Part 43 (1/2)
”Of course, you had heard of the Consult,” Kellhus continued, ignoring his question. ”And like most in the Three Seas, you thought them long dead-the stuff of Mandate delusions. But the stories you extracted from your captives ... there was too much consistency, too much detail, for them to be fabrications.
”The deeper you probed, the more troubling the story became. You had read The Sagas, The Sagas, and you had doubted them, thinking them too fanciful. Destroying the world? No malice could be so great. No soul could be so deranged. After all, what could be gained? Who follows paths over precipices? and you had doubted them, thinking them too fanciful. Destroying the world? No malice could be so great. No soul could be so deranged. After all, what could be gained? Who follows paths over precipices?
”But the skin-spies explained it all. Speaking in shrieks and howls, they taught you the why and wherefore of the Apocalypse. You learned that the boundaries between the World and the Outside were not fixed, that if the World could be cleansed of enough souls, it could be sealed shut sealed shut. Against the G.o.ds. Against the heavens and the h.e.l.ls of the Afterlife. Against redemption. And, most importantly, against the possibility of d.a.m.nation.
”The Consult, you realized, were labouring to save their souls save their souls. And what was more, if your captives could be believed, they were drawing near the end of their millennial task.”
In the absence of light, Kellhus studied his father through the lens of different senses: the scent of naked skin, the displacement of drafts, the sound of bare feet scuffing through the dark.
”The Second Apocalypse,” Moenghus said simply.
”Only you knew their secret. Only you could detect their spies.”
”They have to be stopped,” Moenghus replied. ”Destroyed.”
”So you brooded over what the skin-spies told you, spent years immersed in the depths of the Probability Trance.”
From the very first, ever since descending the glaciers into the wastes of Kuniuri, Kellhus had pondered the man now leading him through these galleries of darkness. Scheme after probabilistic scheme. The branching of innumerable alternatives, waxing and waning with each mile walked, with every insight and apprehension.
I'm here, Father. In the house you have prepared for me.
”You began,” Kellhus said, ”contemplating what would become the Thousandfold Thought.”
”Yes,” Moenghus replied, a simple affirmation. Even as he said this, Kellhus sensed the changes-in acoustics, odours, even ambient temperature. The pitch-black corridor had opened onto a chamber of some kind. One where things still lived, and where things had died-many things.
”We have arrived,” his father said.
Beneath the eaves of the clouds, the Inrithi knights of Ce Tydonn thundered across dead fields and stumped orchards. Pennants slapped against the smoking expanse of s.h.i.+meh: the Three Black s.h.i.+elds of Nangaelsa, the White Stag of Numaineiri, the Red Swords of Plaideol, and other ancient marks of northern peoples. Beneath the black and gold Circ.u.mfix, Lord Gothyelk, Earl of Agansanor, galloped before them, and all the world rumbled.
The distance closed. More and more Fanim climbed the ramped banks of the Jes.h.i.+mal and hastened to join the milling ranks. Arrows began falling among the Inrithi, disorganized volleys that either clattered harmlessly from their great kite-s.h.i.+elds or were stilled by thick pads of felt. Several horses fell screaming, throwing their riders to earth, but the ma.s.ses simply parted about them and pounded on. Spurs urged chargers faster. Lances were lowered. Long-bearded warriors began roaring out to Gilgaol-mighty War.
The heathen began charging toward them, haphazardly at first, like clutches of seed falling from laden trees, then en ma.s.se. The whole horizon moved, at once dark and many-coloured. Among the Tydonni some glimpsed the triangular standard of Cinganjehoi, the famed Tiger of Eumarna.
The Men of the Tusk leaned into their lances, both grinning and grimacing. It seemed they rattled the world to its foundations. ”s.h.i.+meh!” a voice pealed out-the grizzled old Earl, riding hard in their lead. Soon they were all shouting, ”s.h.i.+meh! s.h.i.+meh! s.h.i.+meh!”
Then all was snapping wood and screaming horses, hacking swords and pummelling maces. Men shouting, dying. Gauslas, son of Earl Cerjulla, was the first of the caste-n.o.bility to fall, beheaded by silver-helmed Cinganjehoi himself. But his Warnutishmen, howling in grief, could not be broken, nor could any of the Tydonni. The iron men hammered down s.h.i.+elds and smashed faces. They shattered scimitars with their long notched swords. They brained shrieking horses.
Then, like a miracle, they were reining to stop before blue and black waters. They had taken the riverbank.
