The Unholy Consult (Aspect-Emperor #4)

murdered a brother’s wife,

in the deep, in the night;

choked a mansion’s hope,

on the peak, in the light;

grasping to seize, merely,

in the deep, in the night;

So are my hands more accursed,

than blessed,

more violet than white.

—Song of the Violet Ishroi





Early Autumn, 20 New Imperial Year (4132, Year-of-the-Tusk), Golgotterath.

There was a feeling to the sand, a sterility that made meat of other earth.

The Son of Harweel sat without ceremony, his boots and legs askew, his shoulders slumped, his hands insensate. The Occlusion ramped before him, piling into the cracked joists that raised the bulk of the Promontory like the tip of an accusing finger.

His friend hung dying above. Mu’miorn …

His solitary Boonsman.

He understood that he wasn’t thinking clearly. He understood, in a sideways manner, that he had endured too much: too many uncertainties, too many indignities, too many maddening, ingrown anxieties—and now, at last, too many losses.

All of this was clear to him.

What he couldn’t fathom was what he was doing. Did he mourn? Did he plot or ponder? Disintegrate?

Did he wait?

The cramped shrieks, the blood beneath his fingernails … these were clues.

And Mu’miorn, the adorable fool, refused to shut-up. Natter, natter, natter.

Yatwer, Yatwer, Yatwer …

“Why did you love me!” he heard his lungs bellow in reply. “Why?”

Couldn’t he see? To love him was to die. That was his curse …

But no, his friend insisted. Stupid sausage! To love him was to be murdered …

True, that.

The sun at last outran the woolen shield of clouds. It fell as a hot breath across his back. The blood trickling from his friend gleamed crimson across the stones.

An old Ketyai draped in rotted pelts stood near him for a time, staring up at the deposed Exalt-General—a man whose name Sorweel could no longer remember.

“What happened?” he asked in a voice like bark.

“Innocents …” the Son of Harweel replied on a gurgle. “Innocents were sacrificed.”

The old man studied him, his gaze bald enough to beg hostility.

“Yes,” he finally rasped in reply, flinching from a glance toward Golgotterath over his shoulder. “So the guilty might prosper.”

He hobbled several steps toward Sorweel, bearing an intensity sharpened ever more into the point of a knife. A nimil hauberk swung between and beneath his pelts, the shimmer of countless herons. The man stopped, braced. Eyes more silver than white glittered from a battered, bearded face—one that could have belonged to an ancient Eskeles.

“Worry not, son … Judgment has come to the Aspect-Emperor.”

With that, the wild stranger turned as a heap and began trudging toward the encampment sprawled below the Occlusion.

“Whose judgment?” the King of the Lonely City had screamed at the retreating figure. “Whoooose?”

But he knew. He had been here before, and the old man and Mother had told him precisely the same thing.

The day waned. The raining blood slowed to a spit, then stopped altogether. Where violet became black, red became brown, and this troubled him not at all. Sunlight trickled down to its dregs, drawing the stork’s shadow ever more gracile upon the stone tumble.

He had noticed the white bird immediately, but for whatever reason a watch passed before it fell within the ambit of his soul’s gyre. When he finally turned to gaze at the thing he had to fend the wild urge to seize its feathered heat, to bury his head beneath one great wing …

To hitch and sob.

Mummy …



Be brave, Little One …

Mimara walks. The Ordealmen gape at her, as much for her unborn child as for her parentage.

Some … a few, remember to fall to their faces. The others follow out of ignorance or exhaustion, and this relieves her more than anyone can know …

Relieves the Eye.

Her memories of fleeing the Andiamine Heights scarce seem real anymore, but they possess more than enough substance for her to worry over the irony: that she had fled the Andiamine Heights, run the compass of the World, to the very shadow of Golgotterath, only to find the Imperial Court awaiting her.

Or its monstrous remnants, anyway.

A kind of stupor fell across her and Achamian trudging across the chalk expanse of the Shigogli. She recalls quarrelling over Qirri. Otherwise, she has no recollection how, only that they parted ways. Traversing Shigogli became its own trial, with the Horns boggling her periphery, continually prying at the feeble latch that kept all the screams inside, and with the encampment a growing labyrinth of wreckage before her. Images of her past life confounded any focus she mustered, a thousand little razors, each glimpse another bleeding nick. Slaves buttoning girdles. Dignitaries watching her on the sly. The whole of her life awaited her in those canvas slums—everyone she had fled the previous winter … Serwa … Kay?tas … What would she say? How could she explain? And her stepfather—what would Anas?rimbor Kellhus do with what he saw in her face?

And the Eye. What would it see?

When one is numb enough, terror ceases to exhaust and begins to sustain; if anything her fears quickened her already unnatural gait. Two shadows had accompanied her passage the entire time, hers distinguished for the black orb that was her waist, rippling ever longer across the trampled dust—and then … there was only one. They simply parted, drawn apart on oblivious angles, and she found herself alone, clasping her golden-armoured belly … returning to a place she has never been.

Walking among the Damned.

Her horror of them, and her weeping especially, simply makes it worse, makes them more desperate to inquire, to relieve whatever could be ailing her—not understanding that they are what ails her, they and the dizzying obscenity of what they have done. Not all suffering raises in the Eye of God. Not all sacrifice is holy. She can scarce discern their nations, so potent is the blot of their crimes, and so alike. Conriyan, Galeoth, Nilnameshi—it does not matter. No history, no ageless compact of bone and blood, could mitigate their infernal doom. Their sins had pitched them beyond peoples.

She sees it as if refracted across colourless glass, a shadowy pageant of atrocities, abominations, of Men making as Sranc, not simply with Sranc, but with Men. Orgiastic apparitions, warriors supping upon the living and rutting with the dead, linger like smoke about a hellish glare, light become terror, impossible visions, torture combed into feathers, a thousand thousand strands …

Ciphrang masticating, chewing souls as meat. Sin like naptha. Endless, blistering fire.

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