“And yet, here I am with you … fleeing the Empire.”
Her glare faltered, but only for an instant. “Because you know there’s no holding it, not after Momas has struck down Momemn—his very namesake!—trying to kill you and yours. Empire! Pfah! Do you know how much blood runs in the streets, Kellhus? The Three Seas burns! Your Judges! Your Princes and your Believer-Kings! The mob feasts upon them all!”
“Then mourn them if you must, Esmi. The Empire was but a ladder, a way to reach Golgotterath. It collapses in all incarnations of the Thousandfold Thought.”
The little boy did not need to see his mother’s look, so loud was the silence.
“And that’s … that’s why you … left it with me? Because it was doomed?”
“Sin is real, Esmi. Damnation is real. I know because I have seen it. I bear those two grisly trophies to overawe, certainly, but to serve as a constant reminder as well. Knowledge is responsibility, and ignorance—though you and so many others abhor it—truly is innocence.”
Mother glared in disbelief. “So you deceive me, keep me ignorant, to save me from sin?”
“You … and all mankind.”
The little boy thought of his father bearing the weight of every malicious act committed in his name, shuddered for the thought of damnations piled upon damnations.
Something insane rolled through the Blessed Empress’s look.
“The weight of sin is found in premeditation, Esmi, in the wilful use of others as tools.” His gaze clicked to the flames. “I have made this World my tool.”
“To destroy Golgotterath,” she said, as if naming the solitary point of agreement.
“Yes,” her divine husband replied.
“Then why are you here? Why leave your precious Great Ordeal?”
The little boy gasped for the sheer beauty of it … the effortlessness of his mastery.
“To save you.”
Her ferocity dissolved, only to be reborn as something more violent and shrill. “Lies! Another to add to your pestilent heap—tall enough to shame Ajokli!”
Father looked from the fire to her, his gaze both forthright and yielding, always promising forgiveness, space for the heart to recover. “And this,” he said, “is why you enlisted the Narindar to kill me?”
The little boy watched the Blessed Empress catch her breath at the fact of the question, then choke for the fact of the answer. Her eyes grew oily with grief. Her entire body seemed to wobble. The firelight painted her anguish in filaments, pulsing orange and crimson and rose shadow, beautiful as all things fundamental.
“Why, Kellhus?” she called across the interval between them. “Why … persist …” Her eyes had grown wide as her voice had grown small. “Why … forgive?”
“I know not,” Kellhus said, shifting his position. “You are my only darkness, wife.” He wrapped her within greater arms, pulled her into the warm blanket of his embrace.
“The only place I can hide.”
Kelmomas clung to the cold beneath, the World rolling beneath the Void, willing his flesh to become earth, his bones to become twig and bramble, his eyes wet stones. His brother shrieked and wailed, knowing his mother could deny his father nothing, and his father wanted them dead.
CHAPTER
TWO
Ishterebinth
One topples from events mighty and great
as from clouds and not mountains.
—TSILARCUS, The Sumptitudes
Early Autumn, 20 New Imperial Year (4132, Year-of-the-Tusk), Ishterebinth.
“The Anas?rimbor is almost certainly your Saviour …”
There was serenity in confusion when it was profound, a peace that comes from fathoming so few distinctions as to grasp contradictory things as one. Sorweel was a Man. He was a prince, and a Believer-King. He was an orphan. He was the instrument of Yatwer, the Dread Mother of Birth. He was a Son of Sakarpus, scarcely a man. He was Immiriccas, great among the Injori Ishroi, older than the ages.
He was stretched between life and damnation.
He was in love.
He lay panting as the world resolved into sensible form. The Weeping Mountain loomed, but more as a papyrus cutout than anything substantial. His face pricked for being naked, bald. Clots of Emwama raced through fog, frantic, running as fast as their stunted frames would allow. Memories came flooding back, images indistinguishable from panic. Descending through screeching halls. Oinaral dying in the Holy Deep. The Amiolas—
Sorweel clawed his cheeks, fingers hooked in dimpled skin. He was free! Free of the accursed thing!
And halved.
He remembered the swine-larded Haul, the descent down the Ingressus. He remembered Oinaral’s father, Oir?nas, the monstrous Lord of the Watch.
He remembered Serwa bound and gagged, reaching out, even as his eyes found her in the mayhem, standing wrapped in a bolt of black that lay like paint across her skin—Injori silk. Wind thrashed the gold from her hair. Ishterebinth climbed beyond her, obstructing all creation with recombinant imagery and ruin. Smoke issued from points across its immensity.
Sorweel made to call out, only to be choked silent by misapprehension. Did she know? Had the Ghouls told her of the Dread Mother? Did she know what he was?
What he was supposed to do?
With consciousness comes place. They lay upon the Cirr?-nol, he realized, the great mall before Ishterebinth’s shattered gates. He pressed himself from the stone, drew up one knee.
“Wha-what happens?” he croaked over the uproar.
She turned to him as if jolted from some disturbing reverie. Her left eye was a violet grin for swelling, but her right fixed him with characteristic clarity. His breath caught in joyous certainty that she knew as little of his part in what had happened as he knew of hers.
Even then, he began rehearsing his lies.
“The Last Mansion dies,” she called. “The Intact war one against the other.”
“Good!” a voice barked from behind Sorweel. The young Believer-King turned on a start, saw Mo?nghus sitting upon debris as though upon a latrine, slouched, great arms slung across his knees, black-mane obscuring his face. He, like his sister, was clothed only in a bolt of silk, black like hers, only embroidered with a crimson horse motif, and bound into a kilt about his waist. Blood dribbled from the fingers of his right hand.
“Good?” Serwa asked. “What could be good about such a thing?”
The Prince-Imperial did not look up. The wailing of the Emwama sounded like bleating sheep.
“I heard you, Sister …”
Blood continued to bead and drip from his fingertips.
“Between my screams … I heard you … sing …”