The Great Ordeal (Aspect-Emperor #3)(104)

“Please!” the Believer-King of Conriya heard himself cry, hoarse and plaintive. “After all I have given!”

You owe me this!

The Holy Aspect-Emperor of the Three Seas finally turned to regard him, chips of sun glaring from his eyes.

“Hitherto, the Consult could not move in force against us,” he said. “They could only wait, use the Horde and their cunning to bleed us. Now the Great Ordeal stands upon their very threshold. Agongorea lies yonder, the Field Appalling, and beyond that, Golgotterath itself …”

“Grant me the honour!” Saubon cried out after sparing Proyas an outraged look.

“No!” Proyas shouted. “No!”

But others had begun calling out as well, a greedy cacophony. What had been pity, distaste, had become umbrage, a determination to outdo. Suddenly it seemed he could taste the grease of the place, the pumice sear …

Dagliash was larded with Meat.

“If our Foe hopes to keep us from their foul Gate!” Kellhus boomed over all. “They will strike here!”

Now it was the fortress that seemed the one floating.

Proyas threw himself to his knees before Anas?rimbor Kellhus’s feet, the first among his surging, shouting peers. It was not devotion that impelled him, nor even the will to prove oneself fanatical, for these things had been stripped from him. Only the hunger …

The necessity.

“Pleeease! I beg you!”

The need for something simple.



Zeal, it was often said, dwelt in the deeds and not the words of Men.

But Proyas knew this was not true, knew that one could never sort the words from the deeds, if only because words were deeds, acts committed, possessing consequences as mortal as any fist or knife. But knowing a thing and understanding it were never quite the same. To know the power of words was one thing, but to witness that power, to first hear the words spoken and to then see the souls dance … Words land as hammers.

And yet, to observe a thing always is to observe a thing not at all. Proyas had seen Anas?rimbor Kellhus harangue countless souls across the breadth of the Three Seas—thousands of exhortations across dozens of years, battles, and nations—without understanding the least of what happened. And how could he when he stood among those exhorted? When it was his heart caught upon the hook of that beloved voice, carried from glory to hope to outrage? Far from the surest way to fathom their power, being moved by words was to lose all awareness of motion, to think oneself immovable.

So he witnessed what he had seen countless times for the first time: Anas?rimbor Kellhus addressing the Host of Hosts, not as Warrior-Prophet or even Aspect-Emperor, but as D?nyain, the most astonishing fraud the World had ever known, whetting souls already too keen to be called sane …

For they were in the thrall of the Meat, the Ordealmen. They heaved as mobs, leapt and howled and gesticulated as individuals. Some even had to be restrained by their brothers, such was the intensity of their fury and adulation. To watch was to be at once frightened, heartened—and even aroused.

The Raft had been raised upon posts and fashioned into a podium. The Lords of the Ordeal stood assembled upon it, decked in whatever regalia that remained to them. Their myriad nations swallowed all visible creation about them—heads become beads become grains of sand, all crying out in lust. Closing his eyes, Proyas could scarcely distinguish their howl from that of the Sranc, save that it boomed more than screeched across the Vaults of Heaven.

The Horde of Men, hailing an inhuman beacon …

A D?nyain.

Anas?rimbor Kellhus dangled high above the Raft, crisp and brilliant in a play of vague and watery lights. When he spoke, his voice was somehow portioned between all souls, so that each man heard him as a friend making observations over their shoulder.

“When a man is abandoned …”

Proyas stood at Saubon’s side at the Raft’s forward edge, gazing out across the mobbed tracts. He had often wondered at the contradiction of these sermons, the way the humility they preached never failed to provoke displays of wild and vicious pride …

“When he bleeds for cutting, weeps for loss …”

He had even dared ask Kellhus about it once, in the dark hours following the defeat at Irs?lor. The Holy Aspect-Emperor had explained how suffering pays different wages to different Men: wisdom, for souls such as his own, the resignation belonging to philosophers and lepers; and for souls such as theirs, righteousness, the knowledge that they could exact from others what had been taken from them.

But even this, Proyas now knew, had been another flattering lie, another conceit, another provocation to savagery.

“When a man is fearful, witless for confusion …”

Righteousness had been what he wanted all along. Kellhus had said as much himself. If wisdom had truly been what he wanted, he would have never turned out Achamian.

“When he is MOST SMALL … only THEN can he fathom the proportion of the God!”

Proyas watched the mottled landscape surge, strain, and roar. Nangael thanes, red-faced and screaming. Eumarnans wagging crescent swords across the beam of the morning sun. Agmundrmen clapping their ash bows. He could remember the swelling joy he had once felt witnessing such sights, the besotted gratitude, the bloodthirsty certainty, ferocious and predatory, as if death could be brought about by mere willing …

Now bile leapt to the back of his throat.