The Unholy Consult (Aspect-Emperor #4)

Daylight fell upon the dead land, warmed the clay and the canopy alike. The virtues once extolled by the Bardic Priests of yore thrummed with the grasshoppers that exploded from their feet, warbled with the birdsong that resounded above their heads. Resurgent earth. Air quick with flies and lazy with bees. From the Mountains all the way to the mighty River Aumris the land was thus, temperate, fertile. Wuor it had been called, a name that came to mean “plenty” to the Sons of ancient ?merau.

But then came the reoccupation of Min-Uroikas and with it the infiltration of Sranc across the narrows of the Leash. Despite the oaths made and the redoubts raised, the northwest became perilous to the point where only the forts remained, and the region was eventually abandoned. Wuor shrank, becoming a more limited province on the shoulder of the Aumris. The new frontier came to be called An?nuarc?, a march that would be famed for the Knights-Chieftain it sired. The land conceded to the Foe, the land Achamian and Mimara now travelled, would come to be known as Far Wuor.

It had been long forsaken, a victim of Golgotterath centuries before the First Apocalypse had blighted the Sons of the Norsirai entirely. His chest ached for simply walking … for crossing Far Wuor as Seswatha had. Henceforth, the old Wizard realized, it would always be thus, always be a matter of travelling into ever more accursed land. They were drawing near—insanely near! Soon they would set eyes upon them, the shining horrors on the horizon, the golden tusks climbing to the height of mountain peaks, goring all that is true …

Just thinking about it winded him, set his limbs upon bubbles of terror.

“You’re muttering again …” Mimara piped from his side.

“What?” Achamian barked, affecting indignant surprise.

Given all they had endured, it was mad to think they could still be such cowards when it came to each other. But such was love, in the end, forever fearing the testimony of the other.

Mimara was the lesser coward, of course, always the first to discover her fortitude, and so always the first to plague and harry.

“Who’s Nautzera?” she pressed, her attention pointed and immovable.

He flinched, walked with a more hooded manner.

“Spare me your vinegar, woman. My cuts sting quite well unassisted …”

Achamian had suffered too much to possess a generous, or even an honest, soul. To be put upon is to rehearse grudges, to ruminate upon welts and switches, the marks left and the instruments responsible. Writing his banned history of the First Holy War amounted to writing the history of his degradation. Ink affords all souls the luxury of innocence. To write is to be quick where all else is still, to bully facts with words until they begin weeping. And so the old Wizard drew up lists of offenders and summaries of their crimes. Unlike other embittered souls, he knew the particulars of his victimization with a scholar’s self-serving precision, and he had long ago determined that Nautzera was the greatest of the criminals.

Even after all these years, he could still hear the wretch’s voice creaking through the gloom of Atyersus. “Ah yes … I forgot you numbered yourself among the skeptics …”

Were it not for Nautzera, he would not be here now, freighted by losses beyond numbering. Were it not for Nautzera, Inrau would still be alive.

“I guess, then, you would say a possibility, that we are witnessing the first days of the No-God’s return, is outweighed by an actuality, the life of a defector …”

Inrau!

“That rolling the dice of apocalypse is worth the pulse of a fool …”

“Nautzera is from the old days, isn’t he?” Mimara persisted. “The First Holy War.”

He ignored her, fuming in the disjoint way Men are prone when unaware of their fear or anger. Mumbling! When he had he started mumbling?

Together they followed what had been the bed of an ancient road across the many-cloven feet of the Demua. The stonework had been pulverized for the weight of emptiness and weather long ago, leaving only an overgrown dike that roped high and low, continuous save for the countless creeks and streams that had cracked its nethers asunder long, long ago. To their left, the world piled upward, conifers spearing dark from the climbing canopies. What might have been turrets flanged the nearest scarps, stone skinned in lichen where not otherwise flayed and pitted. The mountains reared massive and snow-capped beyond. But to their right, the world fell away, knitted the very horizon with arboreal crowns—birches, maples, larches and more—great and full and summer-weary.

And ahead of them … to the north … It was at once the direction he walked, and the direction he could not see.

“It terrifies you …” Mimara said from his side.

“I know what awaits us,” he replied, spooked for her penetration, speaking more from the ache in his chest than his throat.

He trailed to a stop at the summit of the rise, watched Mimara stroll ahead, hands pressed to the back of her hips, her abdomen making a bulb of her golden hauberk. The pregnant woman snapped a birch branch obscuring their view, left it hanging like a lamed bird wing. The Demua buckled the horizon beyond her, backed everything into indeterminate haze, one too cold to be called violet. And it seemed he could feel it out there, Golgotterath, like a bruise hidden for shame, like a stitch in the throat that could not be swallowed away. There was nothing to see save a vibrant land unfurling from cloud-wricking knuckles of stone, but he could feel it all the same …

Waiting?

“Nautzera is an old rival of mine in the Mandate,” he admitted. “The soul that set me upon the very path we trod now … The one I most blame, I suppose … aside from Kellhus.”

Mimara had unstopped her waterskin to take a swig. “Why so?”

The old Wizard waved away her offer to drink. “He’s the one who sent me to Sumna, to suborn a former student of mine to spy on your uncle, the Holy Shriah. He feared Maithanet might have something to do with the Consult—even though no one had uncovered any sign of them in centuries, at that point …”

“And what happened?”

“My student died.”

She peered at him. “Maithanet had him killed?”

“No … The Consult assassinated him.”

She frowned. “So the mission was a success.”

“Success?” the old Wizard cried. “I lost Inrau!”

“Yes, well … Lives must always be thrown with the sticks when you command. Surely your student knew as much. Nautzera as well.”

“No one knew anything back then!”

She graced him with an insouciant shrug—one of many little relics of jnan she had carried away from Carythusal.

“So you don’t think uncovering the Consult was worth one life?”

“Of course it was!”

“So then Nautzera merely demanded what had to be done …”

Achamian sputtered, tried to communicate his fury through his glare, knowing he betrayed something quite different.

“What? What are you saying?”

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