The flesh was dense, pungent to smell, in some ways sour and in others sweet. The sinews in particular were difficult to gnaw through. Some among the Inrithi took to chewing the gristle throughout the day. The entrails were heaped in odious piles, along with those pieces—feet, viscera, and genitalia, mostly—too difficult or unsavoury to eat. If fuel was plentiful enough, the heads would be burned in oblation.
The rank and file simply portioned the beasts and cooked them over open fires. With the carcasses so divided, it became impossible to distinguish the limbs from those of Men. Everywhere one travelled, whether through the timbered tents of the Galeoth, or the garish parasol cities of the Conriyans and Ainoni, one saw arms and legs sweating over grease-fuelled fires, blackened fingers hanging slack over light. But if the resemblance troubled any, they dared not speak it.
The caste-nobility, as a rule, demanded more in the way of preparation and variety. The carcasses were beheaded and hung from their heels on timber scaffolds to properly drain. These racks could be seen throughout the encamped Ordeal, rows of white and violet bodies hanging from their heels, graphic for their nakedness. Once drained, the beasts were butchered in the manner of cattle and sheep, then served in ways that disguised the troubling humanity of their forms.
Within days, it seemed, the entire host had set aside its scruples and fell to their grisly fare with relish, even celebratory enthusiasm. Tongues and hearts became the preferred delicacies among the Nansur kjineta. The Ainoni prized the cheeks. The Tydonni took to boiling the creatures before searing them over flame. To a man they discovered the peculiar mingling of triumph and transgression that comes upon those who battle against what they would eat. For they could not bite without suffering some glimmer of the affinity between Sranc and Men—the sordid spectre of cannibalism—and they could not chew and swallow without some sense of predatory domination. The immeasurable Horde, which had been the object of so much foreboding and terror, became small with hilarity and devious wit. At the latrines they traded jokes about justice and Fate.
The Men of the Ordeal feasted. They slept with sated bellies, with the assurance that their most primitive needs had been secured. They awoke drowsy, without the dull and alarming hollow of starvation.
And a wild vitality crept through their veins.
There was a grove of oaks that became sacred with the passage of summer in Ishu?l. As green sickened into orange and dun, the D?nyain made ready, not as yeoman preparing for winter, but as old priests welcoming even older Gods. They sat among the trees according to their station, knees out, their feet pressed sole to sole, the skin of their shaved skulls alive to the merest air, and they gazed into the boughs with a fixity that was not human. They cleared all thought from their soul, laid awareness bare to its myriad engines, and they watched the oak leaves fall …
Each of them possessed gold coins—remnants of a long-forgotten hoard—very nearly worn smooth of image and insignia, but yet possessing the ghosts of long-dead Kings. Sometimes the leaves dropped of their own volition, rocked like paper cradles across motionless air. But usually high-mountain gusts unmoored them, and they battled like bats, danced like flies, as they rode the turbulence to the ground. The D?nyain, their eyes dead with the absence of focus, let their coins fly—a flurry of sparks traced the raw sun. Without fail, some fraction of the leaves would be caught and pinned to the flagstones, lobed edges curled like fingers about the gold.
They called it the Tracery, the rite that determined who among them would sire children and so sculpt the future of their terrible race.
Anas?rimbor Kellhus breathed as Proyas breathed, tossing coinage of a different sort.
The Exalt-General sat before him, legs crossed, hands clutching knees through the pleats of his war-skirt. He looked at once alert and serene, the General of a host that had yet to be truly tested, but beyond this appearance, gusts raked him as surely as they had raked the Tracery Grove. Blood flushed heat through the man’s veins, steeped his extremities with alarmed life. His lungs drew shallow air.
Horror wafted from his skin.
Kellhus watched, cold and impervious behind indulgent, smiling eyes. He sat cross-legged also, his arms hanging loose from his shoulders, his hands open across his thighs. The Seeing Hearth lay between them, flames rushing into a luminous braid. Despite his manifest repose, he leaned forward imperceptibly, held his chin at the angle appropriate to expectation, as if awaiting some pleasant diversion …
Nersei Proyas was but a rind in his eyes, a depth as thin as a heartbeat was long. Kellhus could have reached out and behind him, manipulated the dark places of his soul. He could have summoned any sentiment, any sacrifice …
But he hung motionless instead, a spider with its legs pinched close. Few things were so mercurial, so erratic, as Thought filtering through a human soul. The twist and skitter, the tug and chatter, sketching forms across inner oblivion. Too many variables remained unexamined.
He began as he always began, with a shocking question.