The Great Ordeal (Aspect-Emperor #3)(53)

“What we have always done.”

“But he’s telling us to … to … not to believe!”

Out of everything, this was the most unbelievable … unforgivable.

“That is the test,” Saubon said. “The trial … It has to be!”

“Test? Trial?”

A look too beseeching to be convincing.

“To see if we continue to act when …” Saubon said, “when we have ceased to believe …”

They traded exhalations.

“But …”

They both could feel it, the taint of the meat, a cruel and vicious spring coiled within their every thought and breath. The meat. The Meat.

Yesss.

“Think, Brother …” Saubon said. “What else could it be?”

They had no choice but to believe. Faith is inescapable … and nowhere more so than in the commission of some mighty sin.

“We stand so close …” Proyas murmured.

Only its object varies … the in what.

“Lean into the oar, Brother,” Saubon said, his voice rent between dread and ferocity. “Golgotterath will decide.”

Be it God … Man.

“Yes …” Proyas said on a shudder. “Golgotterath.”

Or nothing.





CHAPTER FIVE


Ishu?l


The father who does not lie is no father at all.

—CONRIYAN PROVERB

Between the truth that aims uncertainly, and the deceit that aims true, scholars no less than kings cling to the latter. Only madmen and sorcerers have truck with Truth.

—The Cirric (or ‘Fourth’) Economy, OLEKAROS





Early Autumn, 20 New Imperial Year (4132, Year-of-the-Tusk), the Demua Mountains

“Nau-Cay?ti …” one of the wretches croaked.

“Nau-Cay?ti …” another rasped, rocking like a worm.

“Such a prizsse …”

Achamian rolled to his knees, coughed. Manacles clamped his neck, wrists, ankles. A circle of figures leaned close about him, black with confusion. Beyond, the world lurched with shadow and gold. A reeking breeze laved his naked back, pinched his gut and pulled vomit to his throat.

He convulsed with a different body, gagged about a string of burning spittle. Memories of a darkling flight crowded his eyes, claws hooked about his limbs, wings shearing hard air, a blasted landscape reeling out to the horizon.

“Such-such a prizsse …”

“He-he-heeee …”

More memories came, like ice packed about his heart and lungs. His wife, I?va, plundering his loins with wanton abandon. The Inchoroi, Aurang, cracking him from his sarcophagus, hauling him into the heavens. Golden bulkheads rearing from bastions of cruel stone, their surfaces stamped in endless, alien filigree …

Golgotterath, the Great Prince realized. He was in Min-Uroikas, the dread Ark-of-the-skies …

Which meant he was worse than dead.

“My father!” he cried, staring about witless. “My father will yield nothing for my return!”

“Return …” one of the wretches gasped.

“There is no return …” another added.

“No escape …”

The Wizard gazed wildly about. Ten ancient men encircled him, their skin sucked tight about their ligaments, their eyes bleary with mucous and misery. They wagged their heads—some bald, some wisped with snow-white strands—as if trapped nodding at the surface of a long, nightmarish slumber. One chewed his own bottom lip, so that blood sheeted his chin.

At first he thought they sat huddled—but he quickly realized they possessed no limbs, that they had been bound like larva to cradle-like sconces of stone. And he understood that these ten men were Men no longer, but wheels in some kind of contrivance, arcane and abominable.

At once, the Great Prince realized who it was who truly scrutinized him—as well as who had betrayed him.

“My wife,” he groaned, testing the mettle of his chains for the first time. “I?va!”

“Has committed …” one of the ancient mouths warbled.

“Such crimes …”

“What was her price …” he coughed. “Tell me!”

“She sheeks only …” the bloody one bubbled.

“To save her soul …”

Laughter, thin and eerie, passed through the wretches, like the lash through the whip, one rising from the trailing of another.

The Great Prince cast his gaze beyond them, toward the gold-girdered walls. He saw hooded light rising across faraway structures, surfaces gleaming through darkness, stamped with infinite detail, packed into inexplicable forms. A sudden awareness of distance and dimension struck him …

Dizzy, gaping spaces.

He fell to his right elbow, so sudden was the vertigo. They floated, he realized. The ancient amputees had been arrayed across a platform of some kind—one rendered of the same unearthly metal as the Ark. Soggomant, foul and impenetrable. He saw golden reliefs through the scuffs in the offal beneath him, warring figures, leering and inhuman. And the form, opposing S’s hooked about the arms of a V …

A shape no Son of the House Anas?rimbor could fail to recognize: the Shield of Sil.

They floated upward through some kind of shaft, one impossibly vast, a gullet broad enough to house the King-Temple whole. The Horns, Nau-Cay?ti realized …