These were the wages of the Strength.
Anas?rimor Kelmomas stood some five paces to his Father’s left, Serwa behind him, her hands resting on his shoulders in the simulacrum of comfort. The Lords of the Ordeal filed through the entrance to their right, fanned across the earthen floors to take their place on the tiers. They had the look of bandits, soiled to the pore and long-hunted by vengeful authority, cutthroats dressed in the plunder of more subtle castes and nations. Almost all of them gawked at the sight of him upon entering, and many continued glancing in his direction long after sitting. Some nodded and smiled in recognition. Others scowled in worry. And still more gazed at him in lingering horror, or worse yet, yearning. He found the attention oppressive, even terrifying—enough to weld his gaze to the cancerous image of Golgotterath through the broad rent in the western wall.
He understood why they stared. He was the first child any of them had seen in a year of arduous travel. What was more, he tokened their own children and grandchildren, the home they had thrown so far over the horizon. This was why Father had commanded his presence: to example what these Men had come to save—to make meat of what they had forgotten.
Kelmomas marvelled at the machination. He had almost forgotten how absolutely his father commanded these Men—the fathomless depths of his dominion. The Believer-Kings had come to make display of their fidelity and devotion, to secure their oh-so-mighty Lord-and-Prophet’s blessing before the assault upon Golgotterath. They had come to be fortified and fortified they would be. But not a soul among them could hope to fathom the primary end of this gathering. If the Holy Aspect-Emperor harangued them, he scrutinized them more, assessed their reliability, so that he might know where best to use, to exploit … the way Kelmomas himself was being used, exploited.
The hard work was about to begin. The tools must be inspected.
Kelmomas clutched opposite folds of his white-silk tunic, stricken for insight. All this time he had thought his father merely a stronger version of himself, someone who could do more of what he could do. Not once had he considered that Father could do things he could never hope to, things he couldn’t even think.
Perhaps anything …
The Holy Aspect-Emperor of the Three Seas strode from blackness to light, stepped before his bench. A golden nimbus hung miraculous about his head—and about each of his hands as well, which he raised in benediction and prayer. Despite the gloom of the Umbilicus and the overcast sky, he was some how bathed in the light, his white-and-gold vestments bright unto squinting, the folds scored by shadows angled to an unseen, mid-morning sun.
“Fathom our Father …” Serwa had told them.
The collected Believer-Kings and their vassals fell to their knees across the tiers. After a pinch from his sister, Kelmomas lowered his eyes to his feet. The Umbilicus rumbled to the chorus of warlike voices, a sound as deep and ancient as the sea. And they all seemed apes in the shadows, carnival wags, compared to their Holy Aspect-Emperor—even Serwa. All of them groped and thrashed in the black—save Him.
Save Father.
We were overweening … Sammi whispered.
Yes. Greedy.
They had always been overmatched. He could see it so clearly now.
“Praise,” his father boomed into the high-sagging hollows.
“Praise be the Meta-God.”
Toying with the worldborn was no measure of his Strength. Any fool could command a kennel. The episode with Inrilatas had shouted as much, especially the ease with which his brother had seen through him—seen through them.
No. He would do what he should have done from the very beginning, what his elder siblings had done: transform himself into a tool. He would make himself useful …
To survive, at first. Then to thrive … perhaps even conquer.
And Mother? She had squandered her utility (as her absence now argued), fumbled whatever confidence Father might have had in her. Even her womb was barren! Let her fawn over her whore-daughter. Let her mewl and cling! She had become cheap. An aging bauble, something to be forgotten—traded for drink and song! Or even given away, should her wits grow addled …
We will accomplish something mighty! Prove our Strength!
Yes … Yes!
Then she would learn—the stupid bitch! Errant cunt! When even the slaves balked for cupping her drool, bathing her delicious secrets, for washing the rank shit out of her sheets! Then she would see, and she would love—love as she should—and caress and hold and say, “Oh, Sweetling, please-please-please forgive me!”
Yes. It seemed so clear watching the caste-noble cattle low about Father’s long knife.
She will be our prize.
“Ishma tha serara …”
The menacing congregation rose at their Lord-and-Prophet’s bidding, forming a bowl of expectant faces across the back of the Eleven-Pole Chamber. The contradiction of it tugged the child, the pathos of once strong souls frantic to recover decorum, dignity, and the grim aura of invincibility belonging to those who have survived unspeakable trials. They seemed at once ghosts, creatures of smoke and rumour, and an assembly of iron ingots, indestructible. The Eleven-Pole Chamber had suffered parallel indignities, what given the rent western wall, the scavenged lanterns, scabbed leather and rotted canvas. He recognized the two carpets banding the interval between them and the Lords of the Ordeal, for he had cartwheeled their length many times when they had lined the galleries of the Imperial Audience Hall. He knew they had been ornamental once, a lavish pictorial retelling of the First Holy War—the story of how Father became holy—but now they seemed of a piece with the blasted ground, the dirt of Golgotterath, their vivid imagery trammelled into stains.
“You …” Father began. “Embattled. Weary.”
The Sons of the Three Seas watched rapt as children.
“I ask you … What miracle has brought us to this place?”
Absorbing even the questions.
“What miracle has brought us to the very end of Men?”
Proyas! Kelmomas silently japed.
“Ages past a knife was cast,” Father said upon inaudible, yet palpable, thunder. “A knife was cast across the Void, tossed glittering in the black, sailing gulfs we cannot imagine before finally striking here. Here. It cracked the underworld spine of Viri, great among the ancient Nonmen Mansions. It threw up the mountains of the Occlusion, and cast out a fire that ignited the very sky above us, and all the skies surrounding …”
Kelmomas craned his head about to spy his father, and found himself ensnared, by the mad profundity of his Mark, by the crisp glory of his felt vestments and white-silk robes, by the haloes about his hands and his head …