Shades.
Holes filled with meat.
Gaps between faces, between stars.
Shadows in skulls.
Holes …
In our hearts …
Our bellies …
Our knowledge—our speech!
Endless holes …
Filled with meat.
CHAPTER
SIX
The Field Appalling
If not Law, then custom. If not Custom, then manner. If not Manner, then moderation. If not Moderation, then dissolution.
—The First Analytic of Men, AJENCIS
The teeth come alive when you are starving, so anxious are they to chew and chew, as if convinced they need only bite to find gratification. Simplicity becomes ferocious when bare survival becomes the matter. I fear I will have no more vellum to write you after this (supposing you receive anything). It shall all be eaten. Along with the boots, the harnesses, the belts, and our honour.
—Lord Nisht Galgota, Letter to his Wife
Early Autumn, 20 New Imperial Year (4132, Year-of-the-Tusk), Agongorea.
Light like an eggshell shattering against novel ground, chips and flecks bouncing incandescent. This time she fell to her hands and knees, Anas?rimbor Serwa, the Saviour’s daughter.
Sorweel stood above her, reeling for the significance as much as the sorcery of what had just happened. “You …” he began, eyes wide with the recognition of truths that could blind. “You-you knew …”
She pressed herself to her knees, gazing. “What did I know, Sorweel?”
“Tha-that he would see my-my …”
He. Mo?nghus. Her eldest brother.
“Yes.”
“That he would … would leap!”
She closed her eyes as though to savour the eastward blaze of the sun. “Yes,” she said, breathing deep, as if confessing something to herself.
“Why?” the Believer-King of Sakarpus cried.
“To save him.”
He fairly sputtered for incredulity. “Spoken like a tru—!”
“Anas?rimbor, yes!”
Her effortless ouster of his voice chagrined, an unwelcome reminder of all the countless ways she transcended him.
“My father submits all things to the Thousandfold Thought,” she said, “and it decides who’s loved, who’s healed, who’s forgotten, who’s murdered in the dead of night. And it cares only for the destruction of Golgotterath … the Salvation of the World.”
She pressed herself to her feet.
“You did not love him,” he heard himself say.
“My brother was broken,” she said, “unpredictable …”
He gazed at her witless.
“You did not love him.”
Was there injury in her eyes? And if there was, how could he trust it?
“Sacrifice has always been the toll, Son of Harweel. Is it so strange that Salvation would arrive decked as horror?”
The uncanny character of the land finally secured his attention. Dead flats, piling on and on. He found himself glancing about, searching for some evidence of life.
“Only we Anas?rimbor can see the Apocalypse,” Serwa continued, “so only we Anas?rimbor can see how murder saves, how cruelty shelters, even though it can only appear as evil grasped within a human span. Sacrifices that boggle hearts are paltry to us, simply because we can see the dead stacked about us all, the dead we will become, should we fail to make the proper sacrifices.”
The soil was lifeless … exactly as he remembered it.
“And so Mo?nghus is your sacrifice?”
“Ishterebinth broke him,” she said, her tone declaring an end to the matter. “Frailty is a luxury we children of the Aspect-Emperor are denied everywhere, let alone here, on the dead plains. The Great Ordeal can probably see the Horns of Golgotterath …” She raised her index finger to the horizon. “Much as we can.”
Sorweel turned to follow her gesture … folded upon his knees.
“And I,” she said, now behind him, “am my Father’s daughter.”
Min-Uroikas.
Absurdly small—golden antlers set as a pin upon the horizon’s seam—as well as perversely immense, something so mountainous as to peer over the World’s very edge. Fragmentary memory swamped his thoughts, shadows charging void, horns signalling ranks of smoke, Wracu dissolving into wraiths. Dismay. Exultation. And it thrashed within him, the stumps of what had once wrestled that gilded apparition, that horrid, despicable, wicked place! Inc?-Holoinas! Unholy Ark!
She brought her lips close to his ear. “You feel it … you who have worn the Amiolas, who can remember the outrages suffered there. You feel it the same as I!”
He gazed, riven by a horror far more ancient than his own … a hatred he could scarcely fathom.
Ciogli! Cu’jara Cinmoi!
“Yes,” he murmured.
Her breath fell moist upon his neck. “Then you know.”
He turned, swiveling up to seize her lips with his own.
The Horns of Golgotterath gleamed soundless for distance, airless. And it seemed an incomparable miracle, to discover himself stone inside her, the daughter of the Holy Aspect-Emperor, to feel her tremble, shudder for enclosing the root of him, for sucking the breath from his mouth, the incredulity from his veins. They cried out in unison, voices drenched, delirious for the thrust and grind of youth amid such ageless desolation.
“Why make love to me?” he asked afterward. They had fashioned a mattress of their clothing, and now they sat naked upon it together, he not so much wrapped as spangled about her. He dragged his boy-bearded chin along her neck to the outside of her shoulder. “Does the Thousandfold Thought decree it?”
She smiled. “No.”
“Then why?”
She craned about within the gangly circuit of his knees, gazed into his eyes for what seemed like a long while. Her observation, her otherworldly intellect, was no longer divided by Mo?nghus, the youth realized. He was the sole object of her scrutiny now.
“Because I see only love when I stare into your face. Impossible love.”
“And that doesn’t weaken you?”
Her look darkened, but he plunged forward regardless, chasing the idiot impulse that was the undoing of so many young men in the hot tumble of passion—the will to know regardless.
“Why love anyone at all?”
She radiated a density so profound that he felt like a kerchief wrapped about a stone. “You want to know how you can trust an Anas?rimbor,” she said, looking to the wasteland, abdominal stretches rising to ribbed heights. “You want to know how you could trust me, so long as I lay every soul at the foot of the Thousandfold Thought.”
He did not so much kiss her shoulder as press his lips to her skin, and a sad part of him was amazed at the innumerable ways of connection, the fact the tethers could never be counted.
“Your father …” he said, expending a breath that made him feel far older than his sixteen summers, ancient even. “He chose me because he knew I loved you. He told you to seduce your brother, reasoning that jealousy and shame would rekindle my hatred of him, so that I might satisfy the conditions of the Niom …”
“Were my father one of the Hundred,” she said, resting her cheek upon the forearm she had propped on her knee, “what you pose as manipulation becomes the God’s work … meaning, does it not?”