Distances piled upon distances as with any other vista, but the land was so scalloped as to possess an edge, to scrape as an oyster shell against the habits of the eye. Men are but one more fruit of the earth, at least apart from the divinity that animates them. To gaze upon land, any land, is to gaze upon what can sustain Men. But to peer across the Field Appalling was to look upon a land that suffered no life whatsoever, that rebuked, not simply Men, but their very foundation. “No ants,” the Southron Men would say, disguising their unease by pretending to marvel. “The land has no ants.” And they shuddered for the premonition of poison.
The sun lay as a crimson bulb upon the horizon by time the final contingents, Shigeki and Nansur for the most part, had “leapt the Knife,” as the Ordealmen called the act of crossing the wair. The Lords of the Ordeal raised greasy bowls in slicked fingers to toast their Exalt-General in the Umbilicus that night. “Steersman,” they called him, a blessed name, for despite the grievous toll, despite the losses of countrymen, even friends, it seemed a miraculous thing to deliver souls so numerous and unruly across the honed edge of the Sursa. If anything, the eulogy given for the Palatine of Kisht-ni-Secharib occasioned more relish than solemnity among those gathered. Rumour said that Urbomm? Adokarsa, Lord Hamazrel’s younger brother and nominal successor could not stop grinning as he related the events that saw his brother drown.
Nersei Proyas called on the pits to be fired, the carcasses to be hoisted, so they might plot their glorious final march sated, their hearts clear of hunger. But such never happened. Called on to plan nothing less than Salvation, the Lords of the Ordeal traded morsels and howls instead. They lingered deep into the wiles of night, recounting stories of mishaps witnessed, drownings rumoured or seen. And Meat or no Meat, how could they not roar in exultation? How could they not set aside their care, if only for a span, and glory in the cruelties they had survived and inflicted?
The Horde was destroyed. They stood upon the fabled shores of Agongorea, the limit of the great Field Appalling. Soon they would spy the very Horns of Golgotterath! Soon they would overthrow them! Deliver the God’s own fury to the Unholy Consult.
And so they set aside their care and rejoiced, indulged acts that would have seen them shamed and murdered, stricken from the ancestor lists of their progeny …
Were they back home.
Faces were always more real. This was why they appeared scowling or grinning in so many things, from the mottle of fired bricks or the staining of sodden plasters, to the deformities of trees and the grace of clouds. All things possessed a face; one need only coax or coerce it from hiding. And as much as faces betrayed the kinship between Men and the World, it betokened their kinship to one another far more. The face both regarded and was regarded, bold before foes and downcast before lovers. Bodies were but impressions, glimpses stretched to cover the whole. Ever did Men turn face to face.
And it was this that Proyas saw leaning into the small heap of flame, faces … faces bleached in his combusting vision, beards larded, cheeks lacquered, sockets housing twin incendiary glitters … faces exulting, grinning beneath a dark look, about a famished bite, at the daring malice of some brother … grimacing, shrieking, whipping in mammalian extremis … faces thrown like rags against balled fists … faces cracking, folding into cloth and mud an—
“That is not for you to do, Uncle.”
Proyas yanked back from the Seeing-Flame, marvelled as always that he could feel its heat only as he leaned away. He pawed his own mien to convince incredulous fingers that he had not blistered then turned. A warlike figure stood at the threshold to the Aspect-Emperor’s spare chamber, otherworldly for the thousands of dancing tangerine lines the firelight cast across his Ishroi arms and armour. The leather-panelled imagery hung as shadowy apparitions about him, more history and scripture, lost to the mummery of the immediate.
“You should leave the Hearth be.”
“Your father …” Proyas gasped, staring wide at the flame-etched phantom that was Anas?rimbor Kay?tas … his Prophet’s son, the boy he had all but raised. “He wanted me to see.”
The air became thick with the unthinkable.
“We are exempt, Uncle, can you not see?”
The figure neared … so like him, only cold with nimil, alien with ghoulish insignia, afire with mirrored splinters. The lips beckoned from the corn-silk mat that was his beard.
“What misdeed,” Kay?tas said, his voice lowered to a growl, “can be committed in the shadow of such a foe? What wickedness? The license to do evil—this has ever been the great prize of the righteous!”
The young man closed a callused hand about his aching handle, bore him up to the brink.
“What did Father tell you?”
The Exalt General stood riven, bent crooked to some essential asymmetry, like a broken bow fiercely drawn. His eyes fluttered. He sneered about drool. And it seemed that he cared not what happened … so long as there was blood.
“That—” Proyas began only to pause on a thick swallow. “That the Men must … must eat…”
The Prince-Imperial smiled in impish triumph.
“See?” the hand said, for that was all that existed now—mouths and hands.
“What does it matter, becoming Sranc,” cruel fingers cooed …
So long as we save the World.
Did you hear? More shrieking.
I love the crack of those fat teeth in the fire—the sound of something precious heeled.
It burns … burns as a beacon within you.
But where char meets the fat … that is what quickens!
Your hatred. Your will to tear down, destroy.
Sweet, yet with the salts of fired life!
It comes as a clawing, I know … A wolven panic.
The fat seething about the crisping skin … Yes!—it lies in the juice of the beast.
The Meat is obscuring us—can’t you see? Like a cataract of the inner eye.
And that beard of sizzling froth!
Scratching us into something … too scrawny for human fetters—too quick!
The way it hangs like spit.
The residue of strife lay strewn across the lifeless plain.
King Iswolor rested out there, his bones as old as ?merau. So too did those belonging to the legendary Tynwur, the Bull of Sauglish, sent to his death for the jealously of King Car?-Ignaini of Trys?. His skeletal remains also lay exposed in eternal indignity, blunt and elephantine in a ring of layered Sranc helter …
No bones found burial in this land.
No bones found burial because nothing grew. No thistles. No amaranth. No lichens graced the rare bare stone. Black stumps yet stubbled the outermost swath of the landscape, pilings of rotted obsidian, remnants of the arboreal forest blotted by the arrival of the Inc?-Holoinas. Lying in the lee of the cataclysm, the plain had been mortared in ash, a powder as fine as pumice but toxic to all life, and perpetually sodden, like the earth about waters. One could clench it in his fist, cast it skyward, but it would not blow. The wind whisked and whistled across the bleak horizons as though over a vast shield of metal.