"Yes," Kellhus said, watching him with unnerving concentration.
"So even now, you're… manipulating me?"
The Exalt-General could scarce believe he had asked the question.
"There is no other way for me to be with you," the Aspect-Emperor replied. " I see what you do not. The origins of your thought and passion. The terminus of your fear and ambit. You experience but a fragment of the Nersei Proyas that I see. With every word, I speak to you in ways you cannot hear."
Some kind of test-it had to be… Kellhus was sounding him, preparing him for some kind of trial.
"But…"
The Aspect-Emperor downed his bowl in a single draught. "How could that be when you feel free, to say, to think, any way you please?"
"Yes! I never feel so free as I feel when I am with you! In all the world, wherever I go, Kellhus, I sense the jealousies and judgments of others. With you, I know I have no cause for wariness or concern. With you, I am my own judge!"
"But that is only the man you know, the Lesser Proyas. The man I know, the Greater Proyas, I hold in shackles of iron. I am Dunyain, my friend, exactly as Achamian claimed. To merely stand in my presence is to be enslaved."
Perhaps this was the golden kernel, the whole point of these thought-bruising sessions. To understand how little he was himself…
There was no revelation without terror and overturning.
"But I am your willing slave. I choose a life of bondage!"
And he felt no shame in saying this. Ever since childhood he had understood the exaltation that was submission. To be a slave to truth is to be a master of men.
The Aspect-Emperor leaned back into the glow of his unearthly halo. As always the hearth's twirling light sketched smoky glimpses of doom across the canvas walls behind him. For a heartbeat, the Exalt-General could swear he saw children running…
"Choice," his Lord-and-God said smiling. "Willing…
"Your shackles are cast from this very iron."
Sorweel and Zsoronga sat unceremoniously in the dust at the entrance of the tent they now shared, gnawing on their ration of amicut. Gone was the Successor-Prince's garish pavilion. Gone were the ritual wigs. Gone were the sumptuous cushions, the ornate decorations. Gone were the slaves who had borne all this pointless luxury.
Necessity, as Protathis famously wrote, makes jewels of lack and turns poverty into gold. For the Men of the Ordeal, wealth was now measured in the absence of burdens.
They sat side by side gazing with a kind of numb incredulity as the figure wobbled toward them through the haze of knee-high dust. They recognized him immediately, though it did not seem so at the time, so quick is the heart to deny what it cannot bear. Limbs like black ropes. Hair white as the sky. He staggered as much as he walked, a gait that spoke of endless miles, a thousand steps too many. Only his gaze remained steady, as if all that remained of him had been concentrated into his sense of sight. He did not blink once the entirety of his approach.
Swaying, he stood before them.
"You were supposed to be dead," Zsoronga said, looking up with a peculiar terror, his voice wavering about some contest of dismay and gratitude.
"I am told…" Obotegwa rasped, his smile more a lipless grimace, "my death… is your duty…"
Sorweel made to leave, but the Successor-Prince cried out for him to stay.
"I beg you…" he said. "Please."
So he helped the old man into the tent, shocked, nauseated even, by his kindling weight. He watched his friend chew his food, then offer up the resulting paste. He watched him raise Obotegwa's feet so that he might wash them, only to wash his shins instead because of the ulcerations that cankered his toes and heel. He listened to him whisper to the ailing servant in the warm, resonant tones of their native language. He understood none of it, and yet grasped all of it, for the tones of love and gratitude and remorse transcend all languages, even those from different ends of the world.
Sorweel watched Obotegwa blink two tears, as if they were all that remained, and somehow he just knew: the man had lived so long only to obtain permission to die. With fingers of trembling teak, the Obligate reached beneath his tunic and withdrew a small golden cylinder, which Zsoronga clasped with solemn disbelief.
He watched his friend take a knife to the old man's wrists.
He watched the lantern oil of his life leak into the earth, until the guttering flame that was Obotegwa shined no more. He stared at the inanimate body, wondered that it could seem as dry as the earth.
