Proyas stood speechless, not knowing why he had come.
Saubon raised his face in scowling appraisal. He absently clutched the rag at his side, began towelling his beard and chest. He nodded to the platter of greying meat on the camp table to Proyas’s right.
“Be-before …” the Believer-King of Conriya stammered. “Y-you said he told you the truth.”
A careful look. “Aye.”
“So he told you that he wasn’t … a …”
Saubon drew the towel down his face. “He told me he was something called ‘D?nyain.’”
“That all of this was some kind of vast … calculation.”
The bitten eyes gazed forward. “Aye. The Thousandfold Thought.”
It seemed the lanterns should wink out for the absence of air.
“So you know!” Proyas cried. “How? How is it you can be … be …”
“Untroubled?” Saubon said, tossing the rag to the ground. He studied Proyas, elbows propped on his knees. “I’ve never been a believer like you, Proyas. I have no need to know what lays at the bottom of things.”
They breathed.
“Even to save the world?”
A scowl and a grin warred for possession of Saubon’s face. “Is that what we do?”
Proyas choked on the sudden impulse to scream. What was happening?
What was happening?
“Wha-what is he doing?” he cried, flinching for the unmanly crimp in his tone, and yet finding himself compounding the treachery with a rush of more white-skinned words: “I-I ne-need … I need to know what he’s doing!”
A long, inscrutable look.
“What is he doing?” Proyas nearly screeched.
Saubon shrugged his shoulders, leaned back. “I think he tests us … prepares us for something …”
“So he is a Prophet!”
As intelligent as he was, a kind of barbaric immodesty had always characterized Coithus Saubon, a vulgar need to lord over those who were his equals. Even in the presence of their Holy Aspect-Emperor, his inclination was to smirk. Now the first spark of genuine alarm humbled his gaze.
“You’ve dwelt in his shadow as long as me …” A bark of laughter that was supposed to sound confident. “What else could he be?”
D?nyain.
“Yes …” Proyas replied, nausea welling through him. “What else could he be?”
Some Men are like this. They would rather scoff, turn aside the plea they hear in other voices to better disguise the penury of their own. It takes them time to set aside the ephemeral arms and armour of the court. For twenty years he and Saubon had dwelt in the revelatory light of Anas?rimbor Kellhus. For twenty years they had discharged his commands with thoughtless obedience, delivering innumerable Orthodox to the sword, setting the fleshpots of the Three Seas alight. Together they had done this, the Right and Left Hands of the Holy Aspect-Emperor. Forsaking wives and children. Breaking all the Laws that had come before. And in all that time they had wondered only at the tragic folly of those they had killed. How? How could Men turn aside their eyes, when the God’s light was so plain?
They were in this together as well. Not even the proud and impetuous Coithus Saubon could feign otherwise.
“The way I see it,” the Galeoth Exalt-General said slowly, deliberately, “he’s preparing us for some kind of crisis … A crisis of faith.”
It seemed sacrilegious, even blasphemous, taking a … tactical attitude to their Lord-and-Prophet. But it also seemed far more canny, far more awake—certainly more than the caged slurry of his own thoughts.
“Why do you say that?”
Saubon stood, absently raked his fingers across his scalp.
“Because we are living scripture, for one … And scripture, if you haven’t noticed, dwells on grievance and disaster …” Again he expressed the attitude of second-guesses, the one that looks past what words mean to consider what they accomplish. “And because he says so himself, for another. He scarcely speaks without referencing Celmomas and the doom of the Great Ordeal’s ancient namesake … Yes … Something is coming … Something only he knows about.”
Proyas stared breathless. It seemed he could not move without stirring the memory of his bruises.
“But …”
“After all this time, you still don’t fully understand him, do you?”
“And you do?”
Saubon swatted the air the way Galeoth were prone when irked by questions. “You think me stubborn,” he said. “Mercenary. Your lesser counterpart. I know this—he knows this! I take no offense because I think you stubborn and insufferably pious. And so we counsel one against the other continuously, each heaving upon the rope of disparate reason …”
“So?”
“This is theatre!” Saubon cried, throwing wide his strapped arms. “Can’t you see? We are all mummers here! All of us! Prophet or not, our Holy Aspect-Emperor must control what Men see … All of us have roles to play, Proyas, and no one gets to choose which.”