The Grandees of Eumarna were broken, killed or beaten away, but there was no respite. Like angry bees the Fanim rea.s.sembled beyond their flanks, even behind them, riding in hard arcs, loosing arrow after arrow. Across the ground, the wounded howled through forests of stamping legs. The bridgeheads were retaken, and the Inrithi Earls thundered at their men, exhorting them to hold them. Vicious melees raged across the bridges and the rapids. But the Fanim were already uncoupling the timber rafts that their mastodons had dragged from the levelling of the Tantanah Gate. On the Jes.h.i.+mal's far bank all the world seemed to throng with the enemy. Fanim riders crowded onto the first of the rafts. More and more arrows fell among the Inrithi.
Earl Gothyelk looked to the white-tiled walls of the city, saw that King-Regent Chinjosa and his Ainoni were yet in disarray. Many still crowded the parapets.
Cursing, he commanded his hornsman to sound the retreat. They had lost the Jes.h.i.+mal.
Kellhus spoke a sorcerous word and a point of light appeared, sheeting low-vaulted walls in illumination. Though ornate by Inrithi standards, the chamber was more austere than any he'd encountered since plumbing the darkness beneath Kyudea. The friezes that panelled the walls did not screen deeper carvings. They seemed more reserved in theme and content as well, as if the product of an older, more stolid age-though Kellhus decided it had more to do with the room's function. It had been some kind of access chamber for the mansion's ancient sewers.
Workbenches and strange iron and wood mechanisms littered the walls with shadow. At the far end of the chamber, where the ceiling sloped so low a man would have to stoop, a cistern opened beneath converging chutes, as dust-dry as everything else in the room. Nearer, two wells or pits had been dropped into the floor, each possessing graven lips that, perversely, had been carved into the semblance of hands reaching out of the darkness to tear at four spread-eagled figures, one for each point of the compa.s.s. With heads bent back in soundless howls, each clutched at the ground with stationary desperation.
The two skin-spies hung suspended above these pits, their arms and legs shackled in chains of pitted iron.
Kellhus approached the nearer one, stepping past a hanging funnel-part of a rust-grooved force-feeding mechanism. How many years had the thing hung here, dangling in absolute black, flinching from instruments, listening to the insistent cooing of his father's voice?
With a gesture he drew the point of light closer. Shadows swung like steepled fingers.
Their facial limbs were drawn perpetually open with rust-brown wire affixed to an iron ring. A contraption of cords and pulleys allowed the things' inner faces to be pulled back or down.
”When did you realize you didn't possess the strength,” Kellhus asked, ”that more was needed to avert the No-G.o.d's second coming?”
”From the very first I recognized that it was probable,” Moenghus said. ”But I spent years a.s.sessing the possibilities, gathering knowledge. When the first of the Thought came to me, I was quite unprepared.”
Their braincases had been sawed open, revealing lobes and milky convolutions hazed by hundreds of silver needles. Neuropuncture. Kellhus reached out a finger, brushed the tip of one near the brain's base. The creature jerked and stiffened. Excrement slopped down into the pit. The reek of it swelled through the room.
”I a.s.sume,” Kellhus continued, ”that you're not entirely without Water ... that this was how you were able to reach out to Ishual, to send dreams to those Dunyain you knew before your exile.”
Through intersecting chains he saw his father nod, as hairless as the ancient Nonmen who had hewn the stone surrounding them. What secrets had he learned from these captives? What dread whispers?
”I have some facility for those elements of the Psukhe that require more subtlety than power. Scrying, Calling, Translating ... Even still, my summons to you nearly broke me. Ishual lies across the world.”
”I was the Shortest Path.”
”No. You were the only path.”
Kellhus examined the two squares of oak that had been laid across the floor on the far side of the wells. They looked like doors, only stripped of their hinges and handles and set with hooks in each corner so that they could be hung directly beneath the skin-spies. The child and woman nailed across them-tools his father had used either to fan or to sate the creatures' l.u.s.ts-hadn't been dead long. Their blood gleamed like wax.
An interrogation technique, or another feeding mechanism?
”And my half-brother?” Kellhus asked. In his soul's eye it seemed he could almost see him-the pomp, the authoritarian grandeur-so many times had he heard him described. Kellhus stepped around the far side of the skin-spies to gain a clear view of his father. The man seemed wizened, all but naked in the glaring light. Strangely bent ... or broken.
He uses every heartbeat to rea.s.sess. His son has returned to him insane.
Moenghus nodded and said, ”You mean Maithanet.”
Her head in the crook of his shoulder, Esmenet stared up through the trees. She breathed deep and slow, tasting the salt of her tears, smelling the dank of mossy stone, the bitter of pinched green. Like little flags, the leaves swung and fluttered, their waxy clatter so clear against the background roar. It seemed marvellous and impossible. Twigs upon branches, branches upon limbs, all upward fanning, at once random and perfectly radial, all reaching for a thousand different heavens.
She sighed and said, ”I feel so young.”
His chest bounced in silent laughter beneath her cheek.
”You are ... Only the world is old.”