The keen-eyed swore that gold flecked the unholy humus. And indeed on certain angles of sunlight, it gleamed in the corners of one’s eye.
The Men of K?ni?ri had called it Agongorea, which the scribes of the Three Seas, ever slaves to their manuals, translated as ‘the Fields-of-Woe.’ But Agongorea was itself a translation of the Ihrims? name the Far Antique Norsirai had learned from their Siqu teachers: Vishr?n?l, the Nonmen called it—the Field Appalling. Their whiter bones lay beneath the wrack of Men, the splintered and charred residuum of their millennial war against the Inchoroi: the nocturnal slaughter following the disaster of Imogirion; the bitter glory of Isal’imial, the battle that cast the last of the Inchoroi and their bestial hordes upon Min-Uroikas for the final time; and much more, enough to transform the flats and the valleys into a vast crypt floor.
The rain had stopped. Dawn bullied the last of the clouds from the sky, and the Interval tolled sonorous through the stone-combed wash of the River Sursa. The Ordealman stirred from their uneasy slumber, rose to join those already gazing and blinking at the sunlit revelation. Many peered, turned to their fellows with anxious queries. The distance, once uniform in its cadaverous pallor, was now sheeted with smashed pottery, grey embroidered in great columns and arcs and rings of human gravel.
The dead, they were told. The dead cobbled their way. “We march into a tomb …” the impious muttered, though under their breaths, lest the Judges hear.
None spoke of the debauched night. They skirted the corpses and the flotsam of brutality, avid to move on. Men squared their kits, gorged on the remnants of the feast. Within a watch, the clarion horns of the Three Seas sounded, and with hymns to their Aspect-Emperor kindled in innumerable hoarse throats, the Holy Host of Hosts embarked. The dead were left as daybreak had found them. There was no question of counting them, for they, like the crimes that had maimed and murdered them, charged a toll too high to be permitted to exist.
The Great Ordeal passed as a migratory cloud into the vacancy of Agongorea. That night they camped across what the ancient Norsirai had named Cre?rwi, or the Bald. For the first time, the Holy Host of Hosts trod upon the very same earth as had the ancient Ordeal assembled by Anas?rimbor Celmomas. The Judges passed as wild hermits among the Ordealmen, vestments soiled, eyes overbright, exhorting them to rejoice for reaching the very Bald named in scripture! They bid them feast, for never had salvation lain so near! “The Horns!” they cried. “Soon the Horns of Golgotterath shall prick the horizon!”
And so once again was wickedness transmuted into worship, atrocity into praise. Night fell as dishevelled hair, a fraught reprieve from the sun’s tyranny. The Nail of Heaven hung as a bared knife pending judgment, and the sprawling desolation of Agongorea gleamed as though alloyed with diamonds. The errant Sons of the Three Seas gorged upon their cherished foe. Pavilions became fuel, and sizzling shanks were held out upon spears over the fires. The singularity of the night consumed them, a darkness and an appetite out of joint with the passing of the days, a welling up from oblivion. Orgiastic excess, priapic violence, shrieks and gales of vicious hilarity—these blew through them, licentious gusts that commanded fists, mouths, and hands. Compelled crimes—both of the meat and for the meat. Only the exhaustion of their supply bridled the evil intensity of the bacchanal. For this was the night they consumed the last of the Meat and began slaughtering the first of the remaining ponies.
The morning saw the Ordealmen anxious for hunger. A strange rictus seized the faces of those few who, either for wretched luck or station, had gone entirely without, a grin that spoke of toothless hate and death in the desert sun.
Proyas looked out from the fires of the hallowed Tribe of Truth and despite his revulsion, exulted in the countless sins he saw.
Images slick and hard and labile, fixing him, whipping his heart with tantrums, meat pummelling meat, bone breaking bone, sweet with visions of stink, shining with exertion, excreta. It was the meat that winced, the meat that battled then struggled then twitched and curled.
Nothing could be more deep.
And yet Men chose breath over meat in all things fundamental. Everywhere, they hung what was holy upon the ephemeral and the fleeting, things too thin to age, too numb to suffer, or too quick to need flee. They would sooner celebrate their own exhalation than submit to the bottomless fact of their meat.
Fey fools! What was the soul if not a veil drawn by Men to spare themselves the indignities of their stink? A gown always unmudded for being always unseen!
Crouched naked in his Lord’s chamber, the Exalt-General rocked and cackled and screamed.
“Yes!” he cried. “That’s it! With the knife!”
The God was inhuman … A spider.
Of nothing and for no one.
While the Meat, of its own accord, grew dark and swollen for beauty.
The Interval did not sound the following morning.
The sun found the encampment strewn across the vast bleak, the capital of a savage and refugee nation.
They rose one by one, lurched from their tents and shelters, more the artifice of potters than Men. Not a soul had dreamed. A breathlessness stubbed their hearts for glimpsing the wages their fellows had paid for their bliss. But a void dwelt where the clamour of trauma and unspeakable transgression should have been, a reflexive blindness to what they had become …
Were becoming.
“Our Prophet has fled us …” some dared whisper to their brothers.
And so too had the Meat.