The Unholy Consult (Aspect-Emperor #4)

With infirm haste, the Ordealmen made ready, toiled to expense the fund of horror within them. But it was the prospect of the days ahead, not the insanity of the nights passed, that moved them. The Meat had been exhausted! And now they marched away from fields where the carcasses lay heaped. What did the count of days matter, when rot simply made skinnies taste sweet? To simply think this was to be stricken to the pit. Skin flushed moist. Scalps pricked. Everywhere one looked, Men could be seen swallowing, endlessly chasing the mirage of charred and larded morsels from their tongues. And they hurried, lest sloth further license their wistful imaginings … make incarnate what could not bear the shaming sun. There is a way that Men lean against the hungers that wrack them, an angle that leverages their greater nature. Ever are Men raised upright by what twists their soul. There is a fanaticism that radiates in proportion to the monstrosities concealed.

The Holy Host of Hosts set out without order or cohesion, rancid flocks moving as though condensed in the same oil, drifting in runnels and clots across the pubis of the land. Bones cracked beneath innumerable heels. The sky claimed the stunning emptiness that makes for sharp autumnal days, a wintry premonition. The air forever seemed too thin to feed the fire creeping about their limbs. Not a voice was raised in conversation, let alone song or psalter. The march, rather, became one of reflection and private remonstrance, an occasion to enumerate all the accursed errors that had delivered them to such disaster …

What would they eat?

The Ordealmen wandered across the horizon-spanning exhumation. Souls teemed across every vista, Tydonni with their beards cast over their left shoulder, Ainoni dragging their shields like harrows, Nansur Columnaries with their packs teetering on their heads. Despite their unkempt appearance, they toiled with hale vigour, an alacrity rendered fearsome for their expressions.

The remaining horsemen roped ahead of the migration. They stared across what seemed a more elemental earth, a landscape flayed and whittled, peeled, a ground skinned to the foundation, so that for some, it seemed they wandered the very Floor of Creation. Even the clouds, spare as they had become, seemed to whisper for reverence. Bones and dirt extended ad infinitum about them, radiating into a plate that raced the sky. Many found solace in the desolation, hallucinating evidence of design in its simplicity. Never, it seemed, had they been less embroiled. Their shadows leaned in their saddles, peering. To cross Agongorea was to autopsy all landscapes, to cut down to the essential, to be stranded with implacable emptiness … and the life required to conquer it.

Men began praying aloud for sign of Sranc.

“Who?” they began asking. “Who will feed us now?”

Behind them, the smear blackening the skies above Dagliash had become the last visual relic of the old World. Mouths watered at the sight, despite the halo of poisonous ochre.

By midafternoon, guarded looks had become bold unto reckless. Eyes began roaming … Anyone who faltered for any reason was noted by a parade of passing glances; those who vomited, especially, or betrayed lesions, or shed locks of hair. For some unfathomable reason, the victims never seemed to know … or to care … even as they scrutinized those about them for the selfsame signs. No one fled. Not one soul so much as curried favour, let alone resorted to unmanly acts of ingratiation. Aside from a dark and scintillant play of looks, everyone acted as though night would never come.

Had any soul reflected, it would have noted how everything, in fact, had taken on the lean glamour of pretense, how all the old actions, all the old words, everything impeccant habit rendered effortless and automatic, had somehow become besides the point …

How all the old realities had decayed into matters of the Meat.

Simply hearing the once-accursed name, Sranc, pricked the ears, alerted the heart to the possibility that somewhere, somehow, more Meat had been found. Dolour was roused into clamour. And as so often happens, anonymity offered up the very tales that want and suspicion demanded. Stranded with their households in the thick of the masses, several Believer-Kings went so far as to whip their horses to the fore of the Host, chasing this or that rumour of contact with their foe. “Secure our portion!” their kin and countrymen cried. An eagerness was kindled within the breast of thousands, a need to see for oneself what lay beyond the obscuring humanity. A corresponding dread voided the souls of thousands of others, an abrupt certainty they would be denied their due, robbed of their portion. Individual shouts cascaded into a general outcry, which served to provoke haste from thousands more. Men began running where they could. Some cast down their weapons and shields. Others tripped into chasms between their fellows, bellowed, first in incredulity, then in suffocated terror, infecting the roiling plains with even more fear, more abandon …

Death came swirling down. The first of the Schoolmen abandoned their baggage-trains to the chaos and took to the sky singing. The thousands about them cried out, and the crowds convulsed with even greater violence, convinced the sorcerers acted on word of Sranc …

Soon hundreds of witches and sorcerers hung pinned over the riotous plain.

And so, after conquering thousands of leagues, surviving the cleavers of a million Sranc, the Great Ordeal was put to route by its own dark humours. Men chased for bald sight of chasing, nothing more—bodies echoing bodies in panic. What had been a great mass trudging westward suddenly blew outward, thinning across the plain. Since nonexistent Meat had no direction, the Ordealmen apparently chased all directions.

Those Lords who stood firm could only marvel, stupefied. The Exalt-General, the Conriyan chronicler Mirathais would write, grew as ashen as the ground vacated around him. “Smoke,” he allegedly said. “For want of meat, we have become smoke.”

Then it happened.

The Ordeal had shattered upon its own depravity, a collective end dissolving into more than a hundred thousand grains of evil desperation, which then … miraculously, found themselves caught.

Heads turned to the charcoal line of the west, where the afternoon orb of the sun hung ringed with sundogs, brilliant in a manner that darkened rather than illuminated what lay below. Not a soul could fail to see them: two shining threads, like golden wire poked through the horizon’s reptilian hide …

Something like a moan passed through the Holy Host. Trumpets wailed from points across the plain. The Men of the Circumfix began falling to their knees, fields drawing down fields, though for worship or wonder or dumb relief, none would ever know …

The dread Horns … The Horns of Golgotterath had finally pricked the horizon, a shining beacon of all that was wicked, all that was obscene and unholy.

For the nonce, the Meat was forgotten.

The Exalt-General wept, Mirathais would write in his journal, “as a father who finds a vanished child.”





CHAPTER

FOUR


The Demua Mountains


A fetish is a belief that a fist might hold.

—“Rejoinders,” Pseudo-Protathis





Early Autumn, 20 New Imperial Year (4132, Year-of-the-Tusk), Far Wuor.

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