The Unholy Consult

  “Skuthula!” the man gasped, raising a hand that had been salted to the pith.

  Death came swirling down.

  Death lay heaped as midden throughout the Canal.

  Bashrag rose like speared bales; Men webbed all the spaces between. Blood had drowned all the depressions, forming pools with cracked ceramic rinds.

  The Exalt-Magus simply stood watching her wards. There was no talk, no reproaches or expostulations of gratitude, simply because there was no sound that could be heard through the monumental wail. The three refugees lay huddled, the two women upon some wall-hanging they had managed to rescue from the encampment, Drusas Achamian on blood-slicked stone. The old Wizard grimaced as he tore fabric from the corpse of an Imperial Columnary—to bind about his ankle, Serwa realized. Her mother lay slack and almost entirely witless against the wall. Mimara knelt at her side, attended to her despite the paroxysms of agony that wracked her. Serwa watched her pregnant sister thrust a finger into a leather pouch that she held cradled in a shuddering hand, withdraw it covered in dust, then press it between their mother’s lips …

  This small task completed, Mimara slumped onto her rump, surrendered to her anguish …

  Or was about to, for her look immediately fastened upon her younger sister standing above, clicked from point to point about her nude form, lingering on the blisters and ulcerations that were her only garb. Pity and horror. After a covert glance at the old Wizard, she proffered the pouch, wincing about some pang as she did so.

  Serwa hesitated.

  What is it? she asked with a look.

  She need only see her elder sister’s lips to hear his name.

  Malowebi struggled to recover his inner composure.

  “Before Sil,” Mekeritrig said, “it was Ark who commanded, Ark who apportioned, Ark who judged …” A wan and predatory smile. “And the Holy Swarm hung upon It as a babe from the teat.”

  The Evil Siqu leaned into the wavering fullness of the downward-burning light. He drew his hips forward, lowered a bare foot to the mirror-polish of the floor. There was a glory to his nude body, a perfection of manly form and proportion that was disconcerting. He reached to the left of the wicked Chair, stroked the long curve of what Malowebi saw was a scalp … the greater skull of another Inchoroi, resembling Aurang in every respect, save for its meek bearing. Where the Horde-General had imperiously consumed the space surrounding, this creature—Aurax, the Mbimayu sorcerer realized—shrank from it, as if simple emptiness were indistinguishable from mortal peril. It huddled against the Chair-of-Hooks as if stranded over a lethal fall.

  “A machine,” Anasûrimbor Kellhus said. “The Inchoroi were ruled by a machine.”

  Mekeritrig smiled. “Aye. But then the Inchoroi held that all are machines … not unlike the Dûnyain. Ark ruled simply because Ark was by far the mightier machine.”

  “Until the Fall.”

  The Nonman retrieved his hand, gazed without blinking at the Anasûrimbor. Aurax made as if to follow the caress, then shrank back to its grovelling station.

  “They were wrecked for losses,” the Evil Siqu replied. “Yes. But they were wrecked for the ruin of Ark most of all. They had become—How would you say?—parasites … Yes. Worms in the vast gut of Ark.”

  He stood to reveal the alabaster magnificence of his form—a beauty that rendered all mortality decrepit.

  “It was Sil who first climbed free of their stupor, who rallied the Divine Inchoroi Swarm. It was Sil who fashioned this place …”

  “Before Sil,” the Holy Aspect-Emperor said, “it was Ark who commanded.”

  Malowebi found himself confused by the repetition, until he realized that the Anasûrimbor tested the ancient Erratic, probed the limits of what must have been an ailing memory.

  A bleary, scowling look. An ancient indecision.

  “It was Sil who raised the Inverse Fire from the Bowel,” Mekeritrig continued, “installed it here, so that all who petitioned him might fathom the Onus.”

  “Yes …” the Anasûrimbor said with peculiar distraction. “The reason all mention of this room was struck from the Isûphiryas.”

