The Great Ordeal (Aspect-Emperor #3)(154)
“I am here,” the glorious voice murmured.
And Proyas looked up into the beloved eyes of his Holy Aspect-Emperor.
A tattered chorus scratched the gaping spaces—gratitude and relief punched from stomach and lungs. In his periphery, Proyas saw the others fall to their faces, and, for an endless heartbeat, he longed only to join them, to fall and weep, to release the horror whose silent claws had so girdled his heart.
But Anas?rimbor Kellhus spoke world-consuming sorcery instead, not so much embracing as engulfing his disciple …
Proyas found himself elsewhere, tripping across different stones, different ground, hunching over his own vomit, grey puddles of Meat. He crouched hacking and trembling. When the nausea subsided, he looked up, swatting tears from his eyes. His Holy Aspect-Emperor stood several paces away with his back turned to him, staring out across the degrees of obliteration …
He spat at the taste of bile, realized they stood upon one of Oloreg’s precarious crowns.
“A great and tragic victory has been won here this day,” Kellhus declared, turning to him.
Proyas stared witlessly.
“But the land is polluted …” his Lord-and-Prophet continued. “Accursed. Viri has at last answered for her King’s ancient treachery.”
Bracing his palms against his knees, the Exalt-General pressed himself upright, battled to keep both his balance and the remaining contents of his stomach.
“Let no man stray upon it,” Kellhus commanded. “Let no man breathe the air that blows across it. Stay to the north, old friend.”
Kellhus stood before him, his white robes impossibly immaculate, his mane silk ribbons in the breeze. The vista yawned deep and necrose beyond him, pillared in tar-smoke, floored with ash, cinder, and innumerable dead.
“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.