The Great Ordeal (Aspect-Emperor #3)(46)

And yet for all of it darkness still encircled him, the obscurity of before, the blackness of after.

For those who worshipped him as a god, he remained a mortal man, possessing but one intellect and two hands—great, perhaps, in proportion to his innumerable slaves, but scarcely a mote on the surface of something inconceivable. He was no more a prophet than an architect or any other who wrenches his conception into labourious reality. All the futures he had raised had been the issue of his toil …

He suffered visions, certainly, but he had long ceased to trust them.



“I was there, Master …” Proyas said. “I saw. No one could have saved Serw?!”

Kellhus held him in the clasp of endless engines.

“Do you mean her life, or her soul?”

The nets of muscle sheathing him flexed into the sigil of horror.

“Does it trouble you, Proyas?”

And he was shadow-play, his disciple, the light of cosmic enormities bent small across the surface of a tear. He was an oak leaf, riding the yaw and twizzle of drafts, hanging above the rumour of whirlwinds …

A glimpse through the aperture we confuse for life …

“D-does what … what trouble me?”

He was anything but a Man.

“To know that Serw? burns in Hell.”



Slaves brought them their repast: small medallions of sizzling Sranc meat, seasoned with blueberries and wild scallions rooted from the seashore. The meat was improbably tender and sweet. The Place called Anas?rimbor Kellhus told his heartbroken disciple a tale of prophets as they ate, the way the bottleneck of their mortality invariably distorted visions they thought took the compass of the Heavens. The infinite could only be experienced in butchered approximation, he said, and communicated with rank fraudulence. “Men are bent on clarity and proportion, even when there is none to be found,” he explained. “They offer up broken visions, Proyas, and call them perfect and whole.” A grandfather’s rueful smile, canny and adoring. “What else can Men see, when their eyes are so small?”

The challenges come as squalls of bewildered anger. “But then-then how is the God to tell us … tell us anything?”

A forgiving frown on a long-drawn sigh, the kind that speaks of wars not quite survived.

“That is the conceit, is it not? The assumption that prophets deliver word of the God to Men.”

Proyas sat motionless for three heartbeats.

“Then what is their purpose?”

“Is it not plain? To deliver word of Men to the God.”

Men are made, and Men are born, and ever do the proportions escape them. They can only guess at themselves, never see, only infer the lines they inhabit from the crooks they glimpse in others. Proyas had been cursed by the fact of his birth, then doomed all the more by what life would make of him. His was a wondering soul, philosophical in the Near Antique sense. But it was also an exacting one, a soul that demanded clarity and resolution. As a babe he had slept in his mother’s arms no matter what the court or domestic furor. The clamour meant nothing to him, so long as beloved arms held him tight, so long as the beloved face smiled down.

The living shall not haunt the dead …

For twenty years this had been what Kellhus had given him: the drowsy slumber of certainty.

“But why?” Proyas cried.

The time had come to rouse him, deliver him to the horror of the Real.

“Your question is your answer.”

Golgotterath suffered none to slumber.

“No!” the man barked. “No more riddles! Please! I beg you!”

Kellhus smiled with wry and mortal reassurance, the way a gentle and fearless father might to fortify his sons against his passing. He turned from the paroxysm of shame that had seized his disciple, grasped the decanter at his side to pour the man anpoi.

“You ask this because you seek reasons,” he said, passing the chanv-laced drink to the Believer-King. “You seek reasons because you are incomplete …”

Proyas glared as a wounded child over the edge of the bowl as he drank. Kellhus felt the concoction bloom warm and sweet over his own tongue and throat.

“Reason is naught but the twine of thought,” he continued, “the way we bind fragments into larger fragments, moor the inhaling now to what is breathless and eternal. The God has no need of it …”

Logos.

Proyas still did not understand, but he had been mollified by the tone of consolation, if nothing else. An anger yet animated him, one belonging to boys who are hectored beyond fearing their older brothers. But despite everything, his hope—the long-abused ache to know—yet occupied the bricked heights of his soul …

Waiting to be overthrown.

“To be all things, Prosha, the God must be at once greater than itself, and less.”

“Less? Less?”

“Finite. A man. Like Inri Sejenus. Like me … To be all things, It must know ignorance, suffer suffering, fear and confus—”

“And love?” the Exalt-General fairly cried. “What of love?”

And for the first time that evening, Anas?rimbor Kellhus was surprised. Love was the logic that conserved Life as opposed to Truth … the twine that bound hosts and nations from the myriad moments of Men.

“Yes … Most of all.”

Love, far more than reason, was his principle tool.