“You would rather break your neck?”
“I would rather splint my soul!”
Even in extremis, the portly Schoolman’s look betrayed the same exasperated wonder that the boy so often provoked on flat ground.
“I fear you’re too young to die for your scruples, Prosha. One must have a wife to widow, children to orphan.”
“You’re damned! All Schoolmen are damned!”
“Which is why your father plunders his treasury to pay us. Now take my hand. Take it!”
“No!”
He was regularly astounded pondering this incident as a grown man. Perhaps others would find cause for pride in bravery, but not Proyas. If terror had been a plaything for him as a boy, a thing to be baited and teased, it was out of ignorance far more than for courage, the preposterous assurance that nothing truly untoward could happen to him. Tyr?mmas’s watery death would ignite the pyre beneath that confidence, teach him the terror of terror.
“Well …” the canny sorcerer had said, “you can wait for the God of Gods to reach down to save you …”
“What do you mean?” Proyas had cried, too breathless to be clever. Some twenty cubits clacked its jaws beneath him. The bark had already begun to bite.
“Or …” Akka continued, pausing for effect.
“Or what?”
Drusas Achamian splayed his inked fingertips wider still, and Proyas noticed that he chewed rather than pared his nails. “You can take the hand He has put before you.”
There had been love in the sorcerer’s look, a father’s bottled fear. He would never admit to the flare of love he had felt in that moment, and he would cringe from its memory the way he cringed from thought of carnal shames.
He dared raise a hand, shifting the entirety of his weight to his other grip, snapping the branch …
He had no recollection of the ground slapping him unconscious. He would get his splint, but for his left leg, not his soul. Everyone said it was a miracle that he had survived. His mother told him that Achamian had cried out louder than she had as he plummeted. For years following, various caste-nobles would mimic the cry—a kind of effeminate whoop—when the Schoolman barged by …
Neither he nor Achamian so much as mentioned the episode.
And now he fell once again.
Proyas staggered through the slums of the Shigeki, the parasols of the Antanamerans, the scissoring timbers of the Kurigaldmen. The ways were largely abandoned, so he had little need to conceal his distress. Still, a consciousness of his appearance rose whenever he neared the battered pavilion of some Lord. Shame and … a gloating. What had happened? What was happening? He began cackling. It seemed his heart would combust, leap into open flame, for the merest remembrance of what had transpired!
The Whore smiled, and no soul hailed him.
Stars dusted the black bowel of the void. The Ordeal matted the visible world beneath, a mosaic broken to the contours of the land, each contingent a tessera set in the mortar of labyrinthine paths. It all seemed mad to him now, the heaps of Sranc parts, particularly crooked hands and horned feet, the countless versions of the Circumfix, gold, crimson, and pitch. It all seemed … frail, fraught with a simmering licentiousness, as if there were a greater Ordeal beyond the one he could see. He could feel strewn across nocturnal miles, the wrack of a more profound host, one senseless of pious decrees and righteous declarations, bound by nothing more than the coincidence of low appetites …
I …
A bestial impatience.
He crouched in a ravine and wept for a short time, gagged for memory and human offal.
I am forsaken.
That faith belonged to the foundation was a truth that Proyas had lived more than fathomed. It was the human ground, a thing too onerous not to be broken and divided between names: “love” in the union of disparate souls, “logic” in the union of disparate claims, “truth” in the union of desire and circumstance …
“Desire” when it reached out, seeking.
All I have known …
He huddled against rock and clay, a little place, croaking alone in the dark, wracked with grief, assailed by fear and imagery.
False.
The sun, he thought, would bring flies.