At Proyas’s behest, Anas?rimbor Kay?tas commanded the Kidruhil to dismount and strip their ponies. The half-starved mounts were gathered on the western perimeter, some five hundred of them, chins pitching, heads ducking to shake manes, before being whipped into the encampment, into the once rampaging, but now eerily quiet, belly of the mutiny. The outcome was not so miraculous as it seemed: all mutinies outran their occasions, stranding those who had merely aped their brothers’ outrage with the cold ashes of fury, searching for excuses, eager to appease their betters. Save for those most responsible, the Ordealmen required only some excuse to set aside their grievances and resume the charade of pious resolve they had been so quick to overthrow mere watches previous. Wary, the Lords of the Ordeal dispersed through the camp in the wake of the Kidruhil horses, each making their way to their own nations and tribes. Equine screams serrated the air about them, compounding into an eerie, unnerving chorus that slipped as oil across the plains. The horses themselves were not so much butchered, as their capacity to suffer was dissected, sorted into strings the most cruel among them might play as a lute. For all their declarations of hunger, the Ordealmen were all but indifferent to horseflesh. Only transgression, it seemed, could replace the Meat, the vicious glee that belonged to wickedness. Only torment could nourish them …
Sin.
That evening, innumerable thousands gathered to watch the execution of those accused of inciting the mutiny—some twenty men, who, apart from V?galharsa, had been picked more or less randomly. Proyas had prepared for more trouble, to the point of deploying the Schools about the accused. As much as he feared the prospect of martyrs, he feared the perception of impotence even more. Someone had to die—if only to reignite the communal fear that all authority requires.
In accordance with the Law, the “leaders” of the mutiny were flayed in public, their skin shaved from them a thumb’s breadth at a time. Between shrieks the wretches called out to their kinsmen, either urging them to rise up, or begging them to set an arrow in their hearts. But far from inciting outrage at some common oppressor, they provoked only paralysis and terror or ridicule and uproarious merriment—the laughter of crazed fools. Most howled and pointed, scooped tears with thumbs and clutched cramping ribs, cheered the tortured shrieks of those they had celebrated, raised upon their shoulders, mere watches before. But others gazed without expression, their eyes as wide as their lips were narrow, like souls incredulous of the horror that awakened them. And the Exalt-General watched, compelled. He could not but ponder the possibility that this demonstration, which was meant to instill as much terror as respect, was far more a reward than a punishment …
That out of some blind, bestial instinct the Ordeal had begun volunteering portions of itself to feed itself.
Of the four hundred and thirty-eight dead Judges recovered, nearly four hundred of them had been partially consumed. According to the mathematician Tusullian, the Lords of the Ordeal could assume that at least ten thousand of their Zaudunyani brothers had engaged in some form of cannibalism …
In addition to whatever other obscenities they had committed.
Proyas bid the Pillarians set his chair upon a knoll just beyond the southern limit of the encampment, and there he sat in full battle-dress, his posture more that of a Seto-Annarian Emperor than a Conriyan King. Kay?tas stood to his right, gazing as he gazed. “We will ponder Golgotterath together,” he had told his nephew, “from a place all souls can see.”
So they peered out across Agongorea’s pewter desolation, the barrens inked in the strokes and curls of deep evening shadow, and meditated upon the image of the Horns rising from a chapped rim. Anochirwa, the ancient K?niüri had called them, particularly when viewed from this distance, “Horns Reaching.” Sitting high across the cadaverous plain, the gleam resembled nothing more than a whore’s golden piercing, the fetish of some unlawful Cult threading a corpse’s puckered skin …
The Inc?-Holoinas.
Golgotterath.
Horror pricked his innards.
His mouth watered.
Years ago Kellhus had bid him to imagine this moment, spying Golgotterath from the Field Appalling, and Proyas could remember his throat tightening at the fancy, the presentiment of standing upon this very spot, only upright, brimming with both fury and humility … to have been delivered so far … to come so near Salvation.
And now here he sat bent, a deformed angle of himself, a shadow thrown across accursed ground.
He was the Steersman!
The one chosen above all others, not for the strength or purity of his conviction, but for the loss of these things—for the bloody socket where the limb of his heart had been.
The sun slipped behind a crimson veil, and slivers of the Horns blazed like uncanny torches, like beacons, either beckoning or warning away, unnerving for the premonition of raw immensity they conveyed—to stand so tall as to bathe in a younger day, a brighter sun.
“Will it be enough?” he heard himself ask Kay?tas.
The Prince-Imperial gazed at him for a long moment, as if willing away urges as fundamental as his own. The crimson upon the Horns limned his cheek and temple in rose, flecked his pupils. “No,” he eventually said, turning back to Anochirwa.
“So how does a general pilot insanity?”
It horrified him, the way the Horns continued to smolder bright after the purple extinction of the sun.
“I fear that power is reserved for prophets, Uncle.”
“Aren’t you afraid of the Hells?” Proyas had once asked Achamian as a child.
It was the kind of brusque query young boys were prone to make, particularly when they found themselves alone with those physically or spiritually deformed, questions inappropriate to the degree they were honest. And how keenly he had wanted to know what it was like to wield such miraculous power in the shadow of damnation.
Achamian’s eyebrows alone registered any shock he might have felt. “Why should I be punished?”
“Because you’re a sorcerer. The Gods hate sorcerers.”
Always the laughing wariness in his look. “And you? Do you think I should be punished?”
The previous week his older cousin had begun responding to all his questions by asking him the same question back—a tactic that had flummoxed Proyas enough to warrant adopting.
“The question is, Do you think you should be punished?”
The portly Mandate Schoolman had chuckled and frowned all at once, scratched his beard in that way that would forever make Proyas think of philosophers.
“Of course I do,” Achamian said, his voice on the sly side of lighthearted.
“You do?”
“Of course. I would be punished for saying otherwise!”
“Only if I were to tell anyone!”
His tutor smiled wide.
“Perhaps it is you I should fear then.”
Something must be eaten …