The ground levelled. The ghastly masses floated into the limits of his periphery about him, a silent, mortal tide. The desolation of the plain encompassed them, and Sorweel squinted out across its tracts, near and far, puzzled that it should be pale rather than black. But the horror that was Golgotterath did not brook distraction—the eye could no sooner deny it than it could an upraised fist. It compelled, even as its vast proportions boggled, rumbled with dire possibilities if not sound, premonitions of doom and infection, of pollution without compare. It seemed something catastrophic had to happen, that at any moment a new Horde would disgorge from the black iron gates, that Consult sorcerers would step singing from the gold-fanged barbicans, howling wicked lights, that Dragons would explode swooping down from the Horns, tossing them in fire and teeth …
He was not alone. All Men stood as if strangled for expectation. But moment followed moment, heartbeat replaced heartbeat, and nothing happened—save that his gaze was drawn ever higher …
The Horns. Two great golden arms raised to the clouds and reaching them, fists frosted for altitude.
The sun shimmered across the monstrous, vertical surfaces, drawing out light and pattern and colour like an overlay of foils, precious and complicated. Script haunted the soaring, the apparition of alien figure and symbol, somehow etched without grooves, somehow iridescent without wink or glitter, almost as if their shadow dwelt within the otherworldly metal.
Crows flocked about the Horns’ lower regions, issuing from points across the black fortifications. Otherwise, no life could be spied apart from their own.
“Real …” Zsoronga repeated in a harrowed voice, one close enough to a sob to kick Sorweel’s own throat.
Everything. Hailing all the way back to the Scions. All the words they had shared during the long watches of the march, all the bitter recriminations, the declarations both pompous and shrewd, all the spasms of conviction and doubt, bone-rotting incredulity …
All of it ended here. Caught upon the teeth of this place. Now they stood before the bald righteousness of their Enemy’s cause …
And the penury of their own.
The Men of the Ordeal drifted to a halt before the spectre. Rot hung pulverized in the air. Innards quavered for standing in the shadow of things too vast, too precarious.
How?
How could such a thing be?
Sorweel stood in the dust, transfixed for the apprehension of what transcended human apprehension. For awe, the inkling that flattened Men upon their bellies, that saw bulls twist as smoke into the heavens. What was spectacle if not unconscious worship?
His right hand clutched the Trysean pouch the way others clasped Circumfixes and other fetishes: as a soundless cry for rescue. Beside him, Zsoronga held hands to either temple, bawled out in Zeumi, his voice among the first to perforate the astounded rumble. Cacophony followed. The lowing of cattle. The howling of apes.
Sorweel didn’t know when he had dropped to his knees, but he understood why as clearly as anything in his murky, misbegotten life. Evil. Where before he had thought, endlessly questioned and interrogated the fact of this place, at long last he could feel. Evil, burnished and monolithic. Evil stacked upon evil, until the very ground bowed against the beam of Hell. All the wickedness he had witnessed, let alone the abominations of the past days and nights, was but a narcotic lapse compared to this place, a doting drunkard’s indiscretion …
He could feel it.
In their surviving tens of thousands, the Men of the Ordeal cried out in wonder and horror and, yes, even jubilation, for they had marched to the very ends of the World. Their Holy Aspect-Emperor had spoken true.
They began falling to their knees in violent remonstration. And the Believer-King of Sakarpus rocked and sobbed among them, wept for so very many things … Shames. Regrets. Losses.
And the dread fact that was Golgotterath.
They gathered upon the inner rim of the Occlusion, the Sons of the Race of Men. Humanity, whose lives wilted so soon after budding, whose generations passed as storms and gentle rains. Ephemeral, yet fertile, and so forever new, casting nations like mantles, as ignorant of their origin as they were terrified of their demise. Humanity had arrived in all its turbulent, amnesiac might, come to obliterate Golgotterath. Thunyeri dwarfing Shigeki, their skin jaundiced for being so fair. Galeoth cowing Scarlet Schoolmen for the violence of their demonstration. Nansur Columnaries standing immobile, deaf to any officer’s cry. Ainoni caste-nobles pawing white upon their cheeks. Thousands upon thousands gazing, witless for incredulity, paralytic for shame and horror, alien gold pricking their eyes …
Men, the cracked vessel from which the Gods drank most deep.
Some had been petty unto murder in their past lives, knifing brothers for the merest slight, while others had been generous unto folly, abiding faithless wives, starving to carry witless parents. It did not matter. Gluttons and ascetics, cowards and champions, reavers and healers, adulterers and celibates—they had been all of these things ere they had taken up their Holy Aspect-Emperor’s Great Ordeal. And for all their numberless differences, they need only look to fathom one another, to know whether they would be greeted or ignored or attacked. To be a Man is to understand and be understood as a Man, to blindly honour expectation so that others might gamble accordingly. For it was the way they repeated one another that made them Sons of Men. Despite their numberless feuds and grudges—for all their divisions—they stood as one before the heinous image.
The Great Ordeal … nay …
Humanity, horrid and beatific, frail and astounding, come to collect their future from wicked debtors.
One race, come to fathom the Ark with sword and fire, and to at long last exterminate the Unholy Consult.
CHAPTER
SEVEN
The Leash
To speak truth to another is to set aside interest and ambition, to either possess faith in another’s estimations or be indifferent to them. The honour of truth is indistinguishable from the horror.
—The Third Analytic of Men, AJENCIS
Early Autumn, 20 New Imperial Year (4132, Year-of-the-Tusk), The Leash.
The face rises from the depths of a pool, pale through the greenish cast of the water. Throughout the surrounding darkness, caverns intertwine, like the thin tunnels one finds beneath large stones pulled from the grass. Just beneath the surface, the turquoise-eyed youth pauses as though tugged by some deep restraint, smiles, and raises his mouth. With horror, the King-of-Tribes watches as an earthworm presses through the smiling lips and pierces the water. It feels the air like a blind finger. Watery and obscene, the bland pink of hidden places.
And always, his own inarticulate hand drifts over the pool and, in a quiet moment of insanity, touches it.
The pop of axes hewing wood, so many as to sound like corn thrown upon a fire. The deep shouts of men, voices upbraiding, teasing, declaring in some incomprehensible tongue.