“Everything,” he conceded, “is as you say.”
And it seemed nightmarish, the way the world within the yaksh simply snapped back to the mad pantomime he had just stripped away, his true father sitting cross-legged without comment, his attention utterly welded to his son’s voice. His inhuman mother attending to his broken face.
They even kept him chained.
The black-haired boy. The wolf-eyed foundling.
Mo?nghus awoke in the predawn light, lying perfectly still in the way of animals upon predatory plains. The unseen camp was silent, as mute as the grey light filtering down from above. He knew his father was absent before he looked about simply for the chill in the air. He likewise knew the Consult skin-spy was present, but how, he would never understand. No alarm occasioned finding her face in the vapid light. The gloom consumed her body.
They stared at each other for what seemed an immeasurable time, mother and son.
“It surprises you that he knows what I am,” the thing-called-Serw? finally said.
“And what are you?” Mo?nghus croaked.
“Malleable. What he needs me to be.”
A pause filled with soundless breathing.
“You … You’re the perplexing one …” She smiled angelically. “The Anas?rimbor.”
The Prince-Imperial nodded. “And if he doesn’t kill me, what then, beast?”
“But he will kill you.”
Mo?nghus rolled onto his side, carried as much of his agony upon his right shoulder as he could.
She could have been a statue, so motionless had she remained. This too was a stratagem.
“I am a child of the House of your enemy,” he said. “I am the very voice he must not hear. You need him to kill me. But you fear that he knows this as well as you … that he’ll keep me simply to deny you.”
An intensity crawled into the disembodied visage.
“Perhaps …” the thing conceded.
Anas?rimbor Mo?nghus grinned through lacerations.
“You really should kill me now.”
The immaculate face withdrew as if on a stalk in water, vanished into adjacent shadows.
CHAPTER
EIGHT
The Lament
Verily, he stood beneath them, made bold demonstration of his will, and yet still he kneeled, as did his kin, as did all assembled across the plain, for It was too vast not to smite their hearts with knowledge that they were gnats, merely, lice roaring.
—“Third Fathom of Pir Minningial,” IS?PHIRYAS
Early Autumn, 20 New Imperial Year (4132, Year-of-the-Tusk), Golgotterath.
The madness was lifting, though the taste lingered.
You did it … the Greater Fraction whispered.
Did what?
Carcasses jerked beneath libidinal fury.
What had to be done …
Anas?rimbor Kellhus smiled as a toadstool of fire and pitch boiled to the very arch of Heaven behind him.
What did I do? Tell me!
The lozenges of flesh so hot as to seem more tongue.
Something unbearable …
Lips mashing lobes, teeth shaking blood from skin and meat.
What? What?
Licking the sewer reek.
You raped and consumed them …
Convulsing upon his wounds.
What? Who?
Sibaw?l, called Vaka by those who had come to fear him …
The Scalded … the Rotting Men.
Supping upon his flayed face.
Thinking it tasted more of pig than lamb.
Camp was raised where Fate had mustered them along the eastern rim of the Occlusion. Despite the fears of the Imperial planners, water proved both unpolluted and plentiful. Springs pricked the heights, forming rivulets that wept orange and black down the slopes. The Ordealmen fasted, merely drank that evening. Together they transformed the inner ramps of the Occlusion into a mighty amphitheatre that took Golgotterath as its cancerous stage. Nary a soul among them spoke. The sunset possessed the autumnal clarity that transforms the loss of light into the loss of warmth and life. The Horns burned for embracing the sun, ere its descent became absolute. The intervening leagues seemed no less clear for the quick rising night. Beneath the gold-mirrored immensities they could easily discern the disposition of the bulwarks, no more than glue and paper compared the Horns, but as great as those ramparts belonging to Nenciphon, Carythusal, or any other great city of the Three Seas. They could count the thousands of golden teardrops that fanged the battlements. They could see Domathuz and Corrunc, the hated towers that flanked mighty Gwergiruh, the Gatehouse of ?bil Maw, which loomed as a blight across so many tales of ancient woe. They could see the stepped fortifications of the Oblitus rising to a monstrous citadel crouched against the inner thigh of the Upright Horn, the High Cwol, barbican of the Intrinsic Gate.
The light receded over the raised edge of the World, faded to a dwindling crimson patina high upon the wrists of the Canted and Upright Horns. Every soul watching thought the stronghold would explode with horrors upon the sun’s final gloaming, but since no soul dared speak, each man assumed he alone suffered this terror, and further despised himself as a coward. They sat and stared in their tens of thousands, bodies buzzing for shame, stomachs churning for fear and incredulity, jaws aching for slow, gnashing teeth.
Perhaps in some dim corner some few realized the perverse thrift of their straits, how only an evil so great could hope to redeem souls so wretched as their own. Even as Fate sharpened the World, their lives had been whittled to a point of private apocalypse. Perhaps a handful understood it well enough to speak it, the murmuring of possibility in their veins, the hope, the prayer, that they had committed those unspeakable crimes to better know the goad that drove them, to better hate the stupefying abomination that so commanded their gaze. And at some level, all of them understood, no matter how dimly, that they must somehow conquer, destroy this ancient and obscene vessel from the Void, or be forever damned. So they sat, they watched, and they took loathing stock of themselves. They prayed as strangers among strangers.
The sun eased against, then melted into the rugged shoulders of the Yimaleti. The burnished rims of the Horns flared brilliant even as their bulk blackened into violet obscurity. The broken circle of their shadow reached out across Shigogli and embraced the multitudes, bore them into the greater arms of the Void, the sky beyond the sky, the Endless Starving.
Night fell without incident, without so much as a faraway flicker of movement. Poised upon various heights about the Occlusion, Schoolmen cast their sorcerous lenses to better see, but nary a soul cried out for some glimpse of their foe. For all anyone knew, the fell stronghold lay abandoned.
The Ordealmen possessed little will to organize, such was their awe and turmoil. Many slept on the ground upon which they sat. The Horns loomed impossible in their fluttering vision as they drowsed and drifted, monuments to the boggling power of the Tekhne, the golden levers that had toppled whole civilizations.
They dreamt unkind dreams.