Here.
They seize him from time to time, the Sons of this place, and he feels the seams tear, hears his scream. But he cannot come apart—for unlike the Countless Dead his heart beats still.
His heart beats still.
There is a head on a pole behind you.
He comes to the shore that is here, always here, gazes without sight across waters that are fire, and sees the Sons swimming, lolling and bloated and bestial, raising babes as wineskins, and drinking deep their shrieks.
There is a head on a pole behind you.
And he sees that these things are meat, here. Love is meat. Hope is meat. Courage. Outrage. Anguish. All these things are meat—seared over fire, sucked clean of grease.
There is a head on a pole.
Taste, one of the Sons says to him. Drink.
It draws down its bladed fingers, and combs the babe apart, plucking him into his infinite strings, laying bare his every inside, so that it might lick his wrack and wretchedness like honey from hair. Consume … And he sees them descending as locusts, the Sons, drawn by the lure of his meat.
There is a head … and it cannot be moved.
So he seizes the lake and the thousand babes and the void and the massing-descending Sons and the lamentations-that-are-honey, and he rips them about the pole, transforms here into here, this-place-inside-where-you-sitnow, where he has always hidden, always watched, where Other Sons, recline, drinking from bowls that are skies, savouring the moaning broth of the Countless, bloating for the sake of bloat, slaking hungers like chasms, pits that eternity had rendered Holy …
We pondered you, says the most crocodilian of the Sons.
“But I have never been here.”
You said this very thing, it grates, seizing the line of the horizon, wrapping him like a fly. Legs click like machines of war. Yesss …
And you refuse to succumb to their sucking mouths, ringed with one million pins of silver. You refuse to drip fear like honey—because you have no fear.
Because you fear not damnation.
Because there is a head on a pole behind you.
“And what was your reply?”
The living shall not haunt the dead.
“What was your revelation?” Proyas cried, anger twisted into incredulity. “That the No-God would return! That the end of all things was nigh!”
He was immovable in the eyes of his Exalt-General, Kellhus knew, the stake from which all strings were bound and all things were measured. Nothing could be so gratifying as his approval. Nothing could be so profound as his discourse. Nothing could be so dense, so real, as his image. Ever since Caraskand and the Circumfixion, Kellhus had ruled Proyas’s heart, become the author of his every belief, the count of his every kindness, his every cruelty. There was no judgment, no decision the Believer-King of Conriya could make without somehow consulting the impression Kellhus had left in his soul.
In so many ways, Proyas was the most reliable of all those he had yoked to his will—the perfect instrument. And he was a cripple for it.
“And you are certain of this?”
To make him believe the first time had been labour enough. Now he must make him believe anew, cast him into a different shape, one that served a far different—and far more troubling—purpose.
Revelation was never a simple matter of authority because Men were never so simple as sodden clay—something that could be rolled blank and imprinted anew. There was fire in deeds, and the world was nothing if not a kiln. To act upon a belief was to cook its contours into the very matter of the soul. The more extreme the act, the hotter the fire, the harder the brick of belief. How many thousands had Proyas condemned to die in his name?
How many massacres had fired the beliefs Kellhus had pressed into his soul?
“I’m certain of what you’ve told me!”
It did not matter, so long as those tablets were smashed … irretrievably broken.
Kellhus gazed not at a man so much as a heap of warring signals: distress and conviction; accusation and self-loathing. He smiled the smile that Proyas unwittingly begged him not to smile, shrugged as if they discussed nothing more than mildew and beans. The spider flicked open its legs.
“Then you are certain of too much.”
The very words that had caused the Greater Proyas to barricade the soul of the Lesser.
Tears lacquered the man’s gaze. Bewildered incredulity slackened his face.
“I … I-I … don’t …” He bit the words against his lower lip.
Kellhus looked down into his bowl, spoke as though rehearsing an old meditation.
“Think, Proyas. Men will so they can become one with the Future. Men want so they can become one with the World. Men love so they can become one with the Other …” A fractional pause. “Men are forever famished, Proyas, famished for what they are not …”
The Holy Aspect-Emperor had leaned back so the fire rising white and scintillant between them would frame his aspect.