Part 39 (2/2)

Soon the Kianene and Amoti were dissolving in panic. Everywhere they looked, they saw chain-armoured myriads, loosed like blond wolves into the streets.

The lantern faltered, and for a moment Kellhus cradled it as though trying to coax it to life with the fire of his own body. With a final hiss, it faded into nothing.

But that was not the end of light. He saw the faintest of glimmers off to his right, toward the sound of booming water. Rather than use any Cant that might announce his presence, he continued in blackness.

The sound grew more and more thunderous as he followed the pitch hallway. A fine mist sheened his skin, matted his hair and robe. The light grew more and more distinct: orange s.h.i.+ning across the black of wet stone. Twice he stooped, drew his fingers across the floor to ensure that he still followed his father's trail.

The hallway opened onto a balcony that overlooked a vast cavern. At first all he could discern were the mighty curtains of water tumbling from abyssal blackness, and on such a scale that the flooring beneath him seemed to float upward. Then he noticed the points of light below, several of them, arrayed across a platform beyond the waterfalls' reach, and reflected in the oily surface of some kind of pool. Braziers, he realized, dim-burning because of the sodden air.

Father?

Kellhus descended a broad stair hewn from the walls. As elsewhere in the mansion, every surface had been rendered with heroic carvings across more p.o.r.nographic reliefs, though on a far greater scale. Kellhus could make out immense vaults, their tangled figures encrusted with the mineral residue of water and millennia. The falls themselves towered into darkness, raucous, white foam wheeling, dropping with the weight of glaciers, so tall they threatened to press him to his knees.

A series of chutes, like halved versions of the long curved horns the Thunyeri used to communicate in battle, had been raised to the tumbling skirts of the waterfalls. There were dozens of them, hooking outward and downward, arranged to convey water to the sprawling floor below, though only three still reached into the cras.h.i.+ng white, the others having broken. Green about the edges, they gleamed copper where the water still runnelled them.

The stair wound away from the falls, curled across the back of the vast chamber, where it met its mirror image and broadened in a monumental fan. Bronze weaponry and armour lay scattered across the steps, remnants of the ancient battle that had been lost here. As he neared the stair's base, the sounds of smaller waters were braided into the background roar: the gurgling of eaves, and the slap and whish of small streams across stone. A cavernous must permeated the air.

”They gathered here in the hundreds,” a voice called across the gloom, clear despite the ambient rumble. ”Even thousands, in the days before the Womb-Plague ...”

A Kuniuric voice.

Kellhus paused on the steps, searched the gloom.

At last.

As broad as the Siricus Arena in Momemn, the floor opened before him, matted with detritus and the small mounds which were all that remained of the fallen. Ripples dilated in endless procession across the broad pool set in the floor's centre. Like a black mirror, it reflected the braziers burning along its far rim, the fat bronze faces looming over them, and the great cascading column of the waterfall. At the terminus of the chutes, a series of immense bronze statues had been erected: kneelers, obese and naked, with channels cut into their backs and with heads hollowed into great-jowled masks. They squatted in a broad semi-circle facing the pool, their expressions lurid in the orange light. Water streamed from the eyes and mouths of three of them, slapping across the stone. The hollowed head of one had broken off altogether. It now rested near the far end of the pool, its single unsubmerged eye staring across the black waters.

”Bathing was holy for them,” the voice continued.

Kellhus descended the last of the monumental stair, slowly walked across the floor. He had grown accustomed to listening through voices, but this one was smooth as porcelain-seamless and inscrutable. Even still, he knew it very well. How could he not, when it was his own?

Advancing around the pool, he saw a pale figure, sitting cross-legged behind the sheets of water that poured from one of the monstrous faces. A man, white-skinned, obscured by rus.h.i.+ng translucence.

”The fires are for you,” the figure said. ”I have lived in darkness for a long, long time.”

Her calm terrified Achamian almost as much as the clamour on the horizon. The very wind stank of sorcery.

”So he uses everyone,” she finally said. ”His every word is bent upon manipulation ...” She stared as though her eyes had forgotten how to blink. ”Don't you mean he uses me me?”

”I-I haven't thought it all through yet, but I think he wants ... children children ... Children with his strength, his intellect, and you-” ... Children with his strength, his intellect, and you-”

”So he breeds breeds. Is that it? I'm his prized mare?”

”I know how hateful these words must-”

”Why would you think that? I've been used my whole life.” She paused, glared at him with as much remorse as outrage. ”My whole life, Akka. And now that I've become the instrument of something higher, higher, higher than men and their rutting hunger-” higher than men and their rutting hunger-”

”But why? Why be an instrument at all?”

”You speak as if we had a choice-you, a Mandate Schoolman Mandate Schoolman! There's no escape. You know that. With every breath, we are used!”

”Then why the bitterness, Esmi? Shouldn't a prophet's vessel sound ex-”

”Because of you, Akka!” she cried with alarming ferocity. ”You! Why can't you just let me go? You know that I love you, so you cling to that, you dig in with grubby nails and you yank and yank and yank, you bruise and batter my heart, and you refuse to let me go!”

”Esmi...Iasked and you came.”

Long silence.

”All this,” she said, her voice almost inaudible for the crack of faraway sorceries, ”everything Cnaiur said ... what makes you think that Kellhus hasn't already told me?”

Achamian swallowed, ignored the lights that flashed across his periphery.

”Because you say you love him.”

Cymbals crashed in a relentless tempo, measuring the h.e.l.lish advance of the Scarlet Spires. They laid waste to all before them. Whatever resistance the heathen mustered, they puffed out like candle flames. Companies of hors.e.m.e.n, bowmen arrayed across the rooftops-all mummified in Anagogic fire.

Save for the adept Watchers who walked the sky in their wake, most of the seventy-four surviving sorcerers of rank marched on foot through the conflagration, sheltering themselves and their Javreh s.h.i.+eld-men with Wards. Bathed in the light of successive Cants, each cadre trailed a flickering array of shadows. They climbed ramps of blackened stone, mounds of smashed brick, found their footing, and worked more thunderous devastation. Stones arced skyward, trailing streamers of smoke. Cornices and pillars collapsed upon their footings, swallowed by the black-billowing issue of their destruction. The whole world seemed rendered in luminous bloods and abyssal blacks. They stepped over sizzling limbs.

Above towering flames and through curtains of smoke, the First Temple and the Ctesarat loomed ever closer, until they encompa.s.sed the horizon. Again and again the Scarlet Schoolmen called out with destruction, but none would answer.

The Fanim ran before them, like flame-maddened beasts.

Only the sky ...

Of all this world, only the sky offered them surcease, a momentary reprieve from spikes of terrestrial congestion. Through furnace eyes they gazed across the world's dark curvature. The sun flared white and preternaturally bright. Thunderheads roiled beneath, trailing into nothingness in the distance, like snow kicked across ice. They saw pale coastlines, vast tracts of bleached ochre and blue. They flexed their frames in languorous vanity, beat their air-scooping wings.

Zioz. Setmahaga. Sohorat ...

Only here, at the limits of this cursed world.

Then the Voice called them, crackling with torment and rebuke. As one, they bent their elephantine heads back, howled into the indigo depths, then plunged backward, diving into the skein of angry clouds. Wind burned eyes that could not tear.

Like stones, they dropped from the belly of the clouds.

<script>