  It seemed clear the Inverse Fire was the brazier hanging inverted and elephantine above them—as was the fact that the Anasûrimbor (whose face remained hidden) gazed into it. What perplexed and worried the Mbimayu sorcerer was the Evil Siqu’s triumphant sneer …

  “I cannot but envy you,” Mekeritrig said, stalking about the gossamer phantasms reflected across the floors. “And mourn. Yesss … Seeing the Inverse Fire for the very first time.”

  Aurax shuddered at his departure, lowered its chin to its feet, seemed to whimper.

  “We entered from over there,” the Evil Siqu declared. He cast some Quyan version of a Surillic Point on an arcane whisper, threw it out upon a flung arm. The white light made liquid of the obsidian floors and fractured confusion of all else, thousands of shining white points slipping like oil across myriad intricacies of gold. It paused above the first in a series of six stairs that simply plummeted into the black sheen. The original golden room had been a juncture of some kind, Malowebi realized, opening onto a dozen or so corridors that, capsized, had become stairs, six descending from the level of the new floor to their left, and six ascending to their right.

  “There were three of us,” Mekeritrig continued, raising his eyes to the Inverse Fire. “Wise Misariccas, cold and cruel Rûnidil, and myself. We were wary. Sil had managed to turn not just Nin-janjin, but all of the Viri—a people famed for their mulish will! We knew it had something to do with this place …”

  The Nonman glanced back toward the Anasûrimbor in a covert manner—dark humour flashed in his eyes … and satisfaction.

  “But nothing more.”

  As far as the Mbimayu sorcerer could tell, the Aspect-Emperor continued peering into the flames …

  What was happening here?

  “How well I remember!” the Evil Siqu gasped, raising his face as if to some morning sun. “Such … glorious … horror …”

  What was the Inverse Fire?

  “Misariccas stood where you are standing … transfixed … unable to tear aside his gaze …”

  Some kind of sinister weapon?

  “Rûnidil—always so harsh, so contemptuous of display!—he fell there … began weeping, bawling … grovelling on his belly and crying out gibberish!”

  Were they already doomed?

  “And you?” the Anasûrimbor asked.

  It was not manly, the gratitude that washed through him for hearing the man speak.

  Look away! he cried in his thoughts. Turn down your eyes!

  The smile that hooked the Nonman’s lips was as unseemly as any the Mbimayu sorcerer had ever seen. “Why … I laughed …” A sudden frown seized the porcelain features. “What else does one do, learning they had lived and murdered for the sake of lies?”

  Mekeritrig gazed back up into the Inverse Fire with an attitude of sharing something sacred—miraculous.

  “I am whole in its presence,” he said on a profound sigh. “Present.”

  The Anasûrimbor remained conspicuously silent—and motionless.

  He deceives you! Lulls you!

  “You should have heard my stalwart Ishroi brothers rant upon our return! We’re deceived! We are deceived! We’re damned all of us! Condemned to eternal torment! The Inchoroi spake true!”

  Laughter, peculiar for its fragility.

  “Such fools! Speaking truth—unthinkable, unlivable Truth!—to power, any power, let alone that of a Nonman King! Oh, Nil’giccas was wroth, demanded that I, the silent one, the cryptic one, explain their blasphemy. And I looked to them, Misariccas and Rûnidil, their eyes so certain that I would confirm their manic claims, certain because we had become brothers the instant we had gazed up into these flames, brothers possessing a bond that no coincidence of blood and bone could rival. They looked to me … eager … dismayed and disordered … and I turned to my wise and noble King and said, ‘Kill them, for they have succ
umbed as Nin-janjin had succumbed …’”

  Another laugh … this one intentionally false.

  “And so was Truth saved …”

  The Evil Siqu looked down once again, blinking as if at some arcane disorientation.

  “For Nil’giccas would have murdered me as well, had I not.”

  And it seemed to Malowebi that he floated, his every experience nothing more than a bubble drifting through cold horror. For he at last understood what it was, the Inverse Fire …

  And the object of the Anasûrimbor’s enraptured gaze.

  Damn you, look away!

  “What was I to tell him? That the hallow Between-Way was a fraud? That everyone he had lost, his comrades-in-arms, his son and daughters, his wife! Was I to tell him they all shrieked in Hell?

