The Great Ordeal (Aspect-Emperor #3)(137)
And like other Men of the Circumfix, a wildness had been kindled within Saccarees, a darkening of what was awake.
For he too had partaken of the Meat.
High upon Mantigol, gazing out over raving plains, Apperens Saccarees laughed heedless of his staring fellows, laughed in a voice the World had not heard for two thousand years …
Aurang … Aurang! Foul beast. Old foe.
At last.
Proyas had chosen the heights to station his command, where he could observe the Holy Host in a glance, but that had proven to be a mistake, particularly as the slopes reared ever more fractured and steep. The disaster Proyas had feared never came to pass. Even exhausted for running, pressed into blind mobs, the Ordealmen proved unstoppable, a hacking tide that swept into the roiling masses of Sranc and over, leaving fields of trampled violet in its wake. As individuals they roared and they cut and they hammered, but as a host they consumed, did not so much throw into flight as trammel. Proyas had lost three in his entourage in his attempts to pace the advance—for he could do nothing more, he had come to realize, than be where he needed to be when this headlong rush finally, inevitably sagged to its knees. And so he had struck for the beaches, driving his pony down the still-crowded slopes.
At last reaching the clotted beaches, he spurred his pony westward, trusting Kay?tas and the others would match his pace. He fairly cried out for relief, so clean was the sea breeze. But the sea itself was as soiled as could be, the breakers flapping with shining limbs, the retreating waters glinting black in silver sunlight, revealing its violet tincture in tidal pools. Sranc bobbed and bumped, knotted the waters like coagulum. The surf heaved carcasses into crashing gyres of slicked skin and fatted foam. The sight was almost narcotic, drowned faces rising from the blur, breaching the gleam, the waves rolling and dumping, dragging and engulfing, rolling and dumping …
Narrow lozenges of beach had been cleared by the shrugging waters, allowing Proyas’s sturdy little steed to chop unhindered across the sand flats, leaping the embroidery of dead along the line of the tide.
Fingers of wind combed his beard, and something began galloping within him.
Rising about him as though upon a vast bowl, the Sons of Men butchered the Sons of Ninjanjin across the cracked shoulders of the Urokkas. Anas?rimbor Kellhus was no more than a spark in the distance, immobile as a navigator’s star, a knife too thin to be seen, piercing the jetting deep.
The Exalt-Magus stepped from one height to another, felt his belly swing from his throat for the way the ground dropped into churning leagues before him. He descended the stairs of the mountain, following Mantigol’s many echoes. He ignored his floating brothers, threaded their ministries of light and death. Then he was striding beyond them, a dozen cubits in a step, over the heaps and mats of smoking dead, around gorges choked with flesh and char.
So did the Grandmaster of the Mandate come down from his mountain, a marble of solitary light treading over dark and ravenous tracts—pearl scalps, gesticulating limbs, masticating rage. They scratched at his image, screamed their outrage, disgorged numberless arrows and javelins, so that for those watching horrified from the mountains, he seemed a lodestone sucking up filings in black, bristling clouds.
But Saccarees felt no alarm. Nor did he enjoy the glee that comes with impunity, the wonder of passing uncut through an assembly of hated foes. A kind of solace hummed through his bones instead, the easy breathing of those who awake with no cares outstanding. Someday it would be thus, a dwindling fraction of his soul realized. Someday one Man, one Survivor, would wander out alone into a world of smoke and soulless fury.
And so he dwindled into the pestilential expanse. So he walked into the threshing depths of the Horde.
A lonely figure. A beacon of precious light.
Be they sons of cruel old Eryeat or his fellow Believer-Kings, Saubon had always stood apart from his brothers. For as long as he could remember, he had never been capable of … belonging … At least not the way other men—such as Proyas—seemed capable. His curse was not the curse of the awkward or fearful, who shied from camaraderie for the way others punished lack of grace. Nor was it the curse of the learned, who knew too much to allow ignorance to close the interval between disparate hearts. Even less was it the curse of the desperate, who reached and reached only to find backs turned against them.
No. His was the curse of the proud, the overweening.
He was no bombast. He did not, as that wretch Ikurei Conphas had done, gloat between his every breath. No. He had been born with a calling, a desire that unmoored all others, that anchored his very being. What he sought cast no reflection in polished silver. Greatness, for him, had always been something he would conquer …
He had wept when Kellhus had told him as much on the Plains of Secharib. “I have raised you above others,” his Lord-and-Prophet said, “because of what you are …”
A man who could never quite worship another.
All this time, bowing his head in prayers he could never speak, standing solemn for ceremonies he could scarcely bear, let alone celebrate—murdering hundreds, thousands in the name of a faith he found more expedient than compelling …
Only to fall to his knees truly now? Here? Gnawed Dagliash as his Temple, the scraping Horde as his choir, worshipping, choking for brimming passions. What kind of perversity was this?
Who discovered worship only after their prophet declared himself False?