The Unholy Consult

  Then she was falling, tumbling with cracked ruin toward the trough.

  Everything was falling, everything slung or mortared across the skewed frame of the Ark, the dross of ages of inhuman squalor, the encrustations of millennia raining down the massive shaft of the Atrium. She glimpsed it as she toppled, the plummet of tremendous curtains beyond the gallery, heaps bearing the roaring Dragon-Prince down, more carrion for the false earth, before crashing into the slot above, a galloping surge of debris, coming down as an avalanche upon her—

  Father!

  The Sranc exploded from the breach as hard-pent waters, leapt hacking and stabbing into the astonished Tydonni thanes. Cleavers made clay of faces. Stone cudgels made bread of bones.

  The Sons of Plaideöl were as stalwart as any soul in the Host of Hosts, but the alchemy of events had plotted their undoing. The suddenness of the collapse. The disorder of the Mysunsai. The baffling terror of the Red Ghoul. These would have sapped the resolve of any soul whatever their mettle. The forward ranks dissolved in the threshing torrent of skinnies. Thane after thane fell in the frenzied heave: Lord Emburalk, famed for his monstrous stature, and for wielding a cudgel other Men could scarce heft, let alone handle; the fanatic Lord Byrikki, called the “Candlemaker” for all the Orthodox he had burned for heresy during the Unification; and many others lesser known. Plaideölmen, however, were a vengeful folk, more incited to outrage than terror by the fact of grievous losses. They would have rallied about their fallen kinsmen …

  Had not their legendary Earl stood at their fore. For all his storied feats in the First Holy War, Werijen Greatheart was no match for the rigours of the Horde. The tribulations of the Great Ordeal had whittled his age into doddering frailty, and like many warlike souls who had outlived their strength and glory, he yearned only for death in battle—verily, this was the reason Anasûrimbor Kayûtas had stationed him in reserve. He found gratification in the first moments of the onslaught, toppling beneath a Sranc who had vaulted upon his shoulders. The bestial creature made a soup bowl of his skull ere his bereaved householders killed it.

  Death came swirling down … bore him as another wailing prize to the gluttony of the Pit.

  So the ancient House of Rilding vanished forever, and the Red Sword standard of Plaideöl dropped to the carcass mats. Like cream spilled, hope is almost impossible to retrieve in the turmoil of battle. Loss begets loss begets loss. Terror is compounded. The resolve of the whole sags, slumps, then unravels into countless mortal coincidences. So did the long-bearded thanes waver upon the vestiges of their hatred before dissolving into horror and dismay.

  The vile surge consumed their floundering ranks, overran the Sons of Plaideöl entirely.

  The raving multitudes sluiced crashing into the Canal, fell upon the Sons of Ingraul, frantically forming ranks behind the shattered hulk of Gwergiruh …

  It could not be … the horror Malowebi saw boiling across the soggomantic sheen.

  Zeum was an ancient and imperial nation, pure of race and language, bound by strict law and subtle manner, steeped in millennial erudition. How could her Sons not hold the Three Seas in contempt? With its mangled maps and polyglot confusions, its perennial internecine wars over garden-plot provinces, its perverse need to forever dispute the sacrileges of their fathers. It was the nature of sausages to eat sausages, to undo what they could not outdo. So of course Malowebi had looked upon Fanayal and his motley court as barbarians, superstitious fools believing whatever their vainglorious agendas required—even more so when the man took Psatma Nannaferi as his concubine. A bandit Padirajah and an outlaw Mother Supreme! The dregs of yet another overthrown order …

  How could he entertain anything such outcasts might say? Especially when it confirmed Likaro …

  And now … there He stood.

  “Our differences are contingent,” the dread image of the Anasûrimbor said, “artifacts of where we fell once cast out of Ishuäl …”

  The Demon.

  “You were delivered to the machinations of the Tekne. And now you see it as the consummation of Dûnyain principles, the truth from which your very sinew and intellect are hewn. You think our error was to confuse the Logos with the movements of our souls, when in sooth it belongs to the machinery of the World. Your revelation was to understand that Logos was nothing but Cause as concealed by the darkness that comes before. You saw that reason itself was but another machine glimpsed in the blackness, a machine of machines.”

