“Heed me!” Proyas shouted, trying in vain to secure their attention, or at the very least their silence. “Heed!” He stood before the clamour, the theatre of gesticulating arms and anguished faces rising across the tiers … mouths open … hungry …
Again he glimpsed Sorweel … and he fairly threw out his arms out in warding, so sharp was the accusation in the youth’s look. Yes-yes—the Sakarpi Believer-King had been there, had witnessed what he … what he … Proyas’s eyes rolled of their own volition across the Circumfix banners, black fabric and emptiness. His voice caught upon a nail of agony in his throat.
The insertion. The welling blood. The wheeze of other incisions. The heat …
Sweet Seju …What have I done?
For several heartbeats, he floated upon the anguished clamour, bobbed thoughtless on bubbling images of unthinkable deeds … commissions … acts beyond the pale of redemption. He heard, but did not register, the sorcerous murmur …
“ENOUGH!”
All eyes found Anas?rimbor Serwa standing with her brother, Kay?tas, just within the entrance of the Umbilicus. The Swayali Grandmistress had recovered her wardrobe and now stood decked in a jet-black billows twined into tentacles about her slight form. And it was nightmarish, the sight of unsullied dress—the gleam of Imperial magnificence—in this polluted and depraved place.
Proyas gawked, astonished as any. She too had survived something, he realized, something more than whatever had blackened her left eye. A trial of some kind had been stamped into her once-immaculate beauty, sucking what had been rounded with youth into stern lines. She looked hard—pitiless.
“Recall yourselves!” she cried in her mundane voice.
She too had witnessed, Proyas realized, recoiling at the memory. She had been there … on the Field Appalling. Shame seized him by the glottis, and he nearly doubled over for gagging.
Cruel old Lord Soter rushed her, crashed to his knees at her feet, crying, “Sweet Doya! Please! What happens to us?” in his lilting Ainoni accent.
She looked sharply at Apperens Saccarees, whose eyes fairly bounced in horror.
“The Nonmen speak …” the Mandate Grandmaster began, his voice fluted and frail. “The-the Nonmen speak of this …” The Schoolman trailed. He had raised two fingers as he spoke, the way a man lost in memory is prone to comb his beard while lost in rumination, only left hanging in indecision before his face. He now gnawed on them, hunched and apprehensive.
“You have been beasts!” Serwa snapped in irritation. “You have floundered in the muck of animal desire, choked on your own most destructive appetites, unable to do anything save gloat and exult. And now, absent the Meat, your soul is rekindled, you finally recall who you were … You awaken from your rutting nightmares … and lament.”
The assembled Lords of the Ordeal gazed aghast. Even the weepers fell silent.
“No …”
All eyes turned to Proyas, who stood baffled, not knowing from whence his words or voice arose aside from some perverse will to truth.
“This … this is no-no awakening,” he stammered, scowling, perhaps even sobbing. “The … the beast that committed … those—those atrocities—I am that monster! What I-I recall …”—a grimace—“I re-recall not as though from some dream, but as clearly as I remember any day I would call my own. I committed those deeds! I chose! And that”—a swallow to unscrew a rictus grin—“that is the horror, m-my Niece. That is the origin or our lament: the fact that we hang upon these foul-foul, heart-cracking deeds … that we, and not the Meat, are the author of our lunatic sins!”
Cries and moans of recognition. “Yes!” King Hoga Hogrim bellowed above the chorus. “We did this! We did! Not the Meat!” The Swayali Grandmistress glanced toward her brother, who shook his head in warning. She strode to the foot of her father’s throne, sparing the Exalt-General a hard look as she did so.
Don’t be a fool, Uncle …
She smelled of mountains, somehow … places far more clean than this.
And then, spontaneously it seemed, the assembled Lords of the Ordeal began calling out for Him, Anas?rimbor Kellhus, their beloved Holy Aspect-Emperor, clutching for some connection between his absence and their malfeasance.
“Father cannot help you!” Serwa cried out to the Believer-Kings. And then, in tones closer to a shriek, “Father cannot cleanse you!”
A chastised hush eventually overpowered them.
“This! This is the toll!”
How many times? How many times had they hung upon their Holy Aspect-Emperor’s words thinking they had understood his warning … Had the circumstances been different, it would have sparked laughter rather than the wringing of hands or hair, the stupefaction of finding oneself oblivious to what was known all along. It was not for nothing their expedition had been named Ordeal. The assembled Believer-Kings, the battered glory of the Three Seas, gazed at the Princess-Imperial aghast.
“What? Did you think Golgotterath—Golgotterath!—could be purchased with cuts and sore feet?”
“Uturu memkirrus, jawinna!” Kay?tas cried out to her.
“We sit upon the stoop of the Consult,” she said in cool retort to her brother. “The Consult, Podi! The Inc?-Holoinas—the horror of horrors!—squats upon the very earth beneath our feet! I fear wallowing is a luxury we can ill-afford!”
“What?” Proyas heard a ghastly voice croak—his own. “What … toll?”
She seemed impossible, the woman who turned to him … the little girl he had once swung in his arms. These children, a fraction of him realized, these Anas?rimbor … He had fathered them more than he had fathered his own.
And they had seen … Witnessed his transgressions.
Who was this? Who was this shaking fool?
“Uncle …” she said, her manner suddenly vacant, as if about the whinge of some remorse.
“What toll?” he heard his old voice ask.
Her gaze failed her. It seemed the greatest terror he had ever endured—watching her turn away.
“Saccarees?” she said, her face averted.
“I-I …” the Mandate Grandmaster said, speaking as if otherwise absorbed in some tome. He turned scowling to the emaciated, yet well-groomed sorcerer standing at his side—Eskeles.
“You have paid …” the once-portly sorcerer said with blank apprehension, “with your immortal souls.”
Damnation.
They had known it. All along they had known it. For this very reason, they filled the black-canvas hollows with shrieks and bellows.
The madness of the Meat was lifting.
They stood upon bottomless earth, yet it seemed the Umbilicus rocked and heaved like the hold of a ship foundering in some tempest.
King Nersei Proyas wept alone in their raucous midst, for himself and no other. For where his brothers had yielded their souls for their shared God, he had done so for … something unknown.
“The World is granary, Proyas …
Images of his wife sleeping, negligent curls crushed against her cheek, arms about a child he would no longer recognize.
“And we are the bread.”