A dizzying moment. Vision wars against vision, one world crisp with edge and grit, the other milky with warring angles, the budding of things long hidden …
And she sees it, Judgment, implacable and absolute, bleeding like dye through the sack-cloth of the mundane. She sees it, the world become a jurist’s scroll, and she cannot but read …
Damnation.
The shattered sword near the entrance: she sees the progression of hands that once clasped the pommel, the parting flesh, the plunging point, the mewling screams of its soulless victims, the glittering perfection of the lines it once sketched through pockets of subterranean gloom.
An invisible palm presses her cheek, forces her gaze across what she does not want to see …
The torment of the Whale-mothers.
Between women and men, women possess the lesser soul. Whenever the Eye opens, she glimpses the fact of this, the demand that women yield to the requirements of men, so long as those demands be righteous. To bear sons. To lower her gaze. To provide succor. The place of the woman is to give. So it has always been, since Omrain first climbed nude from the dust and bathed in the wind. Since Esmenet made herself a crutch for stern Angeshra?l.
But the horror the Eye reveals before her …
The insect obscenity of their innocent forms. Bulbous, their flesh little more than quivering cages. Women bred into monstrous instruments of procreation, until they had become little more than pouches slung about their wombs.
The misery. The huffing and moaning. The mewling screams. The inhuman men filing to their assignations, utterly heartless and insensate. The slapping of hip and genitalia. The animality of coupling stripped to its essential germ, to the milking pitch of insemination …
Sadism without desire. Cruelty—unimaginable cruelty—absent the least will to inflict suffering.
An evil that only the Inchoroi could surpass.
And when her gaze flinches, she sees that this crime is no aberration, but rather an inevitable and extreme implication of what rules the whole. Everywhere she looks she sees it with heart-scratching clarity, rising like bruises beneath the world’s tender skin. Craft. Cunning. The devious pitch of intellect, domineering, devoid of compassion or humility …
And the will—the blasphemous will most of all. The deranged hunger to become God.
She begins trembling. “Akka …” she hears herself gasp. “You-y-you …” She trails to recover her voice and her spit. Tears flood her cheeks.
“You were right.”
Even as she says this a part of her balks—the part that knows how desperately he has yearned to hear these words …
The Holy cares nothing for the designs of Men. And their appetites, it denies outright. The Holy, at all turns, demand the sacrifice of mortal projects, the carrying of burdens that slow, even kill. The Holy was the path of detours, even dead ends. The road that punished for following.
“What are you saying?” the old Wizard croaks.
She blinks, then blinks again, but the Eye refuses to close. She sees rolling heads, masticating mouths. The Whale-mothers, tongueless and screaming … The lean men arched like shitting dogs.
She sees the unspeakable evil that is the Shortest Path.
“This place … The D?nyain … Th-they … They are evil …”
She turns to him, glimpses the horror rising behind his charred face.
“You-you …” he begins in a thin voice. “You see this wi—?”
A roaring crashes through her, a thunder beyond the reach of her ears. Her edges blacken, pursue her inward. Sensation shrinks … then blooms in proportions titanic and absurd. Suddenly she sees Him, her stepfather, Anas?rimbor Kellhus I, the Holy Aspect-Emperor, high on his throne, wreathed in darkness and fury, a malignant cancer cast across the far corners of the world …
Doom incarnate.
Suddenly she sees the Truth of the old Wizard’s terror. A D?nyain ruled the World—a D?nyain!
She reels as if struck, so sudden, so absolute is the inversion of her understanding. Her She?ra corselet, which has always amazed her for its arcane weightlessness, suddenly drags as iron upon her shoulders.
For so long Momemn has been the luminous summit, the hub that ferried light to the more shadowy extremities of the Empire. Despite her hatred, it has always seemed both the source and the rule—for it is ever the want of the heart to make home its measure of measures. But now it pulsed with dread implication, glutinous with foul blackness, a leprous counterpoint to Golgotterath, another stain blotting the world’s mapped places.
“My mother!” she cries, seeing her flicker like a candle flame beneath the rising night. “Akka! We have to find her! Warn her!”
The old Wizard stands gaping, astounded—as well as blasted with the wages of his damnation in the Eye. Everywhere, all around them, torment and perdition, radiating like stones kicked from the Fire. Has the entire world been consigned to Hell?