The Unholy Consult (Aspect-Emperor #4)

That a place had been prepared.

All was riot and confusion, the queer, celebratory outrage that accompanies the undoing of truly catastrophic crimes. Hands struck him, seized him. He was borne off his feet, a doll rendered in human skin and human hair. The faces of his beloved brothers, his fellow Zaudunyani, floated about him, bobbed like inflated bladders jamming the surface of white rushing waters—some, like that of King Narnol, pale for pity and confusion, others, like Lord Soter, demented for outrage. He need not see his Lord-and-Prophet to know he waded through the commotion immediately behind, for it was the rare Lord of the Ordeal who did not continually, and quite unwittingly, glance at Him, so intent were they to express his will as their own. Proyas kicked back savagely, surprising the hands clamped about him, and he glimpsed the man, Anas?rimbor Kellhus standing upon an upside-down ground, in the thick of his Believer-Kings, yet somehow remote, untouchable. Their gazes locked for the merest of moments, Prophet and Disciple …

You planned this.

The blue eyes saw as they always saw, a glance that was at once a peering, a terrifying scrutiny.

Then he was raised up. Golgotterath surged and a subsided. Gold sheered against white across wailing skies. And beneath the thundering invective of the Holy Aspect-Emperor, King Nersei Proyas was carried forth to the multitudes …

So they might rejoice in his suffering.



King Sorweel, heir to the Horn-and-Amber Seat, sat unmoved through all of it, tingling for how near the Most Holy Aspect-Emperor had passed. He looked down, saw the Triple-Crescent Pouch laying in his left palm, though he had no memory of pulling the thing from his belt. Three Sickles. Some time passed before he realized what was happening, how his father’s murderer had scaped King Proyas for the Field Appalling. He could only wonder at the spectacle of the man protesting his innocence with dwindling conviction, not in his claim, but in the truth. He could only marvel at the Lords of the Three Seas, their canine eagerness to be cleansed in accusation, to find reprieve in threats and jabbing fingers. Even Zsoronga dissolved into the general uproar heaving across the Umbilicus floor, leaping with pious demands for retribution, shouting to the rhythm of brandished fists, no different than any Three Seas Believer-King.

On it went.

Sorweel looked to the gaping hole in the eastern wall, almost gasped for the premonition of looking down the miles to Min-Uroikas. He clutched the skin-polished wood. Absent direct sunlight, the hairline etching along the waist and length of the vast cylinders seemed clearer, promising symbols to the peering eye, but collapsing into scribbles rather than resolve. The World-Curse, his Siolan brothers had called it, a prayer for our destruction dropped from the stars …

Immiriccas lowered his face, convulsed for disgust … rallied for hatred.

When the youth finally looked up, the last of the backs were vanishing from the Umbilicus—a few so bold as to leap through the hole, loping like boys about the tumult’s eager edge. Then the grand pavilion was empty, save for Anas?rimbor Serwa standing in the middle of the floor with her back toward him.

“Has it winded you at last?” Sorweel asked.

“No,” she replied, turning to face him. Her cheeks shone white for tears. “I merely mourn another sacrifice … A deep one.”

“And when He comes to you,” Sorweel said, standing and stepping down the tiers much as her father had several mad moments before. “When the Holy Aspect-Emperor places you on the altar of the Thousandfold Thought … What then?”

She closed her eyes, lowered her face.

“You know we cannot be together …” she said, “that what happened on the mountain, on the plain—”

“I know that it was beautiful …” Sorweel interrupted, advancing nearer, “that it made me feel, not as a man, but as a boy, something tender, easily broken, something that could leap. I know that our fire burned within a single pit, that we could not be told apart, you and I …”

She gazed stupefied, retreated from him one step.

He followed. “I know that you, an Anas?rimbor, love me.”

The Triple-Crescent Pouch puzzled his left palm.

When?

“That look upon your face!” she suddenly cried. “Sorweel, you must make it go away! If Father sees it—if he sees me like this! I am too important to him. He will end you, Sorweel, the way he will end any and all liabilities before assaulting Golgotterath! Do you und—”

Thudding feet yanked their gazes to the entrance. Suddenly Zsoronga was seizing his shoulders, huffing for breath, his eyes wild with panic. “Sorweel! Sorweel! Something has gone wrong!” The Successor-Prince glanced wildly at Serwa, pulled his friend toward the great rent in the eastern wall.

Sorweel fought to disengage himself. “What is it?”

Zsoronga stood rapt before the image of Golgotterath, his great chest heaving, his eyes clicking between him and the Swayali Grandmistress. He licked his lips.

“Her-her father …” he said, swallowing for want of wind. “Her father claims”—a grimace of incredulity—“claims that my-my father has violated the-the terms of their treaty …” He closed his eyes as if waiting out some pain. “That-that he sent an emissary to help the Fanim attack Momemn!”

“So what does this mean?” Sorweel asked.

Zsoronga stared only at Serwa now, his expression crumpling for the remorselessness he found there.

“It means,” the Princess-Imperial said without inflection, “that we all make sacrifices this day.”

Zsoronga leapt for the image of Min-Uroikas, only to be caught on a gaseous shout, pulled spread-eagled by interlocking circlets of light about his wrists and ankles. Sorweel found himself rushing the girl, not to assail but to importune. The white eyes and sun-brilliant mouth turned to him, and something shattered across the length of his body, sent him whumping backward. He fell as a thing connected to limbs merely.

He did not so much kneel before the blackness as trip into it.



Scripture, the Great Kyranean once observed, is history inked in madness.

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