Mo?nghus lowered his turquoise gaze. After a congealed heartbeat, he ducked into her embrace much the same as Sorweel had, his frame dwarfing both of them. A small barrage of arrows peppered Serwa’s arcane defenses, drumming light from empty air. The morning sun burnt across the back of the east.
Her spine arched the familiar way, and she dug the knuckle of her thumb in his flank in the way Sorweel had decided was involuntary. She leaned her head back, and answering to her inaugural sorcerous cry, pearl incandescence spilled from her mouth, her eyes, so bright as to utterly occlude her beauty.
Her song loosed a thousand spiders across opposite sides of his skin, scuttling in perfect time together, inside and out. Mist climbed about them, somehow untouched by turbulence, shot through with spiraling white. The dawn-stark landscape flattened into something more stark still. He clenched teeth across an omnidirectional outward heave, the sense of bloating across all dimensions … and then the drop, the instant imploding into cracks in reality, inhaled as smoke … Mo?nghus was screaming, roaring. He felt the man’s arm yanked nerveless, glimpsed him toppling onto Eaglehorn’s grudging ledge, then over—
Lashing brilliance, then a lurching coming to be, as if he were a babe tugged clear his mother’s womb.
They both fell gasping upon lifeless dirt.
CHAPTER
THREE
Agongorea
Only those Principles finding no warrant in other Principles can serve as the warrant of warrants, or the immovable Ground. Absent such Principles, the Ground is merely something that happens when we run …
—The Third Analytic of Men, AJENCIS
Early Autumn, 20 New Imperial Year (4132, Year-of-the-Tusk), Golgotterath.
The Meat be praised.
Proyas never discovered who first shouted this phrase, but the uproar it had occasioned among the others convinced him to make it his own. That it was insane mattered not at all.
Rain baffled the horizon, bathed the land’s wounds and mired its gutters. The Ordealmen toiled through the mudded pasture north of the Urokkas, great rivers of them dragging supplies, gazing to the blackened slopes and gorges, the heights wreathed in charred Sranc. The skies showered down upon them, flattening hair, hunching shoulders, and rinsing the filth and blood from their arms and armour, the purple that so quickly dried into cracking black. In their tens of thousands they trudged across the rain-sizzling flats, stunned for what they had witnessed, frightened for what they had heard. Clean of skin, soiled of heart. Far enough from home to be struck breathless for reckoning the distance.
They struck camp on the banks of the River Sursa, at the legendary Wair Chirsaul, the Mandible Ford, leagues to the north of Antareg. The call was sent out, and Believer-Kings, Generals, and Magi descended on the Umbilicus from all quarters of the encampment, bridling with questions and unnatural vitality. The need to escape the contagion had prevented any kind of accounting the previous night, meaning these Men had gnawed on rumour alone for a full day and night. They were hungry for explanations, famished, even. Twice Proyas bid them to await the arrival of their brothers. “Our Lord-and-Prophet lives!” he cried on the second occasion, seeking to allay what he supposed was the question that burned brightest. “He has taken leave only because our victory was so complete!”
A good number of the assembled had donned their white penitentials to honour the souls taken from them. But if the Lords of the Ordeal mourned in sooth, they showed little sign beyond their garb. Bearded faces bellowed joy and greeting. Eyebrows leapt and eyes twinkled at the exchange of ribaldries. Several coarse jokes regarding Sranc sent gales of laughter across the crowd, left kings and princes knuckling tears of hilarity from their eyes, daubing cheeks with funeral garb. “Just nibble their sardine a little,” Coithus Narnol brayed, “and it’ll put hair on your wife’s chest!”
“Well that explains my wife’s mother!”
Men dressed for dirge and prayer stamped feet for derision. Lord Grimmel roared from high on the back tiers, beating his chest, frothing his mustaches in spittle. Proyas had already decided the man was among those most sensitive to whatever was happening, the least able to hold their Meat.
“Grimmel bears watching …” Kay?tas murmured from his side.
The flood of new arrivals had slowed to a trickle. Fairly every eye in the Umbilicus noted where they stood, that they spoke, but for the moment at least, the chatter boomed as before. “What’s happening to us, Kayu?”
The Prince-Imperial shot him an intent look, one not entirely devoid of malice.
“We eat Sranc, Uncle.”
The rumble dropped through the earthen floor, and Proyas found himself standing before the Lords of the Ordeal, the singular object of their manic regard. There was no mistaking the thinning of their numbers. But there was a ferocious aura to them, the apprehension of storms advancing—it seemed that lightning should vein the shadowy heights above and behind them! They were foul and ragged and dark, their eyes as bright and avid as their dress was soiled and tattered. It seemed he should have been frightened, but King Nersei Proyas of Conriya was not. He raised his hands and cried what had to be cried, invoked the only goad he possessed …
“The Meeeat!” he thundered, matching Grimmel’s savagery. “The Meat be praised!”
The Men of the Three Seas stamped and roared.
Two dozen Pillarians barged through the entrance bearing three Sranc roasted whole into the heart of the Eleven-Pole Chamber. The Lords of the Ordeal howled their approval, fell upon the fare with ravenous enthusiasm. Rather than wire the creatures into poses reminiscent of pig or lamb, the cooks had served them laying on their backs, each in the attitude of charred and blistered slumber, so that between blinks they seemed fire-roasted Men. Proyas at once watched abhorred, and participated. He salivated for the smell, so like burnt mutton, and shuddered for the savour, the bloom of heat and salt and exquisite grease. Here and there, one after another, different souls caught his eye and called out their approval. Proyas smiled and nodded to each, acting the serene commander he needed to be, wondering when had desecration become something he could taste?
The Lords of the Ordeal hunched as dogs over their repast, sawing and wrenching at the bodies, baring bone with bared teeth, chewing only to better bolt down. A glutinous racket squatted in the air, the clamour of mouths masticating. He looked to Kay?tas, wondering if the youth had noticed. Mere moments ago, these Men had begged him for tidings of their Master … and now?
Anas?rimbor Kellhus had been forgotten by his followers.
Proyas smiled in reply to Baron Nomiyal of Mols, who had sparked a small cheer praising him, thinking, We stray!