The masses, which were too raucous with detail to be anything other than homogeneous, instantly bloomed into thousands of flowers large and small as myriad regions set upon the weepers in their midst.
“Seize them! Raise them so that I might see!”
Flowers of concentrated violence, bending ingrown, then leaning out and back, offering countless figures to the scrutiny of the sky, some writhing, some battling, some limp …
“Make a spigot of their throats!”
And the flowers contracted, shrank from whitening extremities, scored by the radial striations of thousands reaching …
“Drink! Drink deep their iniquity! Bathe your heart in the heat of their damnation!”
Men battling forward, holding forth cups cut from scripture. Men shrinking away, hunched over their crimson wages. Men throwing their heads back …
“And prepare! Set aside all that is weak!”
And he flared radiant from the very point of the Accusatory, pure before the noxious gold immensity of the Unholy Ark.
“For behind you lies your only hope of redemption! The Holy Task that the God of Gods has set before you! And you! Shall! Spend! All! Every pain! Every fury! Maimed you shall crawl, stab the stomping maul, gore the groin, pierce the thigh! Blind you shall grope and grapple, knife the squealing black! Dying you shall spit, bellow curses!”
The bodies of the weepers were tossed as rags upon them, grisly flotsam in the tempest.
“You have battled across the World! Witnessed what no Man has seen in an age!”
The flowers dissolved like figures of sand beneath waves.
“And now you stand upon the very cusp of Redemption! Glory everlasting!”
The Host of Hosts clenched and surged in all its miles, for at last it had turned, away from the tossed ramps and precipices of the Occlusion—away from the cruel judgment of its Holy Aspect-Emperor.
“Golgotterath!”
Away from itself.
“Golgotterath!”
And toward.
“All fathers beat their sons!” the Holy Aspect-Emperor cried, his voice scoring the vault of creation.
“All fathers beat their sons!”
CHAPTER
TEN
The Great Letting
To be false is sane when the truth will get you killed. To be false is insane when only the truth can save you. Thus is Reason is the father of Glory, and Truth little more than a pompous sibling.
—Antitheses, PORSA OF TRYS?
Early Autumn, 20 New Imperial Year (4132, Year-of-the-Tusk), Golgotterath.
Days of bodiless terror, fury, and lamentation. Days of moaning without voice, shrieking without breath, gnashing without teeth.
Days of floating … drifting as smoke in the black.
The great and terrible Anas?rimbor Kellhus had pursed Malowebi’s soul. Nothing was left for him save to watch the pageant of dangling glimpses. The wastes crossed. The wrecked Empress, her gaze forever chasing the outlines of things. The son always skulking the camp’s margins. And now the commotion and fury of returning to the Ordeal … All glanced rolling from the thigh of the Aspect-Emperor.
The Thought-dancer …
He could scarce contemplate it: though bodiless, the passionate tumult poets so often blamed on the flesh remained, burned as fierce as he could remember, the terror, the fury, remorse lashed to the eye-gouging limit. Likaro, wherever he cringed, should have been reduced to cinders for the curses heaped upon him!
Like all wreck survivors, Malowebi had taken account of his supplies, what might sustain him. He could feel. He could see. He could think and reason. And he could remember what he had once been … before … before …
He could still curse Likaro.
He still possessed all his faculties—he remained Malowebi, only shorn of his every physical connection, and locked into one of the Decapitants bound to the Aspect-Emperor’s waist—or so he told himself in the beginning. The more he rehearsed the cataclysmic occasion of his imprisonment the more he realized no such transfer had taken place. He clearly remembered the Aspect-Emperor affixing one of the Decapitants to the spouting stump of his neck. If the man had imprisoned his soul in the remaining demon, then he should be bouncing alone across his thigh—he should be in the thing, not staring at its blasted mien.
Which meant the Anas?rimbor hadn’t so much stolen his soul as his head.
The greater horror of this lay in the finality it betokened. If a demon possessed his body, then repossession remained a possibility … He had been stolen, yes, but he had not been destroyed. No matter how pathetic, he could still plot escape, he could still take aim. But realizing his very own head swung from the Anas?rimbor’s hip transformed what had been a prison into a trophy, a probing soul into a mummified gaze.
What was he going to do? He couldn’t entertain this question without lapsing into tirades of disembodied fury, cursing Fanayal for his crazed conceit, Meppa for his heresy, and Likaro for his pulse, his criminal ability to breathe.
The prophetic irony wasn’t lost on him. It seemed he could see the Yatwerian witch as clear as sunlight in his soul’s eye, Psatma Nannaferi, watching him from her mirror, daubing lamp-black across almost closed eyes, young lips communicating an old and wicked grin.
“And now you wish to know your part in this?”
If anything, he had obsessed over this encounter even more than the one with the Anas?rimbor, realizing—with greater assurance as the days passed—that he suffered the very doom the accursed witch had prophesied: to watch, to witness as a reader might, unable to touch, unable to save.
And only now, swinging from the Aspect-Emperor’s hip as he exhorted the debased multitudes from the pulpit heights, did Malowebi fathom the mad object of his curse.
Only now … gazing upon Golgotterath.
He had no heart but the heart he felt was cinder and ash.
Not even the sudden appearance of Zsoronga upon the Accusatory could knock him from his horror. Of course the boy had survived this far. Of course his life was forfeit, given that his father had commanded Malowebi to conspire with his captor’s enemies. Whatever he might have felt for the Successor-Prince was blotted, suffocated by the golden abominations rearing lucent into the clouds beyond his ailing form …
Golgotterath! Golgotterath was real. Woe to those who are fool enough to deny it! And woe to those who throw their sons as number-sticks against it.
“All things abhor you!” the battered youth cried, cringing for the hovering menace of the Pillarians, all but blind to the violations goring the shroud of Heaven beyond. The insult to dimension, artifice become blasphemy for unthinkable scale. The sense of cataclysm hanging in perpetual arrest, like golden knives endlessly falling into the breast of the World.
And Men sheeted the earth before it—Men!—stamped and shouted from across Shigogli.
Zsoronga was bound into a ceremonial posture of submission then summarily kicked from the side of the Accusatory. Malowebi saw it all quite clearly, given the angle the Whore afforded him, every wince and grimace, all the folds and creases that token anguish and outrage. But the Horns pillared the very Heavens behind the sobbing boy, the Inc?-Holoinas …