Zsoronga cried out as if freed of some long-suffering obligation to remain strong. He wept with outrage and shame and sorrow. Sorweel embraced him, felt the anguish kick through his powerful frame.
Afterward, when night had drawn its chill shroud over the world beyond their tent, Zsoronga told a story about how, in his eighth summer, he had come, for no reason he could fathom, to covet his older cousin's Battle-Sash-so much so he actually crept into his quarters and stole it. "Things glitter in the eyes of a child," he said, speaking with the blank manner of the bereaved. "They shine, more than is seemly…"
Thinking himself clever, he had taken care to hide the thing in Obotegwa's annex to his room-in his matins satchel. Of course, giving the ceremonial importance of the Sash, a hue and cry was raised the instant it was discovered missing. By some stroke of disastrous fortune, it was found among Obotegwa's effects shortly after, and the Obligate was seized.
"Of course they knew I was the culprit," Zsoronga explained, staring down at his thieving palms. "This is an old trick among my people. A way to peel past the bark, as they say. Someone else is accused of your crime, and unless you confess, you're forced to witness their punishment…"
Seized by the terror and shame that so often makes puppets of children, Zsoronga had said nothing. Even as Obotegwa was whipped, he said nothing-and to his everlasting shame, the Obligate said nothing as well. "Imagine… the whole of the Inner Court, watching him be whipped and knowing full well that I was the one!"
So he did what most children do when cornered by some fact of failure or weakness: he made believe. He told himself that Obotegwa had stolen the Sash, out of spite, out of fascination-who knew what moved lesser souls? "I was a child!" Zsoronga cried, his voice pinched eight summers short.
One day passed. Two. Three. And still he said nothing. The whole world seemed bent to the warp of his fear. His father ceased speaking to him. His mother continually blinked tears. And so the farce continued. At some level, he knew that the world knew, but the stubbornness would not relent. Only Obotegwa treated him precisely as before. Only Obotegwa, the one bearing his welts, played along.
Then his father summoned him and Obotegwa to his apartments. The Satakhan was furious, to the point of kicking over braziers and spilling fiery coals across the floor. But Obotegwa, true to character, remained amiable and calm.
"He assured Father that I felt shame," the Successor-Prince recalled with a vacant stare. "He bid him recall my eyes and take heart in the pain he had seen there. Given this, he said, my silence should be cause for pride, for it is the curse of rulers to bear the burden of shameful secrets. 'Only weak rulers confess weakness,' he said. 'Only wise rulers bear the full burden of their crimes. Take heart knowing your son is both strong and wise…'"
Zsoronga hung upon these words for a time. He glanced at the shadowy corpse at their feet, sat blinking at the impossibility. And Sorweel knew precisely what he felt, the way you lose so much more than simply another voice and gaze from an otherwise crowded life. He knew that many things in Zsoronga's life had some history peculiar to him and Obotegwa alone-that they had shared a world between them, a world that was gone.
"And what do you think?" Sorweel dared ask.
"That I was foolish and weak," Zsoronga said.
They spoke of Obotegwa long into the night, and it seemed indistinguishable from speaking about life. They said things wise and foolish by turns, as young, intelligent men are prone. And at last, when weariness and grief overca
me them, Zsoronga told the Sakarpi King how Obotegwa had insisted that he befriend Sorweel, how the old Obligate had always believed he would surprise them all. And then the Successor-Prince told him how, on the morn, he would add the name Harweel to his ancestor list.
"A brother!" the Successor-Prince whispered with startling violence. "Sakarpus has a brother in Zeum!"
They slept with the beloved dead, as was the custom in High Holy Zeum. Their breathing pulled deep with rhythmic life, a garland about the breathless.
They awoke before the Interval, buried Obotegwa without marker on the grey, desolate plain.
Sorweel and Zsoronga hung about the edges of the General's retinue, witless for the lack of sleep and the expenditure of passion. The sun had climbed past the precincts of noon, drawing the shadows of things to the east. The line of the land, which for so long reached out in a monotonous crescent before them, had been broken and multiplied. Low knolls rose against low ridges. Ravines rutted mounded distances. Gravel spilled from wandering defilades. The Army of the Middle-North mobbed the horizon immediately behind them, its innumerable pennants little more than shadows lolling through the steaming dust. They rode as they always did at this time of day, their brows angled away from the sun's glare, their thoughts wandering on the slack leash of midday boredom.
