“What …” Proyas asked on emptied lungs, “what are you saying?”
Kellhus grimaced in a rueful, it-could-not-be-otherwise manner.
“We are the antithesis of the God, not the reflection.”
Confusion. Confusion was ever the herald of genuine insight. As the Greater Proyas churned, a chorus of discordant voices, the Lesser Proyas found himself that song, a clamour that he could only conceive as one. When those voices at last embraced one another—he would find himself remade.
Rapid breath. Fluttering pulse. Hands clenched, fingernails scoring sweated palms.
So close …
“And this—” Proyas blurted, only to catch himself, as much for his terror as for the burning hook in his throat.
“Speak. Please.”
A single, treacherous tear fell into the folds of the Believer King’s luxurious beard.
At last.
“This is why you c-call the God-of-Gods …”
He sees …
“Call Him … ‘It’?”
He understands.
Admission was all that remained.
It.
The name of all things inhuman.
When applied to the inanimate world, it meant nothing. No whinge of significance accompanied its utterance. But when applied to animate things, it became ever more peculiar, ever more fraught with moral intimation. And when used to single out apparently human things, it roared with a life all its own.
It festered.
Call a man “it” and you were saying that crime can no more be committed against him as against a stone. Ajencis had called Man “onraxia”, the being that judged beings. The Law, the Great Kyranean claimed, belonged to his very essence. To call a man “it” was to kill him with words, and so to oil the actions that would murder him in fact.
And the God? What did it mean for the God of Gods to be called an “it”?
The Holy Aspect-Emperor watched his most trusted disciple flounder in the wrack of these considerations. Few tasks were so onerous as to make a man believe the new, to think thoughts without precedent. It was an irony so mad as to be an absurdity, that so many would forfeit their lives sooner than their beliefs. It was ardour, of course. It was loyalty and the simple hunger for the security of the Same. But more than anything, it was ignorance that delivered conviction beyond the pale of disputation. Ignorance of questions. Ignorance of alternatives.
No tyranny was so complete as blindness. So with each of these sessions Kellhus merely raised more questions and posed more contradictory answers, and watched the once solitary track he had cut into Proyas vanish into the trampled earth of possibility …
He raised a hand into the dim air, gazed upon the nimbus of gold shining about them.
Such a remarkable thing.
So hard to explain.
“It comes to me, Proyas. In my sleep … It comes ….”
A statement pregnant with both meaning and horror. Kellhus often did this, answered his disciples’ questions with observations that seemed relevant only because of their ornamental import and the odour of profundity. Most failed to even notice his evasion, and those few who glimpsed it assumed they were being misdirected for some divine reason, in accordance with some greater design.
Nersei Proyas simply forgot how to breathe.
A glance toward his trembling fingertips.
Two more balled fists.
“The God …” was the most the Exalt-General could say.
The Holy Aspect-Emperor smiled in the manner of those more bereaved than undone by tragic ironies.
“Is nothing human.”
An empire of his soul …
This was what his father’s Thousandfold Thought had made.
“So the God—?”
“Wants nothing … Loves nothing.”
A pattern conquering patterns, reproducing on the scales of both insects and heavens; heartbeats and ages. All bound upon him, Anas?rimbor Kellhus.
“The God doesn’t care!”
“The God is beyond care.”
He was as much a creature of the Thought as it was a creature of him. For it whispered as it danced, threading the stacked labyrinths of contingency, filing through the gates of his daylight apprehension, becoming him. He declared, and the patterns went forth, making wombs of souls, reproducing, taking on the cumbersome complexities of living life, transforming the dancing of the dance, begetting heresies and fanaticisms and mad delusions …
Forcing more declarations.
“So then why does He demand so much of us?” Proyas blurted. “Why entangle us with judgments? Why damn us!”
Kellhus drew up his manner and expression to answer the bodily cacophony of his warlike disciple, becoming the perfect counterpoint: ease to rebuke his disorder, repose to shame his agitation, all the while reading, counting the cubits of his disciple’s pain.
“Why is wheat sewn and harvested?”
Proyas blinked.
“Wheat?” He squinted as though ancient. “Wha-what are you saying?”
“That our damnation is the Gods’ harvest.”