“No!” the man barked. “No more riddles! Please! I beg you!”
Kellhus smiled with wry and mortal reassurance, the way a gentle and fearless father might to fortify his sons against his passing. He turned from the paroxysm of shame that had seized his disciple, grasped the decanter at his side to pour the man anpoi.
“You ask this because you seek reasons,” he said, passing the chanv-laced drink to the Believer-King. “You seek reasons because you are incomplete …”
Proyas glared as a wounded child over the edge of the bowl as he drank. Kellhus felt the concoction bloom warm and sweet over his own tongue and throat.
“Reason is naught but the twine of thought,” he continued, “the way we bind fragments into larger fragments, moor the inhaling now to what is breathless and eternal. The God has no need of it …”
Logos.
Proyas still did not understand, but he had been mollified by the tone of consolation, if nothing else. An anger yet animated him, one belonging to boys who are hectored beyond fearing their older brothers. But despite everything, his hope—the long-abused ache to know—yet occupied the bricked heights of his soul …
Waiting to be overthrown.
“To be all things, Prosha, the God must be at once greater than itself, and less.”
“Less? Less?”
“Finite. A man. Like Inri Sejenus. Like me … To be all things, It must know ignorance, suffer suffering, fear and confus—”
“And love?” the Exalt-General fairly cried. “What of love?”
And for the first time that evening, Anas?rimbor Kellhus was surprised. Love was the logic that conserved Life as opposed to Truth … the twine that bound hosts and nations from the myriad moments of Men.
“Yes … Most of all.”
Love, far more than reason, was his principle tool.
“Most of all …” Proyas repeated dully, his voice digging through the sand of torpor, the exhaustion of a clinging intellect, staggered heart. “Why?”
He does not want to know.
The Place called Anas?rimbor Kellhus snuffed all extraneous considerations, aimed its every articulation at the soul drowning in the air before him.
“Because of all the passions, nothing is so alien to the God as love.”
There was a head on a pole behind him.
What would Nersei Proyas, first among the Believer-Kings, make of the Truth?
This was the object of the Study.
The carpeted earth did not so much reel as wrench, Kellhus knew, wringing things too fundamental too bleed. Confusions. Questions eating questions, cannibalizing the very possibility of asking. And inversions, blasphemous in and of themselves, but utterly ruinous in their implication.
Upside-down prophets who deliver word of Men to the Heavens?
An inside-out God?
Calamitous insights never arrive whole. They are like the wires that the Ainoni forced into the gullets of captured runaway slaves, things that twist and pierce, that become ever more entangled with the motions of normal digestion—things that strangle from the inside, and so kill, organ by anguished organ.
Twenty years of abject devotion overturned, spilled. Twenty years of certitude, so deep, so profound, as to make murder holy.
How? How would the Zaudunyani respond to the overthrow of their most cherished beliefs?
The man’s eyes fluttered about welling heat. “B-but … but what you say … H-how is a man to worship?”
Kellhus said nothing at first, awaited the inevitable questioning look.
“Doubt,” he said, seizing his disciple’s gaze within the iron fist of his own. “Query, not as Collegians or Advocates query, but as the bewildered query, as those who genuinely seek the limits of what they know. To ask is to kneel, to say, ‘I end here …’ And how could it be otherwise? The infinite is impossible, Proyas, which is why Men are so prone to hide it behind reflections of themselves—to give the God beards and desires! To call It ‘Him’!”
He raised a gold-haloed hand to his brow, feigning weariness. “No. Terror. Hatred of self. Suffering, ignorance, and confusion. These are the only honest ways to approach the God.”
The Believer-King dropped his face, hitched about a low sob.
“This place … where you are now, Prosha. This is the revelation. The God is not comfort. The God is not law or love or reason, nor any other instrument of our crippled finitude. The God has no voice, no design, no heart or intellect …”
The man wept as if coughing.
“It is it … Unconditioned and absolute.”
A soft keening, a sound that was both question and accusation.
How?
The Place called Kellhus watched the Believer-King vanish into what he was, observed the very order of the man dissolve as a clot of sand in quick waters. Deviations were noted. Assumptions were revised. Possibility bloomed across the whole, the branching of branches, new multiplicities for the hard knife of actuality to cull …
Origins were isolated.
“And the wages?” the man barked through lips stringed with snot and spittle.