The Unholy Consult

  “Can’t you see?” she screeches. “Looook!”

  Her tone is so wild, so stricken, that it claws the fabric of every soul in earshot. The cheer cracks and dissolves into bewildered peering. Achamian might have been toothless for the way he gaped.

  The Most Holy Aspect-Emperor stands luminous in the sunshine of a different day, a different World. He nods in forbearance.

  “Daughter?” he calls on a smile.

  And she blinks and she blinks and yet still it hangs there … scarab shining …

  “What is it?” Anasûrimbor Kellhus says, though he is nowhere to be seen. “What ails thee, Mimara?”

  A sarcophagus, iridescent black, hovering where her stepfather stands robed in shining white …

  His leonine image smiling …

  Forgiving …

  Saying …

  “Tell me …”

  The Upright Horn groans with cataclysmic power. The first gust falls upon a vast and chilling gyre.

  “What do you see?”

  Skirts of dust leap and skid across the Shigogli.

  The old Wizard lets slip her hand for trembling.

  WHAT AM I?

  CHAPTER

  TWENTY

  The Furnace Plain

  Twas words that packed the earth.

  Twas words that flung the sky.

  Twas words that made us beautiful,

  ere our Faith became our lie.

  Twill be words that crack the earth.

  Twill be words that low the sky.

  Twill be words you hear us wailing,

  ere the day we die.

  —The Heaver’s Song

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

  Ever does oblivion whisper deceit to time, flattening afternoons into heartbeats, stretching blinks into mornings. Malowebi awoke as from death. It felt like watches had passed, or even more, the rolling of the days, the tumble of years. But mere instants had passed in sooth.

  He hung as before, his hair bound to a warrior’s girdle. He could see his crazed prison mirrored in the soggomant as before, the ovoid smears of the Decapitants strung from the hip of a …

  A statue?

  Tall before the black depths. Bearded in the antique manner. Helmless, with hair braided across his nape, wearing what seemed an elaborate robe …

  The pillar of salt that was the Aspect-Emperor.

  Anasûrimbor Kellhus.

  A feeling … thus began the new Years of the Crib. A feeling not known since Far Antiquity, since the weal and woe of the Apocalypse.

  It was identical in all souls in all places, be it the rice-paddies of southern Zeum, the humid canal-ways of Invishi, or the looming turrets of Attrempus. Whether alone or in their thousands, Men leapt … then turned to the northern horizon, peering. Wives caught up crying children. Priests trailed mumbling into silence, clutched fetishes in palsied hands. Every soul living caught their breath, their tongue, and hung upon the feeling …

  Like falling.

  Like a great inhalation of essence from the World.

  Not a soul could reckon the feeling in ancient days, at least not initially. Some even dared laugh in wonder, marvel at the absurdity of a horror without object, a knowing with direction only, a passion that moved all souls as one. Only when the first mothers began shrieking could they fathom the significance of what would be called the Boding. All souls recognized it now, at least in those nations celebrating The Holy Sagas as scripture. For the faithful of the Three Seas, the Boding dread was itself dreaded, the thing wives and mothers prayed most ardently against.

  And so wailing filled the great fleshpots of the South, the lament of believers confirmed in disaster and unbelievers dismayed, doubly overthrown. Families gathered on the rooftops, made demonstration of their grief. Riot embroiled temples both humble and great, so desperate were souls to entreat and repent. The Hagerna in Sumna, already battered for the quaking wrath of Momus, was set alight, burning above the city it had forever starved. Only the mad took to the streets and alleyways, otherwise, crying out what every heart already shouted. The Boding! Sweet Sejenus, the Boding was upon them!

  The Great Ordeal had failed!

  Very few heard the mothers shrieking this time, so universally did souls call out their own grief. And those who could hear them, their midwives, found themselves too astounded, too mortified, to minister as a Yatwerian priestess should. No womb-prayers were offered, no name-tiles were cracked and pestled. The condolences, such as those that were given, were distracted, for they, and they alone, could recognize the feeling as one they had suffered before, as a feeling uniquely their own, the anguish of a stillbirth guessed and not yet known. The Bode of legend was their boding, the premonition both of tragedy and the necessity of running tragedy’s course …

  The feeling of birthing the dead.

