The Great Ordeal (Aspect-Emperor #3)(102)
Couras Nantilla, who stood next to him, clutched his arm as if to say, See! See!
But Nersei Proyas saw only the power and nothing of the proof. Small commiserations like Nantilla’s grasp simply recalled the consolation lost and the rank turmoil gained: the knowledge that he was no longer Zaudunyani, even though he belonged to them all the same. These Men who had been his brothers were now gulls … fools bent on suffering for their delusions!
And so his heart was broken even as it bounced on a string of giddy drops and steep, aerial turns.
Out of instinct, he aspired to the blank mien and manner that is the refuge of all lost souls in public. But melancholy possesses a spite all its own, and seeks to reveal itself regardless of what the soul wills. Kellhus brought the Raft about, Yinwaul fell away, and the Nele?st bobbed across the whole of the horizon. The angle of the sunlight also changed, and Proyas turned, startled to find himself standing in another’s shadow. It was Saubon. His hand upon the rail, the Galeoth loomed before him, standing so as to shield him from the others.
“Dour befits our terrible station,” the man muttered under his breath, “but not tears …”
Proyas averted his face, pawed away the wetness. His eyes had felt muddy, but then they always felt muddy of late. For a heartbeat he stood as one broken, utterly abject in Saubon’s alarmed gaze. Then he found it, the old arrogant posture, the mien and stance of a great man possessing warrant both temporal and divine—the most profound assurance known to Men. He communicated his gratitude to Saubon with a lingering look.
What was happening?
The encampment blurred as cobbles underneath a carriage. Thousands clotted the battered land, all of them crying out, creating a roar that was scooped by the velocity of their passage overhead. To a soul they shouted out, bellowed in praise and adulation of their False Prophet. Dark and pale and sunburned faces. Mouths pitting beards. Thickets of axes and spears and swords threshing into oblivion.
And then, in a heartbeat, it was all gone, a commotion fading to vapour behind them. The racing ground snapped asunder, and the Raft hurtled out over the turbulent plate of the Nele?st Sea …
At the fore of the Raft, Kellhus stood facing backwards, facing them, his eyes sparking brilliance even in the direct sun. He held his arms out low to his side, as if balancing upon a beam. He alone neither swayed nor stumbled, but rather leaned and straightened as one with the timber deck. The golden discs about his hands could only be glimpsed intermittently; the halo about his head not at all. The wind whisked his hair into a golden snarl, tugged his silk robes into ancient skin, innumerable creases and lobes fluttering across the white gleam of the sun.
Who? Who was this man who had conquered so wide, so deep?
Timbers groaned as they tilted toward the west. A new distance rose up and around his godlike silhouette: the dishevelled bulk of the Urokkas—or what they could see of the mountains through the tailings of the Shroud. The Raft lurched toward them, toward Dagliash.
Who was Anas?rimbor Kellhus?
Had Achamian been right about him all along?
Hanging no higher than a carrack’s mast, they could feel the Nele?st on their skin, taste the ghost of brine and spray. The Sea swept out, and for all its torment below, receded into the featureless perfection of a geometer’s rule. The coastline lay on their right …
As did the Horde.
Dragged south by the prevailing winds, the Shroud extended miles out to Sea. It seemed a thing painted, immense strokes of ochre and dun daubed across the northern horizon. The shores in advance of the Ordeal were barren. They saw nothing save land that had been stamped and rooted and denuded, that is, aside from a lone company of Kidruhil, who cheered in miniature, brandishing lances and shields at their miraculous passage. The Shroud loomed ever higher, stacking hazes and plumes that cricked the neck for gazing. For a time their Holy Aspect-Emperor stood lucid and shining in the rising sun, framed by the gloom of caliginous, sky-spanning veils.
The million-throated howl breached the rush of wind and the boom of surf. Proyas noticed Siroyon pulling a kerchief to his mouth and nose. The Shroud swallowed them. Coughing obscurity. The barks and screams of innumerable throats, braided into a pitch that siphoned burning liquid into ears. The stench was intolerable, base and glutinous with rot, acrid with feces. Despite the foulness, the Lords of the Ordeal peered toward the shoreline to a man. Even Proyas could feel it, the sense of peeking behind curtains both monumental and forbidden, a clamour to glimpse the catastrophic fact of their foe …
The soul-numbing numbers.
His eyes watering, Proyas glimpsed the crawling tracts, disjointed visions of a thousand thousand caterwauling shadows. The land itself seemed to smoke, though nothing burned beyond the throats and stomachs of the onlookers.
Aside from Kellhus, only Kay?tas and Sibaw?l seemed unaffected. The latter actually turned to regard Proyas the instant of his glimpse, and it seemed mad that eyes could be so dead in a fume that pricked everything living. Most all present pawed at the corners of their eyes. Teeth ached for the loudness of the inhuman chorus. Skin tingled. King Hogrim hacked convulsively. Temus Enhor?, Grandmaster of the Saik, fell to his knees retching. Lord Soter did a comic jig to avoid the spatter, cried something in Ainoni about understanding sorcerers with no stomach for the sea.
The Shroud gradually thinned and parted, as did the feverish crescendo of the Horde’s roar. Armour that had flashed in the sun was now flat and pale. Grey soiled their plaited beards. Black wedged the corner of their mouths.