The Unholy Consult

  The Dread Mother?

  “Sranc?” he asked on croak.

  Just then an arrow rifled the air just to the right of his face, struck the scarps behind and above. He ducked low, nerves aflame.

  “No,” she said, her tone clipped. “Men.” She leaned forward to call down once again. “Do you see them, Brother?”

  Sorweel pawed at his eyes, stared blearily eastward, saw nothing. “Men?” he asked, crawling to a better vantage. “Ordealmen?”

  “No …” An arrow zipped high over the tumbling slopes, chipped from an invisible plane about the exposed Grandmistress, then fell away, clattering. “Scylvendi …”

  Scylvendi?

  Another arrow threaded a different path, this one passing through the sorcerous Ward that had deflected the previous bolt. But Serwa was already leaning back, reaching out … It seemed natural watching it happen, and stupendous, even miraculous, afterward, how the neck of the shaft simply appeared in her hand. She held the bulb of the Chorae away, salt sparking like frost across her knuckles and forearm, then cast the thing out over the abyss.

  “Podi!” she cried.

  Peering with greater caution, Sorweel began picking their assailants out, one by one, a thin cloud of helmed heads and armoured shoulders ascending the ramped stages almost immediately below. Two more shafts whistled into Serwa’s defenses.

  “So what … forty-five of them?”

  “Sixty-eight,” she said.

  “Skirmishers …” Moënghus called on a grunt, hoisting himself through the cleft they had climbed the night previous. Even still he made a point of only looking at Sorweel. “They likely saw our arrival last night.”

  “Come,” Serwa said, gesturing for the two of them to join her.

  Sorweel retreated from the edge, and keeping low, withdrew to her side. The vista leapt about him, dizzying for the endless miles of depth.

  Moënghus grinned, scowling, standing hunched in a manner the ledge did not require, as if his ligaments were being wound and released unevenly. A shaft cracked the stone above and behind his head. He did not flinch.

  “Come,” his sister implored on an outstretched hand. “I can see deep into Agongorea from here.”

  Something wild bucked through her brother’s glare. Another shaft skittered from her Ward, bruising the air with a blue glow flattened like paper.

  Already clasped in her left arm, Sorweel followed the Prince-Imperial’s gaze to her abdomen, saw the dimpled residue of his seed across the Injori silk.

  “Brother!”

  Moënghus lowered his turquoise gaze. After a congealed heartbeat, he ducked into her embrace much the same as Sorweel had, his frame dwarfing both of them. A small barrage of arrows peppered Serwa’s arcane defenses, drumming light from empty air. The morning sun burnt across the back of the east.

  Her spine arched the familiar way, and she dug the knuckle of her thumb in his flank in the way Sorweel had decided was involuntary. She leaned her head back, and answering to her inaugural sorcerous cry, pearl incandescence spilled from her mouth, her eyes, so bright as to utterly occlude her beauty.

  Her song loosed a thousand spiders across opposite sides of his skin, scuttling in perfect time together, inside and out. Mist climbed about them, somehow untouched by turbulence, shot through with spiraling white. The dawn-stark landscape flattened into something more stark still. He clenched teeth across an omnidirectional outward heave, the sense of bloating across all dimensions … and then the drop, the instant imploding into cracks in reality, inhaled as smoke … Moënghus was screaming, roaring. He felt the man’s arm yanked nerveless, glimpsed him toppling onto Eaglehorn’s grudging ledge, then over—

  Lashing brilliance, then a lurching coming to be, as if he were a babe tugged clear his mother’s womb.

  They both fell gasping upon lifeless dirt.

  CHAPTER

  THREE

  Agongorea

  Only those Principles finding no warrant in other Principles can serve as the warrant of warrants, or the immovable Ground. Absent such Principles, the Ground is merely something that happens when we run …

  —The Third Analytic of Men, AJENCIS

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

  The Meat be praised.

  Proyas never discovered who first shouted this phrase, but the uproar it had occasioned among the others convinced him to make it his own. That it was insane mattered not at all.

  Rain baffled the horizon, bathed the land’s wounds and mired its gutters. The Ordealmen toiled through the mudded pasture north of the Urokkas, great rivers of them dragging supplies, gazing to the blackened slopes and gorges, the heights wreathed in charred Sranc. The skies showered down upon them, flattening hair, hunching shoulders, and rinsing the filth and blood from their arms and armour, the purple that so quickly dried into cracking black. In their tens of thousands they trudged across the rain-sizzling flats, stunned for what they had witnessed, frightened for what they had heard. Clean of skin, soiled of heart. Far enough from home to be struck breathless for reckoning the distance.

