The Great Ordeal (Aspect-Emperor #3)(45)
“What say you?” Siroyon finally cried to his rival.
Sibaw?l levelled a gaze that could only be called dead.
“Hell …” he replied, his voice dropping from his mouth like sodden gravel from a spade. “Hell kept us safe.”
Silence fell across the Umbilicus. Framed by the sorcerous twining of the Ekkin?, the Holy Aspect-Emperor peered at Sibaw?l for five long heartbeats. He alone seemed untroubled by the vacancy that now dominated his manner.
Anas?rimbor Kellhus nodded in cryptic affirmation, as if understanding rather than affirming what he had glimpsed. “Henceforth,” he said, “you shall do as you will in matters of war, Lord Sibaw?l.”
And so the Chieftain-Prince of Cepalor did, leading his tribal cohorts out before the tolling of the Interval every day, returning with sacks of white skin, which he and his kinsmen consumed raw in the dark. They stoked no fire, and seemed to avoid those fires belonging to their neighbours. They no longer slept, or so the rumours charged. Word of their unnatural ferocity on the fields spread, how the Sranc fled from them no matter what their numbers. Wherever Sibaw?l and his pallid horsemen congregated, the Ordealmen shunned them. The more superstitious fingered charms upon spying them—some even threw arms over their own faces, convinced that dead eyes saw only dead men.
All came to fear the Sons of Cepalor.
There was a head upon the pole behind him.
To remake Men, Kellhus had come understand, one had to recover what was most simple in them—what was basic. The greatest poets eulogized childhood, extolled those who found innocence untrammelled within. But without exception they seized only on the simplicities that flattered and consoled, ignoring all the ways children resemble beasts. Animals were by far the better metaphor. Men did not so much remain children at heart, as they remained brutes, a collection of reflexes, violent, direct, blind to all the nuances that made men Men.
To remake Men, one had to tear down their trust in complication, force them to shelter in instinct and reflex, reduce them to what was animal.
Proyas had good reason to look hunted.
“You’re saying that … that …”
Kellhus exhaled, and so reminded his Exalt-General to do the same. This time, he had bid Proyas to sit at his side rather than opposite the hearth: to better exploit bodily proximity. “Damnation has claimed Sibaw?l and his countrymen.”
“But they live!”
“Do they? Or do they dwell somewhere between?”
Proyas gazed appalled. “But h-how … how could such a thing happen?”
“Because fear pries open the heart. They suffered too much terror upon ground too steeped in suffering. Hell forever gropes, forever pokes at the limits of the living. In Wreoleth, it found and seized them.”
There was a head upon the pole behind him. If he could not turn to see it, it was because it lay behind his seeing … Behind all seeing.
“But-but … surely you …”
He held his disciple in the palm of his intellect.
“Surely I could save them?” A pause to let the import roil. “The way I saved Serw??”
Something between anguish and exasperation cramped his Exalt-General’s face. To strip a soul to its essentials, one had to show the complication of the complicated—this was the great irony of such studies. Nothing is more simple than complication become habit. What was effortless, thoughtless, had to become fraught with doubt and toil.
As it should.
“I … I don’t understand.”
He could sense it even now, the head on the pole behind him.
“There are many I have failed to save.”
There was no denying the indulgence of the exercise. Once Kellhus had mastered the multitudes, once the polity derived its might from him, he had no longer required manipulations so fine as this. Years had passed since he had undertaken a Study so immediate as the soul of a single man.
And for all the implacable serenity of his D?nyain soul, it stirred memories of the First Holy War, the turbulent span when such scrutiny had comprised the sum of his Mission. Since the Fall of Shimeh, no soul (not even Esmenet) had warranted such attention.
The instinct to bigotry that had nearly killed him in Caraskand had quickly come to heel, to serve, compelling acquiescence, silencing critics, even murdering enemies. For years, he had grappled the great beast that was the Three Seas, pinned it to earth, and with gifts and brutalities he had trained it, until his name only need be uttered—until his tyranny had become indistinguishable from his being. This allowed him to move from nations to truths, to turn his intellect full upon the maddening abstracta of the Daimos, the Metagnosis, and the Thousandfold Thought.
He had pierced the obscurantist veils, grasped the metaphysics of Creation, transformed meaning into miracles. He had walked the ways of Hell, returned bedecked in trophies. No one, not even the legendary Hero-Mage of ancient ?merau, Titirga, could rival his arcane might.
He had learned of the head on the pole.
Domination. Over lives and nations. Over history and ignorance. Over existence itself, down through the leaves of reality’s countless skins. No mortal had possessed such might. His was a power and potency that not even the Gods, who must ration themselves across all times, could hope to counter, short of scooping themselves hollow and forever dwelling as phantoms …
No soul had so owned Circumstance. He, and he alone, was the Place, the point of maximal convergence. Nations hung from his whim. Reality grovelled before his song. The Outside itself railed against him.