  There He stood! Malowebi could actually see …

  See Him.

  “You realized the Mission was not to master Cause via Logos, but to master Cause via Cause, to endlessly refashion the Near to consume and incorporate the Far.”

  His reflection twining and coalescing inward, sparking more and more with boiling discharges, bloating about glowering exchanges of submerged … power.

  “But where you were delivered to the Tekne, I was brought to the Gnosis.”

  Incorporeal, yet somehow more real than the pallid echelon of the Mutilated on their stairs, the bulbous distortion that was Aurax, or the masticating faces of the skin-spies thronging …

  “I seized temporal power, usurped the Three Seas as you have usurped Golgotterath. But where you saw antithesis in your damnation, a goad to resume the ancient Inchoroi design, I saw fathomless power.”

  The Four-Horned Brother had come …

  “Where you immersed yourself in the Tekne, took up the generational toil of recovering what the Inchoroi have lost, I mastered the Daimos, plundered the Houses of the Dead.”

  The Thief-of-Souls had found a way.

  “Where you would shut the World against the Outside, and so secure your souls against damnation, I would conquer Hell.”

  He had broken into the granary of the Living.

  “Where you would strike the Outside from the hip of the Real, I would enslave it.”

  And was about to plunder all.

  The Mutilated regarded the boiling image.

  “And if we choose to contest you?” the teeth-baring Dûnyain asked.

  Cinder black about the raging furnace within, the Four-Horned image of the Anasûrimbor raised its hand.

  Mekeritrig abruptly appeared from the nethers of the golden fin, clawing at the incandescent noose about his throat as some invisible force or entity dragged him across the obsidian polish, then hoisted him naked and gagging for the benefit of the expressionless Dûnyain. One of the mightiest Wills to walk the world, pinned to empty air, held upon the threshold of asphyxiation, utterly helpless.

  When the Infernal figure spoke, his voice rumbled as distant thunder.

  “You lured me here assuming the Inverse Fire would seduce me as it had seduced you. Failing this stratagem, you assumed numbers would serve you, that five would have no difficulty overcoming one. You need only cast my blasted carcass from the heights, and the Great Ordeal, dispossessed of its Prophet, would scatter to the winds.”

  Ajokli … the Appalling Father … Prince of Hate …

  “You lured me here because you assumed that this place, the Golden Room, was your place …”

  A God of the Tusk!

  “Even now you still believe that it is I who stand upon your Conditioned Ground.”

  Woe! Woe! An Age of untold woe was about to descend upon Men!

  “And how,” the burnt Dûnyain said, gesturing to the silent throng of skin-spies, “could it be otherwise?”

  Low growling laughter, terrifying for its immediacy, as if someone probed his ears with a knife-point.

  “Because in all the World, no place has witnessed more terror, more obscenity, brutality, or sublime trauma. Your Golden Room is scarcely more than a bubble floating upon the Transcendent Pit. Hell, my brothers. Hell pollutes its every shadow, smokes from its every surface, creeps through its every brace …”

  Again the creak of mighty torsions. Again the groan of warring angles. Like a troubled pool, the congregated reflections blurred for the passage of impossible forces. r />
  “Because, brothers, this place, more than any other on the face of this fat World …”

  The infernal image’s hand fluttered. Cet’ingira’s headless body flopped twitching to the black-mirror floors. The right hands of the skin-spies were yanked down in perfect unison, falling with the Evil Siqu’s decapitated head. The Chorae bound to their palms now nailed them to their obsidian reflections.

  The Anasûrimbor’s head dissolved into a jetting torch.

  “Is my place.”

  Malowebi screamed.

  The old Wizard could not breath.

  Not grey. Not purple.

  Becoming pink, flush with soundless shrieking.

  A son.

  Head craning, gazing through phlegm at the horror surrounding.

  He had a son …

  Stupefied perfection.

  Esmenet was laughing soundless, weeping soundless, cradling the infant for him to see.

  He had become numb unto vacancy, a hole blinking at a nascent soul.

  Miniature fingers, clutching bosom air, already reaching, grasping.

  And all he could think was, Another candle that would be lit.

  Another pyre that would be burned.

