The Unholy Consult

  Men began praying aloud for sign of Sranc.

  “Who?” they began asking. “Who will feed us now?”

  Behind them, the smear blackening the skies above Dagliash had become the last visual relic of the old World. Mouths watered at the sight, despite the halo of poisonous ochre.

  By midafternoon, guarded looks had become bold unto reckless. Eyes began roaming … Anyone who faltered for any reason was noted by a parade of passing glances; those who vomited, especially, or betrayed lesions, or shed locks of hair. For some unfathomable reason, the victims never seemed to know … or to care … even as they scrutinized those about them for the selfsame signs. No one fled. Not one soul so much as curried favour, let alone resorted to unmanly acts of ingratiation. Aside from a dark and scintillant play of looks, everyone acted as though night would never come.

  Had any soul reflected, it would have noted how everything, in fact, had taken on the lean glamour of pretense, how all the old actions, all the old words, everything impeccant habit rendered effortless and automatic, had somehow become besides the point …

  How all the old realities had decayed into matters of the Meat.

  Simply hearing the once-accursed name, Sranc, pricked the ears, alerted the heart to the possibility that somewhere, somehow, more Meat had been found. Dolour was roused into clamour. And as so often happens, anonymity offered up the very tales that want and suspicion demanded. Stranded with their households in the thick of the masses, several Believer-Kings went so far as to whip their horses to the fore of the Host, chasing this or that rumour of contact with their foe. “Secure our portion!” their kin and countrymen cried. An eagerness was kindled within the breast of thousands, a need to see for oneself what lay beyond the obscuring humanity. A corresponding dread voided the souls of thousands of others, an abrupt certainty they would be denied their due, robbed of their portion. Individual shouts cascaded into a general outcry, which served to provoke haste from thousands more. Men began running where they could. Some cast down their weapons and shields. Others tripped into chasms between their fellows, bellowed, first in incredulity, then in suffocated terror, infecting the roiling plains with even more fear, more abandon …

  Death came swirling down. The first of the Schoolmen abandoned their baggage-trains to the chaos and took to the sky singing. The thousands about them cried out, and the crowds convulsed with even greater violence, convinced the sorcerers acted on word of Sranc …

  Soon hundreds of witches and sorcerers hung pinned over the riotous plain.

  And so, after conquering thousands of leagues, surviving the cleavers of a million Sranc, the Great Ordeal was put to route by its own dark humours. Men chased for bald sight of chasing, nothing more—bodies echoing bodies in panic. What had been a great mass trudging westward suddenly blew outward, thinning across the plain. Since nonexistent Meat had no direction, the Ordealmen apparently chased all directions.

  Those Lords who stood firm could only marvel, stupefied. The Exalt-General, the Conriyan chronicler Mirathais would write, grew as ashen as the ground vacated around him. “Smoke,” he allegedly said. “For want of meat, we have become smoke.”

  Then it happened.

  The Ordeal had shattered upon its own depravity, a collective end dissolving into more than a hundred thousand grains of evil desperation, which then … miraculously, found themselves caught.

  Heads turned to the charcoal line of the west, where the afternoon orb of the sun hung ringed with sundogs, brilliant in a manner that darkened rather than illuminated what lay below. Not a soul could fail to see them: two shining threads, like golden wire poked through the horizon’s reptilian hide …

  Something like a moan passed through the Holy Host. Trumpets wailed from points across the plain. The Men of the Circumfix began falling to their knees, fields drawing down fields, though for worship or wonder or dumb relief, none would ever know …

  The dread Horns … The Horns of Golgotterath had finally pricked the horizon, a shining beacon of all that was wicked, all that was obscene and unholy.

  For the nonce, the Meat was forgotten.

  The Exalt-General wept, Mirathais would write in his journal, “as a father who finds a vanished child.”

  CHAPTER

  FOUR

  The Demua Mountains

  A fetish is a belief that a fist might hold.

