The Unholy Consult (Aspect-Emperor #4)

Sinners.

So they began baying for the blood of their foe. Proyas could feel it as much as they, the need to affix their sin to more disposable souls.

“Brothers!” he called, hoping to gather them once again within the harness of his voice. “Broth—!”

I feared what I might find …

A voice spoken through the cracks between spaces, making a million mouths of the pores in their skin. It literally plucked air, strummed hearts. Eskeles was so startled he tripped and crashed backward, bearing Saccarees tumbling with him to the ground. Petals of luminance emanated from the back of the tented chamber. As one they whirled—save Proyas, who had been facing the proper direction all along, and had seen the light kindle from nothing. As one they saw Him step down from the highest of the nearly vacant tiers, near enough for Sorweel to lean out and touch. It seemed the sun itself descended upon its own ray, a beam bearing the twin ink stains of the Decapitants. Golden hair flowing, draped in one of the bejewelled vestments Proyas had seen in the baggage room weeks previous.

“How my heart is gladdened,” the shining figure said.

The Lords of the Ordeal slumped to astounded knees, dropped their faces to the ashen earth of Shigogli.

Only Proyas and the Imperial siblings remained standing.

“Sound the Interval. Let the faithful rejoice, and the unfaithful fear.”





CHAPTER

NINE


The Great Letting


So they cast down the innocent with the guilty, not out of folly, but for the stern wisdom of knowing what cannot be sorted.

—Journals and Dialogues, TRIAMIS THE GREAT





Early Autumn, 20 New Imperial Year (4132, Year-of-the-Tusk), Golgotterath.

Anas?rimbor Kellhus …

The Holy Aspect-Emperor returned at last.

Brilliance, and the corresponding sweep of shadows. Dumbstruck, Proyas watched his Lord-and-Prophet step down the tiers leaving Sorweel and a handful of others astonished in his wake. He did not so much emit light as shed it in skins. Then he was down and among them, dimming to a glower, as if he were a coal drawn from the fire, before the gloom of the interior at last claimed him as one who belonged. Mundane light shone from the flaxen plaits of his beard, made snow and blue shadow of the folds and creases of his robe.

He paused to regard the men bunching like wasps at his feet, then, grinning, at last looked to his Exalt-General … who had yet to fall to his knees.

“M-master …” the Exalt-General stammered.

Fraud.

Kellhus had battered this truth into him the weeks preceding Dagliash. Proyas knew the mad beam of his deception—that even this entrance was mummery—and yet still his heart leapt, his thoughts dissolved into adoring foam. No matter how much his intellect balked, his heart and his bones, it seemed, obstinately continued to believe.

“Aye!” the Holy Aspect-Emperor called across the prone assembly. “Indeed my heart is gladdened!” Simply hearing the pitch and timbre of his beloved voice seemed to ease some long-cramped muscle. “Let no man claim that I bore the Great Ordeal upon my back!”

Proyas could do no more than gaze blinking, his body—no, his being—afire with … with …

“Rise, my brothers!” Kellhus boomed laughing. “Rise and speak! Such occasions suffer no ceremony! We stand upon dread Shigogli—the very threshold of the Place-Most-Wicked!”

The entire shape of what followed, it seemed, lay packed in the subsequent heartbeat of hesitation, set as a spring or a snare. One by one the Lords of the Ordeal climbed to their feet, raising their voices with their frames, calling out in relief and anxious exultation. Soon they were clamouring about their Prophet, boisterous as children about a father missed and not simply returned. Kellhus laughed a hero’s laugh, reached over those near to clasp outstretched hands.

Proyas stood transfixed, scarcely able to breathe.

At last … a voice whispered. At long last.

He felt a sloughing of weights so onerous as to seem celestial—the falling away of dread charges. A tremor passed through him, and for a moment he feared he might swoon for sudden weightlessness. He blinked hot tears, smiled against the imprint of more fraught expressions …

At last … Impostor or not, at last he could follow.

Then he glimpsed Sorweel sitting isolate upon the tiers, shoulders cupped against a chill only he seemed to feel. He glanced at the Imperial siblings standing side-by-side, conspicuous for their reserve.

“But what is this?” the melodious voice of the Holy Aspect-Emperor exclaimed. “Hogrim? Saccarees? Siroyon—brave rider! How can you, the strongest among us, weep so? What is this shadow that so darkens all your hearts?”

Some seventy souls crowded about their Holy Aspect-Emperor’s miraculous return, but they might as well have possessed a single throat for the way these words collectively throttled them.

Silence, save the huff of involuntary sobs, the keen of those biting back shrieks.

The Holy Aspect-Emperor’s scowl faded into a kind of leonine vacancy, as if in recognition, grand and patriarchal, of fears once entertained but long ago dismissed. His stature was his dais, allowing him to search faces across the entire congregation.

“Something happened in my absence. What?”

Proyas glimpsed Kay?tas touching Serwa’s sleeve. Weightlessness became immateriality—smoke. Memories of Kellhus’s carnal strength welled as fire through the Exalt-General. The violating thrust. The lip-gnawing wince. He thought of Cnaiür, the tormented Scylvendi, for what seemed the first time in years. He thought of Achamian upon the Juterum all those years past, wild and blooded, edges singed like a scroll fetched from the flames.

No one dared answer. Everything became as milk and shadow about the Holy Aspect-Emperor.

“What have you done?”

And Proyas glimpsed it, then, in the hole where his terror should have been. He saw the way power coupled with adoration cleaved, set each soul apart from the others. Despite everything they had suffered together, for all the bonds between them, nothing mattered save the judgment of Anas?rimbor Kellhus.

There he stood, the point of focus, the hook that snagged every thought, every eye. Tall. Imperial. Decked in the regalia of his ancient K?niüric ancestors. Pale and golden …

“Will no one answer me?”

There he stood, the D?nyain who had usurped everything that had once existed between Men. He had raised them the way mathematicians raised temples, lines of force parsed and suspended, loads summed, conserved and redirected, until everything hung from the shoulders of a single post … One inscrutable intellect.

“What?” Kellhus exclaimed. “Do you forget where you stand? The accursed ground beneath your feet?”

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