The Unholy Consult (Aspect-Emperor #4)

Within a watch, the Judges ceased to exist. The manner of their death would soil the heart for hearing.

Despite the profundity of the crisis, the Exalt General’s martial instincts and acumen did not fail him. Even before word of the Kishyati uprising arrived, he understood the mutiny was about to crash about them all and that the Judges would have to be sacrificed. His first decision would be the most crucial: to surrender the bulk of the encampment to the roiling mobs, while rallying those he knew he could most depend upon—the Schoolmen and the caste-nobility. He commanded his retinue—the motley of souls, mostly Pillarians, who happened to be in the vicinity—to lash his family’s standard, the Black Eagle on White, to a second pole so that it might be plainly seen, then led them galloping to the perimeter of the encampment, not because he feared for his safety (the Umbilicus, as it turned out, became a sanctuary for those few Judges who survived) but because he knew this was where the sane were always driven in times of madness—to the margins.

Kay?tas, leading hundreds of his crimson-skirted Kidruhil, added the Horse-and-Circumfix standard to his own. Others joined in sporadic succession, all those who had neither perished nor joined in the rampage, and Proyas eventually found himself with the bulk of the remaining horsemen. Together they watched as the Great Ordeal convulsed about its own members, excised instances of itself from within. That so few Lords of the Ordeal had joined their countrymen was perhaps no surprise. Many had dwelt in the presence of their Lord-and-Prophet for decades, let alone years, and all of them—as vessels of his authority—had been whelmed as Judges. Even maddened by the Meat, even drooling for the reek of fired flesh and possessions, even aching for glimpses of unholy congress, the Lords of the Ordeal remained true to their Most Holy Aspect-Emperor.

Like a wolf about a trapper’s fire, they paced the outskirts of the encampment, a bolus of thousands drawn the length of a mile. They leaned upon their pommels agog, aspiration and appetite waging open warfare across their look and manner. Some gasped for ardour, or the throttling shame that followed. Some wept softly. Others aired their lament—for none could deny that the end was upon them. Far quarters smoked. Near quarters shivered for scenes of carnage, appalled for glimpses of porcine obscenity. Castle-noble blood lay trammelled. The Judges shrieked for torments and degradations that at once stoked and battered souls. Thousands grunted and roared, smeared their faces and armour with the blood and filth of their victims.

“How many?” the Grandmaster of the Shrial Knights, Lord Samp? Ussiliar, was overheard crying. “Sweet-sweet Seju! How many are damned this day?”

Living, breathing Men were hammered into mewling worms, things that twisted in slicks of blood. They thought of wives, children, caught a lifetime of worry into a single anguished pang. They sputtered about smashed teeth, perpetually tried to clamber free of the serial assaults but only managed to inflame them. The Agmundrmen took to hoisting mutilated Judges upon Circumfix standards, binding them upside down in grisly mockery of the symbol that had once made them weep. The Massentian Columnaries were nowhere near so generous, stashing their victims away in pavilions that could be easily identified for the mobs crowing and cheering about them. A company of Moserothi scavenged a great sheet of canvas from some pavilion (that belonging to Sirpal Onyarap?, their Lord Palatine, it would turn out), which they used to toss carcasses high into the air.

The multitudes roared and danced, arm clasping arm, throat joining throat, legs leaping for the purity of their transgressions, the beauteous simplicity that is the wage of atrocity. The Ordealmen gloried in their excision, cast their seed across the fell earth of Agongorea. The near-dead lay like sacks of quivering burlap, bald skin scored with crimson, so moist, so vulnerable as to burn as beacons, wanton as Temple whores. Judgment had been cut from the heart of the Holy Host of Hosts.

No sign could be seen of the Schoolmen, who had evidently recused themselves from the matter. Their canvas enclaves remained aloof, shadowy pools of calm in thrashing waters—even that of Swayali, who had been the lodestone of so many base and lascivious desires. They had no stake in mundane grudges, and for all their reckless abandon, the mutineers took care not to cede them any.

The Lords of the Ordeal urged their Exalt-General to call on the Schools to end the riots, and none with such violence as Lord Grimmel, the Tydonni Earl of Cu?rweth. “Command them to strike!” he snarled. “Let them burn the sin from these sinners. Let fire be their redemption!”

The Exalt-General was outraged. “So you would blot those who act upon your own obscene hungers?” he cried in retort. “Why? To better set yourself apart in the eyes of your fellows? I know of no other soul, Grimmel, whose eyes are so reddened for leering—whose lips are so cracked for licking!”

“Then burn me with them!” the Earl cried, his voice cracking for passion … for admission.

“And what of the Ordeal?” Proyas snapped. “What of Golgotterath?”

The caste-noble could do no more than sputter in the rabid gaze of his fellows.

“Fool!” Proyas continued. “Our Lord-and-Prophet foresaw this event …”

Some witnesses report that he paused to survey the shock these words occasioned in the Lords of the Ordeal. Others claim that he paused not all, that it only seemed such for the shadow of a cloud that encompassed the blasted plains. A handful would claim to have seen a halo about his wild, Ketyai-black mane.

“Aye, my brothers … He told me this would happen.”

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