  —“Rejoinders,” Pseudo-Protathis

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

  Daylight fell upon the dead land, warmed the clay and the canopy alike. The virtues once extolled by the Bardic Priests of yore thrummed with the grasshoppers that exploded from their feet, warbled with the birdsong that resounded above their heads. Resurgent earth. Air quick with flies and lazy with bees. From the Mountains all the way to the mighty River Aumris the land was thus, temperate, fertile. Wuor it had been called, a name that came to mean “plenty” to the Sons of ancient Ûmerau.

  But then came the reoccupation of Min-Uroikas and with it the infiltration of Sranc across the narrows of the Leash. Despite the oaths made and the redoubts raised, the northwest became perilous to the point where only the forts remained, and the region was eventually abandoned. Wuor shrank, becoming a more limited province on the shoulder of the Aumris. The new frontier came to be called Anûnuarcû, a march that would be famed for the Knights-Chieftain it sired. The land conceded to the Foe, the land Achamian and Mimara now travelled, would come to be known as Far Wuor.

  It had been long forsaken, a victim of Golgotterath centuries before the First Apocalypse had blighted the Sons of the Norsirai entirely. His chest ached for simply walking … for crossing Far Wuor as Seswatha had. Henceforth, the old Wizard realized, it would always be thus, always be a matter of travelling into ever more accursed land. They were drawing near—insanely near! Soon they would set eyes upon them, the shining horrors on the horizon, the golden tusks climbing to the height of mountain peaks, goring all that is true …

  Just thinking about it winded him, set his limbs upon bubbles of terror.

  “You’re muttering again …” Mimara piped from his side.

  “What?” Achamian barked, affecting indignant surprise.

  Given all they had endured, it was mad to think they could still be such cowards when it came to each other. But such was love, in the end, forever fearing the testimony of the other.

  Mimara was the lesser coward, of course, always the first to discover her fortitude, and so always the first to plague and harry.

  “Who’s Nautzera?” she pressed, her attention pointed and immovable.

  He flinched, walked with a more hooded manner.

  “Spare me your vinegar, woman. My cuts sting quite well unassisted …”

  Achamian had suffered too much to possess a generous, or even an honest, soul. To be put upon is to rehearse grudges, to ruminate upon welts and switches, the marks left and the instruments responsible. Writing his banned history of the First Holy War amounted to writing the history of his degradation. Ink affords all souls the luxury of innocence. To write is to be quick where all else is still, to bully facts with words until they begin weeping. And so the old Wizard drew up lists of offenders and summaries of their crimes. Unlike other embittered souls, he knew the particulars of his victimization with a scholar’s self-serving precision, and he had long ago determined that Nautzera was the greatest of the criminals.

  Even after all these years, he could still hear the wretch’s voice creaking through the gloom of Atyersus. “Ah yes … I forgot you numbered yourself among the skeptics …”

  Were it not for Nautzera, he would not be here now, freighted by losses beyond numbering. Were it not for Nautzera, Inrau would still be alive.

  “I guess, then, you would say a possibility, that we are witnessing the first days of the No-God’s return, is outweighed by an actuality, the life of a defector …”

  Inrau!

  “That rolling the dice of apocalypse is worth the pulse
of a fool …”

  “Nautzera is from the old days, isn’t he?” Mimara persisted. “The First Holy War.”

  He ignored her, fuming in the disjoint way Men are prone when unaware of their fear or anger. Mumbling! When he had he started mumbling?

  Together they followed what had been the bed of an ancient road across the many-cloven feet of the Demua. The stonework had been pulverized for the weight of emptiness and weather long ago, leaving only an overgrown dike that roped high and low, continuous save for the countless creeks and streams that had cracked its nethers asunder long, long ago. To their left, the world piled upward, conifers spearing dark from the climbing canopies. What might have been turrets flanged the nearest scarps, stone skinned in lichen where not otherwise flayed and pitted. The mountains reared massive and snow-capped beyond. But to their right, the world fell away, knitted the very horizon with arboreal crowns—birches, maples, larches and more—great and full and summer-weary.