  They struck camp on the banks of the River Sursa, at the legendary Wair Chirsaul, the Mandible Ford, leagues to the north of Antareg. The call was sent out, and Believer-Kings, Generals, and Magi descended on the Umbilicus from all quarters of the encampment, bridling with questions and unnatural vitality. The need to escape the contagion had prevented any kind of accounting the previous night, meaning these Men had gnawed on rumour alone for a full day and night. They were hungry for explanations, famished, even. Twice Proyas bid them to await the arrival of their brothers. “Our Lord-and-Prophet lives!” he cried on the second occasion, seeking to allay what he supposed was the question that burned brightest. “He has taken leave only because our victory was so complete!”

  A good number of the assembled had donned their white penitentials to honour the souls taken from them. But if the Lords of the Ordeal mourned in sooth, they showed little sign beyond their garb. Bearded faces bellowed joy and greeting. Eyebrows leapt and eyes twinkled at the exchange of ribaldries. Several coarse jokes regarding Sranc sent gales of laughter across the crowd, left kings and princes knuckling tears of hilarity from their eyes, daubing cheeks with funeral garb. “Just nibble their sardine a little,” Coithus Narnol brayed, “and it’ll put hair on your wife’s chest!”

  “Well that explains my wife’s mother!”

  Men dressed for dirge and prayer stamped feet for derision. Lord Grimmel roared from high on the back tiers, beating his chest, frothing his mustaches in spittle. Proyas had already decided the man was among those most sensitive to whatever was happening, the least able to hold their Meat.

  “Grimmel bears watching …” Kayûtas murmured from his side.

  The flood of new arrivals had slowed to a trickle. Fairly every eye in the Umbilicus noted where they stood, that they spoke, but for the moment at least, the chatter boomed as before. “What’s happening to us, Kayu?”

  The Prince-Imperial shot him an intent look, one not entirely devoid of malice.

  “We eat Sranc, Uncle.”

  The rumble dropped through the earthen floor, and Proyas found himself standing before the Lords of the Ordeal, the singular object of their manic regard. There was no mistaking the thinning of their numbers. But there was a ferocious aura to them, the apprehension of storms advancing—it seemed that lightning should vein the shadowy heights above and behind them! They were foul and ragged and dark, their eyes as bright and avid as their dress was soiled and tattered. It seemed he should have been frightened, but King Nersei Proyas of Conriya was not. He raised his hands and cried what had to be cried, invoked the only goad he possessed …

  “The Meeeat!” he thundered, matching Grimmel’s savagery. “The Meat be praised!”

  The Men of the Three Seas stamped and roared.

  Two dozen Pillarians barged through the entrance bearing three Sranc roasted whole into the heart of the Eleven-Pole Chamb
er. The Lords of the Ordeal howled their approval, fell upon the fare with ravenous enthusiasm. Rather than wire the creatures into poses reminiscent of pig or lamb, the cooks had served them laying on their backs, each in the attitude of charred and blistered slumber, so that between blinks they seemed fire-roasted Men. Proyas at once watched abhorred, and participated. He salivated for the smell, so like burnt mutton, and shuddered for the savour, the bloom of heat and salt and exquisite grease. Here and there, one after another, different souls caught his eye and called out their approval. Proyas smiled and nodded to each, acting the serene commander he needed to be, wondering when had desecration become something he could taste?

  The Lords of the Ordeal hunched as dogs over their repast, sawing and wrenching at the bodies, baring bone with bared teeth, chewing only to better bolt down. A glutinous racket squatted in the air, the clamour of mouths masticating. He looked to Kayûtas, wondering if the youth had noticed. Mere moments ago, these Men had begged him for tidings of their Master … and now?

  Anasûrimbor Kellhus had been forgotten by his followers.

  Proyas smiled in reply to Baron Nomiyal of Mols, who had sparked a small cheer praising him, thinking, We stray!

  We have wandered from His Path!

