Silencing it.
“Fleeeee!”
There was no echo, for it had shouted into each soul as a sock. And it seemed that Saubon could only exhale, that the power to draw air had been wrested from his lungs.
No, a thought called through him.
Threads of light uncoiled about Anas?rimbor Kellhus as he ascended, hooked into a spider-leg cage, then cinched him into nothingness.
No …
“Then what does it matter, whether I sanction you or not? Truth is truth, regardless of who speaks it …”
“I ask only for your counsel, for what you see … Nothing more.”
“But I see many things …”
“Then tell me!”
“Only rarely do I glimpse the future. The hearts of men … that is what they … That is what I’m moved to see.”
“Then tell me … What do you see in my heart?”
Proyas had raced with Kay?tas and the others along the autumn-bright beaches. He would catch the foremost Ordealmen, he told himself, rally and reorganize them. But his soul only had eyes for the murderous fray. His manhood ached for the kneading grip of the gallop. To his right, the Zaudunyani clogging the beaches climbed in ascending thousands, skirting Oloreg’s tangled thighs in quicksilver. Flickering sorceries rimmed the blunt summits against the fume of the Shroud above. The first tracts of trampled gore lay exposed in the Host’s wake, smeared as a paste across the flanks of an entire mountain, black and purple, like overripe beets pulverized. Pitched melee braided the Column’s fore, lines of remorseless threshing, Men spearing and hacking their way into reeling mobs of Sranc. Of the voids Sibaw?l and his Cepalorae had wrought in the crazed expanse, few remained that he could see.
For a time Proyas could almost believe he looked down, so favourable was the bias of the land. Dagliash remained the armature, a canker of stone upon Antareg, whose pate extended beyond the shoulders of Ingol, equally overrun. He could see Kellhus pinned brilliant astride the black spew, and the Swayali triunes arrayed across the faraway ramparts, casting Abstractions like miniature sigils onto the ground. His heart leapt for the sight, and his imagination sparked as vivid as prophecy: how he would hew a path through the skinnies, how he would climb carcasses to gain the parapets, so he might call down to Saubon, crying, “See!”
See!
But for every cubit he gained, it seemed another obstacle plagued his advance. The black cliffs loomed nearer. The beaches grew more stony and steep, more prone to roll the carcasses directly back into the surf that deposited them. The waves battered him and his pony for attempting to circumvent the semi-submerged tangles. But as the coast narrowed, greater numbers of Ordealmen found themselves shouldered into the violet waters as well. He tried to force his way through the polyglot masses, a gambit that nearly cost him his life. His horse stumbled, broke his leg. Proyas was thrown—the lolling spear of a nearby Shigeki terrorized his eye as he toppled, but slit his cheek instead. Black water swallowed him. Brine pinched his lips, ignited the cut on his cheek. A profound weight slammed into his back, pestled him against the gravel bottom. Threads of air fluttered over his face. Maybe he screamed.
Then arms hauled him gasping and sputtering to the surface. Sunlight stung his tears, cracked the World into filaments of brilliance and shadow. He saw Kellhus resolve from slurry, started for panic only to realize it was Kay?tas— Kay?tas looking away to the west—to Antareg. The waters churned with wading Ordealmen. In a glance, he saw countless bearded faces turning with the Prince-Imperial’s.
He looked back to Kay?tas, realized he had never seen anything resembling fear or surprise in the Prince-Imperial’s expression—even in his childhood.
Until now.
Then he heard it, impossibly clear through the crazed din.
The once-beloved voice.
Antareg. The land strangely broken, slopes ravined against the ageless laws of erosion, heights heaped southwestward, as if an overthrown mountain had huddled against the shoreline to die. The Nele?st Sea. The aquamarine of placid tracts become white-backed shoals, become matted carcasses and the swirl of violet scum. Dagliash. The towers and turrets, hanging crisp against the slow-surging distances. The Horde. The moulting distances, vast and terrible, a leprous smear hardening into figures and faces pale as spider-bellies.