  And they wept, knowing that every womb was now a grave, and they had become diggers.

  The Death of Birth.

  It towered so high over them one had to kneel to apprehend—kneel to see!

  The Carapace.

  Hanging coal-black above the mobbed terraces of the Oblitus, drawing curtains of dust on vast and invisible rings across the Shigogli. Hanging as it had in so many of the Dreams, only absent the eleven Chorae once affixed to its seams. There! In waking life!

  Mog-Pharau.

  Obsidian against mountainous gold. The sky groaned and clotted above the Upright Horn, clouds piling outwards and up, obscurity belching obscurity. Bluff winds sent detritus scratching across faces of stone. The first tendrils of black began circling Shigogli.

  Mimara had folded about her screaming, her gaze fixed at a deranged tangent, her face quivering for exertion, howling out spit and outrage and incredulity, as if she aired each and every indignity—from flints in her sandal to mad Nonmen kings—she had suffered the seasons previous. Achamian and Esmenet hauled at her, pulled her down the direction of general flight. The babe squalled in the Blessed Empress’s arms. His living, breathing son.

  Hundreds, nay, thousands ran with them, Ordealmen bowling between other Ordealmen standing like posts in cement, faces raised in witless confusion, fixed in the aimless rush. It was the same throughout the smoking hulk of Golgotterath. Upon the stranded walls, over the matted dead, the Men of Three Seas cracked as if upon some inner joist, dividing into those too dismayed to yield their ground and those too dismayed to hold it. A filter fell across the sun, made ochre of gold, wax of nimil. The Upright Horn throbbed so deep that only marrow could hear it. Gusts laved them, throwing hair across mouths, flicking grit into eyes. Faces took to grimacing when turned into the gyre. Those upon the heights raised the crotch of their arms in warding.

  And it towered over them, a black so deep as to mirror the terror beneath.

  The old Wizard sobbed as he hobbled about and over the corpses, spat at the bile. A crazed diversity of shouts scraped the air, cries that washed into ocean surf for sheer numbers. Towering warriors barged about and between them. His leg shrieked. He passed a Cuarweshman wrenching his beard from his bloody jaw. He passed an Ansercan Columnary squatting upon his helm, cackling into his palms and calling out numbers. He passed faces beaten to swollen clefts, and faces without a fleck of blood. He passed faces squinting up as though to gauge the morrow’s weather, and faces breaking … about losses, realizations, limits, all those things peace cannot bring.

  He slowed not so much for understanding as recollection.

  Mother and daughter swivelled inward in alarm, but his reassurance exploded about an impact from behind, and he found himself gulping air on all fours, staring into the upturned face of a Nonman, cold and flawless as porcelain, propped so as to bestow a drowsy, open-mouthed kiss. And he could feel it, the plummet hanging in the sky above all of them, the fatal fall made incarnate, and he did not despair.

  This time it was Mimara exhorting him, begging, tugging on his rancid furs. He did not so much see her as see her stained hand
s, shaking, fumbling the pouch, spilling the cannibal ash—the Qirri. He fairly gagged for the amount she jammed into his mouth, hacked muck between clenched teeth, reflexively swallowed …

  A babe squalled.

  He snorted the ash of Nil’giccas from his mustaches. Lightning fell through him in shivers. He reared back on his knees. A Swayali strode out across the emptiness above the panicked terraces, wreathed in golden incandescence. He saw her gaze into the sky. He saw numberless, windblown grains explode into smoke across her Gnostic Wards. He saw that she was Seswatha, beaten and weary, hounded across the back of the World, and so very, very old.

  Drusas Achamian did not so much understand as belong.

  “Irjulila …” he began chanting, “hispi ki’liris …”

  His voice glared across the wrack, and he glimpsed his hermit-wild face reflected in the Quya’s dead gaze, his eyes sparking blue under birdnest brows, his mouth a hole of brilliance in a whitewater beard. He shrugged aside the ministry of small hands, turned his back to the Bode, hobbled out beyond the wrecked battlements of the Ninth Riser. Wind flailed his eyes, his skin. He looked out over the surging channels of Men, out beyond the revolving shrouds of grey and black, and saw the Horde’s grotesque rim closing upon Golgotterath once again …

  And he thought, Yes … I have been here before.

