“What you see,” the teeth-baring D?nyain slurred, “is the fruit of the Tekne. The very structure of its flesh bears the imprint of intellect.”
“They were a warrior-caste,” the burnt one continued, “bred to lust and to hunger for all forms of trespass, to heap such damnation upon themselves that the merest glimpse of the Inverse Fire would reignite their ardour.”
What good did cursing Likaro do?
“So they are themselves a kind of Sranc?” the Anas?rimbor asked.
But what else was there?
“Their mission,” the caged D?nyain replied, “has likewise been branded into them.”
Better hatred than despair!
“Irrevocable belief has been branded into them,” his one-eyed brother added. “An Inverted Faith, one meant to hoard damnation as a goad to salvation.”
Even though it dwarfed the images of the Mutilated, the Aspect-Emperor’s reflection was somehow the least clear. It was as if globules of pitch lay suspended within the fin of Inchoroi gold, compressing elements of the man’s image.
“And how,” the Anas?rimbor asked, “had their ancient progenitors earned their collective damnation?”
“The Fathers of the Inchoroi?” the teeth-baring D?nyain asked. “Surely you’ve already grasped the answer …”
“I fear I have not.”
The Mutilated paused to count one another’s eyes.
“For straying so near the Absolute,” the burnt one answered.
Absolute?
“I see,” the golden reflection of the Aspect-Emperor said.
Serwa began sprinting up the ragged ramp of the causeway, felt her burnt skin crack into island archipelagos, and though she could count out each blistered atoll, she begrudged them not, for she was as the wind, too fleet to be grappled to earth by pain. Her agony shambled after, incentive to run ever faster into the cobwebs her apprehension had spun before her. She saw her myriad shadows shrinking into a fluttering thicket before her, until absorbed into her alone: a slender girl conjugating blackness. She saw the savaged Obmaw gaping, then engulfing, battered black stone hanging and jutting from the flying golden veneer. She breathed a reek so noxious as to kick one cough from her—then two.
She was in the Ark.
She slowed in wonder, hesitated. She could barely hear the Horde.
Had she managed to slip through undetected?
A monstrous crocodilian face grinned in the light of its own vomit …
She threw her arms up, crouched to one knee.
Fire burst, flung through with saliva like naptha or exploding phosphor. It slipped as water from oilcloth about her ravaged skin and away, heat like a childhood memory, a terror from long ago. She leapt backward and to her right, kicking in a somersault that carried her above the exhalation, and in that heartbeat she absorbed everything illuminated, plotted her lines of flight, for she could feel the ninety-nine Chorae hanging about her—she knew the strings would twang before the inhuman archers who had drawn them. She was already racing by time the points of oblivion began flying, running across a ground of cracked and pulverized bone …
An inner earth of corpses.
Residual wicks of flame danced for small circles of admiring offal. A single grey lane emanated from the breached Intrinsic Gate. Otherwise, complete blackness inhaled all space, leaving only time and memory …
The only two things a child of Anas?rimbor Kellhus required.
A vast atrium lay beyond the Obmaw, a shaft some hundred paces across, enclosed by a tremendous scaffold of columns bearing floors stacked upon floors, all of them pitched like the deck of a foundering pleasure barge. Perhaps the place had been glorious once, some kind of iridescent testament; it was little more than rubbish and hovels strung about a missing mountain now. Midden and debris had levelled the floor she shared with Skuthula, but all else was draped, including endless batteries of rotted cloth and hide—hammocks—hanging from the pitched ceilings.
The Wrac? coiled near the atrium’s vacant heart. At least a dozen companies of Ursranc palatials, Inversi, had assembled across the skewed heights and about the outskirts of the corrupt ground … Far more than she had hoped.
Eighty-eight Trinkets remained.
Absolute …
Ajencis had used the term to refer to the collapse of desire and object, Thought and Being.
Memgowa held that it was nothing other than Death, the reduction of being to the plurality of beings—the becoming thing of existence. But Malowebi had no clue what a D?nyain meant by the term, aside that it was some kind of prize, the end shared by the Mutilated and the Anas?rimbor alike …
“The progenitors called it the Illumination,” the unscathed D?nyain said, reflected in gilded miniature. “The age that saw the Tekne become their faith, the idol they raised above all others. They turned their back on their old Gods, their old temples, and raised new ones, great houses dedicated to unravelling the wellsprings of existence. Cause became their one and only God.”
Of all the shadowy images, the burnt D?nyain loomed the largest apart from the Anas?rimbor. “Cause, Kellhus.”
“For through it,” the wire-headed one declared, “they believed they could overcome the darkness preceding all things, and so become Gods.”
“Attain the Absolute,” the teeth-baring figure concluded, his reflection as tiny as a thumb across the polish.
But what is sunlight to a mole? In their curious, collective manner, the Mutilated told how the Tekne so transformed the problems faced by the progenitors that all the old ways became impossible. It raised them from their traditions, struck the shackles of custom from their intellects, until only their common animality constrained them. They worshipped themselves as the measure of all significance, gave themselves over to wanton gluttony. Nothing was forbidden them, short the obstruction of others and their desires. Justice became the calculation of competing appetites. Logos became the principle of their entire civilization.
“By imperceptible increments,” the one-eyed D?nyain said, his face strange and glaring, “the Tekne unfettered their desires, allowed them to plumb ever deeper perversions.”
The Tekne. Yes. The Tekne lay at the root of their argument.
“They began moulding themselves the way potter’s mould clay,” the unscathed one said.
The Tekne and the transformations wrought by its bottomless potency …
“They stood upon the very brink of the Absolute,” the teeth-baring D?nyain called. “It pricked their fingers, it was so near!”
How, in relieving the Inchoroi of want and deprivation, it had stripped them of everything sacred …
“There was only one riddle they could not solve,” the lone unscarred D?nyain said, “one ancient enigma the Tekne could not fathom …”
“The soul,” his teeth-baring brother gasped.
Three heartbeats of silence followed—silence and tumbling revelation. “It became their Mystery of Mysteries, the focus of their most cunning intellects.”
It no longer mattered who spoke—for the Mutilated did not lie, and the Truth spoke with but one soul.