  And ahead of them … to the north … It was at once the direction he walked, and the direction he could not see.

  “It terrifies you …” Mimara said from his side.

  “I know what awaits us,” he replied, spooked for her penetration, speaking more from the ache in his chest than his throat.

  He trailed to a stop at the summit of the rise, watched Mimara stroll ahead, hands pressed to the back of her hips, her abdomen making a bulb of her golden hauberk. The pregnant woman snapped a birch branch obscuring their view, left it hanging like a lamed bird wing. The Demua buckled the horizon beyond her, backed everything into indeterminate haze, one too cold to be called violet. And it seemed he could feel it out there, Golgotterath, like a bruise hidden for shame, like a stitch in the throat that could not be swallowed away. There was nothing to see save a vibrant land unfurling from cloud-wricking knuckles of stone, but he could feel it all the same …

  Waiting?

  “Nautzera is an old rival of mine in the Mandate,” he admitted. “The soul that set me upon the very path we trod now … The one I most blame, I suppose … aside from Kellhus.”

  Mimara had unstopped her waterskin to take a swig. “Why so?”

  The old Wizard waved away her offer to drink. “He’s the one who sent me to Sumna, to suborn a former student of mine to spy on your uncle, the Holy Shriah. He feared Maithanet might have something to do with the Consult—even though no one had uncovered any sign of them in centuries, at that point …”

  “And what happened?”

  “My student died.”

  She peered at him. “Maithanet had him killed?”

  “No … The Consult assassinated him.”

  She frowned. “So the mission was a success.”

  “Success?” the old Wizard cried. “I lost Inrau!”

  “Yes, well … Lives must always be thrown with the sticks when you command. Surely your student knew as much. Nautzera as well.”

  “No one knew anything back then!”

  She graced him with an insouciant shrug—one of many little relics of jnan she had carried away from Carythusal.

  “So you don’t think uncovering the Consult was worth one life?”

  “Of course it was!”

  “So then Nautzera merely demanded what had to be done …”

  Achamian sputtered, tried to communicate his fury through his glare, knowing he betrayed something quite different.

  “What? What are you saying?”

  She gazed at him, devoid of expression for a long moment.

  Every human act has its season, its effortless stage, even determinations of the heart. Nothing guarantees judgments made in one age will be applicable in the next, that piety and justice will remain pious and just come what may. We all understand this, somehow. We all possess the joints required to bend this way and that, to be what our circumstances sometimes gently, sometimes violently, demand. If hatred renders us inflexible it’s because, like love, it commits us to others. To hate is to sin against … What soul was so execrable as to wish evil on the innocent? Or worse yet, the heroic.

  Nautzera had to be criminal, lest Achamian himself stand charged.

  “Your student …” Mimara said, picking her words as if fearing what she saw in his mien. “Inrau … You do understand that he perished for a reason, Akka … that his life had more meaning than he could possibly fathom.”

  “Of course!” he cried out, his ears buzzing.

  It was happening! The Second Apocalypse was happening!

  Which meant that Nautzera had been right all along …

  The Wizard hung breathing, every pinch of his being a tingle, a sting.

  Nautzera had been right all along. Inrau’s pulse had proven a bargain.

  Achamian turned from her, the mother of his unborn child, lest she see him weep. He plunged down the spine of the ancient road, into the wilds of Far Wuor …

  Some two thousand years after the light of Men had been extinguished in this corner of the World.