  “Look!” the Evil Siqu cried, gazing upward, hands drawn up in horror and incredulity. “Look, Dûnyain! Look at the heinous madness of their crimes, the way they unravel you! Suck the grease of anguish from your very thread! Unthinkable trespasses! Raped to the being! Decanted into screams!”

  “Nay …” he suddenly laughed, a mania shining through his gaze. “There was no explaining this. Not to Nil’giccas—or any Nonman King. That was what Misariccas and Rûnidil failed to reckon: the Inverse Fire cannot be told …”

  Cet’ingira fixed his darkling gaze on the Anasûrimbor.

  “It must be seen.”

  “Skuthula!” the Exalt-General bellowed into the cracked throat of the Obmaw. “I would parlay with you!”

  The sooty blackness remained every bit as inscrutable.

  Apperens Saccarees stood at his side, but no one else, some twenty paces out on the saddled causeway. Over one hundred Ainoni Knights had just died attempting to swarm the Intrinsic Gate: their charred and smoking corpses matted the floors both about and within the blasted hole.

  “Skuthula! Speak to me, Black Worm!”

  A lesser man would have yelped at the sight of great, serpentine eyes opening in the darkness, black slashes for pupils, embedded in irises that flexed like a weave of golden blades. Even Saccarees shrank back a step before recalling himself. Anasûrimbor Kayûtas merely stood as inscrutable as before.

  “Whooo?” the Wracu intoned on a gaseous croak. A malefic orange glow revealed the breadth of its jaws, made one hundred silhouettes of its scimitar teeth. “Who believes reason might prevail where sword and sorcery fail?” An incandescent grin, like a blazing furnace seen about a corner …

  Laughter like tumbling heaps of coal.

  “Anasûrimbor Kayûtas! Prince-Imperial of the New Empire! Exalt-General of the Great Ordeal!”

  “Ahhhhh … Namesake of the Accursed Slayer.”

  “What binds you, Wracû? How have you been enslaved?”

  “You would bait me with your insolence …”

  “You are chattel, a dog chained to the stoop of your master!”

  “I am no more a slave than you are the Slayer.”

  “Indeed, Wracu, I am not my namesake—any more than you are Skuthula the Black, the Great Obsidian Worm!”

  The golden eyes snapped shut, then reopened narrow with malice, hatred, and suspicion.

  “I shall savour thee, manling. Cunning makes the flesh swee—”

  “What happened to the great and terrible Wracu of legend?” Kayûtas interrupted with shouting violence. “The Skuthula I know roosted upon the summit of mountains, tyrannized the very Heavens! Who is this imposter who skulks and snaps from a badger’s hole?”

  The Exalt-General’s voice peeled across the soaring gold faces, hung for a heartbeat before vanishing into the Horde’s ambient wail.

  The Wracu’s eyes narrowed ever further, became slits bent into shining bows. Orange light waxed behind the cage of teeth, limned the crocodilian scowl …

  Then the leering visage disappeared.

  The two Men stood waiting, peering.

  “Just as the legends say,” the Mandate Grandmaster finally murmured. “Bodies scaled in iron, souls skinned in gauze …”

  The Obmaw hung slack and ruined before them, utterly empty.

  “Too much so,” Kayûtas said. “I fear he will die before relinquishing Obmaw now.”

  “Perhaps not,” Saccarees replied. “Perhaps he has already abando—”

  The twinkle of light in the portal’s black gullet stole the Grandmaster’s words …

  Spewing, exploding brilliance engulfed all else.

  “Have you found yourself?” the Evil Siqu asked, his voice silken and oceanic.

  “Everyone who looks finds themselves, everyone who has dared any kind of greatness in this accursed World.”

  The Mbimayu sorcerer howled in voiceless fury, as much for impotence as for what transpired.

  Avert your eyes!

  “Do you see, Dûnyain?” Mekeritrig screeched with sudden intensity. “Do you see the necessity of Resumption! Why Mog-Pharau must walk! Why the World must be shut!”

  The Anasûrimbor had not moved in the slightest.

  “Tell me that you see!”

  Malowebi might as well have been bound to a post.

  “I see … myself … Yes.”

  A scowl hooked the Evil Siqu’s zeal into something less certain.