  His voice cracked the ribs of the horizon.

  “Flee! Flee, Sons of Men!”

  And for a heartbeat all the beleaguered and begrimed faces turned to him, gazed upon the pelt-heaped aspect of the Wizard. His arcane shout fell upon them as Heaven’s own Rod. Those already fleeing surged, while those yet loathe to run crumbled into the tide of their brothers. What had been erosion suddenly became a landslide, currents of men loosed within packed masses, spilling out and down, splashing into pitched battle across a descending array of blockages. Within heartbeats, castaway shields scaled the visible ground.

  “The Second Apocalypse!”

  He looked back to the astonished faces of the women he loved, saw their beauty flinch for the thunderclap that was his shining voice, the calamity that was his black declaration.

  “The Second Apocalypse is upon us!”

  And from the heights of the Oblitus, it seemed the ground moved backwards, so vast was the exodus to escape it.

  Still floating, Drusas Achamian reached for Esmenet, who deftly joined him upon the phantom plate, slipping one hand about his waist, while holding her wailing grandson tight to her breast with the other. He turned to Mimara, grinned as Seswatha had always grinned in the twilight of ruin, a smile that only intimates of doom know, souls stripped to the bald fact of love.

  She gawked at him, shrugged about a sob. How? her look did not so much ask as ache. How could this happen?

  The Upright Horn towered, seized frost from the empty heart of the sky, a bulk that forever plucked the instinct to cringe. The Great Ordeal drained from the cracked black bowl that was Golgotterath, spilled toward the east. The winds crossed some threshold of violence, and Esmenet buried her face in the old Wizard’s pelted shoulder.

  Mimara, for mad reasons all her own, endured the pinprick lashing, glared at the father of her child, weeping freely, asking how … Sweet Seju …

  Why?

  Achamian extended his hand. “Please,” he called across the bloating roar.

  There is knowledge in our manner, ways to prove that utterly elude the apparent sunlight of speech. Sorcery does not exhaust the miracles of the voice: with one word, it seemed, he had demonstrated to her what tomes of disputation could never do.

  Apocalypse was his birthright.

  Horror yawed above them, a light that struck only souls. She pawed at her tears in fury, withdrew the pouch bearing her two Chorae, the one that had saved them in the bowel of Cil-Aujas, and the one she had looted from Kosoter’s corpse at Sauglish. In a single motion, she pulled the thread about her head and cast the pouch out over the void of the Oblitus. No eye followed their descent into the wrack and panic. Her last proof against him.

  Anasûrimbor Mimara stepped teetering to the brink, then took his sorcerous hand.

  The Aspect-Emperor was dead.

  Never had Malowebi been so immobile, so windless within. To be bodiless and still is to cease to exist.

  Memory retrieved him, hoisted him on the back of images across indeterminate cavities. Ajokli—the Four-Horned Brother!—not simply here, but inhabiting Anasûrimbor Kellhus. The clawing implications, the retching terror, the soundless shrieks, the intimation of slaughtered futures …

  And then the little boy had appeared, Anasûrimbor Kelmomas … there he was, scampering between the skin-spies nailed to the floor by their Chorae …

  Malowebi assumed, according to his terror, that the boy belonged to Ajokli … One of the Hundred stood manifest before him! Of course the boy was his!

  Except that he wasn’t.

  “He can’t see me either!” the little boy chortled.

  The geyser of incandescence that housed the Grinning God’s visage sputtered …

  The four remaining Mutilated watched with disfigured fascination. Aurax grovelled.

  The glare vanished from the shoulders, leaving only Anasûrimbor Kellhus, blinking as any mortal man, swaying, peering at his youngest son …

  “K-Kel? How di—”

  The nearest skin-spy clapped the Chorae in its palm about his ankle.

  And the Aspect-Emperor was no more.

