might succeed where a Dûnyain has failed?”
He clamped his right hand—scarred, burnt dark for cruel seasons of sun—about her swanish throat.
She gasped, raises ineffectual hands to the great wrist. “I am everything …” she coughed, “everything you need me to be!”
“You think I am so bent, so disordered?”
Both hands were about her neck now, thumbs digging not so much for her windpipe as her carotid.
“Lover!” she cried. “Assa—!”
“You think I beat you out of shame! Out of depravity?”
“Gnngh—!”
“Disgust!” the King-of-Tribes screamed, wrenching her neck. Shadow inked the crevices of his forearms, the striping of scars, the twining of veins. And he squeezed, driving thumbs like iron hooks, palms like grinding stone. “I battered you for obscenity’s sake!” he barked, his face a lunatic mask. “I tormented you to make you believe! Punished you to gull! To deceive!”
Her manhood arched turgid in her leggings. Noises cracked from her throat. Convulsions wracked her whipcord body. The alabaster perfection of her face perforated, flexed like some horrific gill …
Cnaiür urs Skiotha hunched over her now, corded as hemp, trembling with exertion, huffing air and spittle. His concubine’s body flailed cartilaginous for a heartbeat, an eruption of blind reflexes.