Sorweel was the first to glimpse the speck hanging low over the western horizon. He had fallen into the habit of reading the world as much as watching it, so he said nothing, convinced he witnessed some kind of sign. Was it another stork come to communicate the inexplicable?
He was quickly disabused of this conceit. The speck, whatever it was, hung in the faraway air more like a bumblebee than a bird, like something too cumbersome to fly…
He peered, squinted as much out of disbelief as against the high sun. He saw black horses — a team of four. He saw wheels…
A chariot, he realized. A flying chariot.
For a time he simply watched stupefied, rocking in rhythm to his mount's dogged trot.
A chorus of alarums cracked the air. The General's Pillarian escort leapt into formation about their flanks, their armour and tunics shining green and gold. The Nuns who accompanied Serwa cried out in arcane unison, let out their billows as they strode glimmering into the sky.
The sorcerous chariot rode a low arc over the churned landscape. Sunlight flashed across panels laden with graven images. Sorweel saw three pale faces swaying above the gilded rail-one of them shouting light.
Kayutas, for his part, betrayed no surprise or urgency whatsoever. "Silence!" he cried to those in his immediate circle. "Decorum!" Then, without a word of explanation, he tore off, galloping on a long plume of dust.
The witches hung motionless in the air, their billows winding and waving about them.
The retinue, which typically rode in a loose mass, flattened into a crescent as the officers and caste-nobles jostled for vantages. Sorweel and Zsoronga watched from the centre of the press. The sky-chariot banked toward the Prince-Imperial and swung to earth. The hooves of the blacks bit hard into the denuded turf, and wings of dust and gravel sprawled about their glossy flanks. Golden wheels gleamed about spokes spun into invisibility. The centre figure leaned back, pulling hard on the reins.
Standing in his stirrups, Kayutas raced out to meet them, hailed them with a raised arm.
The three strangers turned toward him in unison.
"They're not human," Zsoronga said. His tone was ragged, and not for exhaustion. He sounded like a man who had had his fill of miraculous things. Like a man straining to believe.
The Kidruhil General reined his pony to a dusty halt, exchanged what seemed cryptic greetings. Nothing could be heard on the arid wind. Then, with scarce a breath expended, he wheeled his mount about and began trotting back toward his astonished command. The sky-chariot lurched into motion behind him, trundling across the earth…
And for some reason, of all the awe-inspiring sights Sorweel had seen and would see, none would be so arresting as the sight of the gilded chariot wheeling back into open sky. He understood his friend's beseeching tone, for it had made a beehive of his own breast as well.
Nonmen.
So many miracles. All of them speaking for his enemy's cause.
For reasons he could scarce fathom, the Exalt-General found himself pondering the siege and fall of Shimeh-the final night of the First Holy War-as he walked the short distance from his pavilion to the black silhouette of the Umbilicus. Fleeing the streets of the Holy City, he had climbed onto the pediment of an ancient fullery, where he had watched his Holy Aspect-Emperor battle the last of the heathen Cishaurim. There had been five of them, Primaries, mightier, despite the crudity of their art, than the most accomplished Schoolmen. Five hellish figures floating high above the burning city, their eyes gouged so they might see the Water-that-was-Light-and Anasurimbor Kellhus had slain them all.
Such was the power of the man he had come to worship. Such was the might. So how had his soul let slip the ardour of his faith? Why had hope and inflexible determination become foreboding and gnawing worry?
The Men of the Ordeal hailed him as they always did when he walked the interior ways of the camp, but for once he did not return their salutations. He fairly knocked over Lord Couras Nantilla, the General of the Cengemi, at the entryway to the Umbilicus, such was the depth of his walking reverie. He squeezed the man's shoulder in lieu of an apology.
