“The sick and the blind must be culled … Those whose skin grows leprous. Those who vomit blood. Those who lose their hair … They too are polluted.”
Golden orbs enclosed his prophetic hands.
“Do you understand, Proyas?”
It seemed a miracle.
“These past months … our discussions … Do you understand?”
They shared a flat gaze, one rumbling with the premonition of new horrors.
“You’re leaving us,” Proyas croaked.
Leaving me.
His Lord-and-Prophet nodded, crushed his plaited beard against his chest.
“Saubon is dead,” Kellhus said, his manner gentle. “You alone know the truth of what happens here. You. Alone.”
Proyas’s face crumpled, a treacherous display that was undone the instant of its commission. It was strange, to weep without grimace or tears.
“But …”
The sick and the blind must be culled …
“You are weak, I know. You need the surety of the divine, and will only suffer so long as you are denied it. But no matter how much you lament, the Greater Proyas remains strong.”
He wanted to cry out, to leap over the plummet, to collapse at His feet and to weep into His knees, but he stood cold and erect instead, somehow understanding everything while comprehending nothing …
The Exalt-General of the Great Ordeal.
“Seize them, Proyas. Bring the Host to heel with whip and sword. Take up its lust, fashion it as a potter fashions clay. Consuming the Sranc has transformed its zeal into a living fire, one that only violence and victims can cajole and appease …”
What was happening? What was he saying?
“Something must be eaten … Do you understand me?”
“I-I think …”
“You, Proyas! You alone! You must make decisions that no Believer could.”
The King of Conriya’s eyes clotted with tears, and he turned to him, his Lord-and-Prophet, only to find the place where he had stood vacant. The Holy Aspect-Emperor of the Three Seas was nowhere to be found.
Proyas picked his way down alone … Another naked soul, stumbling.
Word spread. But the simple fact that Proyas had seized the initiative, that he genuinely seemed to know what had to be done, assured obedience. He forbade passage anywhere near Antareg. He delegated the organization of a mass lazaret on the south side of the Urokkas, dispatched word confining anyone suffering blindness, burns, or sickness of any kind to its miserable precincts. The remainder of the Ordeal marched through the night, sometimes clearing, sometime climbing the scorched carcasses that clotted Oloreg’s smashed teeth. He drafted dozens of Mandati and Swayali to cast Bars of Heaven to illumine their course. For those ailing along the coast, the spectacle inspired no little dread: the sight of their brothers carpeting the shoulders of the mountain, filing beneath haphazard pillars of brilliance, mobbing the passes in their haste to rejoin the Ordeal’s horsemen on the Erengaw Plain.
“They abandon us!” Only one man need voice this fear for it to become the fear of all. With the passing of the watches they could see the sickness consume the most afflicted among them, stealing their hair, rotting their skin, making crimson broth of their innards. They were accursed. They knew as much and they despaired. They had gazed upon the infernal face of Hell itself … and they would not live for it.
The Slough, they began calling it, for it truly seemed that they decayed, inside and out. The agony was wretched, excruciating, yet a peculiar quiet prevailed over the vast lazaret. They had no food save the Sranc, which they consumed raw. They had no shelter, no blankets, no physicians—only their faith and small patches of miserable earth crowded against what seemed the ends of it.
The relatively healthy set about clearing the innumerable Sranc dead: many of the sickest had simply crawled across the tangled masses, making cots of corpses. Sickened caste-nobles organized teams, while sickened Schoolmen hung sorcerous lights of their own. The blind and hale were paired with the sighted. Soon Sranc fairly rained down the scarps, crumpling and cartwheeling.
So they toiled as their brothers fled.
Hoga Hogrim, Believer-King of Ce Tydonn, assumed moral and temporal command of the impromptu host. It was as much a coup as anything else, with the fealty of potential competitors demanded at sword-point. More than a dozen dissenters were murdered (and thrown from the cliffs with the Sranc). Most, however, embraced his makeshift rule, thinking that all would be sorted with the imminent return of their Lord-and-Prophet. The survivors, sickened or otherwise, were already calling what had happened “the Great Scald” by this point. Knowing the way Men rally about a common identity, Hogrim bid his ailing householders to name the huddled and prone masses, and so dozens of longbeards trudged the groaning slopes and silent beaches, declaring that they were the Scalded.
