“Why do you think the God comes to Men?”
Proyas swallowed. Panic momentarily frosted his eyes, his manner. The bandages on his right arm betrayed archipelagos of crimson.
“I-I don’t understand.”
The anticipated response. Questions that begged explanation opened the soul.
The Exalt-General had changed in the weeks following his first visit to Anas?rimbor Kellhus’ spare quarters. His gaze had become equine with uncertainty. Fear now twitched through his every gesture. The tribulation of these sessions, Kellhus knew, had eclipsed any trial the Great Ordeal could offer. Gone was the pious resolve, the air of overtaxed compassion. Gone was the weary stalwart, the truest of all his Believer-Kings.
All Men possess their share of suffering, and those bearing the most are bent as with any great load. But it had been words, not wounds, that had robbed the Exalt-General of his old, upright demeanour, possibilities, as opposed to any atrocity of the real.
“The God is Infinite,” Kellhus said, pausing before the crucial substitution. “Is It not?”
Apprehension crimped the clarity of Proyas’s gaze.
“Of-of course …”
He is beginning to dread his own affirmations.
The Greater Proyas, at least, understood where they must lead.
“Then how could you hope to conceive Him?”
Instruction could be a joint undertaking, a pursuit, not just of thoughts and claims, but of the insights that motivated them; or it could be a forced concession, like those cruel tutors exacted beneath raised canes. Kellhus had been forced to rely on the latter more and more as the years had passed, for the accumulation of power was at once the accumulation of complexity. Only now, relieved of the burdens of his Empire, could he resume the former.
Only now could he witness a faithful soul, an adoring soul, thrash in mortal crisis.
“I-I suppose I cannot … But …”
Soon, he would lift his coin from Proyas … Very soon, only the wind could take him where he needed to go.
“But what?”
“I can conceive you!”
Kellhus reached into his beard to scratch a false itch, reclined so that he sat propped on his elbow. These simple gestures of discomfort, openly displayed, immediately summoned a corresponding ease in the Exalt-General, one that utterly eluded the man’s awareness. Bodies spoke to bodies, and short of flinching from raised fists, the worldborn were utterly deaf to what was said.
“And I, the Most Holy Aspect-Emperor, can conceive God. Is that it?”
The man leaned according to the angle of his desperation. “How else could it be? This is why Men lavish such attention on idols, is it not? Why they pray to their ancestors! They make … make tokens of what lies near … Use what they know to grasp what they cannot.”
Kellhus sipped his bowl of anpoi, watching the man.
“So this is how you conceive me?”
“This is how all Zaudunyani conceive you! You are our Prophet!”
Behave like one.
“So you think that I conceive what you cannot.”
“Not think, know. We’re but squabbling children absent you and your word. I was there! I partook in the conceit that ruled the Holy War before your revelation! The ruinous folly!”
“And what was my revelation?”
“That the God of Gods spoke to you!”
Eyes losing focus. Imagery boiling up out of oblivion. Probabilities like crabs scuttling on the shores of what was unknown.
“And what did It tell me?”
And again it dimpled his depths the way a chill stone might the surface of a warm pool, saying It rather than He.
“The God of Gods?”
Such preposterous care was required. Action and belief turned each upon the other in ways so intimate as to be inextricable. Proyas did not simply believe, he had killed thousands for his Faith. To concede, to recant, was to transform all those executions into murders—to become not simply a fool, but a monster. To believe fiercely is to do fierce things, and nothing fierce happens without suffering. Nersei Proyas, for all his regal demeanour, was the most ferocious of his countless believers.
No one had so much to lose as him.
“Yes. What did It tell me?”
Thrumming heart. Wide, bewildered eyes. And the Aspect-Emperor could see comprehension brimming in the darkness that came before the man. Soon, the dread realization would come, and the coin would be lifted …
New children would be sired.
“I-I … I don’t understand …”
“What was my revelation? What secret could It whisper into an ear so small as mine?”
There is a head on a pole behind you.
Brutalities spin and scrape, like leaves blasted in the wind.
He is here … with you … not so much inside me as speaking with your voice.
There is a head on a pole behind you.
And he walks, though there is no ground. And he sees, though his eyes have rolled into his brow. Through and over, around and within, he flees and he assails … For he is here.