  Shame sent his eyes fleeing to Mimara, who lay gasping knees askew, her head vertically braced against the fell stone of Golgotterath. Her eyes had been seeking his, despite everything she had suffered. There was none of the exhausted relief he might have expected had he lived a life that could bear such expectations. Inhuman blood matted her scalp and cheek. Her face was drawn, funeral-swollen. Gone was the crutch and club of her anger, the obstinance of her mad ordaining. Gone was the indifference, the calluses of resignation worn into her by tedious months on the trail. No, acquiescence and acquiescence alone radiated from her look, a blameless will to yield her own life, even in the delicate glare of another’s dawning.

  He understood instantly what she said, even though he could hear nothing beneath the Horde’s savage choir.

  There’s another.

  He glanced back to Esmenet to communicate his alarm, saw the Canal beyond her—

  Glimpsed the first of the skinnies leaping like apes above the shifting forests of Men.

  Terror … stoked to such extremity as to be identical to agony. Had Malowebi possessed a body, he would have hung as if from a spike hammered into the back of his throat, kicked and clutched.

  “You shall be my angels,” the Ciphrang-God grated in a voice that was the exhalation of countless damned.

  The skin-spies heaved about them, the articulations of their obscene faces clenching for exertion, but their hands lay as welded to the obsidian floor. The reflected Inchoroi, Aurax, had scuttled from his dimple to cringe, behind the teeth-baring Dûnyain upon the farthest stair, his wings raised in a pathetic canopy. The Mutilated stood absolutely immobile, transfixed by the infernal apparition churning ink and fire before them.

  “You shall be my goad, the scourge of nations. Children shall keen for the simple rumour of your coming. Men shall rage and weep. And whatever horror and anguish you should sow, I shall reap.”

  “He hides here,” the one-eyed Dûnyain said, his face blank. “His siblings hunt him and he thinks he can hide fro—”

  The God’s reflection raised a clawed hand, and the reflection of the Dûnyain imploded as if upon a point, skull crumpling like foil, limbs cracking and bursting as if wrenched through a twig-thin embrasure. In a heartbeat, scarce more than mucous ruin remained.

  “Four brothers,” the Prince of Hate mused. “Four Horns. Together we shall gore this World, drink of it as a pierced fruit raised high.”

  The very frame of the Golden Room yawed about the diabolical intonations. The lament of ages filtered in from the encircling darkness.

  The four remaining Dûnyain exchanged looks.

  “The Inverse Fire is naught but a window into my House,” the Dark God-Emperor said. “You have seen what awaits you. Adore me, or suffer eternal damnation …”

  The Mutilated stared, their disfigurations their only expression. The skin-spies brayed, wagged and thrashed for terror. And Malowebi saw, impossibly, a little boy threading the spaces between their wild exertions, following a path that vanished behind the Grinning God’s infernal reflection. The Prince-Imperial? Several of the creatures began hacking at their pinned wrists.

  Malowebi sobbed, thrashed and flailed against his captivity.

  “I alone … Brothers …”

  But nothingness and nothingness alone was his prison.

  “I am the Absolute.”

  What could not be grasped could not be broken.

  CHAPTER

  NINETEEN

  Resumption

  And she shall wail, cry out to Us in the Heavens.

  For We would know what soul that mother hath delivered, and when.

  —Canticles 38:2, The Chronicle of the Tusk

  The King declared all revelation unlawful, citing the unrest of the masses and the lives wasted for fanatical distraction. Thus did water divination fall to the witches.

  —The Annals of Cenei, CASIDAS

  Early Autumn, 20 New Imperial Year (4132, Year-of-the-Tusk), Golgotterath.

  There are places that Men are brought from which they may never be retrieved, irrevocable places that, no matter how distant in years or leagues, will forever shackle them to terror and desperation.

  The old Wizard grasped a spear, hauled himself to his feet.

  A son.

  He managed to surmount the chest of a felled Bashrag. He teetered over the carnage, steadied, then stood peering down the Canal.

  He had a son.

