“Reason lies at Dagliash!” Shukla barked in reply. “And we have fled from it!”
Proyas did not need to see it, for he could feel it, the way hunger warped souls to the very frame, so that what was crooked appeared true, and what was mad determined what was sane. And so it was the God of Gods who required they withdraw from Agongorea, who wanted them to sit on polluted plains and grow fat and lecherous on the rotting carcasses of Sranc. What else could be more obvious? More true?
Even he trembled at the prospect … it was so … so … delicious.
“Death lies at Dagliash!” he bellowed, throwing himself against what seemed a thousand needles of inclination. “Death! Disease! And damnation!”
This was why Anas?rimbor Kellhus had broken his heart, why he had broken Proyas in two: so that he might stand apart from the seditious conspiracies within his own soul, and so call them out when uttered by others. To be confident was to be at one with what was believed, to resort to the thoughtless axioms of dogma to solve all things. To be confident was to embrace the blindness that Men called their heart.
The very faith, the very belief that had delivered the Lords of the Ordeal to the Field Appalling, was about to visit them with destruction.
“Any man!” Kay?tas ranted from his side. “No matter what his station! Any man who deserts the Holy Host of Hosts shall be offered up as spoils to the others!”
Kellhus had foreseen this dilemma—of this much, at least, Proyas could be certain. The Holy Aspect-Emperor had known the perils of the Meat, and more importantly, he had known the hash it would make of a believer’s arrogant soul. And so he set about razing the very convictions he had manufactured in his two Exalt-Generals, tearing their certitude to the ground, knowing that it was the weak soul, the heart set against itself, that would prove strongest crossing this contradictory ground.
His Steersman had to be an Unbeliever.
The Exalt-General wept for the realization.
This was Conditioned Ground. His Lord was here …
In him.
The Southron Men roiled in fiendish consternation. Nuharlal Shukla had become the object of sudden, openly predatory attention, and he shrunk back to his place on the tiers, scowling for all the looks that fondled him. An air of communal sorting had fallen across bowled assembly, men rehearsing carnal whims that were no longer notional, counting out those they deemed the most treacherous among them.
As easily as their hunger had united them, it now divided.
“Enough!” Proyas cried with paternal disgust. “Turn aside your foul longing! Turn your gaze forward, to the Horns that daily creep upon the horizon!”
This was Conditioned Ground. Kellhus had chosen him because, unlike Saubon, he possessed a conviction that could be obliterated. And Kay?tas, as His son, D?nyain, was simply too strong to be weak, to succumb the way the Shortest Path demanded.
“This is the Slog of Slogs, my brothers!”
He stabbed a warrior’s forefinger in the direction of Golgotterath beyond the mottled black walls of the Umbilicus.
“And the skinnies await us there! There!”
Fresh. Alive. Hot with violet blood.
The Lords of the Ordeal erupted, baying as much as cheering. The gloom buzzed.
Only he could do this. Only Proyas … the boy who had never abandoned Achamian’s knee—not wholly.
Only he could feed them.
“Golgotterath is now our granary!”
Riots broke out across the encampment that night. Gangs of men had formed, and with threats and beatings, managed to pursue hundreds of “deserters” into the bone-scattered wastes. The inevitable reprisals devolved into pitched battles—and even more blood for the Judges to celebrate. Screams climbed beauteous beneath the infinite vault of the night, the fluting of distressed life … thrashing meat.
The mutiny itself did not begin until the following morning, soon after the toll of the Interval. Before prayers had even concluded, an Ingraulish knight by the name of V?galharsa threw down his great shield and began bellowing the only thing that mattered, the only thing he deserved given the mad deprivations he had endured. “Mich!” he began bellowing. “Mich-mich-mich!”
Meat.
An estimable if not mighty warrior, the Tydonni thane cudgelled the first Judge to seize him, a diminutive Nroni by the curious name of Epithiros. By all accounts, V?galharsa and his kinsman began to eat the unfortunate priest, who apparently lived long enough to kindle the lust of thousands, so piercing and effeminate were his screams on the wind. The mutiny proper began when his fellow Ingrauls closed ranks against the company of eighty-three Judges dispatched to recover Epithiros: Men who were likewise murdered, desecrated, and in the case of three, partially consumed.
A contingent of Ainoni—Kishyati for the most part—lay camped adjacent to the Ingraulish mutineers. One could scare imagine a greater gulf between races, and yet the madness leapt between camps with ease. Like the Ingrauls, the swarthy sons of the River Sayut chased away their caste-noble commanders and fell upon the Ministrati encamped among them. They gathered in unruly mobs, their outraged cries falling in and out of unison. The dead they passed across the tips of their spears, exulting in the blood looping across their cheeks and lips.
Souls had become desiccate tinder, and words sparks. Throughout the Great Ordeal, Men threw aside all restraint, and swarmed down the thoroughfares of the encampment, screaming for Meat, and murdering all those who would restrain them. Baron Kemrates Danidas, whose father Shanipal governed Conriya in the Exalt-General’s stead, found himself crossing a camp of Auglishman, a barbaric people hailing from the coasts of Thunyerus, when the mutiny struck. Despite the protestations of his younger brothers (who counselled flight), he attempted to restore order, and so doomed all of Lord Shanipal’s sons. General Inrilil ab Cinganjehoi, another celebrated son of another celebrated warrior from the days of the First Holy War, actually managed to forestall the mutiny among his own Men, only to watch that order dissolve for no reason short the steepening angle of the sun. The General would survive, but only because he, like most other Lords of the Ordeal, refused to raise more than his voice against the growing riot.