So was a second Ordeal born that night, a host of those who could scarcely hope to survive the morrow, let alone save it. Black clouds piled in echelon across the northwestern horizon, and the sickest (those coughing and vomiting blood) lay staring in glazed wonder for the way the dark giants swallowed the constellations. The front soon formed a low, roiling ceiling above the mountainous stages of the Urokkas. The rain was not long in following.
The Men shivered and steamed. Some roared and rejoiced, while others bent their heads, too weary to care. Among the sickened on the shoreline, some wept for relief, thinking they might be cleansed, while those losing their skin began howling and shrieking in agony. Raindrops had become acid. Torrential sheets chased the slopes, flooding the ravines and gorges, rolling the dead down, draining black into the heaving sea. Muck and misery ruled the shores. The mouths of the dead were filled as cups.
An eerie quiet ruled the high and low places come the following morning. The Sea scarcely gurgled. Chill morning mists broke about the heights and drained from the ravines, revealing at every stage the crazed proportion of death and destruction. Dead burred the ridges, matted the slopes, their limbs hooked for rigour, their mouths grinning for spite of the living. Crows and gulls feasted, the black feather and the white, their ancient feud forgotten for the largesse. The passes of Oloreg lay empty, inked for the dark of morning shadow. The eyries abandoned, the summits lay barren beneath the sky.
Few among the Scalded were surprised. They had lived, as all civilized Men had lived, with pestilence their whole lives. The sick were always left behind. That was simply the way.
So they sat in solemn resignation, too aggrieved to be aggrieved by the thought of their plight. They sucked shallow breaths, perpetually braced against the sting. They passed their innards as vomit and offal. They gasped misery. Some bickered, some railed and accused, but most gazed out across the Sea, wondering at all the horizons that lay between them and their wives and children. Those blinded by the Scald smelled and listened, marvelled that air could take on the substance of water, that purity and pollution could be tasted, or that they could hear the scarps before them—hear the sound of falling—in the fluted pulse of the surf below. They raised their faces to the eastern warmth, wondered that they could see with their skin—that no man could be blind to the sun so long as he could feel.
Some wept.
And to a man they understood their toil was at an end.
Sibawûl Vaka had sat motionless for the entirety of the night and the morning, his skin weeping, his flaxen hair tugged from his scalp strand by strand, drawn like spider webs out over the Sea. When Proyas and his entourage appeared on the shoulders of Oloreg, he turned his head and stared, watched the Exalt-General descend to meet King Hogrim, the self-proclaimed Lord of the Scalded. Without a word of explanation, Sibawûl te Nurwul stood and began stalking the cliff-face, his eyes pinned upon some indeterminate point to the west. His surviving kinsmen joined him, and others joined them, souls clawing free from the torpor of doom. Soon pestilential masses were teetering to their feet, not out of curiosity or alarm or even less duty, but because their brothers so stood, so
stumbled …
Because they too were Scalded.
Sibawûl picked his way down to the carcass-littered beaches, apparently unaware of the growing thousands in his tow. Had the Sea possessed even a fraction of its native violence, his path would have been barred, but it remained miraculously calm, placid enough to see the bloom of cadaverous oils across its surface, a shimmering film of violet and yellow. He waded eastward, mapping oleaginous worlds across the water with his passage, aqueous coastlines curling into bewilderment and oblivion.
And all those able, some twenty-thousand anguished souls, laboured after him.
The tracts of floating dead rose and fell with the rhythm of deep-sleeping children. Water slurped and suckled the vertical stone. The Great Scald had shattered Antareg’s seaward faces, laying out piers of ruin. Sibawûl waded between blasted enormities, dwarfed beneath incisors of rock as great as Momemn’s towers. Forever staring west, he traced the seaward limit of the mountain’s thighs to the mouth of the River Sursa.
