“Though you lose your soul … you shall gain the World …”
A simple phrase, but Proyas could tell speaking it had broken Drusas Achamian’s breath in twain.
He had recited the words while walking, as they often did during Instruction, the idyllic wooded ways of the Ke in A?knyssus. Years afterward, Proyas would come to realize the ancestral reserve was where he was typically the most dismissive of his arcane tutor, the most arrogant, cruel even. For whatever reason, he found license in the wash of wind through bobbing leaves, in the sunlight fracturing about branches, forever flashing in some corner of his eye, forcing the squint he would subsequently take to Akka’s claims and assertions.
“But what does the World matter?” Proyas had snapped.
Achamian shot him a shrewd and disapproving look, the one he reserved for childish answers to mannish questions—the one that never failed to remind the young prince of his king father. Proyas would punish the Schoolman for this imposture as well.
“If the World were shut against the Outside,” the rotund man said, “what would happen then?”
“Pfah! You and your Apocaly—”
“If, Prosha. I said if …”
A scowl … the very one that would be aged into his face.
“‘If,’ you say, ‘then’! What does it matter, if such a thing can never come to pass?”
How he had hated the man’s knowing smirk. The strength it betrayed. The pity.
“I see,” Achamian replied. “So you are a miser, then.”
“Miser? Because I observe the Tusk? Because I commit hand and breath to the God?”
“No. Because you see only gold, and nothing of what makes it precious.”
Derision. “So gold is no longer gold, now? Spare me your riddles!”
“Would you throw gold to sailors wrecked at sea?”
There is such heat in the boyish soul, such need to declare for and against. To be a child is to be heard as a child, and so to be sealed in, to have no way of invading the World with your voice. So he, like so many other proud unto arrogant boys, defended his meagre circuit with zeal—at the cost of smaller truths if need be.
“Never! I’m a miser, remember!”
And that would be the first time …
The first time he would glimpse genuine worry in Drusas Achamian’s eyes. And with it the question …
What kind of King will you be?
The World’s shadow retreated across the rolling face of the World.
Night drained from the rising ground of day, receding across the horizon implacable and soundless, and where trapped, evaporating into oblivion. The pinnacle of the Horns caught the sun before anything and lorded it over the nations of slumbering Men, jaundiced the gloom in the shadowy lee of the Occlusion. No birds sang. No dogs barked.
Some had found reprieve in work. The previous evening, a company of Shrial Knights discovered the wain bearing the Interval abandoned on the Agongorean side of the Occlusion. They dismantled the cart and its contrivances and carried them through the passes—some twelve men and ropes were required to drag the great iron cylinder and its skin of etched benedictions. They worked through the entire night reassembling it. Unable to find the Prayer Hammer, they sounded the thing with a battleaxe, marring the Invitic inscription. And so the Interval tolled for the first time in three days, its far-ranging hum eerily resonant in the desolation, its ring, some would swear, sharpened for the Horns.
Men wept in the thousands.
The fire of dawn ignited the mighty golden hulks, slowly burned downward, even as the shadow of the Occlusion retreated across the Furnace Plain. The long-suffering Men of the Ordeal roused, climbed stupefied to their feet, not so much more themselves than less what they had been. Once subsumed in the bestial morass, the old facts of individual character seemed to stir and reassert.
So it was that the most irrepressible among them, Halas Siroyon, spurred Phiolos out across the crazed earth of Shigogli. He rode as if to outrun the broken glass in his breast, the shame that so lacerated his heart. He rode the Famiri way, his nut-brown chest bared to both wind and foe, his ravaged Circumfix standard raised high in his right hand. He passed beyond the shouts of his brothers, dwindled into a speck against the waste. He found peace in the interval, felt the ghost of his galloping youth. He rode until the gold-hanging immensity became palpable, and he had to arch his back and set his shoulders against the urge to cringe.
The fortifications stacked beneath the unholy Ark loomed large upon the cliffs of the Scab, the great black tumour that served as the Horns’ pedestal. The General tacked to the south, calling, “Do you see it, old friend?” to his steed. “The stopper of the World!” The stoneworks were, for all that he could see, devoid of life. They were titanic by any measure, black bastions like Shigeki ziggurats, black walls whose height dwarfed those encircling Carythusal or A?knyssus.
Clinging to Phiolos, he plunged feckless into their shadow, then veered to pace their circuit, then, as was the custom of heroes on the Famiri Plain, he leaned back against his cantle, raised high his arms, and offered his naked chest as a flying target for his foe. Not a shaft fell from the brutal heights. He laughed and he wept. He followed the circuit marvelling, peered into the recesses between the gold-fanged battlements. He felt like a runaway child. He felt daring, reckless with what was holy. He would be remembered for this! He would be inked in scripture! He came to the famed Field of ?gorrior, the plate of dust where the scarps failed, and the fortifications stood knuckled directly upon the plain. He rode about the stumped immensity of Corrunc, then pulled Phiolos toward the legendary Iron Gate of ?bil Maw.
He would be redeemed!
Man and horse slowed as they came to the storied ground immediately below the breastworks of Gwergiruh—the hated Grinning Gatehouse. Siroyon drew Phiolos to a halt not five paces from where, in days of Far Antiquity, General Sag-Marmau had issued his final ultimatum to Shauriatas, and where foul Sil, the Inchoroi King, had struck down Im’inaral Lightbringer, Hero of Siol, in days more ancient still …
So young! Halas Siroyon was naught but a child—could be nothing but in the malevolent shadow of such a place. How bold must Men be! To raise pride and defiance against such a spectacle! Such a place!
Mortal. Skin so soft as to welt for the hurling of stones.
Gwergiruh towered only half so high as Corrunc to the north or Domathuz, her monstrous sister to the south. Even still it dwarfed both for its breadth and depth. The whole took the accursed shape of a pentagon, with ?bil Maw lying at its mathematical heart, doors of ensorcelled iron opening into a murderous gorge some thirty paces deep. Siroyon’s daring ended at the mouth of this gorge. Peering, the overawed man could see the wicked portal, doors as tall as a carrack’s mast, stamped with oil-shining reliefs, figures bound to one another in poses of anguish and abjection, the misery of one becoming the frame for the lament of the other …