And for all the implacable serenity of his D?nyain soul, it stirred memories of the First Holy War, the turbulent span when such scrutiny had comprised the sum of his Mission. Since the Fall of Shimeh, no soul (not even Esmenet) had warranted such attention.
The instinct to bigotry that had nearly killed him in Caraskand had quickly come to heel, to serve, compelling acquiescence, silencing critics, even murdering enemies. For years, he had grappled the great beast that was the Three Seas, pinned it to earth, and with gifts and brutalities he had trained it, until his name only need be uttered—until his tyranny had become indistinguishable from his being. This allowed him to move from nations to truths, to turn his intellect full upon the maddening abstracta of the Daimos, the Metagnosis, and the Thousandfold Thought.
He had pierced the obscurantist veils, grasped the metaphysics of Creation, transformed meaning into miracles. He had walked the ways of Hell, returned bedecked in trophies. No one, not even the legendary Hero-Mage of ancient ?merau, Titirga, could rival his arcane might.
He had learned of the head on the pole.
Domination. Over lives and nations. Over history and ignorance. Over existence itself, down through the leaves of reality’s countless skins. No mortal had possessed such might. His was a power and potency that not even the Gods, who must ration themselves across all times, could hope to counter, short of scooping themselves hollow and forever dwelling as phantoms …
No soul had so owned Circumstance. He, and he alone, was the Place, the point of maximal convergence. Nations hung from his whim. Reality grovelled before his song. The Outside itself railed against him.
And yet for all of it darkness still encircled him, the obscurity of before, the blackness of after.
For those who worshipped him as a god, he remained a mortal man, possessing but one intellect and two hands—great, perhaps, in proportion to his innumerable slaves, but scarcely a mote on the surface of something inconceivable. He was no more a prophet than an architect or any other who wrenches his conception into labourious reality. All the futures he had raised had been the issue of his toil …
He suffered visions, certainly, but he had long ceased to trust them.
“I was there, Master …” Proyas said. “I saw. No one could have saved Serw?!”
Kellhus held him in the clasp of endless engines.
“Do you mean her life, or her soul?”
The nets of muscle sheathing him flexed into the sigil of horror.
“Does it trouble you, Proyas?”
And he was shadow-play, his disciple, the light of cosmic enormities bent small across the surface of a tear. He was an oak leaf, riding the yaw and twizzle of drafts, hanging above the rumour of whirlwinds …
A glimpse through the aperture we confuse for life …
“D-does what … what trouble me?”
He was anything but a Man.
“To know that Serw? burns in Hell.”
Slaves brought them their repast: small medallions of sizzling Sranc meat, seasoned with blueberries and wild scallions rooted from the seashore. The meat was improbably tender and sweet. The Place called Anas?rimbor Kellhus told his heartbroken disciple a tale of prophets as they ate, the way the bottleneck of their mortality invariably distorted visions they thought took the compass of the Heavens. The infinite could only be experienced in butchered approximation, he said, and communicated with rank fraudulence. “Men are bent on clarity and proportion, even when there is none to be found,” he explained. “They offer up broken visions, Proyas, and call them perfect and whole.” A grandfather’s rueful smile, canny and adoring. “What else can Men see, when their eyes are so small?”
The challenges come as squalls of bewildered anger. “But then-then how is the God to tell us … tell us anything?”
A forgiving frown on a long-drawn sigh, the kind that speaks of wars not quite survived.
“That is the conceit, is it not? The assumption that prophets deliver word of the God to Men.”
Proyas sat motionless for three heartbeats.
“Then what is their purpose?”
“Is it not plain? To deliver word of Men to the God.”
Men are made, and Men are born, and ever do the proportions escape them. They can only guess at themselves, never see, only infer the lines they inhabit from the crooks they glimpse in others. Proyas had been cursed by the fact of his birth, then doomed all the more by what life would make of him. His was a wondering soul, philosophical in the Near Antique sense. But it was also an exacting one, a soul that demanded clarity and resolution. As a babe he had slept in his mother’s arms no matter what the court or domestic furor. The clamour meant nothing to him, so long as beloved arms held him tight, so long as the beloved face smiled down.
The living shall not haunt the dead …
For twenty years this had been what Kellhus had given him: the drowsy slumber of certainty.
“But why?” Proyas cried.
The time had come to rouse him, deliver him to the horror of the Real.
“Your question is your answer.”
Golgotterath suffered none to slumber.