The Unholy Consult (Aspect-Emperor #4)

He feels the thud of the man through the timber stringers. Cnaiür halts his climb upon him, as though he plans to prod him with his boot. Proyas could have been either blank earth or a murdered loved one, so titanic is the man’s gaze, so numb.

“I asked …” Proyas pants upon a grimace. “I-I asked … Him …”

The same eyes, irises blue unto white, pupils as bottomless as Carythusali greed. The same wild, ransacking gaze.

“Asked what?”

Even his voice has aged savage.

Proyas blinks, tries to swallow.

“How you died.”

The eyes narrow.

“And what did he say?”

“With glory.”

Another man would have balked at such a cryptic answer. Another man would have pressed, asked for details, laying out the entrails of the encounter, seeking to isolate some clear meaning. Not the most violent of all Men.

“He did this to you?”

A meeting of cracked lips. “Yes.”

There was something stronger than iron in their mutual regard, something heavier than ground.

The Scylvendi King-of-Tribes turned his head and spat.

“I was never such a fool as you.”

Again Proyas smiles, somehow anguished and serene.

“So … the argument … unfolds.”

The savage mien winced. “Aye. My feud is ongoing. But yours, Outland King, leaks from your insides.”

Proyas does laugh then, and weep. “Give it … time.”

The World is grey now, spaced in blurs of looming light … His mother giggles, teases him for having such lustrous curls … and there, clear as linen warming in sunlight, stands the Scylvendi barbarian who had delivered Anas?rimbor Kellhus to the Three Seas. Somehow stronger, the violence of his intensity more keen, for the leathery ruts about his eyes, the hide of beaded swazond, and the intervening decades of atrocity.

“From the beginning,” Cnaiür growls, “I hated.”

“And so … you were known …”

“He is the coal that kindles my wrath,” the Scylvendi retorts, “the knife that compels my will. Do you think I do not see this? Do you think I am numb to his depraved yoke? From the beginning! From the beginning he has ruled my obsession … And knowing this, I have thrown my own number-sticks. Knowing this, I have raised myself—by my own hair I have wrenched myself!—from his innumerable snares.”

And Proyas sees it, not so much the truth of the Scylvendi as the truth of tragedy, the doom of all doomed souls. To believe themselves set apart. To think all floods subside at their feet.

“He told me … He told me … you were coming …”

A look of sullen thoughtfulness.

“He is no God,” Cnaiür urs Skiotha said.

“And what is … he?”

A scowl.

“The same as me.”

Proyas understands the imperative to be wary, to measure the potential offense of each and every word in his savage presence. Malice flexes beneath his every movement, his every expression, a serpent awaiting the merest provocation to strike. His hulking stature and iron-strapped arms merely assure the outcome.

The Believer-King understands these threats, but feels nothing of their urgent clamour. It is a measure, he realizes, of where he stands on the circuit of death.

Proyas swallows, gasps against the plucking of something deep within his chest. “Do you truly … think … all this … is a ruse?”

Cnaiür drops as if to grapple or throttle, his teeth clenched, the pouched skin of his neck taut about flaring tendons.

“He!”

A granitic fist cracks the wood next to Proyas’s right ear.

“Is!”

A second thuds across the fabric spilled next to his left.

“D?nyain!”

The most-violent-of-all-men arches like a lover over him.

“And I shall dog him! Snap at his heels! Bay through the watches of his sleep! I shall wait upon his outrageous arrogance, cast upon the obscene gluttony of his Mission! And when his diseased tools are spent, when he is battered and bereft, then—then!—I shall reveal the dread beam of my vengeance!”

“You … would risk … al—”

“What? Your great cities? Midden heaps! The fat of Three Seas? The People? Creation? Fool! You appeal to reason where there is none! You would put my hatred upon the balance with my desire—show me the mad wages of my design! But my hatred is my desire! My ribs are teeth, my heart a gut without bottom! I am fury incarnate, outrage become stalking sinew and flesh! My shadow cracks the earth, falls upon Hell itself! I smoke for the murder of innocents! And I shall sup upon his humiliation! I shall put out is eyes! Make adornments of his fingers! his manhood and his teeth! I shall hack him into the worm! the worm that is the truth!—truth!—of his nature! For he is naught but a maggot feasting upon carrion and corruption!

“The meat of you!” he howls, yanking high his knife …

Cnaiür urs Skiotha freezes, hangs as if upon the rawness of his own voice. And Proyas wonders at his own detachment, that he could see his life wobble upon a point, and not care, let alone fear.

The King-of-Tribes stands from his murderous crouch. “And you?” he spits, sheathing his knife. “Who are you to bandy reasons? You who have been trampled, you who have been thrown underfoot! When do the slain argue the righteousness of the slayer?”

The light greys. Proyas feels the empty air in his mouth, the absence of words or spittle. He sees … Serw? … standing two steps down. Unaged. Slight, waifish even, despite the barbarism of her costume. As beautiful as she was the day Sarcellus murdered her in Caraskand.

The mad King-of-Tribes bends his head from side to side in pursuit of a kink. The Sack of Golgotterath plays out in bright miniature against his profile, and Proyas finds his eyes drawn to what now seems a submarine drama. The Shroud of the Horde rears across the background, obscuring the far reaches of the Occlusion, challenging the Horns for the Heavens.

The light is dimming.

He glimpses intermittent threads of crimson, then the grilled face blots the spectacle once again, grimacing for perpetual disgust.

“He has used you up.”

And Proyas sees it across the encroaching gloom, images struck in the light of a less jaundiced sun. A different Age. A different Holy War. A Norsirai garbed like a beggar, mannered like a king—and a Scylvendi … “Yesss …”

And it seems impossible, the carelessness of that moment, that he had once held the Holy Aspect-Emperor and the Scylvendi King-of-Tribes within the compass of his mortal judgment. Had he felt it then, youthful fool that he was? Had he sensed the tickle of this mortal instant …

Way back then?

Turquoise scrutiny. Shit escapes the broken body below him, hangs animal. The light is dimming. The madman looks up into the gloom, his eyes counting the Circumfix-entangled insignia hanging from the void of the Eleven-Pole Chamber. He throws out his neck-breaking arms. “Burn it!” he roars, as if darkness and empty air were also his thralls. “Burn this place!”

Cnaiür urs Skiotha turns away, strides down to the grave shadows milling below—becomes a hulking silhouette once again. He barges through them, passes through the breach into swazond sunlight.

And Proyas lies breathing, as before, crafting each inhalation into shapes that might slip unnoticed between the swelling agonies.

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