  There was no pointing to it, but it lay in plain view nonetheless. Something dull and evil and ferocious possessed these once-noble Men, something scarcely bridled, something that gluttony and gluttony alone could assuage. Obwë Gûswuran, illustrious Grandmaster or no, began scavenging the rinds of skin and fatty white disdained by others, slurping them in strings. Lord Gora’jirau, a surviving Invitic Knight, made sport with one of the heads, tearing away the blistered lips and cheeks, his manhood arched against his tattered linen kilt.

  Proyas watched as grisly feast became lurid demonstration. He stood where he always stood during Council, to the right of the vacant place belonging to the Holy Aspect-Emperor. The panels of the Ekkinû undulated according to their own, ethereal rhythms. He had directed Saccarees to stand on his left, knowing the water his presence would draw among the Schoolmen. Even more importantly, he had instructed Kayûtas to stand on his right: no argument for authority carried more weight than blood. As Kellhus had told him on many occasions, the appearance of continuity was continuity for Men.

  “Gird yourself, Uncle,” the Prince-Imperial muttered, his beard as wetted for grease as any other. “More and more they will be as crocodiles … beasts that must be sated to be assuaged.”

  Unnatural as it had become, their appetite still possessed limits. Groaning aloud for distension, belching and loosening belts, the caste-nobles retired from their monstrous repast and formed conspiratorial clusters on the tiers surrounding. Mutters quickly piled into patriarchal thunder. Individuals once again called out for answers and explanations, faces slicked for grease, beards flecked with debris.

  Their surviving Exalt-General raised a hand to command silence, took the attitude of appraisal, regarding them as the final voices were hounded into silence. His gaze flinched from the gutted carcasses that lay on the tables between him and these Men he must lead. A skull lay tipped in the wreckage, its face half eaten. Proyas clenched his teeth for the heat fondling his loins.

  “Anasûrimbor Kellhus …” Nersei Proyas finally declared, paused out of some bardic instinct. “Our Most Holy Aspect-Emperor has charged me with leading the final march upon Golgotterath.”

  One heartbeat passed, then the assembly leapt to the limit of stature and voice, howling incredulity, shouting dismay. Frenzy had seized them whole, soldered them into a singular beast.

  Or nearly so, for Prince Nurbanu Ze barged quite alone to the floor, bellowing, “Nooo!” among the burst carcasses. “The Scald consumed Him! My men saw this!”

  The uproar crashed into silence.

  “Even as the Scald struck them blind, they saw this!”

  Proyas squinted, then scowled, but Kayûtas was already in motion, leaping the nearest trestle with his broadsword drawn, Proyas stammered something he would never remember. The Prince-Imperial’s blade hooked white—cutting white … Nurbanu Ze stood stupefied, his expression clogged for incredulity. Blood jetted hot and crimson across the greying scraps and gelling grease …

  Death came swirling down.

  And for the merest heartbeat they all saw it, flaring as luminous as flame in a nocturnal cavern, the miracle of the Father in the Son. No mere Man could have done what he had done. No human.

  The Jekki Prince pitched backward, flopped across the soiled carpets. Proyas glanced up and out, saw the Lords of the Ordeal laughing, roaring in lunatic approval—exultation. And his gaze caught upon the blood-slicked joints and lobes. Drool crowded the corners of his mouth.

  He raised his arms high, as though bathing in the elation. He thrust the arch of his manhood against the cheek of their raucous image. Couras Nantilla howled in seizures, mucous threading the black hole of his mouth. Grimmel had dared go so far as clasp his manhood through his kilt.

  Kayûtas stood above Nurbanu Ze, strangely stooped and blinking, as if not quite comprehending what he had done. The dead man’s bleeding had wetted more than dinner scraps: his dying had pitched poppy red across the Prince-Imperial’s nimil hauberk as well—a pattern like a Wracu’s crest …

  Few things had seemed so beautiful. Enticing.

  Kayûtas caught his gaze, and as if recalling some crisp routine from the blurry edge of stupor, he turned to Proyas stiffly, thrust his hand high in salute, his frame trembling for something more profound than exultation.

  Even the Son had succumbed, Proyas realized with dim horror—succumbed to the swollen tyranny of the Meat.

  What of the Father?

  The Lords of the Ordeal redoubled their thunderous acclaim. Hell itself had cast open its gates before them. Tens of thousands had fallen beneath the Scald of Dagliash. Tens of thousands more languished dying for contamination. Their Holy Aspect-Emperor had abandoned them for no reason …

  And yet they rejoiced, understanding, at long last, that murder was glory.

