This place … Where there were no tracks to follow.
A shadow caught his eye, a patch of raggish black blown like something ethereal across the ground. He looked up, saw a stork wheel white and pristine where vultures should have been.
Yes … something whispered. And it seemed he had known all along.
“Recall,” Serwa said from his side, “our destination …”
He turned to look in the direction she nodded, saw Golgotterath, the great golden idol that somehow made all this holy …
“Father understood …” she said, and he could almost believe that she spoke to fortify her own resolve. “Father knew. He realized that this must happen.”
“This?” Sorweel cried. “This?”
An unknown part of him had intended his tone to be a rebuke, a slap, but she had retreated into her old, implacable manner. He would be the one to flinch …
He was always the one who flinched.
“The Shortest Path,” the Princess-Imperial said.
He followed her even though he suspected that she wandered aimlessly. They picked their way between the camps congregated about fire pits of maimed flesh. Men eating. Men languid in their obscenities, almost as if they seduced the corpses they desecrated. And Men frenzied, hooting and cheering the brutal fury of their kinsmen, falling upon their victims in gangs. The plain resounded, but the voices were scattered across so many registers—from grunts to shrieks (for some victims still lived) to sobs to laughs to murmurs to faraway calls—that the silence that rendered them distinct loomed over all, creating a crazed and contradictory din. The stench was unbearable, so much so that he breathed through pursed lips.
The thought came to him quite unbidden. He is a demon …
Ciphrang.
And she said, “It is good that you believe.”
Despite everything, her cool gaze added.
Despite. Even. This.
He did not believe. But then, neither had he disbelieved. He had vacillated, dangled from the words, the exhortations of other souls. Porsparian. Eskeles. Zsoronga. Oinaral … and now this woman. He had staggered reeling from conviction to conviction—worse than a court buffoon!
And now … now …
What greater testimony could there be?
Evil.
At long last he understood the power of enigma, the reason why priests and gods were so jealous of their mysteries. The unknown was immovable. So long as doubt and confusion draped the Aspect-Emperor, he belonged to the doubt and confusion that shrouded the Whole. Short of genuine knowledge, he could not be sorted from the blackness that framed all things. He had to seem elemental, even divine, for the simple want of some mortal interval, some fact that bound him to the midden heaps of what was known.
But this … This was knowledge. Had he possessed the most fanatic, contrarian will, Sorweel would have been unable to deny it. For here it was … Before his very eyes … Here. It. Was.
Evil.
Evil.
A wickedness so unthinkable that mere witness courted damnation.
The viscous glide of penetrations. The tremulous kiss of tongue tips. The masticating teeth. The savaged carcasses. The bowel grunt, the seizure of seed jetting across skin and crimson meat.
Yesss … a voice cooed through a shuddering gasp. Sooo lovely. Sooo-sooo-sooo lovely.
These things stamped him with bodily force. They blew through the flimsy sheets of his soul and set upon the raw things, making snakes of his innards, knives of air … He need only open his lips to gag. He need only blink to loose the tidal outrage swelling within, a fury indistinguishable from judgment, a violence that was justice distilled—the very essence of holy retribution! It seemed he need only raise his fists to the sky, cry out the wrath and disgust shaking him apart from within, and the skies would answer with cleansing lightning …
It seemed … so it seemed ….
But he had learned enough to know that the Gods could do little more than whisper in this World, that they were diminished by their interventions—that they required instruments to enact their eternal designs, tools …
Like Prophets. Like Narindar.
The stork still lingered in the far sky, wings hooked about unseen rivers of air, slowly circling the degeneracy that dimpled the sepulchral plains.
The Believer-King of Sakarpus stumbled to his knees, senseless of Serwa’s alarmed glare. He huddled over his retching.
Welling dismay.
I understand, Mother …
Anguished repentance.
At last I see.
They made their way to a knoll that rose as if upon the back of an earthen wave. A single man occupied the hunched summit, sitting crouched above a lone corpse. Sorweel was several blinks in recognizing him, such was the transformation of his appearance: his once-impeccable beard a matted morass, his skin nearly as black as Zsoronga’s for filth and dried blood, his brown eyes bright and wild—so very wild.
It was the legendary Exalt-General … King Nersei Proyas.
Serwa stood above him, leaning across the sun so that he glanced up at her, blinking. The bestial cacophony hung upon the breeze, the sounds of the living plumbing the dead.
“Where are my sisters?” she finally asked.
Proyas flinched as if stung upon the neck. Sorweel glimpsed hair lashing a gob of scalp upon his Circumfix pendant as it swung over his shoulder.
“B-back—” the Exalt-General stammered, only to be choked by his own throat. He coughed, spit a shining web across the dirt. “Back in the encampment …” The man’s canny brown eyes, which had only ever emanated confidence before, clicked earthward for a heartbeat, before returning as an outraged glare. “Going mad.”
She pitched high a skeptical brow.
“And what do you call this?”
A drunkard’s smile. His look became heavy-lidded, even flirtatious.
“Necessity.”
The once-regal man affected a laugh, but the truth sat unconcealed in his eyes, begging openly.
Tell me this is a dream.
“Where is Father?” the Grandmistress snapped.
His gaze sagged, his chin dipped.
“Gone …” the man replied on a blink. “No one knows where.”
Sorweel found himself upon one knee, gasping, tripping backwards for his nearness to the carcass mire. What was this? Relief?
“And my brother …” Serwa snapped after a heartbeat. “Kay?tas … Where is he?”
The Exalt-General cast a senile glance over his shoulder.
“Here …” he said in the distracted way of someone engaged in a different conversation. “Somewhere.”
The Swayali Grandmistress turned away, leapt skidding down the knoll’s defilade.
“Please! Niece, I beg you!” Proyas cried, rolling his head while staring at the stripped corpse before him: some other savage Three Seas lord, only puckered and hairless, like something boiled for too long.
“What?” the Princess-Imperial cried, her cheeks silvered for tears.
The sight caught Sorweel’s throat in a toddler grip.
“Should I—?” the Exalt-General began.
He paused to swallow, made a sound like a speared dog.
“Should I … eat … him?”
Both the Grandmistress and the Believer-King stared at the man dumbstruck.