The Great Ordeal (Aspect-Emperor #3)(20)
Proyas drew a hand across his face, winced for the wet of his tears. “What … what are you doing here?”
A narrow look. “The same as you, I suspect.”
The Believer-King of Conriya nodded, found no words to speak.
Saubon frowned in an affable, grinning way. “The same as you … Yes.”
A chill air swept across them, and Proyas’s nostrils flared for the taint of meat, both cooking and rotting.
Sranc meat.
“He summons me for private counsel as well …” Saubon explained. “He has for months now.”
Proyas swallowed, understanding full well, but not comprehending at all.
“Months now?”
The World is a granary …
“More rarely when the Ordeal was still broken, of course.”
Proyas stood blinking. Astonishment had furrowed his brow and forehead as a gardener’s claw.
“You have been speaking with-with … Him?”
The Norsirai King stiffened in obvious affront. “I am Exalt-General, same as you. I raise my voice in relentless honesty, as do you. I have sacrificed as much of my life! More! Why should he set you apart?”
Proyas stared like an idiot. He shook his head with more violence than he intended, the way a madman might, or a sane man plagued by hornets or bees. “No … No … You are right, Saubon …”
The Believer-King of Caraskand laughed, though a bitterness sharpened his humour into a scowl.
“I apologize,” Proyas said inclining his chin. Their animosity had always imposed a formality between them.
“And yet it dismays you to see me here.”
“No … I—”
“Would you declare as much to our Lord-and-Prophet? Pfah! You have always been too quick to flatter yourself with the fact of his attention.”
Proyas felt like a child for the red-rimmed sting of his glare.
“I … I don’t understand.”
How does one sum their impression of complicated others? Proyas had always thought Saubon headstrong, mercurial, even curiously fragile, given to bouts of near-criminal recklessness. Saubon was a man who could never quite outrun his need to prove, even in the all-seeing gaze of Anas?rimbor Kellhus …
And yet here the man stood, so obviously the stronger of the two.
The tall Norsirai raised his chin in the boasting, Galeoth way. “You have always been weak. Why else would he draw you under his wing?”
“Weak? Me?”
A faint smile. “You were tutored by a sorcerer, were you not?”
“What are you saying?”
Saubon began backing toward the mountainous silhouette of the Umbilicus. “Perhaps he doesn’t instruct you …” he called before turning to stride away.
“Perhaps he draws the poison from your soul.”
He and Saubon had clashed innumerable times over the years, disputed points both inane and catastrophically consequential. The breaches in jnan were beyond counting: the bellicose Galeoth had even called him coward in the Imperial Synod once, shamed him in the eyes of all those assembled. And the same could be said of the field, where his counterpart seemed to make sport of violating the terms he negotiated in their Lord-and-Prophet’s name. In a pique of rage, Proyas had gone so far as to draw on the fool after he seized Aparvishi in Nilnamesh. There had been a similar incident in Ainon after Saubon sacked the estates of dozens of caste-nobles Proyas had already sworn to the Zaudunyani! He had gone to Kellhus after this last, thinking that surely the “Mad Galeoth” had gone too far. But he found only rebuke.
“You think I overlook your frustration?” Kellhus had said. “That I fail to see? If I do not speak of it, Proyas, it is because I have no need. All the ways Saubon falls short on your string are the ways he mobilizes those he leads. What most irks you most, best serves me.”
Proyas had trembled for hearing this, physically shook! “But my Lor—!”
“I’m not shaping warlords to rule my Holy Empire,” Kellhus had snapped. “I’m fashioning generals to conquer Golgotterath … to overthrow wicked heights, not treat honourably with heretics.”
Proyas had laboured to foster a greater spirit of generosity between Saubon and himself after this incident. They had even become comrades in some respects. But if the weeds of grievance had been torn up, the roots still remained. A wariness. A skepticism. An inclination to begin shaking his head in negation.
Saubon, after all, remained Saubon.
Now Proyas watched the man recede and vanish into the blackness of the Imperial Pavilion and found that he could not move. So he stood in the mazed ways just beyond the precincts of the Umbilicus, at first staring, then at last hiding, sitting crouched between stained canvas panels, sitting anchored. Reflecting upon it afterward, Proyas would realize the purity of his vigil, one that belied the carnival of thoughts and apprehensions that tormented his soul. Afterward, he would realize the man called Proyas had not waited at all …
The Greater Proyas had.
For the space of two watches he sat in the dust, gazing, his every blink pricking his eyes.
The Umbilicus formed the radial hub of the Great Ordeal, the point of intersection for all the avenues that twined and forked like arteries across the desolate plains. He watched the files of Men dwindle into broken threads, then ambling particles, warriors who seemed to have no errand, only a vagabond restlessness. Very many glimpsed him in the shadows, and no matter what their reaction, be it a glance or a leering grin, a curious viciousness seemed to haunt their manner. So Proyas watched the light shed by the Nail of Heaven glow across the worn and weathered tent-tops instead, averting his gaze so that the passersby seemed little more than shades—rumours of Men.