“What you already know, Uncle.”
“And what is that?”
The Prince-Imperial loomed pale and flaxen and carnivorous.
“That something must be eaten.”
The artful general, Triamis the Great famously wrote, must keep slack looped within a cruel fist.
“Sweet God of Gods, who walks among us,” the caste-noble chorus intoned, voices deep with majesty, clipped with harried inattention, a need to dispense with mere ceremonial mummery …
“Innumerable are your holy names …”
To be commanded, Men must always feel the constraint of their commander, the firm hand that perpetually threatened to choke each warrior individually. Individuals could be culled, whipped or even executed. So long as there was reason in it, the ranks conceded this to their commanders. A disciplined host was a victorious host, and the punishment of malcontents was preferable to slaughter on the field. But if there was no reason or proportion to the punishment meted, or if the crimes punished were collectively viewed as spoils—as due exchange for grievous sacrifices made, say—then woe to the general who dared yank the leash too hard. Great generals, Triamis believed, had to be as much augur as orator and tactician; among all the traits and abilities that conspired to create battlefield brilliance, none was so crucial as the ability to read the ranks, to look into the amorphous rumble and see when the leash need be jerked, slackened, or even altogether released.
The simple fact of the matter, after all, was that armies went where they willed. By divining that destination, the general could command what had already been decreed, dispense the inevitable as wages, and so transform mutiny into adulation. The great general always owned the acts of his army.
No matter how depraved or criminal.
Proyas—who had first read the famed Journals and Dialogues when he was eleven, who had presided over as many victories as Triamis himself!—knew this lesson as well as any soul breathing.
He must own what was happening …
He must bid his Men eat … lest he be consumed.
He stood panting at his place to the right of his Lord-and-Prophet’s vacant bench. The Lords of the Ordeal stacked the tiers before him, intoning the Prayer, each a feral slick of pollution—the new Unclean. Once meticulous beards now hung loose and slovenly, strung into rat-tails for negligence and grease. Once polished armour now reflected nothing more than shape and shadow. Once groomed hair now lay matted or leapt crazed …
“May your bread silence our daily hunger …”
But nothing attested to their transformation so much as their eyes, too bright and over-wide, the one point where their savagery lay raw, exposed to the open air. Proyas could feel them paw at his surfaces, simmering gazes, peering with the hostile incredulity of those who know they hunger too much to warrant feeding.
“Judge us not by our trespasses
but according to our tempta—”
“We should go back!” someone erupted from the gloom of the far tiers—Lord Grimmel. Cries of hoarse assent followed, a cascade that tumbled into thunder. As Kay?tas had predicted, the Temple Prayer crashed into ruin at the feet of their impatience. They lacked the will to sustain even this.
“Back to the skinny fields!” Lord Ettw? Cundulkas cried, eyes fairly rolling.
Yes! the Greater Proyas whispered. Yes … We should return to Dagliash!
Others joined the chorus, an upswell that terrified for its fury as much as its unanimity.
“There is no returning!” Proyas screamed, cutting into the uproar as decisively as he could.
“Our Lord-and-Prophet commands this … Not me.”
It seemed miraculous that invoking Him yet possessed any weight whatsoever, so profoundly had the scales been overthrown. He need only look at them, his brother Believer-Kings, to apprehend the throttling truth. What had once been an assembly of glory had become a council of fiends.
Madness ruled the Great Ordeal.
But not one was so demented as to contradict their Holy Aspect-Emperor—at least not yet. The Eleven-Pole Chamber rumbled with indecision. It was almost comical watching them digest the paradox, how they hung as beasts on the very limit of their Lord-and-Prophet’s leash, trembling for the equipoise of lust and terror. One by one, a wariness stole over their looks, the scoffing manner of those frightened by what they had revealed. To eat your enemy was to need him. And to eat Sranc, they were now learning, was to be enslaved.
The Believer-Prince of Erras, Halas Siroyon, would be the first to crack the stone silence.
“No one has seen so much as a track,” he said, his tone plain. “The earth is dead in this accursed country. Dead all the way down.”
The meaning was clear. They had all assumed, given the Holy Sagas, that Agongorea would be teeming with Sranc—with sustenance. “More rotted hide than earth,” the Book of Generals famously described it, “a mire of baying mouths.” Perhaps this had been the case in Far Antiquity, when the High Norsirai had kept the creatures penned to the west of the River Sursa. It was not the case now.
“Siroyon speaks true!” Lord Grimmel cried, his face hot with blood, his jugular a skinned cord on his neck. “There’s nary a scrap to be found on this accursed table!”
“He’s starving!” Lord Ikkorl cried, stabbing the Earl’s image with a thick finger. “Look! You can even see his rib through his breeches!”
The Umbilicus at once chortled and raged. Proyas glanced to Kay?tas, who stood upon his immediate right, the youthful image of the ghost that somehow yet commanded them. Nimil did not sully easily and tarnished not at all, so his Ishroi armour gleamed with rivulets of light and pools of concentrated image. He had managed to maintain his appearances otherwise, braiding his golden beard, combing oil and order into his flowing hair. As a result, he stood before the assembly as a visual rebuke, an unwanted measure of how far their debauchery had cast them from grace.
“Impertinent Holca dog!” Lord Grimmel roared, fumbling for his sword.
“Dagliash!” Nuharlal Shukla, the normally reserved Grandee of Saw’a-jowat screeched. “We mus—!”
“Yes!” Prince Charapatha bellowed in affirmation. “We must return to Dag—!”
“But they rot! How ca—?”
“If we flay them! Stretch them out! Dry them out! Turn them into rations!”
“Yes! Yes! We can gnaw on it, suckle the salty swee—!”
“Enough!” their Exalt-General boomed. “Where’s your Reason? Where’s your Faith!”
Kellhus had been preparing him all along—Proyas could see that now. The Holy Aspect-Emperor had known from the very beginning that He would have to abandon the Great Ordeal, that someone else would have to navigate the shoals of Golgotterath …
That he would need a Steersman.