Surfaces vast and gold soared and plunged about the Inchoroi, who appeared sepia for reflected light, like something carved from an apple. He hung out from one arm, clawed feet braced against the Horn’s impenetrable skin, so high his lungs ached for the emptiness of the air. Though he had been Grafted for this world, the frame of his body remembered its distant womb, or at least held fast some portion of it. His soul, however, recalled nothing of his origin, unless solace could be called recollection. He dreamed it on occasion, especially when novelty had commanded his day, as if all those ancient experiences, hidden as they were, remained essential to his understanding. But he could never remember these dreams. He knew only that contentment hummed deep within, hanging thus, stirring him to wonder at worlds with thinner air.
He was old, aye, so ancient as to be broken into multitudes by the Ages. Glorious Iskiak, Spear-Bearer to mighty Sil, the great King After-the-Fall. The legendary Sarpanur, celebrated King-Healer, the great Killer-of-Hells. The infamous Sin-Pharion, reviled Plague-Bearer, the Soul-Most-Hated …
Aurang, the accursed Horde-General.
He remembered their hallowed vessel faltering upon the shoals of the Promised World, and the Fall, the Inertial Inversion Field piercing the crust to the pith, gouging the landscape, heaving it out upon a cataclysmic hoop, raising mountains to retard their descent … just not enough.
He remembered the Weal that followed, how Sil had rallied the Holy Swarm from the brink, taught them how to prosecute war with the remnants of their once-dread Arsenal. Sil had been the one to show them how they might still save their eternal souls!
He remembered enough.
So many incarnations, so many ages labouring upon the brink! And now it happened … at last, after uncounted millennia, the piling of years so numerous, the past could only be crushed into Law. So very soon!
Even from such heights, he could smell the shit of Men on the wind. He could see them plainly enough, smeared across the rim of the Occlusion, another Ordeal, come to break tooth and claw upon their Sacred Ark.
And he knew the sweet, sweet fruit they would pluck. He had wandered far over the plains and mountains of this World prosecuting Resumption. His soul had flitted through all the greatest cities of Men; aye, he knew well the pig fatted for the feast. The humid brothels, where the oils were both scented and bewitched. The temples, gilded and immense. The vast babble of the markets. The slums and alleyways, where gold was daubed in blood. The teeming streets. The cultivated plains. The soft-skinned millions awaiting their delicious ministry. The squirming. The screaming …
The whirlwind walking, vast and black.
And his phallus hooked high across his strapped abdomen, a bow strung for war …
And glory.
Each clasping an arm, Achamian and her mother hustle her from the uproar of the assassination into the partitioned rear of the Umbilicus. Appalled and appalling faces slide by, some gawking, others turning aside. Thighs she cannot see are slicked. Her feet skid and squish in their sandals.
No-no-no-please-please-please-no!
“What happens?” Achamian cries under his breath.
“The baby comes,” Mother says, intent on steering them clear the looming Lords of the Ordeal.
This is the answer Mimara can tell he expects, yet he sputters in disbelief.
“No. No! It must be something—food, maybe. Rancid horseflesh, per—”
“Your baby comes!” her mother snaps.
They trot through flaps, down a gloomy corridor. Mimara can feel them like straps so very deep within, muscles cinching, cramping, screaming …
“Mimara …” Achamian cries, genuine panic in his voice. “Perhaps if you vomit?”
“Fool!” her mother curses.
But if anything, Mimara shares the old Wizard’s incredulity. It cannot be. Not now. It was too early! This couldn’t be happening now! Not on the stoop of the Inc?-Holoinas—Golgotterath! Not with Proyas hanging from the Accusatory, leaking like a waterskin. Not when they stand within a toss of completing what they had set out to do!
Judging him, Anas?rimbor Kellhus, the D?nyain who had conquered half the World …
She does want to vomit, but for the idea of delivering a newborn soul—her first child!—to such straits, to such an evil time and place! Had any cradle been more ill-omened, more terrifically malformed? But it happens nonetheless, and as appalled as she is—cannot but be—an invincible calm dwells within her, a corporeal conviction that this one thing is true …
A life lies within her … and it must out.
They cross the antechamber where she had first found Mother, press into the bedchamber beyond.
Must and gloom.
“Per-perhaps …” the old Wizard stammers as they ease her onto the mattress. “Perhaps we-we could try … try …”
“No …” Mimara gasps, grimacing in an attempt to smile. “Mother is right, Akka.”
He leans stooped over her, his face slack and ashen. Despite everything they have endured, never has she seen him more terrified, more broken.
She clasps his hand instinctively. “This too is part of what happens …”
It has to be.
“Think of it as a Cant,” Esmenet snaps, fussing over pillows. Mother fends her own dismay and horror, Mimara realizes … over the murder they had just witnessed.
And the fate of her mad little son.
“Only blood instead of light,” the Blessed Empress huffs, raising a cool, dry palm to her forehead. “Life instead of ruin.”
There was violence to his Translocations—Malowebi could tell as much by the flurry of light and shadow—and yet experience insisted that he had not moved at all, that the very World had been torn down and reassembled around him, plank by plank, in the twinkling of an eye.
So it was the shouting turmoil of the Umbilicus fell away as a page turned, revealing the nocturnal barrens of the Shigogli, which also fell away as leaf bound to a common spine, returning to the encampment, only higher on the slopes, before the entrance of a sagging pavilion, one with panels like leopard skins for mouldering discolouration.
The little Prince-Imperial wailed as they plunged into the black interior. The Anas?rimbor conjured light with an indecipherable murmur, inking the evacuated interior in blue and white.
“His face, Father! I could see it on his face! He w-was going to-to assassinate, assassinate you.”
Malowebi spied a great screw hook anchoring a set of rust-pitted shackles to the barren centre of the floor.
“No, Kel,” the ever-hanging shadow said, pinning the child to the ground next to the plate. “He loved me the same as the others—more than many, in fact.”
The cherubic face was swollen for injustice and incredulity. “No-no … the hate … You had to see it, Father! Why do you pretend?”
The Holy Aspect-Emperor had crouched such that Malowebi could see little more than his hands deftly manacling his son’s ankles and wrists. It almost seemed he caressed fluttering shadows, so intense and artificial was the contrast between light and dark. Great veins inked across tendons. Tiny hairs aglow.
“So much raw ability,” the occluded presence said. “All of it yoked to darkness.”
“It was there! The hate was there!”
Anas?rimbor Kellhus stood erect, and Malowebi watched the boy bolt back in his shackles, his innocence too pale, too raw for a demonstration so bestial.
“You are a fascinating child.”
“You’re going to kill me …” A wild, flaxen maul about a face of anguished rose and sniffling pink. Wet blue eyes sparking for the dismay of the unloved and betrayed. “You’re talking the way you would if you were going to kill me!”