The Unholy Consult (Aspect-Emperor #4)

“Our salvation!”

They have seized her, the brutish Men, lifted her upon lacerated arms, and now they are bearing her in the wake of her Imperial mother. The anguish of her loins is beyond describing, and she is paralytic with exhaustion, but she feels it, nevertheless, the residue of the Nonman King, like a wire strung through her from pith to extremity. She hangs from Nil’giccas as a beggar’s laundry.

“Our salvation!”

She turns, sees the old Wizard floating upon hands beside her, cursing his bearers, nearly lost in his rancid bundle of animal skin for struggling. She feels the nausea that is his Mark. She realizes he has been shouting her name.

“Our salvation!”

Her mother marches on foot with singular purpose before them, her grandson held tight to her breast. She is diminutive in the shadow of the Ingrauls wedging apart the masses before her.

“The Blessed Empress!” they bellow as they lurch to and fro. “Make way! Make way!”

“Our salvation!”

She sees them, the Men of the Ordeal, the pageant of damaged faces … falling to earth as their bodies drop them to their knees.

“Our salvation!”

Following the eyes of those more distant, she sees Him, glorious for the paint thrown by the setting sun, descending from on high.

“Our salvation!”

She sees the High Horn, its mirror immensity throwing sundogs across her periphery.

“Our salvation!”

She worries that she has just given birth, and yet feels no yearning for the bundle in her Empress mother’s arms. She wonders what has happened, and why, surrounded by such joyous extravagance, she feels only desolation.

“Our salvation!”

She sees the whorl of warriors across the battered terraces below, the gutter of coal and cinder that is the Canal. She sees the curtains walls, like a saw with golden teeth. She sees the smashed maw of ?bil, the Extrinsic Gate, the barrows of debris where Domathuz and Corrunc had once loomed impenetrable.

“Our salvation!”

She glimpses the great, deformed curve of the Fallen Horn hunched on a mountainous, gleaming arc over the back of the Scab. She sees a scatter of garnets taking flight … crows and vultures riding thermals.

“Our salvation!”

She stares out across what would be holy scripture.

She sees Him …

“Our salvation!”

Anas?rimbor Kellhus, the Most Holy Aspect-Emperor. She sees Him descend into fields of reaching …

The old Wizard is shouting her name.



The stupor of calamity is the stupor of an undertaking too enormous, the idiocy of not knowing where to begin. Achamian relinquished all thought, allowing his feet to step over bodies, his gaze to chase glimpses in the absence of intent or design. He stumbled after. He looked about witless. Puddled blood shivered for the violence of the Ordealmen and their demonstration …

“Our salvation!” like a hammer strike across Inchoroi gold.

“Our salvation!” mapping their Lord-and-Prophet’s descent, becoming a booming stair …

Until He alighted upon the ground belonging to all, and tranquillity stole across Golgotterath. His very image twitched for unearthly power, the lines of him scribbling for a heartbeat, then no more. Silence flew out across the Ordeal as a ripple in a pool.

“Our salvation!” resounded once more, absent any centre … then dissolved into an oceanic murmur.

Suddenly Men who had been too desperate to recognize let alone attend to the three refugees threw themselves to their knees amid the carcasses, begging to serve their Most Blessed Empress. Hobbled, Achamian could only stand and gape, watch blinking as Esmenet—holding his infant son bundled in her arms—commanded the Ingraul who had been their bulwark to convey them to her divine husband. He did not protest when the towering warriors hoisted him from his feet and began passing him across their heads. He should be thrown bodily as upon a flood, it seemed. Buoyant upon warlike hands, he remembered how he had floated thus some twenty years previous in Sumna … as the Holy Shriah railed against the iniquities of the Fanim.

He did not swoon as he had that day—or at least not in the same manner. Incredulity was but the margin of what he suffered. His life—and since seizing Seswatha’s Heart, his being—had been a creature of this place. For all our sovereign pretension, we are welded to what we fathom. The degree to which events knock us from ourselves is the degree to which we are indistinguishable from our knowledge.

Absent some horizon, a compass needle is no compass at all.

So he was bourne to the uttermost tier of the Oblitus, at once insensate and alert, alive to every excruciating detail of his transit. Wounds. The spirit-crushing bulk of the Horn above. Drying gore. He remembered crying out to Mimara, either at the behest of some agency other than his own, or out of stupid reflex for catching glimpses of her miraculous face.

The Ordealmen crowded across the steps of the Oblitus, eyes lunatic with exaltation, or dull with disbelief. The Schoolmen had alighted like crows along the protuberant heights of the Scab, many-coloured sorcerers-of-rank crowding the ledges with their sword-wielding brothers. Men knelt in prayer or exhaustion. Men sat transfixed, rigid about their own breathing. Men stood and craned their heads, straining for some glimpse of what transpired. Men milled and conversed, animate for joy and expectation. Here and there individuals pricked the old Wizard’s rolling gaze: a bloody-headed Galeoth whetting his blade, a Shigeki heaving the dead about to check faces, an Ainoni sitting and rocking as he repeatedly stabbed his own thigh.

So the old Wizard was passed as a coin from hand to hand. Hemp ropes draped the Risers, hoists either bound to wicker baskets or knotted into simple nooses. Thus he was hauled up scorched-stone faces. His handlers, no matter how savage their appearance, accorded him the same reverence they accorded their Blessed Empress. The vista of the Oblitus and the ruined hulk of Gwergiruh became more vertiginous with each tier he surmounted. As the Ordealmen heaved him up the penultimate wall, he saw Mimara below, a view so unobstructed, so lucid, that he could not but recall some portion of what was happening …

And who he was.

She looked up, hearing the one shout he had not voiced. He could weep for the dark oval of her face.

Then callused hands seized him once again, drew him about. He was lifted between battlements, wheeled around to stand on his good leg …

So that he might gaze dumbstruck across the summit of the Oblitus.

The sound of weeping larded the hush.

A Carythusali proffered him a spear he might use as a crutch. He took it.

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