The disciple hung his head, crushing his beard. His gaze was swollen and uncomprehending.
The Place drew its robe up and aside, welcomed the kiss of unencumbered air. It approached the man from behind, reached out to clutch the pulse racing in his throat.
The truth of a thing … it whispered.
It drew its member across the man’s buttocks …
Savoured the flutter beneath its fingertips …
Then the insertion. The stench of feces and sizzling lamb. The cough that was really a sob …
Deep … until all that remained was one place, the congress of Greater Souls.
It seized the man, lifted him from his feet. It used him as he had never been used before.
There was a head upon a pole behind him.
All souls wander. No matter what track they follow, it is never their own.
Faith is thrust upon us all. Even the suicide, who makes a fetish of refusal and a conceit of lamentations, has faith. Even the ironist, who would mock all creation to better sun his thistles. Even he believes …
Faith is as inescapable as Men are small. They are borne breath by breath, a bubble in oily oblivion. No compass is so puny as the now, and yet it is the estate of man, his ephemeral empire. Faith. Faith alone binds him to what was and what will be—to what transcends. Faith alone clasps hands with what is other and holds firm. It is as inevitable as suffering, as compulsory as breath.
Only its object varies …
The in what.
Proyas had believed in Anas?rimbor Kellhus, had assumed he dwelt within a World without horizons, where all the hidden things had been counted and enslaved. He was here and he was now, as meagre as any Man, but he was everywhere and eternal as well—so long as he believed. What horror could the World hold for him, standing at the Holy Aspect-Emperor’s right hand? No matter where he travelled, no matter what atrocities he committed, the God was for him.
But no longer.
The ground had pitched, and all things now fell to the horizon. Proyas did not so much flee as plummet from the Umbilicus, did not so much walk as drop through the canvas-sheeted ways of the encampment, so steep had his world become … the scarp it had always been.
The God had never been for him. It was a spider … Infinite and inhuman.
Kellhus was not His Prophet.
Faith was deception, the mean and the base groping for the epic and the glorious—proof against idiot insignificance, against truth.
Ever had he hung upon the beating of a single, witless heart. Ever had he been flotsam in the mad surge of events, another battered now, reaching, clutching for a surety that did not exist.
Ever had he been used, exploited! Ever had he been a fool! A fool!
Ever had he fallen thus …
He fell to his knees among the shag-hide tents of the Nangaels, raised fists to the catamite images that clogged his eyes. Upon this ledge he huddled, sobbing for loss and degradation …
Faith was the small aping immensity, the remote painted across the near, the triumph of conceit over terror.
The most blessed ignorance.
And it was no more.
Terror had been a drug when Proyas was young.
Ever had he been a hero as a youth, dazzled by the great souls of legend; ever was he bent on proving his bravery, not to others, but to himself. His mother would sometimes weep for the hazards he dared: scaling the mortices of the Atikkoros, taunting the bulls used by a troupe of Invitic acrobats, and climbing every tree opportunity afforded, not simply into the bower, but to the skinny peak, where the wind would pitch him as an iron ingot upon a stalk of milkweed.
His favourite had been a grandiose oak that everyone called Wheezer for the hoarse noise it made when the wind possessed the proper temper. The tree’s original peak had been sheared away, leaving the lesser half of what had been a fork, an upward arching branch that provided the footing he used to surmount Wheezer the way he could no other tree. There he would hang swaying, his heart racing, his hands and head fuzzy for floating exhilaration, Aoknyssus reaching out in grim and intricate stages, and it would all seem to be for him—him! He must have climbed the hoary old beast at least a hundred times without incident. And then, one dour, autumnal day, it simply cracked. He still felt the twang of mortal terror recalling it, the clutch of cold sweat across his skin. He still caught his breath …
Swinging out and dropping down, doomed until a skein of lower branches miraculously caught the broken bough. He found himself hanging, legs kicking out over void. The entire palace would hear his scream (he would spend some three months hating Tyr?mmas, his older brother, for endlessly mimicking his cry. He could remember pondering, in the first few instants, which was the greater horror, dropping to his death, or hanging exposed as more and more shocked and scowling faces gathered beneath …
“Are you daft, boy? I said take my hand.”
And then, from nowhere it seemed, there was Achamian, standing as though upon invisible ground, floating, reaching out with ink-stained fingers.
“Never!”