  The air was already filled with orisons when the Interval tolled the following morning, the encampment’s myriad thoroughfares and alleyways already brimming with believers. Today Men would cross the Wair Chirsaul—the famed “Mandible Ford” that figured so prominently in the Holy Sagas—and begin the final march on Golgotterath. But even though genuine passion cracked their voices, animated their demonstrations as much as ever, something impeded their manner, muddied eyes that should have been clear, blurring hope into hunger, gratitude into gloating.

  The weather aggravated matters. Rain fell as cold pellets that stung upturned cheeks, but sparse enough to make a percussive clatter of canvas and ground alike. It was a drizzle that relentlessly promised downpour, that augured some violent tempest that never came. Blackness lay in the direction of Dagliash, but for ash and smoke, fires that could not be doused by waters, heavenly or terrestrial.

  The River Sursa had quickened, taking on the dull grey of the barrens beyond. The shallows of Wair Chirsaul had slowly travelled north over the intervening centuries—a fact attested to by the league or so separating them from the ruins of the Wairing Wall, which had defended the crossing in Far Antiquity. Despite this remarkable pilgrimage, they remained much as the ancient authors had described: a field of rushing waters, cracked and combed into white by the stone beneath, here kicked into roostering geysers, there sucked into swift, ink-black channels. Only the famed bone-fields so eulogized in ancient days were missing; the fords appeared every bit as treacherous as described, otherwise.

  A lassitude possessed the Ordealmen, the void of heart and manner that so often follows revels gone mad. The Great Scald had made plain the catastrophic beam of their Enemy’s power, and now their Lord-and-Prophet, their Holy Aspect-Emperor, had abandoned them. Word of his Will as declared by their Exalt-General had spread as wildfire through the encampment; they knew what they had to do, but they knew not how they should feel. And so they awoke,
frightened by the dark and wanton turbulence kindled in their souls, by the rumours that they were becoming Sranc, and for the first time they realized how very far they had wandered from home.

  For this was the great secret of faith, the making near of distant things, the making home in what was vast with cruelty and indifference. Had the Gods not existed, Men would have almost certainly made them up, if only to people what was endless and empty, to trust in what was inscrutable. With Anasûrimbor Kellhus leading them, they had marched the sacred way of Salvation, followed the Shortest Path. With King Nersei Proyas, a man like themselves, it seemed they walked as any man walked, naked to untold danger and temptation …

  Only now in the absence of their Master could they fathom how utterly they were exposed. The leagues between them and their homes leaned heavy against their heart and for a time, at least, smothered the embers kindling there.

  The Judges saw this apprehension, and so walked among the mucked tracks crying out their exhortations over the droning priests. “Rouse! Rouse! Rejoice, Brothers! For our trial draws to holy conclusion! Golgotterath—the very Blight!—lays upon the yonder!” Those they deemed mutinous they seized on charges of impiety as they always did. Only the number of charges laid and the severity of the penalties levied distinguished this morning from any other. Twenty-three Men of the Ordeal, including Baron Orsuwick of Low Kalt, would be staked to the lash, and another seven would be hung from the limbs of the monstrous willow that stood as an unlikely and arthritic sentinel overlooking the Wair. Three would vanish altogether, spawning rumours of ecclesiastic murder and cannibalism.

  Were it not for the seven strung from the willow, these events might have vanished in the mass toil of the Crossing. The Exalt-General was not consulted (even though the Aspect-Emperor almost certainly would have been). The Judge who ordered the display, a Galeoth caste-noble named Chassain, had been too ingenious devising his admonition. The nude bodies were lashed to the great boughs not by the arms or torsos, but by the shins, so that the miscreants hung upside-down, their arms dangling in tireless supplication, exactly the way Sranc were hung to bleed. Thousands of Ordealmen either passed beneath or near them, a great fraction of those who had camped to the north of Wair Chirsaul. Not a soul failed to hear of them. And even though very few made the connection between their dead brothers and their butchered foe, the image roused no less conflict in their hearts. They denied harbouring any such worries, of course, made as they always did when confronted with the grim handiwork of the Ministrate. They played scoundrels, speculating on the offences committed, the punishments meted, and thought themselves holy for scorning dead sinners.