The Great Ordeal (Aspect-Emperor #3)(17)

Only now could he witness a faithful soul, an adoring soul, thrash in mortal crisis.

“I-I suppose I cannot … But …”

Soon, he would lift his coin from Proyas … Very soon, only the wind could take him where he needed to go.

“But what?”

“I can conceive you!”

Kellhus reached into his beard to scratch a false itch, reclined so that he sat propped on his elbow. These simple gestures of discomfort, openly displayed, immediately summoned a corresponding ease in the Exalt-General, one that utterly eluded the man’s awareness. Bodies spoke to bodies, and short of flinching from raised fists, the worldborn were utterly deaf to what was said.

“And I, the Most Holy Aspect-Emperor, can conceive God. Is that it?”

The man leaned according to the angle of his desperation. “How else could it be? This is why Men lavish such attention on idols, is it not? Why they pray to their ancestors! They make … make tokens of what lies near … Use what they know to grasp what they cannot.”

Kellhus sipped his bowl of anpoi, watching the man.

“So this is how you conceive me?”

“This is how all Zaudunyani conceive you! You are our Prophet!”

Behave like one.

“So you think that I conceive what you cannot.”

“Not think, know. We’re but squabbling children absent you and your word. I was there! I partook in the conceit that ruled the Holy War before your revelation! The ruinous folly!”

“And what was my revelation?”

“That the God of Gods spoke to you!”

Eyes losing focus. Imagery boiling up out of oblivion. Probabilities like crabs scuttling on the shores of what was unknown.

“And what did It tell me?”

And again it dimpled his depths the way a chill stone might the surface of a warm pool, saying It rather than He.

“The God of Gods?”

Such preposterous care was required. Action and belief turned each upon the other in ways so intimate as to be inextricable. Proyas did not simply believe, he had killed thousands for his Faith. To concede, to recant, was to transform all those executions into murders—to become not simply a fool, but a monster. To believe fiercely is to do fierce things, and nothing fierce happens without suffering. Nersei Proyas, for all his regal demeanour, was the most ferocious of his countless believers.

No one had so much to lose as him.

“Yes. What did It tell me?”

Thrumming heart. Wide, bewildered eyes. And the Aspect-Emperor could see comprehension brimming in the darkness that came before the man. Soon, the dread realization would come, and the coin would be lifted …

New children would be sired.

“I-I … I don’t understand …”

“What was my revelation? What secret could It whisper into an ear so small as mine?”



There is a head on a pole behind you.

Brutalities spin and scrape, like leaves blasted in the wind.

He is here … with you … not so much inside me as speaking with your voice.

There is a head on a pole behind you.

And he walks, though there is no ground. And he sees, though his eyes have rolled into his brow. Through and over, around and within, he flees and he assails … For he is here.

Here.

They seize him from time to time, the Sons of this place, and he feels the seams tear, hears his scream. But he cannot come apart—for unlike the Countless Dead his heart beats still.

His heart beats still.

There is a head on a pole behind you.

He comes to the shore that is here, always here, gazes without sight across waters that are fire, and sees the Sons swimming, lolling and bloated and bestial, raising babes as wineskins, and drinking deep their shrieks.

There is a head on a pole behind you.

And he sees that these things are meat, here. Love is meat. Hope is meat. Courage. Outrage. Anguish. All these things are meat—seared over fire, sucked clean of grease.

There is a head on a pole.

Taste, one of the Sons says to him. Drink.

It draws down its bladed fingers, and combs the babe apart, plucking him into his infinite strings, laying bare his every inside, so that it might lick his wrack and wretchedness like honey from hair. Consume … And he sees them descending as locusts, the Sons, drawn by the lure of his meat.

There is a head … and it cannot be moved.

So he seizes the lake and the thousand babes and the void and the massing-descending Sons and the lamentations-that-are-honey, and he rips them about the pole, transforms here into here, this-place-inside-where-you-sitnow, where he has always hidden, always watched, where Other Sons, recline, drinking from bowls that are skies, savouring the moaning broth of the Countless, bloating for the sake of bloat, slaking hungers like chasms, pits that eternity had rendered Holy …

We pondered you, says the most crocodilian of the Sons.

“But I have never been here.”

You said this very thing, it grates, seizing the line of the horizon, wrapping him like a fly. Legs click like machines of war. Yesss …

And you refuse to succumb to their sucking mouths, ringed with one million pins of silver. You refuse to drip fear like honey—because you have no fear.

Because you fear not damnation.

Because there is a head on a pole behind you.