The Unholy Consult: The Aspect-Emperor

R. SCOTT

BAKKER

THE UNHOLY CONSULT

THE ASPECT-EMPEROR, BOOK FOUR

In this much anticipated, shattering conclusion to The Aspect-Emperor books, praised for their sweeping epic scale and detailed historical world-building (Grimdark Magazine), R. Scott Bakker delivers the series’ feverishly harrowing and long-awaited finish to a story cycle that has stretched across seven books in two series.

In The Unholy Consult, the Men of the Great Ordeal have been abandoned by Anasûrimbor Kellhus, and the grand crusade has devolved into cannibalism and chaos. When Exalt-General Proyas, with Prince-Imperial Kayutas at his side, attempts to gain control of the lost Men and continue their march to Golgotterath, it rapidly becomes clear that the lost Lord-and-Prophet is not so easily shaken from the mission.

When Sorweel, Believer-King of Sakarpus, and Serwa, daughter of the Aspect-Emperor, join the Great Ordeal they discover that the Shortest Path is not always the most obvious, or the safest. Souls, morality, and relationships are called into question when no one can be trusted, and the price for their sins is greater than they imagined.

An uncompromising portrayal of a catastrophic world of myth, war, and sorcery, the scope and creativity of the Aspect-Emperor books stand alongside George R.R. Martin’s A Song of Ice and Fire. Powerful and haunting, this thrilling final installment of Bakker’s groundbreaking series promises to be one of the most talked about epic fantasy books of all time.

Also by R. Scott Bakker

THE PRINCE OF NOTHING SERIES

The Darkness That Comes Before, Book One

The Warrior-Prophet, Book Two

The Thousandfold Thought, Book Three

THE ASPECT-EMPEROR SERIES

The Judging Eye, Book One

The White-Luck Warrior, Book Two

The Great Ordeal, Book Three

WRITING AS SCOTT BAKKER

Neuropath

Disciple of the Dog

Copyright

This edition first published in hardcover in the United States in 2017 by

The Overlook Press, Peter Mayer Publishers, Inc.

141 Wooster Street

New York, NY 10012

www.overlookpress.com

For bulk and special sales, please contact [email protected]

or write to us at the above address.

Copyright © 2017 by R. Scott Bakker

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopy, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system now known or to be invented, without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer who wishes to quote brief passages in connection with a review written for inclusion in a magazine, newspaper, or broadcast.

ISBN 978-1-4683-1487-8

To Chris Lotts

For floating from the same string

Contents

Also by R. Scott Bakker

Copyright

Dedication

What Has Come Before …

Chapter 1: The Western Three Seas

Chapter 2: Ishterebinth

Chapter 3: Agongorea

Chapter 4: The Demua Mountains

Chapter 5: Agongorea

Chapter 6: The Field Appalling

Chapter 7: The Leash

Chapter 8: The Lament

Chapter 9: The Great Letting

Chapter 10: The Great Letting

Chapter 11: The Occlusion

Chapter 12: The Last Whelming

Chapter 13: The Occlusion

Chapter 14: Golgotterath

Chapter 15: Golgotterath

Chapter 16: The Incû-Holoinas

Chapter 17: The Upright Horn

Chapter 18: The Golden Room

Chapter 19: Resumption

Chapter 20: The Furnace Plain

Appendices

One: The Encyclopaedic Glossary

Two: The False Sun

Three: Four Revelations

Four: Maps

Acknowledgments

About the Author

Fictional seduction,

On a black snow sky.

Sadness kills the superman,

Even fathers cry.

Black Sabbath, Spiral Architect

Have you ever in your life commanded the morning, And caused the dawn to know its place, That it might take hold of the ends of the earth, And the wicked be shaken out of it?

Job 38:12-3    

What Has Come Before …

THE PRINCE OF NOTHING

Wars, as a rule, fall within the compass of history. They mark the pitch of competing powers, the end of some and the ascendancy of others, the ebb and flow of dominance across the ages. But there is a war that Men have waged for so long they have forgotten the languages they first used to describe it. A war that makes mere skirmishes out of the destruction of tribes and nations.

