The Great Ordeal (Aspect-Emperor #3)(128)
Brother Si?l, Viri begs your pardon.
But Cu’jara Cinmoi, who prized vengeance before honour, shut his heart and his Mansion against his cousin. And so cruelty begot wickedness, and betrayal, betrayal. Nin’janjin and the surviving Viroi turned to the Ark. Wars raged. The Inchoroi forged weapons out of perverted life. A darker epoch passed, and Viri became but another name for folly and sorrow, the first and some say the deepest grave in the long shadow that the Inc?-Holoinas has cast over this World.
When so much is so mad, what can become of proportion?
The Raft swept out over the Misty Sea, its deck crammed with Swayali witches wrapped in their golden billows, and Saubon’s householders, freighted for armour, bristling with arms. They seemed a motley band, the Knights of the Desert Lion, but no Believer-King could boast a more deadly collection of souls.
The World swayed and levelled about the platform’s beam. Saubon caught himself peering at his Lord-and-Prophet the same hunted way Proyas had the day previous, a look that did not so much seek to see as to solve, as though the image were a cipher revealing less invisible and more terrifying things. He tore his gaze away, glimpsed a naked white carcass, Man or Sranc, lurching in the black swells.
What was this adolescent mooning?
One does not clutch at ribbons tripping down a stair. Men reach for what is stronger—and that is simply the way. They flail for what is slow and great to better brace themselves against madness of the small and quick. Proyas had been overthrown for the same reason the sight of the Horde so offended the heart: for want of something greater that was not insane.
A meaning so vast as to be empty, so slow as to be dead.
A Frame.
But everything was quick and everything was small and only distance or delusion made it seem otherwise. What was the Horde if not the manifestation of this, the way obscenities could be piled upon obscenities and still be desired, even craved?
Proof that one can eat and shit one’s frame.
Unlike Proyas, Saubon had always expected as much of the World. In a perverse sense, his Lord-and-Prophet’s confessions had not so much overthrown as confirmed his faith. That Kellhus was small and that Kellhus was quick in no way altered the fact that he was so much the stronger. The haloed man soaring backward into the gnawed monstrosity of Antareg had conquered the Three Seas. No matter what he was, he was greater than any martial soul to have trod good green earth. No matter what he was, he was Anas?rimbor Kellhus. The more Saubon had pondered it, the more it seemed that he had not so much believed the words as the power—the thing that could not be denied. The conquests of Anas?rimbor Kellhus were the only revelations that mattered, the only truths posterity could examine. As he had said to Proyas, who else should hew their future?
The hand of Triamis. The heart of Sejenus. The intellect of Ajencis. Kellhus dwarfed all other souls. It was that simple.
So why did he harbour this horror within him … the sense of hands too frail to fist?
The World abruptly dipped and rolled, taking his purloined stomach with it.
And there it was, floating up around the poised form of Anas?rimbor Kellhus, before sinking below the line of the Raft.
Dagliash …. another dead corner of a dead civilization.
The cliffs of Antareg loomed black over the booming surf, only to whisk beneath the timber deck. The Swayali about the perimeter began singing, and it was peculiar to be surrounded by feminine voices possessing no place. Like tiles in tipping succession, the Nuns stepped from the Raft onto the echo of the ground, where they wricked their billows open, and uncoiled into something greater for the beaming sun.
Saubon gawked with the others for the way the demented vista transformed their beauty into something rare and lapidary. The Urokkas had cut a region of vast clarity from the Shroud. Reeking sheets pinned every limit, strata of dust that craned and twined like film in water, decohered. And the distances beneath shook for agitation, like sand in the box of a racing wain. Sranc … everywhere they raged in scabrous mats that disintegrated and reformed about cloven ramps, clenched heights, and sprawling meadows alike. The mountain slopes burned as if slagged in bitumen, yet still the creatures could be glimpsed, in clots if not individually, scraping their way upward. Fishhook brilliance winked about the crown of mount Ingol adjacent, the razor-white so characteristic of Gnostic slaughter.
This … This was their Frame, a World of poisonous pins, as small and vicious in substance as in extent.
Kellhus stood with his back to the enormities, still facing the direction they had come, his hands yet extended to either side, as if welded to the golden discs that darkened them. He steered and slowed the Raft to better trail the expanding chevron of witches. The rotted bastions of Dagliash loomed ever more near. Saubon could clearly see the defenders brimming upon the walls, Sranc of a different breed clotted about battlements reduced to gumlines. Ensconced within serpentine coils of gold, the Nuns advanced on the decrepit fortifications, more than eighty gilded wildflowers thrown wide. Their keening, high and feminine, perforated the suffocating thunder. Sorcery glittered across the interval, lines like incandescent hairs. Blinking against the glare, Saubon saw walls and turrets ignite as torches, shedding sparks that flailed and screamed.
Even Sranc perished clawing for something …
Reaching.
Viri lay dead an age ere the Mangaecca—the most grasping of the ancient Gnostic Schools—came to its derelict halls. Using debris as their quarry, they raised a citadel about the legendary Well of Viri, the enormous shaft that plumbed the Mansion to its dregs. Nogaral, they dubbed their new stronghold, the “High Round”.