He gazes through what seems a darkling glass.
Evil Golgotterath, like a wicked idol, squatting, watching beetles scurry about its horned feet.
Scylvendi throng in the foreground just outside, yelling, running, casting brands at the rotund walls of the Umbilicus … The light dims.
Moments pass before Proyas realizes one of Cnaiür’s spectral entourage has tarried …
Another silhouette. Another neck-breaking physique.
It approaches, parting smoke like ethereal waters. Once again, identity comes in stages. Once again, a familiar mien obscures the epic gleam of the Inc?-Holoinas and the whorls of battle beneath. But this face is different, the ware of a more refined potter. The brutality bequeathed by the father has been tamed by the beauty of the mother, drawn into a more aquiline manliness.
“Mo-Mo?nghus?”
The dark Prince-Imperial nods. Obscurity plumes and bloats about his edges. The Shroud-of-the-Horde has become his halo.
“Uncle.”
And it seems proper, that this too, should be real. Geared in the accoutrements of the People, it is undeniable, the fact of what Mo?nghus is. So … something whispers within him. All truth shall be out this day …
“How?” he coughs. “What are … you doin—?”
“Shush, Uncle.”
Fire leaps through the Eleven-Pole Chamber. Anas?rimbor Mo?nghus hesitates, then raises a hand as great as his father’s, clamps it about Proyas’s mouth and nose.
“Shush …” he says with what seems an ancient melancholy. He has pondered this. He has resolved.
Convulsions wrack bloated flesh.
“You have lingered overlong.”
His strength scarcely seems human.
“And I will not let you burn.”
The Skeptic-King of Conriya suffocates. Light and image dissolve. His lungs cramp. A burning flashes from his bones. His flailing astonishes him, for he had counted his body dead.
But then the animal within never ceases battling, never quite abandons hope … Faith.
No soul is so fanatic as the darkness that comes before.
This is the lesson we each take to our grave—and to hell.
None knew who had stacked the great basalt megaliths upon the summit of the Upright Horn. For watches, the Horde-General had crouched beneath the greatest of them, sheltered from the sun under the veined canopy of his wings, gazing down over the burnished rim of the plummet, watching the play of pieces great and small across the immense, circular benjuka plate below. The Canted Horn reared vast to the south, his only companion in the yawning vacancy of the sky, a stooped and stunted sister, hazed more than obscured by the scant clouds breaking upon it.
How long had he waited? Even for a being so deformed, the passage of time seemed no less miraculous. Millennia had become centuries, and centuries had become years … and, now, mere watches remained. The sun would set upon their Salvation … at long last. Resumption.
The ancient Inchoroi terror stood erect upon the summit, heedless of the plummet, little more than a wick against the oceanic onset of the Shroud. His Horde had engulfed the western plains, drawing the dark promise of the Shroud across the western skies. Soon, so very soon, it would put out the cruel eye of the sun. Soon, so very soon, the Derived would fall raving upon the Trespassers, mount their labile corpses, and cleanse their filth from the stoop of the hallowed Ark.
Their chorus inflamed him. Chill wind scoured the golden pitch, knifed at his great lungs. On a whim, he raised his wings, allowed it to buffet him as a kite, raise him to the pinnacle of the massive stone. Looking out, he could see the very curve of the World, and he moaned for a sudden yearning to be raised higher, ever higher—to be pitched into the bosom of the infinite Void …
To walk above and between worlds.
A thread of scintillant crimson yanked his regard back to the beetles beneath him.
Fire consumed the Umbilicus, flames binding like momentary muscle, wrapping and unwrapping liquid bones. Anas?rimbor Mo?nghus wandered the perimeter of the conflagration, clenching and relaxing hands that would not cease shaking—especially his right, which still tingled for the mash of his Uncle’s beard. And he wondered at the smoking skin of the pavilion, how it heaved upon sheets of clean fire and plumes of noxious black, how it trembled and writhed as a living thing.
It was, he decided, a fitting pyre for King Nersei Proyas.
The Holy King-of-Tribes had led his barbaric entourage higher on the slope, where they now stood fairly encircled by more burning wrack, the rubbish that remained of the Great Ordeal’s belongings. Either custom or madness had granted his father three paces, for he stood encircled as much as accompanied, stripped to the waist save his nimil vest. Only grizzled Harlikarut, eldest living son of Oknai One-Eye, dared stand at his side. His Consult mother, the thing-called-Serw?, stood apart for a change, gesturing toward the very thing tyrannizing their communal barbaric regard: Golgotterath.
The constellation of puzzled squints sparked no curiosity in the Prince-Imperial. He had just suffocated a beloved uncle—a fact that did not so much occupy his thoughts as obviate any need for them. Some fury is simply too great to be perceived, too deep of keel, too broad of beam not to vanish into life. And so Anas?rimbor Mo?nghus had not the least inkling that he was about to murder his father.
“You would burn him alive?” he heard himself scream as he approached. “The man who saved you twenty-years ago?”
Several faces turned to him, but only those nearest. His father, a beacon of brutality even in such brutal company, made no demonstration of hearing …
His wasn’t the only outrage, Mo?nghus realized, glimpsing his counterfeit mother gesticulating between the taller Men. The load of gazes blunted, then finally heaved his glare in their direction. He peered over the burning tracts of encampment out to Golgotterath, Horns gleaming beneath the sky-climbing Shroud.
A line of luminous red flickered from the thigh of the Upright Horn to the termite confusion below.
“That is the sign!” his false mother cried—and in Sheyic, no less. The assembled Chieftains scowled for incomprehension.
“The Holy Spear of Sil!”
Even swamped by roaring flame and whooping warbands, her words rang as clarions.
“You are sworn, Son of Skiotha! We must strike!”
The Prince-Imperial climbed among the outermost Chieftains, peering at the preposterous beauty of his mother, wiping his palms against his foul Scylvendi breeches.
The Holy King-of-Tribes loomed before her, banded limbs taut, hands clenching emptiness.
“You think I believe your nonsense?”
She seemed so slight in his overpowering shadow, so tragically beautiful, an emblem of a world desired, but never possessed … Never enough.
“Everything …” she cried, poised to flinch, to ward. “Everything you promised me! You swore an oath!”