Thieve wearing one mask, murder wearing another; the face beneath will be forgotten.
—AINONI PROVERB
Faith is the name we give to our determination.
A search for things better known whilst weeping,
And understood not at all.
—The Goat’s Heart, PROTATHIS
Early Autumn, 20 New Imperial Year (4132, Year-of-the-Tusk), the northeast shore of the Nele?st
Dreams came, dark tunnels beneath weary earth …
A ridge against the night sky, curved like a sleeping woman’s hip.
And upon it two silhouettes, black against clouds of stars, impossibly bright.
The figure of a man seated, crouched like an ape, legs crossed like a priest.
And a tree, branches swept up and out, vein-forking across the bowl of the night.
And the stars revolve about the Nail of Heaven like clouds hurried across winter skies.
And the Holy Aspect-Emperor of the Three Seas stares at the figure, stares at the tree, but cannot move. The firmament cycles like the wheel of an upturned cart.
The figure seems to perpetually sink for the constellations rising about him. He speaks, but his face cannot be seen.
I war not with Men, it says, but with the God.
“Yet no one but Men die,” the Aspect-Emperor replies.
The fields must burn to drive Him forth from the Ground.
“But I tend the fields.”
The dark figure stands beneath the tree, begins walking toward him. It seems the climbing stars should hook and carry him in the void, but he is like the truth of iron—impervious and immovable.
It stands before him, regards him—as it has so many times—with his face and his eyes. No halo gilds his leonine mane.
Then who better to burn them?
For Sranc, the ground was meat, and so the desolation of the land was complete. The Nele?st had fallen unnaturally calm, lapping the grey beaches with swampish lassitude. It climbed into a distance bleak for want of feature, the line of the horizon smeared from existence, so that Creation coiled without demarcation into the greater scroll of the sky. Their left flank secure, the Men of the Circumfix crossed the southern marches of what had once been A?rsi, the most warlike of the great High Norsirai nations. Illawor, the province had been called, and in ancient times, it had been quilted with fields of sorghum and other hardy cereals. The Ordealmen spied the ruins of what they thought were small forts peppered across the despoiled landscape, but were in fact ancient byres. Every homestead had been a bastion in ancient A?rsi ere the First Apocalypse. Men slept with their swords, wives with their bows. Children were taught how to commit suicide. Sk?lsirai, they called themselves, the “Shield-People”.
Now the Great Ordeal chased the Horde across the waste that remained of their land, consuming those Sranc they butchered as they marched. New names were needed, given the revulsion and disgust milled into their existing epithets. To eat Sranc or skinnies or muckers was to eat excrement or vomit or even worse. The Ainoni began calling them “Catfish”, for the slicked skin, the pallor, and because they swore the beasts tasted like the black rivers roping the Secharib Plains. But the name soon fell into disfavour. Despite the advantage of euphemism, it seemed too flaccid a term to capture the madness of eating the creatures.
“Meat” soon became the term of choice, at once generic and visceral, a symbolic condensation of both the fact of their obscenity and the point. To eat was to dominate, to conquer as they needed to conquer. But it was horror as well, for their nightly feast could be nothing other than horror, the encampment dazzled with bonfires, greasy for shadow, adorned with innumerable dismemberments, butchered Sranc swinging on ropes, heaped into seeping piles, their innards coiled in oily puddles of violet and black.