  “See!” the child gurgled, squealing for preposterous joy. “I told you! I told you! They can’t see me! The Gods! The Gods can’t see me!”

  Unable to think, Malowebi witnessed, watched it all in golden reflection, how the Mutilated seized a begging Kelmomas, first with sorcery, then with hands lacking five fingers, how the child had wailed and kicked and shrieked, realizing he had traded one tyrant for four. Malowebi glimpsed the flutter of small limbs as the Dûnyain thrust him into the great black sarcophagus, heard the porcine shrieks of bodily violations, the heartbreak of his blubbering, his whimpering cries, as the great face of the Carapace closed upon its ancient seal …

  “Mu-mu-mum-meee …”

  He could remember! The Carapace climbing soundlessly upright … The very root of the Horn roaring.

  The Aspect-Emperor dead.

  Never had Malowebi been so immobile, so windless within.

  A vision like straps about your chest.

  You see a chip shining black, hanging within the watery distortions pulsing about the remaining Horn. You see the dust devils have ceased their random scrawl, and now orbit the great black plate of the Shigogli. You see Men spilling like iron filings and grains of quartz, pouring through the very breaches they had wrought mere watches previous. You see Magi like seeds detaching in a different wind, this one blowing not around, but toward you. You see the Horde amassed upon the far line of the Occlusion, following the miracle of its retreat with the cataclysm of its return. You see the pallid stampede chasing the same, second wind.

  And you know because you can feel it, the dimple in what Men cannot perceive, an absence beyond the sensible, beyond horror. You know the Whirlwind walks.

  The No-God has returned.

  “You must do something!”

  You scream this, but your father stands stationary, like a statue, you would think, were it not for the way his immobility raved. Indifference, bottomless indifference, combined with an umbrage that could humble Gods. Your father’s grudge could not be more personal, more clotted with the blood and hair of human outrage, and yet, somehow, it remains apiece with the spectacle before them.

  Tsurumah … Mursiris …. Mog-Pharau!

  “What?” you cry scathing. “The great King-of-Tribes stands witless? Undone by the undoing of all things!”

  And when your father—your true father—finally turns, you are taken aback, so keen is the edge in his gelid gaze, so murderous. His lips vanish, so wolfish is his sneer. His teeth are too small, too even, too white. And you understand, at last, t
hat you are to this man what your brothers and sisters were to their true father, a lesser light wrapped in a coarser cloth.

  He turns to his chieftains, and too much seems to move, as if the countless cat-rib scars were in fact stitches, something binding him to his place. And on a bolt of horror you realize he is no longer a Son of Man, your father. Sin and hatred have cut his soul from his mortal frame, and now Hell suffuses the whole.

  “It matters not,” he tells his proud chieftains, “what you see when you look upon this boy. He! He is your King-of-Tribes, now.”

  He swivels his gaze, grinning at each many-scarred warrior in turn. You don’t see madness so much as the limits of reason shining in his turquoise eyes.

  “Dare not doubt me … Look! Gaze upon me, my cousins, admit what you have always known, what your drunken kinsmen murmur when the fires burn low. Look upon me and know the fell potency of my curse. Dare betray him, blood of my blood, and I shall visit thee!”

  The words pinch your heart between thumb and forefinger. He turns his back on all things, it seems, and you stand every bit as astonished as the others and even more confused. Together you watch him, your legendary sire, Cnaiür urs Skiötha, the breaker-of-horses-and-men, descend the inner rim of the Occlusion and walk out alone into vast and distant machinations of doom. You even weep.

  Only their terror of your father keeps you alive.

  No knowledge runs so deep as knowledge of calamity; no name is more primal—or final. It is what infants wail and homicides rave. It is what old men groan as sight dwindles, and what mothers weep. It is what poets lavish with spit and pearl. Tribulation is our maker, the foe that so hounds us as to craft us like clay. Think on it! Tales of murder would not so enthrall us, were we not the children of survivors.

  The Men of the Ordeal could feel it in the crescendo of the winds, the confluence. They could feel it in the groan that tingled through all substance. And they could feel it in the nauseous void pressed against their spine, always there no matter how far they managed to run, the premonition that something … something …