“A glamour of some kind,” Achamian muttered, replying to her questioning look.
They crested the heights, stood numb and dizzy, gawking out over the grim reaches. It seemed impossible (as much for the Dreams as in spite of them), the way the mountainous curve of the Occlusion followed a perfect compass line, extending out below brumous skies, the rim of a concavity so vast as to defeat vision. Rising from ulcerated foundations, the Ark lay at its centre, dull-gleaming, miraculously intact given its cataclysmic arrival. The fortifications about its base, even the hulking towers of Domathuz and Corrunc, seemed burnt pastry in comparison, wicked only for the ten thousand little teeth of gold fanging the ten thousand battlements. The plain of Shigogli radiated out from the Horns’ bower, as flat as marble floors, and betraying the meaning of its ancient name, “Inniür,” for it was now more the colour of bone than the charcoal it had been in previous ages …
High to their left, they saw the greater mountains of the Yimaleti pile into cerulean obscurity to the northwest.
And to their right, in the east, they saw the Great Ordeal strewn along the Occlusion, steaming with dust, sizzling with indistinct activity, its southern flank so near that even Achamian could discern individual figures. The thunder of it lay viscous on the autumn air. The voice they heard somehow floated upon the rumble, a harangue that suffered no deaf ears. They stood numb … gazing more to accustom their souls to the spectacle than to scrutinize or see. And as they watched, pockets of turmoil erupted within the undifferentiated mass, crude rings, as if it were a pool beneath a hail of gravel.
Screams complicated the striate roar.
“What happens?” Mimara asked.
Achamian fought for wind. He spared her a passing squint, nothing more.
“Your stepfather,” he said upon a shuddering exhalation.
To come so close.
Proyas thought of girls with stooped shoulders and bold eyes, peppercorns crushed upon honeyed quail, the dust hanging about the blue-dancing feet of the priests of Jukan. He thought of children discoursing with grand authority in another room, unaware of any parent listening. He thought of clouds bloating above him, crisp white upon hazy blue, soundless and soundless and soundless …
He thought of love.
The pain did not so much subside as swell into something too great to be apprehended. Even the stings had been blunted into spheres.
Only the flies truly plagued him.
The ground below rotated first to the left, then to the right, but for no reason he could fathom, for the air had been gutted of all motion. Some torsion in the rope maybe? Some imperfection …
He could feel the slack weight of it, hanging from his bones … the meat.
So cold to be …
And so hot to touch.
The more he pondered the broken ground below, the more it became a conclusion.
At one point he thought he saw Achamian—or some ancient, crazed version of him, shoulders heaped in rancid furs—standing upon the arc of his rotation, squinting up. Proyas even smiled at the image, croaked …
“Akka.”
Though it knifed his chest doing so.
Then the apparition was gone, and only his conclusion remained.
He found bliss in dozing.
Then he was being hauled upward. He had no awareness of it until he saw his companion below, the Zeumi youth, the friend of Harweel’s son. Remorse skewered him to the pommel. Then he was spinning in the orange glare of evening, drawn relentlessly upward, grip by grip. It dawned on him as he was heaved across the promontory’s lip that the man’s strength had shouted his treachery all along …
The fact that he was inhuman.
The white clad image spiralled about him, luminous for the haloes about his head and hands, stained for the cadaverous contradiction of the Decapitants. Then serrated ground … warm water rinsing his face with cool, slaking his thirst.
“Gaze …” the beloved voice said—for even after everything, it was still beloved.
“Gaze upon Golgotterath.”
And Proyas saw them out across the Shigogli, the Horns rising colossal on a tangent to the furnace orb of the sun, black burnished in smoldering gold.
“Why?” he croaked. “Why do you show me this?”
He did not need to turn to see the Aspect-Emperor hesitate. Golgotterath had become his face.
“I’m not sure … The closer I come, the greater the darkness grows.”
Swallowing had become laceration, but Proyas grimaced more for confusion. His entire life, it seemed, had been apportioned equally between this very day, and all that had gone before.
“You bid me … bid me commit those abominations.”
“Yes. To accomplish the impossible you had to commit the unthinkable.
To bring such a host this far through lands so perilous … You have wrought a miracle, Proyas.”
The Exalt-General wept for a time.
“I needed you weak …” his Master explained. “If you had been strong, you would have sought alternatives, you would have gambled on some way, any way, to avoid taking the monstrous actions you took.”
“No! No! If I-I were strong … you need only command me! I would have committed any atrocity in your name!”
A rueful breath. “That is the universal vanity of Men, is it not? To presume they can know all their decisions, past and future …
“No, old friend. I see more of you than you can fathom. You would have balked, assumed that I had to be testing you somehow. If you did not question me, if you assumed me good, then you would have questioned my command. This is why I tore down your conviction. To be uncertain is to embrace the expedient. By trammelling your faith I assured you always reached for the nearer club, that you always found for hunger when you cast your sticks.”
Golgotterath … Even so distant, it nevertheless managed to loom, to stir some kernel of primeval alarm.
“Then … why denounce me?”
The beloved face did not flinch. “Because your life is worth the lives of millions … the lives of Miramis, Thaila, and Xinemus.”
Proyas closed his eyes about hot tears, sputtered for relief and outrage both.
“How then? How does … denouncing me … change … anything?”
“By healing the hearts of those who continue the battle. By giving me Men who fight as Men reborn.”
A line of southward-bound geese crossed the intervening sky, drawn into a cryptic rune.
“So am I saved? Or have I … have-have I … damned myself?” Anas?rimbor Kellhus shrugged.
“I am no prophet.”
The other Proyas hissed between clenched teeth. Affront blotted all distinctions.
“False!”
“The seeds are cast and I say which grains will grow, no different than any Prophet.”
“Lies! Deceit and deception—all of it!”