As damned as the Ordealmen are, the Ark leans across the Eye in a manner almost too violent to comprehend, a vision that strums the scale of the spirit too profoundly to hear. All this time, she has thrown aside her face, shielded her gaze, lest she vomit, void her bowel.
But there is no avoiding it now, short of groping her way forward.
Evil. An alien malice as cold as the Void.
Mutilated babes. Cities heaped like so many beehives upon a bonfire. The Horns gleam static through imagistic clamour, rise against clouds of tangled violet, crisp and gleaming, massive and inanimate, scarcely reflecting the eruption of demonic atrocities below, the thousandfold glimpses of dying peoples, races, civilizations—crimes that break the back of imagination, multiplied unto lunacy across the span of lands and ages, so heinous as to draw Hell, like fat in famine, up through the pores of the World.
She stands shaking, a child drawn from the tub in winter. Urine sops her inner thighs. She smells burnt belongings, roasting horseflesh.
Please!
“Princess-Imperial?” a masculine voice exclaims. “Sweet Sejenus!”
And she sees it, blackness bound in whirling dust, towering across the Heavens …
“Is it truly you?”
“Our Holy Aspect-Emperor,” Apperens Saccarees said, affecting a brittle distraction. “Does he know you are here?”
The old Wizard shrugged. “Who can say what he does and does not fathom?”
That earned him a sharp look.
“Aye,” the Mandate Grandmaster replied. The man set aside the tome he had been perusing, scrutinized the greatest traitor his School had ever known.
The Men of the Ordeal had been roasting horses when Achamian finally hobbled into the encampment, great shanks of meat slicked over fires fuelled by what belongings they had managed to salvage thus far. Few paid him any attention. They were grim, exhausted. Many were blackened for unwashed skin. Mangy black and brown stained every tunic. A kind of expectancy animated them, but tempered by the air of survival, of too many cuts endured, the fever, perhaps, of a lingering sepsis. Achamian recognized the look, or the nub of it anyway, from the siege of Caraskand. These Men of the Ordeal had suffered grievously getting here. They had burned and hacked the breadth of E?rwa, crossed an ocean of Sranc, and now they had reached the point of greatest dread for any host campaigning in hostile lands, the turn where they must begin consuming the very things that sheltered and conveyed them.
The old Wizard was neither troubled nor surprised.
Night had gathered almost all ere he had found the Mandate encampment. He had not known what to expect of his former brothers. Both more and less, he supposed, than the ring of ramshackle pavilions he found. The skies had cleared, baring all to the Nail of Heaven and the pallor of the infinite Void. He found breathing difficult, so convincing was the illusion of airlessness. Thanks to some perversity of his vantage, the Ark appeared to loom inscrutable over the encampment’s immediate perimeter, its monstrous contours gilded by hooks of silver sterility. Resolve as he might, Achamian could not stop casting glances over his shoulder. You’re here! a breath would cry within him. Here! And alarums would skitter across his skin, terrors would burr his thoughts, and yes, even glee would evanesce through his soul.
It was happening. The horror and anguish that he and every Mandate Schoolman alive or dead had dreamed night after miserable night—all of if could be redeemed! Vengeance—vengeance!—was finally at hand!
And yet the aura in the compound had been one of doddering … numbness.
“However …” the Grandmaster continued, “you are the legendary Drusas Achamian …” He smiled. “The Wizard.”
He had never known Saccarees personally, but he had heard of him. As irritating as teachers find prodigies in the room, they crow in their absence, quick to find evidence of their efficacy. Saccarees fairly had his masters falling over themselves in self-congratulation. Whatever the man’s gifts, Kellhus had certainly recognized them quickly. Achamian idly wondered whether the Mandate had ever possessed a Grandmaster so young. The only thing more outrageous than his hairline was the fact his hair possessed so little grey.
Achamian smiled in turn. “And you are?”
Twenty years in self-imposed exile, months warring across the wastes, and there it was, as oiled and effortless and accursed as it had ever been: jnan.
“Please,” the Mandate Grandmaster said, his smile revealing teeth that were far too even. He spoke, Achamian could not help but think, like a man struggling to awaken. “Things will go better if we speak plainly.”
It boggled to think, but decades had passed since he had last suffered the company of the wise. There’s a difference that learning makes, a manner the vulgar are apt to distrust, even despise. Apperens Saccarees, the old Wizard very quickly realized, was enduring him.
The old Wizard pursed his lips, exhaled. Everything, it seemed, reeked of tragedy—and hope.
“A shadow lies across this place.”
The Grandmaster shrugged as if at errant absurdity. “We make preparations to assault Golgotterath, recall.”
“No. Something ails you. Something ails all of you.”
Saccarees looked down to his thumbs.
“Think of the ground you stand upon, Wizard.”
Achamian frowned scoffing. “You’ve slept upon this ground every night of your life.”
“Yes, but we quite literally marched across the World to get here this time, didn’t we?”
Achamian blinked away images of himself swatting the fool.
“Why has Proyas been condemned to die?”
Had he learned something? Had he seen through Kellhus somehow?
Again the Grandmaster hesitated. Despite his urgency, Achamian found himself conceding that Saccarees was, when all was said and done, a good man …
For it was plain that shame had conquered something in him.
The Grandmaster flattened his expression. “How is it, do you think,” he asked, speaking to an abstract point to the right, “that so many Men have managed to journey so far?”
The old Wizard scowled, understanding the riddle, but resenting the misdirection.
“They walked … same as me.”
The sneer of someone who has hung from his limits for too long. “And what, pray-tell did you use to nourish your steps?”
Achamian had frequented enough opium dens during his years in Carythusal to know well the expression that lay cold as a claw upon his face. He had seen it many times on many addicts, the look, the one that raises fury and outrage to a perilous height, then dares others to risk the truth.
“What,” the Mandate Grandmaster pressed, “did you eat?”
Cu’jara Cinmoi …
“Forage.”
Then Nil’giccas.
“And what forage, do you think, the Great Ordeal had available?”
So it came to the old Wizard at last, the doom he and Mimara had tripped into.