The Great Ordeal (Aspect-Emperor #3)(18)

“And what was your reply?”

The living shall not haunt the dead.



“What was your revelation?” Proyas cried, anger twisted into incredulity. “That the No-God would return! That the end of all things was nigh!”

He was immovable in the eyes of his Exalt-General, Kellhus knew, the stake from which all strings were bound and all things were measured. Nothing could be so gratifying as his approval. Nothing could be so profound as his discourse. Nothing could be so dense, so real, as his image. Ever since Caraskand and the Circumfixion, Kellhus had ruled Proyas’s heart, become the author of his every belief, the count of his every kindness, his every cruelty. There was no judgment, no decision the Believer-King of Conriya could make without somehow consulting the impression Kellhus had left in his soul.

In so many ways, Proyas was the most reliable of all those he had yoked to his will—the perfect instrument. And he was a cripple for it.

“And you are certain of this?”

To make him believe the first time had been labour enough. Now he must make him believe anew, cast him into a different shape, one that served a far different—and far more troubling—purpose.

Revelation was never a simple matter of authority because Men were never so simple as sodden clay—something that could be rolled blank and imprinted anew. There was fire in deeds, and the world was nothing if not a kiln. To act upon a belief was to cook its contours into the very matter of the soul. The more extreme the act, the hotter the fire, the harder the brick of belief. How many thousands had Proyas condemned to die in his name?

How many massacres had fired the beliefs Kellhus had pressed into his soul?

“I’m certain of what you’ve told me!”

It did not matter, so long as those tablets were smashed … irretrievably broken.

Kellhus gazed not at a man so much as a heap of warring signals: distress and conviction; accusation and self-loathing. He smiled the smile that Proyas unwittingly begged him not to smile, shrugged as if they discussed nothing more than mildew and beans. The spider flicked open its legs.

“Then you are certain of too much.”

The very words that had caused the Greater Proyas to barricade the soul of the Lesser.

Tears lacquered the man’s gaze. Bewildered incredulity slackened his face.

“I … I-I … don’t …” He bit the words against his lower lip.

Kellhus looked down into his bowl, spoke as though rehearsing an old meditation.

“Think, Proyas. Men will so they can become one with the Future. Men want so they can become one with the World. Men love so they can become one with the Other …” A fractional pause. “Men are forever famished, Proyas, famished for what they are not …”

The Holy Aspect-Emperor had leaned back so the fire rising white and scintillant between them would frame his aspect.

“What …” Proyas asked on emptied lungs, “what are you saying?”

Kellhus grimaced in a rueful, it-could-not-be-otherwise manner.

“We are the antithesis of the God, not the reflection.”

Confusion. Confusion was ever the herald of genuine insight. As the Greater Proyas churned, a chorus of discordant voices, the Lesser Proyas found himself that song, a clamour that he could only conceive as one. When those voices at last embraced one another—he would find himself remade.

Rapid breath. Fluttering pulse. Hands clenched, fingernails scoring sweated palms.

So close …

“And this—” Proyas blurted, only to catch himself, as much for his terror as for the burning hook in his throat.

“Speak. Please.”

A single, treacherous tear fell into the folds of the Believer King’s luxurious beard.

At last.

“This is why you c-call the God-of-Gods …”

He sees …

“Call Him … ‘It’?”

He understands.

Admission was all that remained.



It.

The name of all things inhuman.

When applied to the inanimate world, it meant nothing. No whinge of significance accompanied its utterance. But when applied to animate things, it became ever more peculiar, ever more fraught with moral intimation. And when used to single out apparently human things, it roared with a life all its own.

It festered.

Call a man “it” and you were saying that crime can no more be committed against him as against a stone. Ajencis had called Man “onraxia”, the being that judged beings. The Law, the Great Kyranean claimed, belonged to his very essence. To call a man “it” was to kill him with words, and so to oil the actions that would murder him in fact.

And the God? What did it mean for the God of Gods to be called an “it”?

The Holy Aspect-Emperor watched his most trusted disciple flounder in the wrack of these considerations. Few tasks were so onerous as to make a man believe the new, to think thoughts without precedent. It was an irony so mad as to be an absurdity, that so many would forfeit their lives sooner than their beliefs. It was ardour, of course. It was loyalty and the simple hunger for the security of the Same. But more than anything, it was ignorance that delivered conviction beyond the pale of disputation. Ignorance of questions. Ignorance of alternatives.

No tyranny was so complete as blindness. So with each of these sessions Kellhus merely raised more questions and posed more contradictory answers, and watched the once solitary track he had cut into Proyas vanish into the trampled earth of possibility …