  Malowebi found himself caught on wonder.

  “But you feel it … like a memory that resides in your veins …”

  Deny him! Please!

  “Yes.”

  What was happening? The Mbimayu sorcerer wanted to believe that the Anasûrimbor had somehow prepared for this threat. But Mekeritrig so utterly assumed the Inverse Fire would reveal … What? The truth? Could a deeper, far more horrific layer of revelation lay beneath what he had already grasped …

  Could the Aspect-Emperor be deceived?

  Schoolmen were loathe to ponder Hell. They built innumerable habits of avoidance into their lives.

  The infamous Nonman Outlaw gazed back up to the Inverse Fire—what for Malowebi remained a play of spectral incandescences across the mirror-black floors. Convections cast shadows like liquid or smoke across the length of his chiselled white frame. After several heartbeats, an opiate glassiness emptied his look.

  “After a time,” he said vacantly, “the sheer profundity of it, the monstrous scale of the anguish … it becomes soothing … sublime …”

  The sluicing of firelight across white skin.

  “And never … never repeating, always different … like some kind of broken arithmetic …”

  Horror cracked the white enamel of his expression.

  “We call it the Goad,” he continued, a ferocity cracking through his voice. “It is what has bound our Holy Consult these thousands of years …” A seizure of anguished fury. “To see the crimes committed against us! That is what drives us to blot the foul abomination that is this World! The torments revealed by the Inverse Fire!”

  He had fairly screamed this, and now he stood riven, sinews finning his neck and arms, his hands clutching emptiness.

  “But I suffer no torment,” the Anasûrimbor said.

  Malowebi hung in numb oblivion. Mekeritrig was several heartbeats blinking before he could properly peer at him.

  “So you think the Fire deceives?”

  “No,” he replied. “This artifact senses the continuity of the Now with our souls as they exist outside of time. It siphons it like sap, boils it into an image the Now can comprehend. The Fire burns true.”

  Pained scowl. “Then you see that you are my brother?”

  The Golden Room swayed across the belly of Malowebi’s visual field: the Holy Aspect-Emperor had finally turned to face the founding soul of the Unholy Consult.

  “No …” the Anasûrimbor replied once again. “Where you fall as fodder, I descend as hunger.”

  Death.

  So cool in the harem tangle. A Bashrag lay with its black-shag head in the crotch of its triune arm, like a child counting in a game of hide-and-seek. A Nansur Columnary sweated beneath, sprawled like something dropped from the sky. Another r
eclined almost as if snoozing, save for the unnatural crook of his neck where his head pressed against the trousered thigh of the former. A severed arm reached out, intent on tickling his ear …

  And it all … tingled.

  There was a simplicity to things dead, a stillness that was singular for perching within the husk of motion. And it struck her as the most beautiful thing, the immunity. To live was to grind possibility into an endless thread of actualities, to slough moments like a serpent shedding an infinite, anguished skin. But to die … to die was to be, to dwell with the ground as ground, an obdurate and impervious extension.

  Imagine never having to breathe!

  She gazed at the decapitated head of a handsome man, young, with fulsome lips and straight teeth set in a lantern jaw. How she had once prized young, handsome Men, wondered how even their filth could feel so clean. She imagined catching his eye in some gilded corridor on the Andiamine Heights, upbraiding him for some contrived oversight, a naughty old queen, flirting …

  But then her gaze caught upon an Ursranc pinioned between human legs, and she found her fancy overthrown … for the creature was more handsome—and all the more repellent for it.

  Tingling … within her and without.

  She drew a finger across her lips, and blinking, turned to the commotion to her right, saw her daughter, Mimara, screaming soundlessly at her side, and her lover, Achamian, holding the pregnant girl’s hand, shouting words no one would know. She reached out, laid a tentative palm across her distended abdomen, wondered that it was so warm …

  Birth.

  And on a sharp intake of breath, her macabre tranquillity was expelled, and all the riotous urgency of living crashed through her once again.

  All the dead eyes about her, even those cooked to snot in blasted sockets, turned away.

  The Evil Siqu regarded him narrowly.

  “Subterfuge!”