At long last the plains had yielded. At long last the Great Ordeal, the sum of his lifelong hope and toil, trod the fabled lands named in the Holy Sagas. At long last they marched into the shadow of foul Golgotterath- Golgotterath!
For all the perils facing them, for all the privations, this should be a time of jubilation. For who, in all the world, could withstand the might of Anasurimbor Kellhus?
No one.
Not even the dread Consult of Mog-Pharau.
So why did his heart pound air into his veins?
He resolved to make this his question. He resolved to set aside his pride, and to reveal the full extent of his misgivings…
To ask his Prophet how he could doubt his Prophet.
But for once the Aspect-Emperor was not alone in his chamber. He stood arms out while two body-slaves attended to him, cinching and fussing robes freighted with ceremonial splendour: the costume of a Ketyai warrior-king from Far Antiquity. He wore a full-length gown whose hems had been bound into his ankle-wraps. Golden vambraces encased his forearms and matching greaves his shins. Opposing Kyranean Lions gleamed across his breast-plate. With his stature and haloed mien, he seemed a vision from some ancient relief-save for the two severed demon heads hanging from his girdle…
"You are troubled, I know," Kellhus said, grinning at his Exalt-General. "For all your yearning, for all your faith, yours remains a pragmatic soul, Proyas." The slaves continued their silent labour, binding straps and laces. The Aspect-Emperor glanced down at his garb, rolled his eyes as if offering himself up as a poor example. "You have little patience for tools you cannot immediately use."
As a young child, one of Proyas's duties had been to bear his mother's train at public ceremonies. All he remembered of the toddling farce was stumbling after the long-dragging hems, clutching embroidery, losing it, then stumbling after the hems again, while all the Conriyan court roared in adoring laughter around him. In so many ways, Kellhus made him feel the same tender fool, always chasing, always stumbling…
"If I have fail-"
Kellhus interrupted him with a warm hand on his shoulder. "Please, Proyas. I'm just saying we grapple with earthly things tonight…"
"Earthly things?"
A broad smile cracked the flaxen curls of the Aspect-Emperor's moustache and beard.
"Yes. The Nonman King has finally answered our call."
Earthly, Proyas reflected, was not a term many would accord the ghouls.
"Even now his embassy waits here in the Umbilicus," his Lord-and-God continued. "We will receive them in the Eleven Pole Chamber…"
Within a matter of heartbeats, Proyas found himself immersed in the organizational carnival that perpetually characterized life behind the veils of power. Slaves took him in hand, washing his hands, brushing and perfuming his field armour, oiling and combing his hair and beard. A part of him always found it remarkable, the degree of coordination required for even the simplest and most impromptu of state occasions. An Imperial Eunuch festooned in insignia from across the Three Seas led him out into the airy chill of the Eleven Pole Chamber. Kellhus already stood on the low dais, dispensing trivial instructions to a small mob of functionaries. The Ekkinu, the sorcerous arras that framed the throne, writhed gold on black with the utter absence of motion. Glimpsing Proyas, Kellhus gestured for him to stand at his side.
His thoughts racing, the Exalt-General took his place next to the throne, convinced he could feel the sinuous, symbolic twine of the Ekkinu in the air behind him. He had never been able to fathom the significance of the Nonmen to the Ordeal-especially since whatever strength they could muster would be but a fraction of their former glory-and scarcely anything at all compared with the might of the Great Ordeal-at least in his humble, human opinion. But Kellhus had sent hundreds to their death, if not thousands, in his perpetual attempts to contact Nil'giccas: small fleets charged with leaving the Three Seas and running the coasts of Zeum, thence into the mists of the Ocean and the legendary shores of Injor-Niyas.
All in the name of striking an alliance with a ten-thousand-year-old king.
Another question to trouble their discussions.
Proyas gazed up into the gloom of the tented heights. Only three braziers had been lighted, so they seemed a small island of illumination surrounded by half-glimpsed Circumfix banners and walls and panels so dim as to be nothing more than the ghosts of structure.
The slaves and functionaries withdrew, taking the air of carnival bustle with them. Save for the shadowy guards posted about the chamber's perimeter, it was just the two of them.
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