  They had taken to snorting the Qirri the way the Survivor had before leaping to his death. Neither of them made mention of this, though both of them understood it with the clarity of monumental inscription. Instead, they told each other that the Scylvendi pursued them, that Cnaiür urs Skiötha peered into the horizon, seeking some glimpse of their furtive forms. More than wisdom or even hope, Qirri was necessity. After all, the People of War galloped in their wake …

  So they raced through the night, trotting through wooded galleries, wading across rushing, roaring, moon-silvered streams. Mimara fell picking her way across one particularly evil tributary. She lost her footing on the mossed lip of a boulder, swung about in an attempt to recover, then simply vanished into the gushing blast. For a heartbeat, Achamian could scarcely breathe, let alone call out or leap into sorcerous action. By time he recovered his wits, she was already hauling herself onto the far shore some twenty lengths away, hacking water. He rushed to her side, fussed in the speechless way of one who ministers to disasters of their own making.

  “What of the pouch?” he finally managed to ask.

  She swatted through her sodden pelts, her eyes wide, but quickly found the rune-embroidered thing flattened against the purse she used to hold her two Chorae. They crouched upon a moonlit rock, hunched to inspect the contents, with their nostrils if not their eyes. She looked beautiful for the way the damp flattened her hair into jet—so very much like her mother. He could do no more than glance at her gold-scaled belly.

  “Why?” the Scylvendi barbarian raved in his soul’s eye. “Why have you come, Drusas Achamian? Why have you dragged your bitch across a thousand screaming, rutting leagues? Tell me, what moves a man to cast number-sticks across his woman’s womb?”

  Though Mimara was the one sodden, Achamian would be the one wracked with chills when they resumed.

  So they crossed Far Wuor in fits and sprints. Mosquitos plagued them during certain watches, hung so thick as to form scribbling haloes around the moon and the Nail-of-Heaven, and left them almost entirely unmolested during others. Walking had ceased taxing them at some point, becoming something far nearer sleep—or at least something less wakeful, more automatic, more effortless. Achamian did not so much own or experience his strides as he floated on them, like an indolent Ketyai prince borne upon the litter of his own body. He found himself wandering at right angles to the world, both walking, negotiating pitched ground and rugged terrain, and dreaming in a peculiar, frenetic sense, hearing a voice that he recognized as his own voice, and suffering desires more obstinate than his own.

  “No!” he heard himself cry. “What you say …”

  He found himself walking into the Scylvendi’s apparition, the wraith of Cnaiür glaring into his eyes, grating in the voice of floods and landslides, the heat of him, the stink, promising at once murder and congress.

  “Twenty winters have thawed, and now you find yourself in my tent, sorcerer, every bit as lost, as baffled and dismayed! Every bit as blind to the darkness that comes befor
e!”

  He wandered far from his walking.

  The Qirri was there, of course, a prop for the canvas ceilings of his heart and soul. It alone cleared the spaces within and about him, made it possible for his body to march where his will could not hope to follow. It was always there, not so much lurking as mooning about, sulking for being bound within a sack, desiccate, inert. A nagging in the background. Free me! Give me life!

  And for all the madness, nothing, it seemed, could be more proper. If they consumed Nil’giccas, then Nil’giccas imbibed them, the residue of one soul blown across the coals of another, flickering into a brighter flame. Consuming Qirri, the old Wizard realized, was a form of giving, not taking, a way to resurrect the Last Nonman King—Cleric!—to bear his being upon the back of their own living life.

  He caught himself shouting aloud at one point, crying, “What choice? What choice?” The Qirri was the only reason they had found Sauglish, the only reason they had survived Ishuäl, the only reason they trod the skirts of Golgotterath. They had no choice. So why was he arguing? Because it was evil? Because it amounted to cannibalism, eating another sentient soul? Because it was slowly twisting their sensibilities in ways they could scarce conceive? Because it was beginning, ever so slowly, to own their thoughts, let alone their passions?

  What did any of this matter to someone damned always already?

  This was his death march, his long and anguished climb to the Golden Room. His Dreams even augured as much! This!—this was his death, his doom and damnation!

  To die the death allotted to Seswatha.

  “No,” Mimara was gasping, from somewhere—behind? The whole world was walking now, angular shadows massed into scissoring forests. “No, Akka, no!” Had he been speaking aloud? All that distinguished them was their direction, how they walked toward what all Creation fled.