“Leave him be,” Kellhus called after her.
She paused, did not so much look at him as turn her chin to her shoulder.
“I cannot,” she said in hollow reply.
“Then ware him, Esmi, attend to the limit of his chain. He is more hunger than human.” His voice welled for a wisdom indistinguishable from compassion. “The son you loved never existed.”
Her eyes scraped the image of her Lord-and-Prophet. “Then I shall ware him,” she said, “as I ware my husband.” The Blessed Empress turned and vanished into the great tent of her husband.
Kellhus and Achamian stared after her, and for a heartbeat, it seemed not a day had passed, and they stood as they stood in the First Holy War, boon companions on a murky trail, and the old Wizard found that no courage was required to speak.
“In Ishu?l we saw where you kept your women … how the D?nyain kept their women.”
The haloed face nodded—more to the recollection than the words, it seemed. “And you assume this is how I have used Esmi. As another D?nyain woman, a means to multiply my power through my issue.”
The old Wizard shrugged. “She assumes as much.”
“And what of you, old teacher? As Mandate Schoolman, you saw souls as tools as well, instruments of your ends. How many innocents have you placed on the balance opposite this wicked place?”
The old Wizard swallowed.
“Not those I loved.”
A smile that was both sad and exhausted.
“Tell me, Akka … What was the penalty for harbouring a sorcerer in Sumna during the Ikurei Dynasty?”
“What do you mean?”
Now the Aspect-Emperor shrugged. “If the Shrial Knights or the Collegians had discovered you all those years ago, what would they have done to Esmi?”
The old Wizard fought to purge the injury from his glare. This was what Kellhus always did, a mad part of him recalled. Always exhuming shallow graves. Always murdering what piety you hoped to raise against him.
“Dif-different times!” he stammered. “Different days!”
Anas?rimbor Kellhus, Holy Aspect-Emperor of the Three Seas, loomed as the incarnation of tempest, as drought and plague. “I am a tyrant, Akka, the most terrible soul to walk this World in an Age. I have butchered whole nations merely to terrorize their neighbours. I have authored the death of a thousand thousand souls, glutted the Outside with the fat of the living. Never has a mortal been so feared, so hated, so adored as I …
“The Hundred themselves raise arms against me!”
He actually seemed to swell as he spoke, bloat across dimensions of dark import.
“I am the very thing I must be, if this World is to survive.”
What had happened? How had his cause—his righteous cause!—become smoke and conceit?
“For I know, Akka. I know as a father knows. And so knowing, I compel sacrifice, I punish those children who stray, forbid those games that corrupt, and aye … I take what survival requires.”
Be it lives or wives.
Futility crashed upon Drusas Achamian then, all the more agonizing for its inevitability. He was nothing but an old madman, a crank who had nursed too many grudges for too many years to hope to see beyond them. Where? Where was Mimara? It wasn’t supposed to happen this way. Not like this! How? Why? Why deliver her to the Ordeal, only to chain her to her body? Why shackle her to her womb at the moment of their greatest need?
Why? Why would the God pluck his own Eye now, on the very eve of the Second Apocalypse?
All the years Dreaming, fretting, reliving the greatest Terror the World had known, toiling without sanction or purpose, drinking, raging, whoring, laying in mortal dread of slumber. And now … now …
“Yes,” the Aspect-Emperor of the Three Seas said.
It wasn’t supposed to happen this way.
“But it happens nonetheless, Akka. A reckoning like no other.”
Trembling. Shaking about an old man’s entrails, about the shame of being seen shaking.
The blasted figure nodded. “You gave me the Gnosis because you believed I was the answer …”
“I believed you were a Prophet!”
“And you saw through that guise, saw that I was D?nyain …”
“Yes! Yes!”
“So you recanted, repudiated, thinking me false …”
“You are false! Even here! Even now!”
“No. Merely ruthless. Only what I need to be …”
“More lies!”
A look of exquisite pity.
“Did you think justice would save the World?”
“If not ju—”
“Did justice deliver the Nonmen? Did justice deliver the Ancient North? Look! Look about you. We stand before the very gates of Min-Uroikas. Look. Regard the Host I have assembled, the Factions and the Schools I have recruited, the might and glory that I have led across the desolate breadth of E?rwa, across innumerable leagues of screaming, rutting Sranc. Do you think goodness could have accomplished this? Do you think honesty could have compelled so many fractious souls? That fear of myth and legend alone could have served as my goad?”
And he had looked—how could he not, knowing where he stood. His whole life he could only cry “Golgotterath!” and stamp his feet, knowing what was for him ages of history and horror was but an absurd word for others, a chit belonging to a lost game. And now here Achamian stood, hearing his very own cry on another’s lips, and turning …
And seeing …
“The Gods are witless,” Kellhus pressed, “blind for seeing all. The God of Gods is naught but their bewildered sum.”
The nocturnal immensity, menace soaring to the stars, gleaming sterile beneath the Nail of Heaven.
“No,” Achamian gasped.
“Only a mortal can conceive what lies outside the sum of all, Akka. Only a Man can raise eyes to, let alone arms against, the No-God …”
“But you are no Man!”
So uncanny, his haloes, so impossible.
“I am the Harbinger,” the glowing vision said, “a direct descendant of Anas?rimbor Celmomas. Perhaps, old friend, I am just human enough …”
Achamian raised hands to either side of his head, staring so that the Holy Aspect-Emperor and the Inc?-Holoinas complicated either edge of his vision, opposing augurs of woe, each shining as if oiled, each noxious as much for their Mark as for their hated memory.
“Then show it!” he cried, throwing his hands out in sudden inspiration. “Cut Proyas down! Show mercy, Kellhus! Demonstrate the very salvation you have promised!”
Each inhuman.
“Proyas is already dead.”
“Liar! He lives! and you know he lives! for you intended it! So show it! Suffer one snarl, one loose thread, in your accursed weave! Act as a human would! Out of love!”
A bereaved smile, twisted into something leering by the Nail of Heaven.
“And what are you, Holy Tutor, but a snarl, a loose thread that I suffer?”
The Harbinger turned away, began striding toward the warren of beaten pavilions fencing the slope immediately below. Achamian opened his mouth in idiot protest, once, twice, like a fish left gasping in the dust. His voice, when it came, cut for desperation.
“Please!”