The Great Ordeal (Aspect-Emperor #3)(52)

Proyas stared breathless. It seemed he could not move without stirring the memory of his bruises.

“But …”

“After all this time, you still don’t fully understand him, do you?”

“And you do?”

Saubon swatted the air the way Galeoth were prone when irked by questions. “You think me stubborn,” he said. “Mercenary. Your lesser counterpart. I know this—he knows this! I take no offense because I think you stubborn and insufferably pious. And so we counsel one against the other continuously, each heaving upon the rope of disparate reason …”

“So?”

“This is theatre!” Saubon cried, throwing wide his strapped arms. “Can’t you see? We are all mummers here! All of us! Prophet or not, our Holy Aspect-Emperor must control what Men see … All of us have roles to play, Proyas, and no one gets to choose which.”

“What are you saying?”

“That our parts remain to be written. Perhaps you’re to be the fool … or the traitor … or the long-suffering doubter …” A bleary gaze, filled with hilarity and rheumy spite. “Only he knows!”

Proyas could only stare at the man.

Saubon grinned. “Perhaps you must be weak to survive the catastrophe to come.”

Proyas shuddered—the substance of him rippled like water in a kicked pan. His exhalation was audible, ragged with turmoil. Lantern-light pricked. Tears spilled hot down his cheeks. He glared angrily at Saubon, knowing the sight would astound him.

“So …” he began, only to stumble upon a crack in his voice. “So what is your role then?”

Saubon watched him carefully. It would be the first and only time Proyas would see pity on his face. The man’s blue eyes, which had become all the more fierce for the rutting of his skin and the greying of his brows, clicked to his bare toes, which he flexed as if to better grip the ground. “The same as you, I suspect.”

Proyas wondered at the belt cinched about his chest. “How could you know this?”

Saubon shrugged. “Because he tells us the same things.”

A stabbing shame accompanied these words. All breath and motion fell from the Believer-King of Conriya.

Some secrets are too vast to be hoisted. A space must be cleared.

“Did he—?”

Madness. This couldn’t be happening …

Saubon scowled. “Did he what?” A barking laugh. “Bugger me?”

All the air … All the air had been breathed.

A gaze that had been anxious and incredulous was now simply stupefied. The Galeoth Believer-King exploded in a fit of coughing. Water dribbled from his nose.

“No …” he gasped.

Proyas had thought he had been looking at his counterpart, but when Saubon moved, paced to the threshold hands to his head, he found his gaze fixed on the vacant space the man had occupied.

“He says he’s mad, Saubon.”

“He-he told you this?”

Their rivalry, such as it was, suddenly seemed the most profound of their many bonds. In an inkling, they had become brothers in a perilous land. And it occurred to Proyas that perhaps this was what their Lord-and-Prophet desired: that they finally set aside their meagre differences.

“He buggered you?” Saubon cried out.

It was a crime among the Galeoth, using a man as a woman. It was a shame like no other. Among all the buzzing terrors, Proyas realized that he would forever bear this taint in Coithus Saubon’s eyes. That he would, in some measure, be a woman. Weak. Unreliable in the ways of manhood and war …

A strangeness had seized Saubon’s expression, the bundling of some crazed fury. “You lie!” he exploded. “He told you to say this!”

Proyas simply matched his gaze, observed more than watched the man’s rage crack and crumble against his blank constancy. And he realized that even though he had been the one to suffer their Aspect-Emperor’s violent embrace, it was Saubon who would be the most grievously tested …

The one most pitted against the bigotries of his soul.

The statuesque Norsirai paced, his every tendon pulled taut, a thousand strings grooving his pale skin. He glanced about, frowning in the manner of addled drunks or senile old men, as if things obvious had been misplaced. “It’s the Meat,” he muttered on a sob. Without warning he leapt, batted the platter and its morsels across the gloomy interior. “This accursed Meat!”

The violence of the act startled both of them.

“The more you consume …” Saubon said, staring at clawed hands. “The more you … you hunger.”

Confession has its own calm, its own strength. Only ignorance is so immovable as resignation. Proyas had thought this strength his, especially given the bewildered frailty that had preceded it. But grief welled through him as he made to speak, and the desperation that cramped his expression seized his voice.

“Saubon … What’s happening?”

Speechless horror. One of the lanterns sputtered; light wavered over the ochre continents and archipelagos stained across the canvas walls.

“Tell no one of this,” Coithus Saubon commanded.

“You think I don’t know as much!” Proyas cried in sudden fury. “I’m asking you what we’re supposed to do?”

The man nodded, as much wilderness as wisdom flashing in his gaze. It almost seemed they took turns, each tethering the fraught excesses of the other, like two snarled kites trying to find some kind of crippled equipoise.