Mo?nghus found himself hanging from the limit of his chain, breathing about an inner vastness, a void that pinned him to the empty air surrounding. It seemed the ground could plummet, and he would remain motionless, hooked to the void. Some time passed before he heard the King-of-Tribes screaming.
“… so you had not the least inkling! There you dwelt—my blood! seed of my loins!—in His very House! and you had not the merest whiff of the abomination dandling you upon his knee. No. You loved him, adored him as your father even as your heart balked. You wondered that you could be so fortunate to be his son, a Prince-Imperial, struck from the bones of a living God! You gloated as all children gloat, that you yourself were divine, that Kings and Generals and Grandmasters had knelt and kissed your knee!”
A father’s face should be a thoughtless thing, something too near to be seen, or at least studied, but for all the glory Kellhus had afforded him, Mo?nghus was no more than a foundling in the end. The mien before him was a stranger’s, even more alien for the ways it resembled his own, and not for the grills of swazond planking his forehead and cheeks.
“I have memories …” he said to the visage, smiling heedless at the homicidal glare. “Memories that would crack your heart … Never has the World seen such a family—such a court!”
A manic grin, savage for the carnivorous precision of his teeth.
“And this is supposed to surprise me? Overthrow my conceit? Nay, boy, it merely confirms me in my outrage, rekindles my conviction. Of course you loved him—worshipped, fawned and adored him. He gave you meaning, and meaning, boy, is the gold that he tosses in the air. And you are just another beggar, another mewling cripple, scratching dust at his feet!”
“And yet, here you are!” Mo?nghus shouted in incredulous retort. “Here you stand wedded to the selfsame goad! Soiling sheets with a Consult abomination! Bedding Apocalypse! The only gold that Kellhus throws!”
A growling cackle.
“Apocalypse? That is my end. Not his.”
Mo?nghus tried to smirk through the thick of swelling.
“So what is his end?”
The powerful shoulders hitched in a shrug. “The Absolute.”
The Prince-Imperial frowned.
“The Absolute? What’s that supposed to mean?”
The plainsman spat to his right. “To know as the God knows.”
“More madness!” Mo?nghus cried. “What foo—?”
“The Nonman seek the Absolute,” the thing-called-Serw? said unbidden from across the yaksh. “They practice Elision, thinking they can hide themselves from Judgment, and so pass into Oblivion unseen, find absolution in the Absolute. The D?nyain use the same word the K?niüri inherited from the Nonmen, but enamoured of intellect and reason, they believe it to be a goal …”
Mo?nghus snorted derision. “First you play my mother, and now you play my sister!”
Cnaiür’s eyes whitened about cruel inspiration.
He strode to where his concubine loitered and clapped great, scarred hands about her throat. He hauled the slack-limbed beauty to a point immediately above the sagging Prince-Imperial. “I know your family, boy. My spies have never stopped watching! You speak of Serwa … the witchqueen …”
He brandished his consort’s face as though she were a bulb ripped from a grandmother’s garden, growling, “Yessss!” Sinew leapt from his banded arms, and thumbs burrowed into her pigeon-breast throat. Despite the crimped lines of anguish, her beauty arrested the Prince-Imperial, her face became a world where he might live, a place where strife yet suffered innocence—that is, until the visage unravelled into arachnid fingers, becoming a series of spastic clutches.
“She is every bit as inhuman as her namesake!”
Mo?nghus kicked back and around in involuntary terror. “Madness!” he cried. “You! You’re the one who lies with monsters! With beasts!”
Cnaiür threw the thing-called-Serw? to bald ground, spat as it scuttled to the safety of leather walls.
“But what of you and your monsters, boy?” he replied with a malicious grin. “What of the lone piglet in a brood of Anas?rimbor wolves?”
“I-I don’t understand …”
“Pfah! I see the knowledge in you, the knowledge you would deny to preserve your golden life. How could you not feel the gulf between their souls and our own? So quick as to prick your hackles. So canny as to make you forever fear the treacheries dwelling in your face. Never forgetting, so greedy are they for munition! They cozened you with soft words and embraces, draped you in the bangles of their glory, so that you might caper as one of them, and still you knew their defect, what made them more abomination than human!”
The old Scylvendi Hero-King spat again, raised arms to the conical ceiling and its morning-glowing seams.
“Had they faces like fingers, you would cry out for swords and fire. But no, they possess souls like fingers instead. Their perversion can only be guessed, argued, and never seen!” He spoke with savage gesture, arms low and wide, snapping into fists and bladed palms. “My beast has been contrived to listen to secrets, while yours has been fashioned to speak them, bred—bred like fighting cocks!—to wind through the gut of our souls, to eat with our mouths, shit with our anuses! Bred to tangle the chambers of our heart, twine about our pulse, to own us from within, to nest in the pitch black of our follies, our conceits, our hopes, our loves!—all our womanish weaknesses!”
And he stood there, his true father, a mangled soul housed in twists of meat, slicked in sweat, grinning for blood, shining about his edges for the morning bright, scars like silver nails.
“You know of what I speak!”
This little black-haired boy.
This wolf-eyed foundling …
Who was he?
“Do not worry …” the Ghoul-most-hated had said. “You shall be my son, after this.”
So cold, that blackness. So clean.
“Those who call you brother, you shall know not.”
He lay across the dirt, as naked as his father but for his shackles. He lay, starving limbs a tingle, his temple pressed against the cool earth, a sand like the sodden sand on the strand’s limit, only dry. He spoke without tone or intensity of what had happened, how he had come to Ishterebinth, what he had endured, and how that had delivered him to this place. He found it astounding how he could talk of Harapior without raging, how he could recount his grievances the Scylvendi way, with precision and hate. He told them of Serwa’s seduction and their subsequent incest, how she had used him in an attempt to make the King of Sakarpus hate. He told them how she had sang while he had gagged and shrieked. With slow, measured words, he recounted the details of his sister’s monstrosity, her resemblance to her arachnid father, and he found it absurd that he fought Cnaiür urs Ski?tha’s argument, mad even, given that it was his own.