Something stronger than hope.
That night Proyas roamed the encampment the way some general out of legend might, either seeking clues to the tenor of their men or answers to some turmoil lurking in his own heart. The sky could have belonged to the Carathay, the night was so clear. The moon shone from the southeast, bleaching the wreckage white, and inking the shadows. Thrice Proyas found himself surrounded by panting gangs, and without fail they hesitated upon recognizing his station, and he had seized that wonder, that heartbeat of roiling indecision, gesturing to the leering wretch that most obviously hung upon the sufferance of the others, the one they had already raped and defiled in the twilight carcass of their souls, and saying, “The God offers this one in my place.”
It was not so much madness rendering them one of their own to eat, because occasion was all any of them sought, the pretext of being one among others punishing an evil unto bliss. The screams subsequent to his departure cast a wicked glamour upon the night, for they were no different than the cries of his wife, Miramis, naked, shaking, pitching for the bliss of him.
The madness of this troubled him not at all.
The Great Ordeal was his hole to fill, his stomach to feed.
His Horde.
It gaped within him, his hunger, transformed him into a living hole.
Proyas ransacked the Holy Aspect-Emperor’s baggage, pretending to be seeking evidence of his merciless Will. He found nothing that was not ornamental, nothing that expressed any truth of Him.
He absconded from the stores with only a ceremonial shield squared about a curve in the Columnary manner. When leaned properly in a leather-panelled corner, it shattered his reflection across dozens of etched and stamped circumfixes, yet conserved his ghostly aspect all the same, transforming him into a being of luminous threads. He savoured the illusion.
He alone had been divided against himself.
Not Saubon. Not Kay?tas …
He alone was weak enough to be strong, at this time, upon this ground, the Field Appalling.
He alone could see the Sranc standing in his own skin. Pale. Dog-hunched. Porcelain and perfect …
Lecherous for blood.
Proyas was relatively certain that no soul in history had killed so many as Anas?rimbor Kellhus. The cities razed. The captives massacred. The sons and husbands stolen in the gullet of night. The heretics burned en masse. Every atrocity, no matter how miserable or spectacular, was but a wheel in the greatest argument of all: that the World should be saved …
The Holy Thousandfold Thought.
Now morning had come, and he stood flushed and panting before an ocean of faces, the assembled Great Ordeal of Anas?rimbor Kellhus, and the potency of it leapt through him, the primeval knowledge, the surging, stag-stamping vitality, and he knew, for all the ache of demonic expression, that what he did was what must be done, that the finality of what was holy redeemed the madness he was about to commit. He stood upon the summit of all that was wicked, and yet he was holy, steeped in sacred inner light!
“Do you feel it, my brothers? Do you ride your own heart as an unbroken steed?”
The Men of the Great Ordeal danced for righteous frenzy, their arms and faces black for sun. They were the wicked, the low and the base. By eating Sranc they had become Sranc. They were the monsters they had eaten. And now that he knew as much, he understood what was required to lead them, to bend them to Kellhus and his Great Argument …
Victims. That had been the lesson of the Mutiny: if he failed to provide the Ordeal with victims, it would simply take them.
It would begin feeding upon itself.
“Let us show our Foe! Let us demonstrate the compass of our strength! Our murderous lust! Let him cower, tremble for knowing He will be eaten!” He howled this last in a drawn sing-song that sent vicious gales warbling through the uproar. Even now, staring out across the heaving distances, he could see Ordealmen throwing severed heads.
“Let us garland our arrival in might and horror!”
The Horns gleamed in the clear morning sun behind him, baffling the eyes the way they loomed above the smashed teeth of the Ring Mountains, the famed Occlusion, despite lying miles beyond them—despite being things manufactured.
“Now let them gaze upon us! Let them witness the bottomless extent of our resolve!”
One final repast was all they required.
“Let!”
“Them!”
“Fear!”
He stared across the threshing expanse of madmen. His every glance revealed some depraved vignette: Men shaking, their eyes rolled to white; Men cutting their own limbs, making war-paint of their own blood; Men rutting like dogs, strangling and pummelling, smearing seed upon themselves and their brothers …
“We! We are the Chosen!”
And he could feel It, the Spider that was the God …
“We! We are the Exempt!”
Seizing his voice with tempest lungs, blowing truth as a howling roar.
“The Wicked-that-are-Holy!”
It seemed so obvious … so true …
“And we shall pick of the lowest bough!”
As if his heart had become an unconquerable fist.
“And we shall eat—eat!—of the fruit that He—He!—hath given!”
Hands outstretched over the ravenous multitudes …
“We shall eat what Hell hath cooked for us!” he screamed.
And so led them all into irrevocable damnation.
Hunger had drawn them as a bow. A single word loosed them …
His word.
His pony galloped for the promise of expanse, of fleeing without obstruction from cruel spurs, and for the first time it seemed Proyas could breathe the pallor of the air, the odour of land without pungent life, soil that had been rotted to the mineral nub.
The smell of absolute ground.
He had loved Achamian, the Divided Man. Whatever animus he had borne against him, he had borne out of terror of this love. Out of his own divisions.
As Kellhus had said.
The Scalded shambled across Agongorea, a leprous swarm, their heads hung low, their skin hanging from bodies become wounds. They drank of such rivers that braided the bone-strewn plains. They did not eat. They suffered as few had suffered, rotting while they still lived, becoming putrescent in macabre stages. They lost their hair, their skin, their teeth. They vomited blood upon ancient Ishroi bones.
Went blind.