Yes, my friend. What of salvation?
“There is no recompense,” the Place said, “save knowing …”
“Knowing that we know nothing!”
“Exactly.”
“So—?”
Sorrow and scrutiny.
“You see it. After all these years you finally understand.”
A moment of stunned gazing, swollen face swaying as though staring from the deck of a foundering vessel. The man did not need to speak for the Place to hear the name.
Achamian.
The Place smiled, as if things catastrophic could be gentle ironies all the same.
“The teacher you renounced …”
A grimace seized the man’s expression of wronged incredulity. Jaw pulled down. Lips cramped about a soundless cry. Spittle strung like spider’s silk across the void of his mouth …
“He is the prophet you sought all along.”
The Place held its weeping slave, rocked him in its arms. The smell of burnt lamb wicked through the closed confines of the chamber.
“Then what are you.”
Spoken with lament, without the intonation of a question. Spoken the way beloved dead are removed from the place of mourning.
“A deceiver,” the Place said. “False …”
“No—”
“I am D?nyain, a Son of Ishu?l. I am the product of a monstrous decision made two thousand years ago, a decision to breed Men as Men breed cattle and dogs, to remake them in the image of intellect …”
He pulled the man to the side, and down, so that his bearded face lay like a plate on his lap.
“I was sent forth to hunt down and kill my father,” the Place said, “who had been sent out before me …” He paused to brush a greying lock from the man’s brow. “When I discovered the weakness of Men, I understood that my father would command enormous power … that I would need the strength of nations to overcome him.”
Warring patterns. Everything turned upon the way patterns owned the souls of Men. Truth, as surely as Luck, simply sorted the conquered from the dead.
“So I began acting a prophet, even as I denied being one, knowing that my intellect would astound you and your brothers, that eventually you would make me your prophet …”
“No! Tha—”
“Thus I seized my nation, the First Holy War …”
The Place drew a long-fingered hand across the side of the Believer-King’s face, temple to jaw. They seemed unreal to the man, it knew, those fierce and unruly days. The residue dwelt within him, the imprint of bearing witness, sparked to life from time to time in dreams and reveries. Pebbles from an ocean, but nothing else. Like all other survivors, he was perpetually stranded, forever thrown.
“My father had anticipated this, had known that the trial of my journey would transform me, that the assassin who had departed Ishu?l would arrive his disciple.”
Petulant fury. Toddler defiance. “No! This canno—!”
“But there was something he failed to realize …”
Swollen indecision. Hope reaching out through anguish and asphyxiation, clutching for the reversal that would return everything to what had been. “What? What?”
“That my trial would drive me mad.”
“But you are my Lord! M-my salvation!”
“Caraskand … The Circumfix …”
“No—cease! Stop this! I’m-I’m begging you! Pleas—”
“I began seeing … phantasms, hearing voices … Something began speaking to me.”
“Please … I-I …”
“And in my disorder, I listened … I did what it commanded.”
Sobs wracked the man, the convulsions of a bereaved child. But these words yanked something through Proyas, as if he had been wound by a windlass and released. The Place relaxed its grip, lowered him back to its lap. The man’s bloodshot eyes fixed him heedless of any shame or fury.
“I killed my own father,” the Place said.
“The God! It has to be the God! The God spe—”
“No, Proyas. Gird yourself. Peer into the horror!”
I tend the fields …
A glutinous breath. The squint of a soul attempting to squint away its own misgivings. “You think th-this voice is … is your own?”
And burn them.
The Place smiled the negligent smile of those who could have no stake in feuds so minor.
“The truth of a thing lies in its origins, Proyas. I know not from whence this voice comes.”
Hope, beaming with a hand-seizing urgency. “Heaven! It comes from Heaven! Can’t you see?”
The Place gazed down at its most beautiful slave.
“Then Heaven is not sane.”
The Place bid the man strip and he stripped.
Even after so many years of hardship, the man’s frame remained upright and unbroken. He was lean, the way all Ordealmen were lean; shadow inked the overlay and anchoring of his every muscle. Black hair matted the olive-pale skin of his chest. It thinned to a line as it descended the hollow of his belly, then bloomed about his groin and thighs. His phallus lay grey and inert.