Like something boneless and amphibian, cold against the hot curl of his tongue.
How? How? How had such a thing come to pass? How could …
Coughing, vomiting for convulsive violence, so intense was the insertion, hot and bulbous, thrusting aside the chill paste of viscera. Grunting, blowing air, bull-huffing, bellowing— How—
Sibaw?l … drowsy and almost dead, slack beneath his monstrous exertions, his head rocking to the pelvic violence, bobbing like a drunkard fending oblivion.
Sejenus says …
What? What was happening? Just the day previous, it seemed, he had gloated over these selfsame acts, abused himself while wallowing in their miscreant memory, laughed at the horror of his blackened seed … exulted.
And now? Now?
Now he sat upon the throne of a far mightier father …
And the madness of the Meat was lifting.
He slumped from the seat to his knees. A great fist clenched within his breast, yanking his every tendon, every ligament, from the muck of his flesh. He rocked to and fro, keening, spit whistling from his teeth, air pinching his gums. A God seized the nape of his neck, thrust him forward. He convulsed about spittle, choked on threads of burning mucous. Obscenities wheeled, glimpses through smoke. Taking. Touching. Tasting …
“No!” he croaked, his expression alive and jerking, as if hooked by strings to battling birds.
“Noooo!”
Yes.
Proyas? Proyas Vaka?
The premonition struck him with the force of a physical blow. He looked about wildly, blinking rheum from his eyes … peering … was it? Yes?
A form in the Umbilicus gloom, a golden, gliding apparition, hands outstretched, fingers spread between luminous rings …
Yes.
And the velvet arms were about him, and he was clinging, clutching with the guileless ferocity of a child plucked from mortal terror. Again and again, the great fist hammered his innards, beating sob after sob from his breast. And with his face buried, Nersei Proyas wept, for all things it seemed, for there was no limit to the dragon roaring, no limit to the injustices endured. He wailed into dulcet cloth, gasped scented, reverend air, and no matter how violent his spasms, the form he clutched remained unperturbed, not so much immovable as fastened to what was necessary and pure. The chest rising beneath his mashed cheeks. The torso broad and buoyant within the desperate circuit of his arms. The beard like crushed silk against his scalp. The arms iron boughs, with palms hot as wonder …
And the voice, humming more than speaking, reciting hymns in tones of warm water, viscid with love and comprehension.
Safe, a shuddering exhalation whispered. Encircled and safe.
“I—” he tried to say, but the crash of remorse was tidal. Wincing shames and biting terrors.
The humming trailed.
You have achieved the impossible …
A breath like dropping through gossamer tunnels. Tears like acid.
Secured a glory that none will know.
“But th-the … the things—!” he croaked. “S-such wicked, wicked … things!”
Necessary things …
“Depravities! Things that cannot be undone!”
No act can be undone.
“But can-can th-they be forgiven?”
What you have surrendered … can never be reclaimed …
He ground his forehead into the delusion’s hallowed shoulder, clenched the fabric of the robe with a will that could not quite tear. An entire life come to this, a numb fraction realized … All of it, the terror-lust-exultation, turbulence concentrated into a fevered tingle, blasting through the bottleneck of this moment, this final …
Revelation.
The tracks you have left … are eternal …
For an instant he was the little boy he had once been, only wrecked and desolate, devoid of the least pious spark. A child, open for the utter absence of wile, as he had to be, given that it was a question Proyas-the-man could never speak.
“Am I damned?”
And he could feel it, the regret and the pity, passing through the glorious form like a relaxation of a breath too long held.
The World is saved.
An opiate air clung to each sounding of the Interval, a sense of not quite awakening. The first Lords of the Ordeal began filing into the gloom of the Umbilicus. Proyas watched them and did not watch them. He cared not what they made of his stooped posture or the rictus of anguish that passed for his expression. Nor did he need to, for they were likewise grim, likewise maniacal, some more, some less.
The madness of the Meat was lifting.
So much must be done!
If the Consult were to attack this very moment, what then?
He heard Siroyon’s name mentioned, but otherwise could not decipher their growling banter. No matter what face his errant attention plucked from the growing assembly, he could see it, the horror of souls reclaiming what was irredeemably polluted. Wringing hands. Eyes darting or downcast or blank for inward peering. Some, like the Earl of Cuarweth, wept openly. A handful even screeched like spurned wives, and so compounded their degradation. Lord Chorgah began sawing away his beard with a knife, plait by rancid plait, staring out as if perpetually hung upon some untoward awakening, tidings of heartbreak delivered in the dead of night. No one embraced—indeed they seemed to cringe from one another, the sensitive shrinking from the proximity of the numb.
But they all looked to him.
So he stood the way an old king jealous of his fading dignity might, with forced bravura. He looked out across the once-magnificent assembly, breathing, it seemed, no deeper than the ache in his throat. He blinked. Tears like razors split his cheeks.
Those that could fell silent.
The madness of the Meat was lifting.
“If …” he began, looking out to the assemblage of poles and wires that pinned the blackness above them. Even as he spoke, he spied the bereaved son of Harweel on the tiers, newly returned from Ishterebinth … bearing tidings no one cared to hear. “If the Consult were to attack this very moment, what then?”
“Then we shall be blotted,” Lord Grimmel screamed, “and justice—justice!—will be done!” Out of all of them, he had always swung furthest from the rope of the Meat, but he was not without sympathizers. The Lords of the Ordeal erupted across the tiers. Wagging fists. Straining fingers. Cries, some outraged, others beseeching, bewailing, urging, resounded through the high-canvas hollows. It did not matter, the violence or the stupor, whether the man was a Grandmaster or a barbarian prince, they all mouthed the same cry …
How?
All of them, that is, save Sorweel. He sat in the violent shadow of the Zeumi Successor-Prince (who stood howling with the others) cringing more for disgust than fear, a kind of hole in the furor, a pocket of incredulous cold.
“Sin! Grievous sin!”
“My own hand did this! My hand!”