Just as described in the Holy Sagas.
He warred with scarred Phiolos, managing only to pull him into stomping circles. He gazed across the soaring scarps of masonry, felt a sudden prick of nude vulnerability.
“Show yourselves!” he cried out to the black heights.
The great steed wagged its mane and settled.
Silence.
Faraway water trailed from the outer curve of the Canted Horn, which hung like a mountain’s belly above. The rising sun had set the rims of the Horns afire: an eerie light jaundiced everything that could be seen.
The grasswives claimed that Halas Siroyon had been born the same day and watch as the great Niz-H?, and that the ancient Famiri hero haunted his bones as a result. The General himself scoffed at such rumours, even as he affected an archaic manner to promote it—for he understood that mystique, as much as glory, raised a man in the jealous estimation of Men. His innards quailed for being dwarfed in so many ways, and yet he laughed, howled the way Niz-H? had once laughed at the ancient King of Shir.
“Throw open your granaries!” he bellowed. “Send forth your Sranc—your skinnies!—so that we might dine on them!”
There is power in base savagery, in the desire, let alone will and capacity, to commit monstrous acts. All violence is equally ancient. To match a wicked foe abomination for abomination was to whisper in his ear while he slumbered—for the righteous were no more potent than when they were ruthless also.
“Anas?rimbor Kellhus!” Siroyon cried, craning his head as if to toss his defiance over the soaring parapets. “The Holy Aspect-Emperor has come!”
Monumental silence. Vacant heights. A murder of crows screeched from some unseen distance. The air stagnated for want of wind.
“To conquer!” he roared, at last feeling the weight of his own fury. “To consume!”
He thrust his makeshift banner into the earth, and at last gave Phiolos license to peel away in pursuit of their mutual terror. From the rim of the Occlusion, the Men of the Ordeal watched astounded. They made a choir of Shigogli with their cries, roaring with an exultation that unmanned them, so fevered was its wonder and fury.
And it was a thing of desolate glory, the Men thundering across the plain as Golgotterath hoarded darkness against the climbing sun. Swords hammered shields. Spears pricked the sky.
Siroyon’s leaning banner—a Circumfix stitched black on white, tattered and gore-stained—leaned like a dead yeoman’s scarecrow for the length of the day, ere night fell …
And it was never seen again.
Prosha … the pious and precocious little boy, the beautiful one, who had inherited the face and eye of his mother—just as the poets said. The pompous boy. The ridiculous boy, who had brought his father joy only when observing him unseen.
For Seju knew his tongue had brought the man only grief otherwise!
“Where, Father?” he had asked after hearing the last of House Nersei’s ancestral rivals, the Nejati, had been executed. “Where lies the honour in murdering children?”
The long look of a father afflicted by the very thing that made him most proud. “In sparing my sons and my people war ten years hence.”
“You think you will be forgiven this?”
“Prosha …” The tone of a father long resigned to the condemnation of those he loved. “Prosha, please. You will understand soon enough.”
“Understand what, Father? Atrocity?”
A fist hammering the table.
“That power is damnation!”
He flinched for the force of that memory no matter what occasioned it.
Why? Why was he the one to fear damnation so? It all seemed so clear, no matter how much confusion Achamian had poured into his ear. This life was but a flicker, a vista glimpsed in a flash of summer lightning, then gone. There were a thousand Hells for a hundred Heavens—so many more ways to drown in fire and anguish than to wander meadows in paradise. How? How could anyone be so low, so base, as to willingly sacrifice their very souls to monstrous Eternity?
How could anyone embrace wickedness?
But his father had been right. He had come to understand given the fullness of time. Piety was simple, and the World, woefully complex. What was virtuous, what was holy: these were verities that only the simple and the enslaved could know with certainty. For the Lords of Men, they were riddles beyond fathoming, perils that gnawed souls into the deepest watches of the night. If his father had spared the sons of Nejata, what then? Vengeance would have been their inheritance, discord and rebellion the consequence. The piety that would have spared them was the piety that would have put other, nameless innocents on the altar.
Piety was simple, too simple to not amputate life.
The taste of salts—human salts—licked from carcass skin.
The Interval tolled, calling the Lords of the Ordeal to the Umbilicus—to reckon the unthinkable. Awaiting them, Nersei Proyas, Believer-King of Conriya, Exalt-General of the Great Ordeal, spat memory across the carpets below the Holy Aspect-Emperor’s bench. He bent forward, elbows on his knees, warring against the urge to wretch. He raised his head to the gloom of the Umbilicus, wondered that for all their debility, enough men could summon enough routine, to drag let alone assemble the monstrous pavilion, mallet the tiers, hang the banners, unfurl and hoist the Ekkin?. He wondered even though he was one of those men, souls inclined to express adoration in simple labours. Somehow he had dragged the Great Ordeal across Agongorea and assembled it upon the porch of Golgotterath.
It still reeked, he decided, of the corrupt smoke of Dagliash.
The glint of his dead father’s signet ring hooked his gaze.
The madness, a fraction observed, impassive. The madness of the Meat was lifting.
The memories were not.
He sat gnawing on his knuckles, which ached. He hunched gagging, his mouth shedding spit about rhythmic convulsions. He wept, for shame that his son should have such a father. He even cackled for a time, as it seemed an evil man should. He had succeeded! He had discharged the dread task of his Aspect-Emperor! And the glory of it was such that he could only laugh—claw his beard and hair sobbing, shrieking.
Eating Sranc. Lying with Men. Cannibalism. Rutting with corpses …
No-no-no! The mere inkling of these things made chill knives of his lungs, maggots of his heart. What? some fraction shrieked and shrieked. What have you done? His lips parted, his teeth clamped, and his limbs waved like a corpse tumbling in surf. Something like a worm twisted from his gut to his skull, something hateful and weak, snivelling and blubbering … No! No!
His lips, plush and cold, releasing threads of blood and spit bowing in the wind.
Wishing it all back … Railing. Shrieking.
The hair of his cadaverous pubis trembling. Skin so pale beneath the haze. The taste … so …
What was this wretched instinct? This will to blot out all existence in the name of undoing the irrevocable?