“Because you know no end that is not our Mother.”
He stared at the meat in his hands, the scorched extremities, the pink nearer the bone, layered like torn pudenda. It seemed sorcerous, the way the bone and cartilage gleamed.
“And if I make Father’s end my own?”
He resumed gnawing.
“You have no command of your ends. You are like Inri in that respect.”
He swallowed, sucked at his teeth.
“So I should resign myself to death then?”
The illustrious witch scowled. “I know not what Father intends. Perhaps even he doesn’t know, given Golgotterath and the Great Ordeal. I fear you are the least of his cares, little brother. A mote, merely.”
Apparently the World was about to end.
Yes! Don’t you see? We have time!
Shut up!
Time to make amends!”
“And if you were in my straits, Sister, what would you do?”
Her look harrowed for its indifference. “Fathom our Father.”
And it was a testament to their blood, the fact that she need say no more, for their blood had been the answer all along.
The little Prince-Imperial resumed chewing.
Two triunes of Nuns guarded the Accusatory, one occupying the heights, the other the broken terrain below. Achamian need not conjure another Lens to know the witches observed their approach with great interest.
Rather than approach from below, they climbed into the Occlusion, picking their way through the black basalt ruin of the Arobindant. Her husband’s followers, Esmenet explained, had difficulty enough respecting her when she towered over them, let alone when she called up from gullies. But the climb, which appeared straightforward from below, proved taxing, especially for Mimara. The old Wizard’s heart almost leapt from his mouth glimpsing her totter upon the slopes, her arms dancing out for balance, her belly a great pear.
“Why?” he could hear the Scylvendi snort. “Why have you dragged your bitch across a thousand screaming, rutting leagues?”
The Nuns most certainly knew he was a sorcerer, for his Mark was deep. But they made no sign of preparation as they scaled the final approach. They had cast their own Lens, after all, and so knew full well the Blessed Empress accompanied him.
Achamian hauled Mimara, who still looked miraculous for being clean, onto the gravel shelf with him and her mother. The promontory’s root lay immediately above them.
“Let me do the talking,” Esmenet said, though the old Wizard had no idea why she shot him the warning glare. “If I could have surprised them,” she added, “I’m sure they would have ob—”
A feminine call in the near distance cut her short, followed by a disjoint chorus of sorcerous mutters. The three of them scrambled onto the levelled foundations of the Arobindant’s ancient citadel, saw the Swayali triune arrayed some thirty cubits above the back of the Accusatory, their eyes and mouths flashing white, their billows unfurled, so that curlicues of golden fabric snaked through the open spaces about them …
Esmenet cursed, gawking the same way Achamian and Mimara did.
“So much,” the old Wizard muttered, “for occupying the high ground …”
The image stupefied. The Accusatory pointed exactly as the legend said, not so much to the Canted Horn as to the Upright, vast and gleaming, a great golden axle for the desolation wheeling out about it. The Swayali witches hung as though pinned upon the monstrous tableau, their silk still shining despite months of insult, blooming like stalkless flowers, meaning glowing hot from their mouths and eyes.
Achamian turned to Esmenet, who seemed to be mumbling what she was going to say. He clutched her forearm, saying, “Wait … Esmi …”
She turned to him frowning.
“If Kellhus wished to … to kill you … to kill us …”
“Then what?”
“I … I could think of no better way than this!” Away from the encampment, where he could concoct any exonerating tale.
She smiled as if at his naiveté, drew two fingers from the height of his cheek down through his wiry beard.
“I’ve lived with him for twenty years, Akka. I know my husband.”
“Then you know this could be a trap!”
She shook her head in gentle negation, seeming to see too much, the way she always had, of the desperate contradictions within him.
“No, old fool. I know that he needs no traps to murder the likes of you and me.”
And then she was off, matronly in the white silk occasion that had been hemmed to fit her frame. He began shaking, understanding … at last, that Esmenet, far from taking the easy road, had suffered more losses, that out of all their souls, hers was the most numb—the most capable. And he continued shaking, even after Mimara clutched his shoulders and waist, for it seemed nothing less than a miracle watching Esmenet stride thus, beneath the flowering threat of the Swayali, into the deeper lunacy of Min-Uroikas, walking as though she were the World’s only terror …
“They will not harm her,” Mimara said, her voice hollow, her eyes as rapt upon the Blessed Empress as his own. “But neither will they heed … We have come all this way for nothing.”
“How can you know?”
Lightning sparked between the cerulean clouds snared upon the Horns’ heights, and they stiffened, the old man and the woman.
“Because that’s what she believes.”
To live is to starve for want of the eternal.
The black sails of the Umbilicus swallow them, but the crowd does not abate within the Eleven-Pole Chamber. And the Son of Harweel can see it in every harrowed face about them, the famine.
“I’m sorry,” Eskeles begins, “about … about Zsoronga …”
“We have all thrown love upon the funeral pyre …” the young King of Sakarpus replies. “We have all made sacrifices.”
The Schoolman looks uncertain. “You understand then …”
“He was his father’s wager.”
Eskeles bows his face, acknowledging the wisdom. “As are we all, my young King.”
“Indeed.”
To live is to witness the rotting of instants and nothing else. To be the decay of presence, the forever failing light. Life is the damnation that anticipates damnation.
And now that he has outrun life?
“Such times!” Eskeles exclaims. “I can scarce believe …”
He has become he who follows his following.
“How do you mean?”
The coming after that comes before …
“To dream of the Apocalypse as we in the Mandate do, then to wake up and … and witness the selfsame horror …”
His every breath the most miraculous throw …
“Golgotterath.”
The White-Luck.
Terror. Servitude. Worship.