The Great Ordeal (Aspect-Emperor #3)(47)

“Most of all …” Proyas repeated dully, his voice digging through the sand of torpor, the exhaustion of a clinging intellect, staggered heart. “Why?”

He does not want to know.

The Place called Anas?rimbor Kellhus snuffed all extraneous considerations, aimed its every articulation at the soul drowning in the air before him.

“Because of all the passions, nothing is so alien to the God as love.”

There was a head on a pole behind him.



What would Nersei Proyas, first among the Believer-Kings, make of the Truth?

This was the object of the Study.

The carpeted earth did not so much reel as wrench, Kellhus knew, wringing things too fundamental too bleed. Confusions. Questions eating questions, cannibalizing the very possibility of asking. And inversions, blasphemous in and of themselves, but utterly ruinous in their implication.

Upside-down prophets who deliver word of Men to the Heavens?

An inside-out God?

Calamitous insights never arrive whole. They are like the wires that the Ainoni forced into the gullets of captured runaway slaves, things that twist and pierce, that become ever more entangled with the motions of normal digestion—things that strangle from the inside, and so kill, organ by anguished organ.

Twenty years of abject devotion overturned, spilled. Twenty years of certitude, so deep, so profound, as to make murder holy.

How? How would the Zaudunyani respond to the overthrow of their most cherished beliefs?

The man’s eyes fluttered about welling heat. “B-but … but what you say … H-how is a man to worship?”

Kellhus said nothing at first, awaited the inevitable questioning look.

“Doubt,” he said, seizing his disciple’s gaze within the iron fist of his own. “Query, not as Collegians or Advocates query, but as the bewildered query, as those who genuinely seek the limits of what they know. To ask is to kneel, to say, ‘I end here …’ And how could it be otherwise? The infinite is impossible, Proyas, which is why Men are so prone to hide it behind reflections of themselves—to give the God beards and desires! To call It ‘Him’!”

He raised a gold-haloed hand to his brow, feigning weariness. “No. Terror. Hatred of self. Suffering, ignorance, and confusion. These are the only honest ways to approach the God.”

The Believer-King dropped his face, hitched about a low sob.

“This place … where you are now, Prosha. This is the revelation. The God is not comfort. The God is not law or love or reason, nor any other instrument of our crippled finitude. The God has no voice, no design, no heart or intellect …”

The man wept as if coughing.

“It is it … Unconditioned and absolute.”

A soft keening, a sound that was both question and accusation.

How?

The Place called Kellhus watched the Believer-King vanish into what he was, observed the very order of the man dissolve as a clot of sand in quick waters. Deviations were noted. Assumptions were revised. Possibility bloomed across the whole, the branching of branches, new multiplicities for the hard knife of actuality to cull …

Origins were isolated.

“And the wages?” the man barked through lips stringed with snot and spittle.

Yes, my friend. What of salvation?

“There is no recompense,” the Place said, “save knowing …”

“Knowing that we know nothing!”

“Exactly.”

“So—?”

Sorrow and scrutiny.

“You see it. After all these years you finally understand.”

A moment of stunned gazing, swollen face swaying as though staring from the deck of a foundering vessel. The man did not need to speak for the Place to hear the name.

Achamian.

The Place smiled, as if things catastrophic could be gentle ironies all the same.

“The teacher you renounced …”

A grimace seized the man’s expression of wronged incredulity. Jaw pulled down. Lips cramped about a soundless cry. Spittle strung like spider’s silk across the void of his mouth …

“He is the prophet you sought all along.”



The Place held its weeping slave, rocked him in its arms. The smell of burnt lamb wicked through the closed confines of the chamber.

“Then what are you.”

Spoken with lament, without the intonation of a question. Spoken the way beloved dead are removed from the place of mourning.

“A deceiver,” the Place said. “False …”

“No—”

“I am D?nyain, a Son of Ishu?l. I am the product of a monstrous decision made two thousand years ago, a decision to breed Men as Men breed cattle and dogs, to remake them in the image of intellect …”

He pulled the man to the side, and down, so that his bearded face lay like a plate on his lap.

“I was sent forth to hunt down and kill my father,” the Place said, “who had been sent out before me …” He paused to brush a greying lock from the man’s brow. “When I discovered the weakness of Men, I understood that my father would command enormous power … that I would need the strength of nations to overcome him.”

Warring patterns. Everything turned upon the way patterns owned the souls of Men. Truth, as surely as Luck, simply sorted the conquered from the dead.