All those able followed, a great wallowing column.
He stood motionless for a time at the river mouth, gazing across the slow-twisting rafts of Sranc dead, out to the line of the far shore, Agongorea … the Fields Appalling. More and more of the Scalded climbed the gravel shores behind him, black for scorching, sodden with water that dripped crimson, an assembly both spectral and appalling. Never had the World witnessed a multitude more wretched: souls with hanging skin, weeping burns and ulcerations, naked backsides clotted with excrement and blood. Their hair fell into the wind, creating a haze of black and gold filaments that was drawn out over the Sea.
No less than one hundred souls perished during the ensuing vigil. Not a man among them knew what it was they were doing, only that it was proper—the thing demanded. The sun crawled down from its meridian, sank low enough to match the gaze of the wasted Cepaloran Chieftain-Prince. Incredulous, the Scalded watched as the dead that had rolled out to Sea began drifting back, funnelled into the river mouth even as those upstream continued bumping south. The tides were rising, the learned among them murmured. The tides that flooded the Neleöst with brine had stalled the effluence of the River Sursa, the way they had since time immemorial. The waters became cloudy and viscous with decay.
More and more dead Sranc were rolled from the deeps, clotting and tangling, forming a macabre plate that spanned the whole of the river mouth. Here and there a glimpse of hair shocked the lithe, porpoise tangle. Sibawûl Vaka stepped upon the waterlogged carcasses. He lurched and stumbled like a toddler, but nevertheless began crossing the great and ghastly expanse, kicking loose clouds of midges and flies like so much sand from a river’s bottom.
Men wept for watching the dark miracle.
And followed.
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
Momemn
It is no accident, they say, that Men pray to the Gods and the dead both: far better silence than truth.
—AJENCIS, Theophysics
VI. The Game, as the reenacting of the whole as whole, is cruel to strangers. To lose the Game is to take loss as a lover.
—The Sixth Canto of the Abenjukala
Mid-Autumn, 20 New Imperial Year (4132, Year-of-the-Tusk), Momemn
The honour of awakening the Blessed Empress of the Three Seas fell to ancient Ngarau, the Grand Seneschal. His mother, however, dismissed the pouch-faced eunuch, electing to laze in bed with her darling little boy instead. And so he lay in her embrace feigning sleep, his back curled into the gentle furnace of her bosom, covertly watching the pastel colours climbing from the frescoes on the walls, the sheers glowing for the morning sun. It never ceased to astound him, the way his soul would bob and float in her embrace, a thing ethereal, tethered and safe.
She did not think herself a good mother, Kelmomas knew. She did not think herself a good anything, for that matter, so long and so chill were the shadows thrown by her past. But the terror of failing her damaged son (for how could he not be damaged, given the horrors he had suffered?) cut her to the quick like no other fear. The boy seized upon these maternal insecurities without fail, sometimes stoking, other times soothing, always exploiting. He would often complain of being hungry or lonely or sad, anything that might provoke her guilt and indulgence.
She was too weak to be a good mother, too distracted. They both knew that.
She could only lavish him with affection afterward … always afterward.
So regularly did he play the neglected child that it now took effort not to, and he had found himself caught on several occasions, needing to escape, yet playing on her guilt anyway, trusting that her duties would force her to abandon him all the same. But sometimes, her fear for her precious son was such that it blotted all other concerns. “Let nations burn,” she had once told him, her gaze unnerving for sudden ferocity. This was such a morning.
He needed to resume his surveillance of the Narindar, not because he still believed watching the Four-Horned Brother would keep him safe, but because he needed to see … just what he did not know.
The happening of what happened, he supposed.
In earlier days he would have simply demanded his freedom, uttered something wicked, something cutting, knowing that her shriek or her slap, when it came, would grant him license to do almost anything, be it flee, further injure, or feast upon the comic profundity of her remorse. Little boys were supposed to be pompous and hurtful. Something never failed to balk within her when he played the perfect son. This was Mimara’s great lesson ere he had finally driven her away: that the children most flawed were the children most loved.