  Sorcerous lights bloomed wondrous across the stepped walls of the Oblitus to his right. Fluttering white. Pulsing turquoise. Glowing vermillion. To his left, Gwergiruh stacked into the soot-black sky. Ingraulish axemen teemed across the wrack some forty paces or so before him, hastening to reinforce the great phalanx of their kinsmen bracing the throat of the Canal beyond. The Longbeards thrust and chopped across the fore of the black formation, toiling to stem the white-skinned deluge, Sranc masses leaping, popping like surf upon breakers, becoming a sizzle of maggots beyond the violet haze …

  So many. Too many.

  He had a son! Achamian realized.

  Suddenly lights flashed within Golgotterath’s ramparts. The old Wizard watched awestruck as Quya strode from the breach of Domathuz into the regions above the thronging slot, their skulls ablaze with blasphemous meaning, the canyon below erupting for their lethal ministry.

  The slaughter was absolute. The Canal was transformed into a great, rolling furnace, first engulfing, then incinerating the white masses. Panic overcame the remaining Sranc. Chaos dissolved into something more chaotic still. The Canal became a trough that boiled with ingrown lines of flight, a heaving in all directions. The iron-draped Ingrauls surged forward, hewing and thrusting.

  The old Wizard stood agape, his own Cant forgotten. None other than Lord Vippol himself floated at the fore of the Quya, decked in his antique wire armour, singing with the fury of those insane for growing old … And there!—there was Cilcûliccas, the Lord of Swans, the far-famed slayer of the Knifedragon …

  Kellhus had called on Ishterebinth, a numb fraction of him realized.

  The creatures fell as millet before the scything Sons of Ingraul; they burned as pitch-sodden torches beneath the singing Sons of Eliriqû. Sword and fire consumed the remaining skinnies. The Ingrauls raised their gored weapons in triumph, began streaming over the long oven floor to retake the breach.

  He had a son!

  By some caprice, Achamian caught the eye of Lord Vippol hanging above. The darkling gaze held his for a heartbeat, then turned away in disorder …

  And then it happened … the all-conquering roar of the Horde crashed into impossible silence.

  Ringing ears.

  A babe wailed … and it dizzied, so impossible was the sound.

  The very ground seemed to yaw for unreality, so ambient and
overwhelming had the sound been. Though it had stopped his ears for mere watches, it had become a thing primordial in that short time, a peer of Creation.

  The old Wizard cast about bewildered, saw every other soul doing the same …

  “It flees!” some Longbeard cried from the parapets above. “The Horde! Fleeeeees!”

  A babe wailed into the wake of the man’s ravaged voice, a cry like a bleeding reed.

  Achamian turned to the two women, Esmenet, crouched between the knees of her daughter, who grunted and keened. “D-do you he—?”

  A thunderous explosion of masculine voices seized all that was visible. Cheers, Achamian realized. Cheering. The Men of the Three Seas threw out their arms, seized one another in disbelief, or simply dropped to their knees and wept. Golgotterath boomed and resounded. Exultation cracked into unhinged exhibitions of incredulity and joy. Men curled into keening, snuffling balls. Men huffed and bellowed like beasts, beat their chests, kicked and stomped carcasses. Men seized elbows and danced their grandmother’s jigs.

  The blackness of the Shroud thinned about the back of the northern wind, became as smoked glass. A second daylight broke upon them, one not seen by mortal eyes in an age.

  The babe wailed. The mother sobbed. The second birth would be mercifully quick.

  Furtive in the celebratory uproar, Esmenet hurriedly cut the cord with Chipmunk, then bundled the blue slip in a swathe of cloth torn from a corpse. The old Wizard would never know what became of it, the dead twin.

  Holding the first bundle to her chest, Mimara wept uncontrollably.

  The old Wizard hobbled down from the Bashrag’s great chest, made a seat of its cauldron head. He propped his elbows on his knees, lay his eyes in his palms. Tremors wracked him.

  When was a thing over? When was tribulation complete?

  Drusas Achamian had a son.

  Sunlight fell as a healer’s hand, fingers breaking through the tatters of the Shroud, blessing pockets of ruin with dulcet illumination. Those touched looked out and wondered, their faces blackened for soot and gore. They saw rays as enormous as the Horn only spectral and pure, threading slow mountains of smoke and dust that tumbled orange, black, and dun to the rib of the sky, glowing through septic fumes.