Fingers of wind combed his beard, and something began galloping within him.
Rising about him as though upon a vast bowl, the Sons of Men butchered the Sons of Ninjanjin across the cracked shoulders of the Urokkas. Anas?rimbor Kellhus was no more than a spark in the distance, immobile as a navigator’s star, a knife too thin to be seen, piercing the jetting deep.
The Exalt-Magus stepped from one height to another, felt his belly swing from his throat for the way the ground dropped into churning leagues before him. He descended the stairs of the mountain, following Mantigol’s many echoes. He ignored his floating brothers, threaded their ministries of light and death. Then he was striding beyond them, a dozen cubits in a step, over the heaps and mats of smoking dead, around gorges choked with flesh and char.
So did the Grandmaster of the Mandate come down from his mountain, a marble of solitary light treading over dark and ravenous tracts—pearl scalps, gesticulating limbs, masticating rage. They scratched at his image, screamed their outrage, disgorged numberless arrows and javelins, so that for those watching horrified from the mountains, he seemed a lodestone sucking up filings in black, bristling clouds.
But Saccarees felt no alarm. Nor did he enjoy the glee that comes with impunity, the wonder of passing uncut through an assembly of hated foes. A kind of solace hummed through his bones instead, the easy breathing of those who awake with no cares outstanding. Someday it would be thus, a dwindling fraction of his soul realized. Someday one Man, one Survivor, would wander out alone into a world of smoke and soulless fury.
And so he dwindled into the pestilential expanse. So he walked into the threshing depths of the Horde.
A lonely figure. A beacon of precious light.
Be they sons of cruel old Eryeat or his fellow Believer-Kings, Saubon had always stood apart from his brothers. For as long as he could remember, he had never been capable of … belonging … At least not the way other men—such as Proyas—seemed capable. His curse was not the curse of the awkward or fearful, who shied from camaraderie for the way others punished lack of grace. Nor was it the curse of the learned, who knew too much to allow ignorance to close the interval between disparate hearts. Even less was it the curse of the desperate, who reached and reached only to find backs turned against them.
No. His was the curse of the proud, the overweening.
He was no bombast. He did not, as that wretch Ikurei Conphas had done, gloat between his every breath. No. He had been born with a calling, a desire that unmoored all others, that anchored his very being. What he sought cast no reflection in polished silver. Greatness, for him, had always been something he would conquer …
He had wept when Kellhus had told him as much on the Plains of Secharib. “I have raised you above others,” his Lord-and-Prophet said, “because of what you are …”
A man who could never quite worship another.
All this time, bowing his head in prayers he could never speak, standing solemn for ceremonies he could scarcely bear, let alone celebrate—murdering hundreds, thousands in the name of a faith he found more expedient than compelling …
Only to fall to his knees truly now? Here? Gnawed Dagliash as his Temple, the scraping Horde as his choir, worshipping, choking for brimming passions. What kind of perversity was this?
Who discovered worship only after their prophet declared himself False?
It was the Meat—almost certainly.
But he did not care. He could not care, not with Anas?rimbor Kellhus standing astride the sky, brilliant for booming meaning, drawing out the entrails of the earth—eviscerating a mountain!
The Maker of Grounds.
The Well of Viri was now as deep as Ciworal had been high—deeper. Its mouth had been smashed and cratered, but below this rim, it became a cylindrical pit, its sides ornamented in totemic reliefs that seemed too spare and shallow to belong to the Nonmen. Arms out and head thrown back, the Holy Aspect-Emperor compelled the Pit, evacuated the deep. The ruins of Nogaral dropped skyward, tumbling to the plume’s summit, falling outward, riding chutes that no eye could see. Ruin crashed about the walls and towers of Dagliash, a cyclopean downpour that pelted and heaped. The debris seemed tossed like half-coppers to beggars, with only the merest concern where it landed, but such was not the case. A legion lay concealed in the consumptive depths, and their Holy Aspect-Emperor entombed them—shut them in! Made the ground anew!