The Lords of the Ordeal growled solemn affirmation, sobbed for their own fallen kin.
Serwa inexplicably squeezed his shoulder, and he craned his face back and upward, following her gaze to the shadowy spaces about the entrance … where he saw Mother, her hair pinned severely back, wearing a priest’s white occasion hemmed to her diminutive form. Kay?tas held her by the arms, but the new Exalt-General proved no match for the Blessed Empress of the Three Seas, who simply barged past her eldest son, whispering furiously as she did so. Kelmomas fairly chortled. Mimara followed in Mother’s wake, looking preposterous for her girth, scanning the booming interior with anxious eyes. An ancient beggar hobbled immediately behind her, one blasted by the Mark. Kelmomas wriggled against his sister’s grip in an attempt to follow his mother’s passage after the intervening throngs engulfed her, but his sister conceded him nothing.
What happens?
More madness …
As if to confirm his appraisal, Father abruptly folded his legs upon the bench, and floated … a mere hand above the cushion at first, and then a cubit forward, so that he hung as something iron in the open air … and using no sorcery that Kelmomas could see! All shadow steamed from him, so that he was perfectly illuminated, an image impossibly crisp, save for the two black smears hanging from his waist. Suddenly the reality surrounding seemed a bruised fruit.
“What miracle?” the Holy Aspect-Emperor of the Three Seas asked, his voice tickling the cavities of the ear. “What miracle has delivered us to this place?”
Not a soul among them could say what word their prophet was about to utter, and yet each, the boy realized, had prepared to receive it.
Father shook his head and smiled, blinked tears for these fools he so loved. He held forth his gold shining hands.
“Each other.”
Shouts exploded across them, mouths howling from beards, eyes spilling for tears, faces reddened, fists closed and raised as hammers. Praising. Blessing. Cursing.
“Because of you—you!” his father’s voice cracked godlike through the uproar, “I know Golgotterath shall fall in flames in ruin! Because of you, I know the Unholy Consult shall at long last be broken! That Mog-Pharau, Tsurumah, shall be preempted—stillborn! By your individual will, individual might, the End of Days shall be forestalled!”
This place.
And they shook and they heaved, the lost Southron Men, wild with renewal, with fury and hope … until their apish stink became all but intolerable.
Kelmomas fought in vain for some further glimpse of Mother through the mobbed Lords of the Ordeal. Like dogs overanxious for the touch of their master, they had been slinking forward one by one, abandoning the tiers for hard ground, or the step above for the step below—almost as though they understood without knowing what their beloved Warrior-Prophet would demand of them next. When Father finally called, “Come to me, my brothers, and be Whelmed! Let my hands be the basin that cleanses you!” they fell over one another for naked urgency, imploding into a jostling ball that the little Prince-Imperial found both comic and revolting. Again he peered at the entrance, leaned forward and back in another futile attempt to find Mother, but Serwa flicked his ear—hard—saying, “Decorum!” on a harsh whisper.
But she too was gazing toward the entrance by this point. He studied her meditative profile against the bickering throng of Kings and Grandmasters. Before he could query, she was already kneeling beside him, somehow recalling the doom hanging over his head with a single sharp look. “Stay … put,” she murmured, then left him, withdrawing behind the Ekkin? arras and hastening around to the entrance … So she might assist Kay?tas with Mother?
He could barely suppress his chortling. He quite liked the thrill of occasions such as this, he decided. The untoward always intervened—did it not?—no matter how great the Strength …
No mastery was complete. Every act was a wager, even those belonging to Father.
We were such a wager … the voice whispered.
Yes.
The caste-nobles who yet loitered on the bottommost tiers had taken to singing, some hymn the Prince-Imperial had never before heard. The words caught like sparks on tinder, and soon the whole chamber thundered.
The purple tempest, drowning brown and birthing green,
The darling rumour, revealing love that cannot be …
The eight-year-old turned to regard the hanging emanation that was his mighty father, His Arcane Holiness, Anas?rimbor Kellhus I, Aspect-Emperor of the Three Seas, his shoulders arched back, his knees wide, his wrists balanced on his knees, the whole of him bright with otherworldly light. The boy’s stomach bubbled for the way he simply floated—how he could so effortlessly contravene the shackles that bound the monkeys cavorting about him. That he could so dwarf the Sons of Men!
Even now, he throws the number-sticks.
Yes.
He watched a savage version of Lord Soter kneel then lean forward to kiss Father’s right knee. Kelmomas strained once again for some glimpse of Mother or Mimara, but he could see nothing through the screen of bobbing torsos. He turned back to the pack of noble dogs vying before him, feeling, for the first time, the glum of boredom. And then he saw him …
A balm to my heart, a lamp to my feet,
Guide me, O’ Saviour, to the place I might sleep …
There, naked in their midst, bold unto absurdity.
An Unbeliever.
Any moment is but a snag upon a thread in a boggling weave. This is why the White-Luck Warrior is dead, even though this present moment continued to breathe. This is why the moment-once-called-Sorweel walks to himself the way one might walk toward a door. Life is but a mote compared to what comes after. To be Eternal is to be dead.
Eskeles is quick to smell the possibility of benediction, so the moment-once-called-Sorweel is already on the floor when the others surge to queue. They stand, singing the same booming hymns as the others. Patience absent all effort. Eskeles is joyous with bloodlust—the soft fronds of his character have been pulled away from his religious barbarism. “I have never forgotten, your Glory. I have never forgotten that it was you who saved me …”
“Neither have I,” the moment-once-called-Sorweel replies.
Time eats the queue’s numbers; they draw closer. The moment insists that his companion precede him in the queue. Eskeles makes fatuous protestations, but is too careless to conceal a kind of miserly glee.
They approach the floating Demon, soul following soul, like beads about to be unstrung. The moment-once-called-Sorweel sings with the others. Eskeles is like a trembling curtain, his hair is so wild. The moment-once-called-Sorweel only stands revealed when the Schoolman kneels.
The Demon regards him.
The air cracks and hisses, such is the intensity of its hunger.