But since Thelli had come to him with her threat, an aura of delicacy had poisoned everything he now said. He had become loathe to contradict her in the old way, fearing what might happen were his accursed sister to reveal his secrets. It would break Mother no matter what, learning that her beloved son was no different than her husband, that he too possessed the Strength she thought accursed and inhuman.
So now he played along with her spasms, making of them what he could. He lay soaking in her warmth and fussing adoration, dozing in amniotic serenity, the heat of two bodies clasped between the same silken folds. And yet, more and more it seemed he could feel the Four-Horned Brother abiding in the nethers below, like a rat scratching at the backside of his thought. She kissed his ear, whispered that it was morning. She lifted the hand she had clasped, drew it up for a better view. Mothers are prone to inspect their children with the same thoughtless propriety with which they inspect themselves. He at last turned his head toward her, wondered at the paleness of his skin between her brown hands.
“This is how you spend your days,” she murmured with faux disapproval, “a Prince-Imperial grubbing in the gardens …”
Suddenly he noticed the black crescents beneath his nails, the faint lines of ingrained dirt. Why her observation should trouble him he did not know. He regularly smeared himself with soil to convince her of this very thing.
“I have fun, Momma.”
“You are indulged …” her voice began, only to trail into vapour, the papyrus whisk of the shears in the still-warm Meneanor breeze. She bolted upright, calling out for her body-slaves.
So it was Kelmomas found himself pouting in a steaming bronze tub, listening to his mother expound upon what he decided were the whorish virtues of cleanliness. The water greyed almost immediately for his filth, but he settled as deep into it as he could given the freshness of the air. He groused: the fools had set the tub upon the landing immediately before the unshuttered portico. It was autumn. Mother knelt on a pillow beside him, joking and cajoling. She had dismissed the slaves, searching, he knew, for some dregs of normalcy in the ritual of mother bathing child.
Theliopa appeared just after she wetted his hair, her mazed, lace-finned gowns zipping as much as swishing. She stood on the threshold, an explosion of grey and violet fabric, her hair a kinked halo of flax, haphazardly pinned with gaudy broaches. Her skull, the boy thought, seemed particularly indiscreet today.
<
br /> If she attached any significance to his presence, she betrayed no sign whatsoever.
“General Iskaul,” the sallow girl said. “He-he has arrived, Mother.”
Mother was already standing, drying her hands. “Good,” she replied, her voice and manner transformed. “Thelli will finish bathing you while I prepare,” she said in reply to his questioning eyes.
“Nooo!” he began to protest, but his mother was already barging past his sister, calling for her slaves as she hastened to her wardrobe.
He sat rigid and dripping, gazing at his approaching sister through wisps of steam.
“Iskaul has come-come with the Twenty-ninth from Galeoth,” Theliopa explained kneeling on Mother’s pillow. She was forced to crush her gown against the copper-gleaming tub, such was its hooped girth, but despite the obvious amount of effort she had invested in its manufacture, she seemed to care not at all.
He could only glare at her.
Not here, the secret voice warned. Anywhere but here.
She has to die sometime!
“You have been plotting my murder,” his pale sister said while taking inventory of the soaps and scents arrayed on the floor beside her. “You-you can scarcely ponder-ponder anything else.”
“Why would you assu—?” he began protesting, only to have more water dumped over his head.
“I care-care not at all,” she continued, pouring a bowl of orange-scented soap powder across his scalp, “what you think or what-what you do.”
She began kneading it into a lather. Her fingers were neither cruel nor soothing—simply efficient.
“I forgot …” he replied, resenting every nod of his head. “You don’t care about anything.”
She worked her way from his forehead, back along his crown, her fingernails nipping his scalp.
“I have many-many cares,” she said. “But they are light, like Father’s. They leave no tracks in the snow.”
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