The nearest of the Lords shrank from Him, answering to some cue too subtle to perceive. Some even scrambled.
“Must I remind you?” Anas?rimbor Kellhus thundered. His eyes flared white. A voice, inverted and unintelligible, traversed alien planes of comprehension. He swept his right arm on a grand arc … The air itself snapped, a concussion that blooded noses, and the westward wall of the Umbilicus vanished, a flake of ash blown from a bonfire. Fresh air laved them, bore some portion of their stench away. Men squinted against the sudden, grey-blue glare, gazed out.
Overcast skies …
The slums of the encampment, descending on a vast curve.
And in the distance, soaring from fortifications like insect excretions, the Horns of Golgotterath.
Soundless. Stationary. Two golden fists raised to the height of cloud and mountain, a tantrum frozen, endlessly preparing to crack the chalk spine of the earth. The monstrous Inc?-Holoinas.
“Damnation!” the Holy Aspect-Emperor railed. “Extinction!”
How, King Nersei Proyas wondered … How could relief and terror be so conjoined?
“The line of your fathers hangs upon the very end of the World! We stand upon Apocalypse!”
The Holy Aspect-Emperor’s attention, so effortlessly divided among those immediately about him, suddenly yawned wide then clapped shut about the Exalt-General.
“Proyas!”
He leapt within his own skin.
“Y-yes … God-of-Men.”
The Lords of the Ordeal heaved and parted about their beloved Prophet’s advance. The fury of his aspect fairly beat them from his path. Proyas resisted the sudden urge to retreat … run.
“What happened, Proyas? What could so soil so many hearts?”
For all the years he had served him, the Exalt-General had wondered at the intensity of his presence, the way he could swell, somehow baring your every nerve, or shrink until he was no more than a fellow traveller. Kellhus’s eyes fixed him with hooks of ethereal iron. His voice trilled, strummed the unthought rhythms of his heart.
“I … I did as you charged.”
Something must be eaten …
“And what was that?”
Do you understand me?
“You … You said …”
A frown, as if at a pain inflicted.
“Proyas? You have no call to fear me. Please … speak.”
His heart yanked his breath short. A sense of stampeding injustices. How? How could events conspire against?
“Th-the Meat. It ran out just as you feared … S-so I c-commanded what you … What you said I must.”
The blue-eyed gaze did not so much pierce as plummet through him.
“What did you command?”
Proyas glanced at the encircling carnival of expressions, some of them wilfully blank, others already rehearsing passions to come.
“That … that we-we …” His bottom lip twitched, refused to relent. He swallowed. “That we march upon those sickened by Daglias—”
“March upon them?” the Holy Aspect-Emperor snapped. It was peculiar, even nightmarish, for Proyas to find himself inside the crushing circuit of his scrutiny and interrogation. How many? How many proud Men had he watched Kellhus reduce to stammering impotence with this very look, this very tone?
“You told-told me …”
He stood utterly alone, blinking the overlong blinks of a cornered child.
Immaculate from several paces back, the Holy Aspect-Emperor’s appearance now betrayed the toll of whatever it was he had suffered during his absence. Broken filaments jutting from the plaits of his beard. Bruised crescents beneath his eyes. Scorching about his sleeves.
“Told you what?”
“You told me to … to … feed them.”
Incredulity, dawning betrayal … so meticulous, so exact, that fractions within Proyas roiled and recoiled, all but convinced that he himself was the deceiver here!
“Feed them? Proyas … What else would you do?”
“N-n-no. Feed them … to … to themselves.”
Until this point, Kellhus had assumed the attitude and manner of a father reaching out to his youngest son, the one most bullied, and so most beloved. But the forgiving air of entreaty vanished, first in scowling confusion, then in outraged comprehension—and lastly, resolution … Judgment.
Futility crashed through Proyas then, crown to root. A farce. A mummer’s travesty … all of it. He could almost cackle, let his eyes roll after floating hands …
Madness … All of it … From the very beginning.
“I fed them! I did what you charged!”
He could traipse and cartwheel …
“You think this”—an inhuman glint in his gaze—“amusing, Proyas?”
The Lords of the Ordeal crowed in outrage. A place had been prepared, and they fairly fell over themselves in their rush to occupy it. Proyas would have wept had not the capacity been scraped from him. So he smiled a false monkey smile instead, the one persecuted children use to incite yet more persecution, and consigned his grimace to the organs about his heart. Thus he gazed at them, his brothers, the illustrious Believer-Kings of the Middle-North and the Three Seas.
One need only ponder cowardice to unravel the complexities of Men—the reflex, like gagging, to forever be the one aggrieved. Who had suffered more than them (save the Scalded)? Who had endured more (save the murdered, the raped, the eaten)? In the absence of their beacon, they had wandered and then they had erred. They had turned to the one who dared claim the light of their Holy Prophet as his own …
They had trusted.
So it was their Exalt-General had led them into depravity, commanded the commission of acts so foul, so wicked, they could scarce be imagined. He had exploited their confusion, preyed upon their hunger, anguish and disarray. He had made a feast of their honest and open hearts …
And betrayed all that was sacred and holy.
“How long?” the Holy Aspect-Emperor cried in tones of heart-cracking defeat. Twin rivulets, silver for the shining blank of the sky, slipped across his cheeks, so profound was his staged grief.
Proyas could summon no more than a wild look in reply.
“Tell me!” the face that had been his temple cried. “Traitor! Miscreant! False”—a breath breaking about convulsive passion—“friend!” Anas?rimbor Kellhus raised the blade of a gold-rimmed hand, held it shaking in the simulacrum of scarce-restrained violence. “Tell me, Nersei Proyas! How long have you served Golgotterath?”
And there it was in his periphery, dominating the barren tracts of Shigogli—gold knifing skyward from leprous foundations—the threat that was to redeem all evil.
“When did you first cast your number-sticks with the Unholy Consult?”
And Proyas understood then, the truth of the altar that had owned his every aspiration, so greedily consumed his every sacrifice. He saw what it was Achamian had seen, so very many years ago …
The False Prophet.
It was, a fraction of him realized, his first true revelation, the way light piled upon light, begetting ever more profound understandings. He saw that Kay?tus had known and that Serwa had not. He saw that all the World was oblivious otherwise—though oh-so many suspected. He realized, even though he lacked the words to voice it, that he stood upon Conditioned Ground.