The Great Ordeal (Aspect-Emperor #3)(16)
Within days, it seemed, the entire host had set aside its scruples and fell to their grisly fare with relish, even celebratory enthusiasm. Tongues and hearts became the preferred delicacies among the Nansur kjineta. The Ainoni prized the cheeks. The Tydonni took to boiling the creatures before searing them over flame. To a man they discovered the peculiar mingling of triumph and transgression that comes upon those who battle against what they would eat. For they could not bite without suffering some glimmer of the affinity between Sranc and Men—the sordid spectre of cannibalism—and they could not chew and swallow without some sense of predatory domination. The immeasurable Horde, which had been the object of so much foreboding and terror, became small with hilarity and devious wit. At the latrines they traded jokes about justice and Fate.
The Men of the Ordeal feasted. They slept with sated bellies, with the assurance that their most primitive needs had been secured. They awoke drowsy, without the dull and alarming hollow of starvation.
And a wild vitality crept through their veins.
There was a grove of oaks that became sacred with the passage of summer in Ishu?l. As green sickened into orange and dun, the D?nyain made ready, not as yeoman preparing for winter, but as old priests welcoming even older Gods. They sat among the trees according to their station, knees out, their feet pressed sole to sole, the skin of their shaved skulls alive to the merest air, and they gazed into the boughs with a fixity that was not human. They cleared all thought from their soul, laid awareness bare to its myriad engines, and they watched the oak leaves fall …
Each of them possessed gold coins—remnants of a long-forgotten hoard—very nearly worn smooth of image and insignia, but yet possessing the ghosts of long-dead Kings. Sometimes the leaves dropped of their own volition, rocked like paper cradles across motionless air. But usually high-mountain gusts unmoored them, and they battled like bats, danced like flies, as they rode the turbulence to the ground. The D?nyain, their eyes dead with the absence of focus, let their coins fly—a flurry of sparks traced the raw sun. Without fail, some fraction of the leaves would be caught and pinned to the flagstones, lobed edges curled like fingers about the gold.
They called it the Tracery, the rite that determined who among them would sire children and so sculpt the future of their terrible race.
Anas?rimbor Kellhus breathed as Proyas breathed, tossing coinage of a different sort.
The Exalt-General sat before him, legs crossed, hands clutching knees through the pleats of his war-skirt. He looked at once alert and serene, the General of a host that had yet to be truly tested, but beyond this appearance, gusts raked him as surely as they had raked the Tracery Grove. Blood flushed heat through the man’s veins, steeped his extremities with alarmed life. His lungs drew shallow air.
Horror wafted from his skin.
Kellhus watched, cold and impervious behind indulgent, smiling eyes. He sat cross-legged also, his arms hanging loose from his shoulders, his hands open across his thighs. The Seeing Hearth lay between them, flames rushing into a luminous braid. Despite his manifest repose, he leaned forward imperceptibly, held his chin at the angle appropriate to expectation, as if awaiting some pleasant diversion …
Nersei Proyas was but a rind in his eyes, a depth as thin as a heartbeat was long. Kellhus could have reached out and behind him, manipulated the dark places of his soul. He could have summoned any sentiment, any sacrifice …
But he hung motionless instead, a spider with its legs pinched close. Few things were so mercurial, so erratic, as Thought filtering through a human soul. The twist and skitter, the tug and chatter, sketching forms across inner oblivion. Too many variables remained unexamined.
He began as he always began, with a shocking question.
“Why do you think the God comes to Men?”
Proyas swallowed. Panic momentarily frosted his eyes, his manner. The bandages on his right arm betrayed archipelagos of crimson.
“I-I don’t understand.”
The anticipated response. Questions that begged explanation opened the soul.
The Exalt-General had changed in the weeks following his first visit to Anas?rimbor Kellhus’ spare quarters. His gaze had become equine with uncertainty. Fear now twitched through his every gesture. The tribulation of these sessions, Kellhus knew, had eclipsed any trial the Great Ordeal could offer. Gone was the pious resolve, the air of overtaxed compassion. Gone was the weary stalwart, the truest of all his Believer-Kings.
All Men possess their share of suffering, and those bearing the most are bent as with any great load. But it had been words, not wounds, that had robbed the Exalt-General of his old, upright demeanour, possibilities, as opposed to any atrocity of the real.
“The God is Infinite,” Kellhus said, pausing before the crucial substitution. “Is It not?”
Apprehension crimped the clarity of Proyas’s gaze.
“Of-of course …”
He is beginning to dread his own affirmations.
The Greater Proyas, at least, understood where they must lead.
“Then how could you hope to conceive Him?”
Instruction could be a joint undertaking, a pursuit, not just of thoughts and claims, but of the insights that motivated them; or it could be a forced concession, like those cruel tutors exacted beneath raised canes. Kellhus had been forced to rely on the latter more and more as the years had passed, for the accumulation of power was at once the accumulation of complexity. Only now, relieved of the burdens of his Empire, could he resume the former.