What was happening to him?
“Ask Father?” Kay?tas laughed. “Sweet Sejenus, no. In a sense, though, we had no need to: he could see the debate in us. Whenever we dined with him, he would make some declaration that managed to contradict whatever theory we happened to fancy at the time. How it would drive Mo?nghus wild!”
In some ways, the young man’s resemblance to his father made their differences that much more stark. But in other ways … Proyas shuddered for sudden memories of his last encounter with Kellhus. He found his gaze shying from the nimil-draped image of the Prince-Imperial …
Lest he see.
“Of course it was Thelli who figured it all out,” Kay?tas continued. “She realized that we could not solve Father because he did not exist, that Father was, in point of fact, no one at all …”
A cold tongue licked the Exalt-General’s spine.
“What do you mean?”
Kay?tas appeared to scrutinize the climbing Shroud. “It sounds like blasphemous nonsense, I know … But I assure you it is anything but.” The blue eyes turned to appraise him, wet and iridescent. “Look … the thing to always remember about Father, Uncle, is that he is always—and only—what he needs to be. And that need is as ephemeral as Men are ephemeral, and as capricious as the World is capricious. He is what circumstances make of him. Only his end binds his myriad incarnations together. Only his mission prevents his soul from dissolving into the mad foam of what happens …”
Speech is impossible without breath, so Proyas clung to his pommel without reply. With the Ordeal in his periphery, it seemed they floated in the wreckage of a great flood. The rumble of sorcerous dispensations poked through the growing wail. Both of them peered at the grim shadow of the Urokkas, saw the flutter of rose luminance through the bowel of the black-and-ochre Shroud.
“Did you devils ever ponder the truth of me?”
The Prince-Imperial graced him with a wicked grin. “I fear you’ve only just become interesting.”
Of course. One never need ponder what one trusted.
“You dwell on your grievances,” Kay?tas added after a moment—a pale approximation of his father. “You’re dismayed because you’ve learned that Father isn’t what he claimed to be. But you’ve simply made the discovery that Thelli made—only without the benefit of her unerring sense of fashion. There is no such man as Anas?rimbor Kellhus … No such Prophet. Only an intricate web of deceptions and stratagems … bound by one inexorable—and as you know, quite ruthless—principle.”
“And that would be?”
Kay?tas’s look was mild.
“Salvation.”
The land that the Sons of Men came to call Yinwaul had leapt with life in those days, rugged and astringent. Boreal forests had darkened every horizon north of the Sea, cloaking the Erengaw Plain, sooting the shoulders of the Yimaleti. Lions had stalked deer in the meadows, ambushed muskox in the fens. Bears had swatted pickerel and salmon from the streams. Wolves had sung eternal songs beneath the Void.
And Nin’janjin had ruled in Viri.
Though populous, Viri lacked the monumental grandeur and ostentation that so characterized Mansions like Si?l, Ishori?l, or Cil-Aujas. “Ji’milri,” Cu’jara Cinmoi would famously call her, “That Anthill.” Her Sons were peculiar also, at once ridiculed for their rustic ways and archaic legalism and revered for the spare profundity of their poets and philosophers. They cultivated a modesty that was indistinguishable from arrogance, that reflex to judge all things in excess as excessive. They eschewed ornamentation, despised gratuitous display. They scorned slavery, seeing a more shameful enslavement in the dependence of the master. They bent their backs and dirtied their hands, blackened their nails in ways that made their southern cousins chortle and sneer. They alone embraced the Starving and the Scalding, the sky and the sun that their race had taken as their bane. No matter where they travelled, the Sons of Viri were instantly known by the broad, wicker bowl of their hats.
Wisi, the shipwright Sons of Illiser? called them—“Nails”.
Only on the hunt and in the subsequent feast did the Viroi yield to elhusioli, the Nonman daimos of excess. Their expeditions were things of song and legend, so much so that H?syelt, the Dark Hunter, was said to hunt them from time to time. The Hoar-Pelt, the great white bear-skin the Nonmen Kings of Viri wore in a crown’s stead, was held to be a gift of the jealous and mercurial God.
Nin’janjin’s astrologers had spied Imburil, the star that Men call the Nail of Heaven, long before it waxed. But they had no forewarning of the calamity to come three years following. How could they, when the very Gods had been confounded?