The Ordeal had drawn near to legendary ruins by this time, so that word of Sibaw?l’s survival passed as lightning through the Holy Host of Hosts. A booming cheer seized the masses, one that pained the throats of those who caught any glimpse of the harrowed Cepalorae. Expressions are ever the measure of weal and woe. A simple look is often enough to fathom the scale, if not the specifics, of what some other soul has suffered, to know whether they have triumphed or merely persevered, wavered or capitulated outright. The look of the Cepalorae communicated something more horrible than suffering, something incommunicable.
That night, when Sibaw?l answered the summons of his Holy Aspect-Emperor in Council, the gathered Believer-Kings found themselves appalled by the man’s transformation. Proyas embraced him, only to recoil as if at some whispered rebuke. At the behest of Anas?rimbor Kellhus, Saccarees related the legend of Wreoleth according to Mandate lore. The Grandmaster spoke of how Mog-Pharau had stamped his chattel with a terror of the place so that its inhabitants might be spared, “as grain is spared the millstone.” Wreoleth, he explained to the anxious assembly, had been the granary of the Consult, and its Sons suffered as no other Son of Men had suffered.
“What say you?” Siroyon finally cried to his rival.
Sibaw?l levelled a gaze that could only be called dead.
“Hell …” he replied, his voice dropping from his mouth like sodden gravel from a spade. “Hell kept us safe.”
Silence fell across the Umbilicus. Framed by the sorcerous twining of the Ekkin?, the Holy Aspect-Emperor peered at Sibaw?l for five long heartbeats. He alone seemed untroubled by the vacancy that now dominated his manner.
Anas?rimbor Kellhus nodded in cryptic affirmation, as if understanding rather than affirming what he had glimpsed. “Henceforth,” he said, “you shall do as you will in matters of war, Lord Sibaw?l.”
And so the Chieftain-Prince of Cepalor did, leading his tribal cohorts out before the tolling of the Interval every day, returning with sacks of white skin, which he and his kinsmen consumed raw in the dark. They stoked no fire, and seemed to avoid those fires belonging to their neighbours. They no longer slept, or so the rumours charged. Word of their unnatural ferocity on the fields spread, how the Sranc fled from them no matter what their numbers. Wherever Sibaw?l and his pallid horsemen congregated, the Ordealmen shunned them. The more superstitious fingered charms upon spying them—some even threw arms over their own faces, convinced that dead eyes saw only dead men.
All came to fear the Sons of Cepalor.
There was a head upon the pole behind him.
To remake Men, Kellhus had come understand, one had to recover what was most simple in them—what was basic. The greatest poets eulogized childhood, extolled those who found innocence untrammelled within. But without exception they seized only on the simplicities that flattered and consoled, ignoring all the ways children resemble beasts. Animals were by far the better metaphor. Men did not so much remain children at heart, as they remained brutes, a collection of reflexes, violent, direct, blind to all the nuances that made men Men.
To remake Men, one had to tear down their trust in complication, force them to shelter in instinct and reflex, reduce them to what was animal.
Proyas had good reason to look hunted.
“You’re saying that … that …”
Kellhus exhaled, and so reminded his Exalt-General to do the same. This time, he had bid Proyas to sit at his side rather than opposite the hearth: to better exploit bodily proximity. “Damnation has claimed Sibaw?l and his countrymen.”
“But they live!”
“Do they? Or do they dwell somewhere between?”
Proyas gazed appalled. “But h-how … how could such a thing happen?”
“Because fear pries open the heart. They suffered too much terror upon ground too steeped in suffering. Hell forever gropes, forever pokes at the limits of the living. In Wreoleth, it found and seized them.”
There was a head upon the pole behind him. If he could not turn to see it, it was because it lay behind his seeing … Behind all seeing.
“But-but … surely you …”
He held his disciple in the palm of his intellect.
“Surely I could save them?” A pause to let the import roil. “The way I saved Serw??”
Something between anguish and exasperation cramped his Exalt-General’s face. To strip a soul to its essentials, one had to show the complication of the complicated—this was the great irony of such studies. Nothing is more simple than complication become habit. What was effortless, thoughtless, had to become fraught with doubt and toil.
As it should.
“I … I don’t understand.”
He could sense it even now, the head on the pole behind him.
“There are many I have failed to save.”
There was no denying the indulgence of the exercise. Once Kellhus had mastered the multitudes, once the polity derived its might from him, he had no longer required manipulations so fine as this. Years had passed since he had undertaken a Study so immediate as the soul of a single man.