The Unholy Consult (Aspect-Emperor #4)
R. Scott Bakker
Fictional seduction,
On a black snow sky.
Sadness kills the superman,
Even fathers cry.
Black Sabbath, “Spiral Architect”
Have you ever in your life commanded the morning, And caused the dawn to know its place, That it might take hold of the ends of the earth, And the wicked be shaken out of it?
Job 38:12-3
What Has Come Before …
THE PRINCE OF NOTHING
Wars, as a rule, fall within the compass of history. They mark the pitch of competing powers, the end of some and the ascendancy of others, the ebb and flow of dominance across the ages. But there is a war that Men have waged for so long they have forgotten the languages they first used to describe it. A war that makes mere skirmishes out of the destruction of tribes and nations.
There is no name for this war; Men cannot reference what leaps the short interval of their comprehension. It began when they were little more than savages roaming the wilds, in an age before script or bronze. An Ark, vast and golden, toppled from the void, scorching the horizon, throwing up a ring of mountains with the violence of its descent. And from it crawled the dread and monstrous Inchoroi, a race who had come to seal the World against the Heavens, and so save the obscenities they called their souls.
The Nonmen held sway in those ancient days, a people that surpassed Men not only in beauty and intellect, but in wrath and jealousy as well. Their Ishroi heroes and Quya mages defended the World, fought titanic battles and stood vigilant during epochal truces. They endured the Inchoroi weapons of light, watched their enemy wilt before their own. They survived the treachery of the Aporetics, who provided the Inchoroi with thousands of sorcery-killing Chorae. They overcame the horrors their enemy crafted: the Sranc, the Bashrag, and most fearsome of all, the Wracu. But their avarice at last betrayed them. After centuries of war, they made peace with the invaders in return for ageless immortality—a gift that was in fact a fell weapon, the Plague of Wombs.
Thus it became a war between doomed species, the one beauteous, the other vile. In the end, the Nonmen hunted the Inchoroi to the brink of annihilation. Their surviving Quya mages sealed the Ark, which they had come to call Min-Uroikas, and hid it from the world with devious glamours. Exhausted, bereft of hope or purpose, they retired to their underworld mansions to mourn the loss of their wives, their daughters, and the future of their once-glorious race.
As much as nature, history abhors vacuums. From the eastern mountains, the first tribes of Men began claiming the lands the Nonmen had abandoned—Men who had never known the yoke of slavery. Of the surviving Ishroi Kings, some fought, only to be dragged under by the tide of numbers, while others simply left their great gates unguarded, bared their necks to the licentious fury of a lesser race.
So began the Second Age, the Age of Men. Perhaps the Nameless War would have ended with the fading of its principals, but the Ark itself remained intact, and Men ever lusted for knowledge. Centuries passed, and the mantle of human civilization crept along the great river basins of E?rwa and outward, bringing bronze where there had been flint, cloth where there had been skins, and writing where there had been recital. Great cities rose to teeming life. The wilds gave way to cultivated horizons.
Nowhere were Men more bold in their works, or more overweening in their pride, than in the North, where commerce with the Nonmen had allowed them to outstrip their more swarthy cousins to the South. In the legendary city of Sauglish, those who could discern the joints of existence founded the first sorcerous Schools. As their learning and power waxed, a reckless few turned to the rumours they had heard whispered by their Nonman teachers—rumours of the great golden Ark. The wise were quick to see the peril, and the Schoolmen of Mangaecca, who coveted secrets above all else, were censured, and finally outlawed.
But it was too late. Min-Uroikas was found—occupied.
The fools discovered and awakened the last two surviving Inchoroi, Aurax and Aurang, who had concealed themselves in the labyrinthine recesses of the Ark. At their hoary knees the outlaw Schoolmen learned that damnation, the burden that all sorcerers bore, need not be inevitable. They learned that the world could be shut against the judgment of Heaven. So they forged a common purpose with the twin abominations, a Consult, and bent their cunning to the aborted designs of the Inchoroi.
The Mangaecca relearned the principles of the material—the Tekne. They mastered the manipulations of the flesh. And after generations of study and searching, after filling the pits of Min-Uroikas with innumerable corpses, they realized the most catastrophic of the Inchoroi’s untold depravities: Mog-Pharau, the No-God.
They made themselves slaves to better destroy the world.
And so the Nameless War raged anew. What has come to be called the First Apocalypse destroyed the great Norsirai nations of the North, laying ruin to the greatest glories of Men. But for Seswatha, the Grandmaster of the Gnostic School of Sohonc, the entire world would have been lost. At his urging, Anas?rimbor Celmomas, the High King of the North’s mightiest nation, K?niüri, called on his tributaries and allies to join him in a holy war against Min-Uroikas, which Men now called Golgotterath. But his Ordeal foundered, and the might of the Norsirai perished. Seswatha fled south to the Ketyai nations of the Three Seas, bearing the greatest of the legendary Inchoroi weapons, the Heron Spear. With Anaxophus, the High King of Kyraneas, he met the No-God on the Plains of Mengedda, and by dint of valor and providence, overcame the dread Whirlwind.
The No-God was dead, but his slaves and his stronghold remained. Golgotterath had not fallen, and the Consult, blasted by ages of unnatural life, continued to plot salvation.
The years passed, centuries became millennia, and the Men of the Three Seas forgot the horrors endured by their fathers. Empires rose and empires fell. The Latter Prophet, Inri Sejenus, reinterpreted the Tusk, and over the course of centuries the faith of Inrithism—organized and administered by the Thousand Temples and its spiritual leader, the Shriah—came to dominate the entire Three Seas. The great Anagogic Schools arose in response to the Inrithi persecution of sorcery. Using Chorae, the Inrithi warred against them, attempting to silence their blasphemies.