“What are you saying?”
She turned to regard him, and it seemed mad to be so intimate with any woman so beautiful, let alone an Anas?rimbor.
“That faith, not trust, is the attitude proper to the Anas?rimbor. That to be sacrificed in the name of my father is the greatest glory that this life offers … What higher meaning could there be? You are a Believer-King, Sorweel. The degree of your degradation is the degree of your sacrifice is the degree of your glory!”
This chastened him, reminded him of the perilous stakes. If she were to learn that he, the inconsolable orphan-king of Sakarpus, had been chosen as Narindar—that he was the knife that the dread Mother of Birth herself had raised against her family—then her father would know as much, and he would be put to death before the sun had set upon this endless tomb floor. The fact of his conversion, the fact that Oinaral had convinced him that the end of the World was truly nigh, and that her father, the Holy Aspect-Emperor, had indeed come to save it, would mean nothing. To kill him would be to unwind the machinations of an outraged Heaven; few murders in myth, let alone history, had purchased as much!
Anas?rimbor Serwa, the woman he loved, the daughter of his father’s murderer, would kill him without the least hesitation, just as she had killed her brother no more than a watch before. No matter how utter his adoration, how pure his devotion, she would end him were it not for the Dread Mother’s glamour … Her divine spit upon his recreant face.
How long would that unearned blessing last? Would he carry it to his grave? Or would it be rescinded, the way all things unearned seemed to be rescinded, the instant he needed it most?
He reeled, only now grasping the absurd consequences of his conversion …
How he had fallen in love with his executioner.
“What,” he asked, “do they call women who love fools in your country?”
She did not so much as blink.
“Wives.”
She fell asleep and he remained awake, wondering that things so pale, so barely skinned as they, could be so fierce, so immune to whatever had slapped life from this ground. She had told him how some Nonmen called this land “Unn?rull,” the Trackless Plain, because it swallowed footprints “like the beach between waves.” And indeed, not a track could be seen, though the whitish gravel nearby had the cast of mealed bones. And it seemed proper, the impunity of their love-making, the exposure. To be as children. To exult in what has been given, especially beneath the spectre of Golgotterath.
To wander trackless ground.
“Ware her, my King,” Eskeles had warned him that first day in the Umbilicus. “She walks with the Gods …”
Their next sorcerous leap, he embraced her the way a lover might, breast to breast, pelvis to thigh, and it seemed miraculous, her face tipped back below him, her lids glaring rose, her mouth welling with meaning, spouting truths that blind the eye, that rewrite the Book-of-the-World, her hair fanning out into a silken disc, her skin darkening for glaring brilliance, her voice burrowing through the flesh of Creation, rising out. Her eyes closed molten pools, smiling.
He dared seize her passion, lower his lips to her Metagnostic song.
They stepped clear spinning parabolic lights. He found it disorienting, the way the plain remained unchanged despite spanning the length of horizons. Even the Horns remained fixed—a fact that brought home their distance, and so their lunatic immensity.
She was already scanning the horizon, and Sorweel caught his breath in apprehension.
“There!” she cried, throwing his gaze eastward with a pointing finger. He spied winking light, as though pulverized glass had been sprinkled across the distance. The Believer-King of Sakarpus cursed under his breath, only now realizing the idyll that had thrown them together could not possibly survive the Holy Aspect-Emperor and his Great Ordeal.
They spent the next few watches trudging into their elongated shadows, Serwa silent, entirely absorbed by their destination, or apparently so, Sorweel endlessly peering, squinting, asking what it was the specks in the distance could be doing. The parade of perils about to confront him assured the questions were little more than cover. What was he going to say to Zsoronga? And the Dread Mother—was she simply waiting to punish his treachery? Would she rescind her glamour before the implacable regard of the Holy Aspect-Emperor? He only became genuinely curious about the figures in the distance when he realized Serwa wasn’t so much ignoring him as she was refusing to answer.
The reason for her refusal became obvious when they came upon the first of the blood-drenched Ordealmen, Karyoti by the look of them, severed heads impaled upon their manhood …
Human heads.
Serwa pulled him to his feet. He followed her in a stupor, wending between scenes of carnivorous languor and crimson squalor, his jaw slack. He understood that this was an occasion for horror, for raving shouts. But the most he could do was shrink into the shadow of wilful incomprehension.
How. How could such a thing be? Just yesterday, it seemed, they had left an Ordeal of grim and pious Men, a host that paraded as much as marched, bustling with symbol and insignia, stacked across the distance with ponderous discipline; only to return today to find …
Abomination.
Every step had become a lever, a kind of effortless toil. He looked, even as his soul averted its gaze, saw them congregated like vultures about the blasted dead, feeding, caressing, rutting with wounds … man after man, their hair matted, their beards wild and frayed, their armour scabbed with rust, mired with filth and gore, on and on, rocking about body after mutilated body, on and on, doing … things … things too ghastly to be … possible, let alone witnessed. He thought he recognized several of the faces, but could not summon the will to defile names. The tickle in his gut unsheathed feline claws. Nausea scratched through him. He vomited. It was only in the burning, coughing aftermath that the horror finally managed to squeeze whole into him—and with it, a kind of crazed, moral outrage, a sense of disgust so raw as to be excruciating …
Even Serwa, for all the reptilian serenity of her D?nyain blood, had blanched. Even the Grandmistress of the Swayali walked, pallid and shaking, her eyes pinned on the blessed abstraction of forward.
A myriad of faces turned to their passage, their beards slicked in blood, their eyes hollow with a kind of incredulity, their mouths taut with swollen bliss. Sorweel’s gaze fastened upon a man, an unkempt Ainoni, who had pulled the head and shoulders of a corpse across his lap. He watched him seal his lips about the breathless mouth, hover in a prolonged and grisly kiss … before seizing the deadman’s bottom lip in his teeth, jerking and tearing with the ferocity of a battling dog.
Madness. Anomie unlike any he had ever experienced.