“Truth,” the shadow of the Holy Aspect-Emperor said in a voice that was also a shrug. “Lies … For the D?nyain, these things are naught but tools, two keys to two different arenas of the World. Tell me which is greater: The truth that sees Men extinct, or the lie that sees them saved?”
The deposed Exalt-General spat blood. “Then why not lie now? Why not say, Proyas, yours is the lot most blessed? You shall sup with Heroes, lay with virgins in Holy Chalahall!”
“Because if I were to lie to you, I would not know what I was lying for … The darkness all but owns me here … The darkness that comes before. Any lie I might utter would serve ends I cannot know … I speak the truth to you, Proyas, because truth is all I have left to speak.”
Heat cupped the fallen Believer-King’s eyes, a sting he could not swat away.
“So these are my wages?” he cried on the welling edge of anguish. “These are my wages? Betrayal? Damnation?”
The white-robed figure stood without reply, or perhaps replied by standing.
Proyas looked back to Golgotterath, the tyrant that had commanded this final betrayal in sooth. And it seemed the most mad thing, both in and of itself, and relative to him and his yearning. At long last he could scry the distance, pace the cubits, between here and the dread end that had given meaning to every instant of his life.
To come so close.
All that Malowebi knew of Nersei Proyas was the residue of what passed through the Satakhanic Court, rumours of politic melancholy, godlike appearance, and ferocious conviction, the very image of the great man bound to a legendary vocation—not much, but more than enough to know it was no small murder the Holy Aspect-Emperor committed here at the very ends of the earth.
“Let me die,” the man begged. “Please, Kellhus.”
The Anas?rimbor’s voice fell as edict from the overarching oblivion, as it always did given Malowebi’s skewed vantage.
“No, Proyas … The World holds no torment that can compare to what awaits you. I have seen. I know.”
“Then … be done with it!” Proyas sobbed. “If I am … to be your witness … tell me … tell me your truth so that I might condemn! Curse you in turn!”
Blood and swelling had made a horrid smear of what looked to be handsome features, but the nobility of the ruin was indisputable.
“But you know my truth as well as you know my lie,” the occluded presence said. “I have come to save the World.”
Broken lips grimaced about missing and broken teeth. A grisly smile. “And that is why … the Gods themselves hunt you!”
Malowebi cringed. Images of Psatma Nannaferi drowned his soul’s eye, an old crone flooding nubile fields.
The Holy Aspect-Emperor replied as if this were the very clay to be cracked and sifted. “As they have to! The thing—the most horrific thing to understand, Proyas, is that at some point the Inchoroi must win. At some point, perhaps this year or ages hence, the whole of humanity will be butchered. Think on it! Why did Momas strike Momemn, his namesake city, and not this infernal place? Why is Eternity blind to Golgotterath? Because it stands outside Eternity, outside what the Gods can see. And that blindness is nothing short of breathtaking, Proyas! Our actions, our Great Ordeal, follows a doom outside of doom! We undertake a pilgrimage that rewrites the Hundred with every step!”
And Malowebi reeled hearing this, both for the turmoil of unwelcome understanding, and for the realization that the Yatwerian witch, despite her absolute contempt for the future, did not know it …
“When they attack me,” the Anas?rimbor continued, “their assassins are doomed since Creation to succeed, and then they fail as they were always doomed to fail. Eternity is transformed and the Hundred with it, oblivious to the transformation. The Unholy Ark is the disfiguring absence, the pit that consumes all trace of its consumption! To the degree it moves us, we pursue a Fate the Gods can never see …
“Do you see, Proyas? We act outside Eternity, here … in this place.”
Lacking any body immune to convulsions of understanding and passion, Malowebi floundered. A doom outside of dooms?
“Aye, if the Absolute is anywhere to be found, it is here.”
Dizzied, the Mbimayu Schoolman clung to the macabre image of the man lying broken upon the Accusatory, the peril of the Horns conjoining the sky and plain beyond him. The Believer-King of Conriya seemed curiously unconstrained, despite the cruel way his elbows were trussed behind his back. His eyes followed random tracks across the distance.
“And the God of Gods?” the battered face gasped.
The view pitched and rolled to the left as the Holy Aspect-Emperor set a sandalled foot upon his beloved disciple’s shoulder. Malowebi’s view rolled with his severed head; the barren arc of the Occlusion replaced the captive, towering heaps of wrack veering across the distance with compass precision.
“As blind to His Creation,” the Anas?rimbor said, “as we are blind to ourselves.”
Malowebi heard hot skin scuffing across stone. The scene dangled back to the Accusatory and distant terror of the Horns—absent Nersei Proyas. The hemp rope snapped tight across the rock.
Anas?rimbor Kellhus stood motionless upon the promontory for a time, as always entirely occluded from view. Still reeling, Malowebi averted his attention from the narcotic emblem, the Ark, followed its wicked shadow, the blackness reaching for the scabrous outskirts of the encampment, the Great Ordeal. He saw the Host of Hosts, and it seemed nothing more than the teeming of insects … beetles scrabbling in circles beneath the gaze of Anas?rimbor Kellhus.
How could such an enterprise be a madman’s errand? Who would enslave a civilization to wage war against mere fables?
Anas?rimbor Kellhus had upended the World for a reason, one wholly as dire as he claimed.
A night. An age.
The second drop has broken things. Cuts murmur and abrasions moan. It will not be long now.
The slow twist reveals his brother, Zsoronga, who hangs dying with him, then takes him away.
The sun breaches the summits rearing behind them, and looking out and up from his meat where it dangles, the Skeptic-King sees it.
Truly sees.
A golden crown for a head greater than any mountain, a laurel, set upon negligent earth …
An infinite abdication.
Breathing hurts. Breathing is difficult.
He swings, the hemp creaking like wood. He swings seeing …
He knows impossible things, dying. He understands that his father had understood all along. On his deathbed, proud Onoyas had called for his son knowing he would not come … And yes, even hoping … Because it mattered not at all, what a life makes of a soul.
Not at all.
Proyas can see it now, though he must raise mountains to lift his brow.
The World is more real, parsed into light and shadow. The distances are more distant …
And we are less embroiled.
Impunity leaps from the cracks between us …
And we punish whom we will.
CHAPTER
ELEVEN
The Occlusion
Inked the heart’s verses,
on the peak, in the light;
stole a lover’s breath,
in the deep, in the night;
caught a child’s tumble,
on the peak, in the light;
dried a mother’s cheek,
in the deep, in the night;
blinded an ally’s children,
on the peak, in the light;