There is no name for this war; Men cannot reference what leaps the short interval of their comprehension. It began when they were little more than savages roaming the wilds, in an age before script or bronze. An Ark, vast and golden, toppled from the void, scorching the horizon, throwing up a ring of mountains with the violence of its descent. And from it crawled the dread and monstrous Inchoroi, a race who had come to seal the World against the Heavens, and so save the obscenities they called their souls.

The Nonmen held sway in those ancient days, a people that surpassed Men not only in beauty and intellect, but in wrath and jealousy as well. Their Ishroi heroes and Quya mages defended the World, fought titanic battles and stood vigilant during epochal truces. They endured the Inchoroi weapons of light, watched their enemy wilt before their own. They survived the treachery of the Aporetics, who provided the Inchoroi with thousands of sorcery-killing Chorae. They overcame the horrors their enemy crafted: the Sranc, the Bashrag, and most fearsome of all, the Wracu. But their avarice at last betrayed them. After centuries of war, they made peace with the invaders in return for ageless immortality—a gift that was in fact a fell weapon, the Plague of Wombs.

Thus it became a war between doomed species, the one beauteous, the other vile. In the end, the Nonmen hunted the Inchoroi to the brink of annihilation. Their surviving Quya mages sealed the Ark, which they had come to call Min-Uroikas, and hid it from the world with devious glamours. Exhausted, bereft of hope or purpose, they retired to their underworld mansions to mourn the loss of their wives, their daughters, and the future of their once-glorious race.

As much as nature, history abhors vacuums. From the eastern mountains, the first tribes of Men began claiming the lands the Nonmen had abandoned—Men who had never known the yoke of slavery. Of the surviving Ishroi Kings, some fought, only to be dragged under by the tide of numbers, while others simply left their great gates unguarded, bared their necks to the licentious fury of a lesser race.

So began the Second Age, the Age of Men. Perhaps the Nameless War would have ended with the fading of its principals, but the Ark itself remained intact, and Men ever lusted for knowledge. Centuries passed, and the mantle of human civilization crept along the great river basins of Eärwa and outward, bringing bronze where there had been flint, cloth where there had been skins, and writing where there had been recital. Great cities rose to teeming life. The wilds gave way to cultivated horizons.

Nowhere were Men more bold in their works, or more overweening in their pride, than in the North, where commerce with the Nonmen had allowed them to outstrip their more swarthy cousins to the South. In the legendary city of Sauglish, those who could discern the joints of existence founded the first sorcerous Schools. As their learning and power waxed, a reckless few turned to the rumours they had heard whispered by their Nonman teachers—rumours of the great golden Ark. The wise were quick to see the peril, and the Schoolmen of Mangaecca, who coveted secrets above all else, were censured, and finally outlawed.

But it was too late. Min-Uroikas was found—occupied.

The fools discovered and awakened the last two surviving Inchoroi, Aurax and Aurang, who had concealed themselves in the labyrinthine recesses of the Ark. At their hoary knees the outlaw Schoolmen learned that damnation, the burden that all sorcerers bore, need not be inevitable. They learned that the world could be shut against the judgment of Heaven. So they forged a common purpose with the twin abominations, a Consult, and bent their cunning to the aborted designs of the Inchoroi.

The Mangaecca relearned the principles of the material—the Tekne. They mastered the manipulations of the flesh. And after generations of study and searching, after filling the pits of Min-Uroikas with innumerable corpses, they realized the most catastrophic of the Inchoroi’s untold depravities: Mog-Pharau, the No-God.

They made themselves slaves to better destroy the world.

And so the Nameless War raged anew. What has come to be called the First Apocalypse destroyed the great Norsirai nations of the North, laying ruin to the greatest glories of Men. But for Seswatha, the Grandmaster of the Gnostic School of Sohonc, the entire world would have been lost. At his urging, Anasûrimbor Celmomas, the High King of the North’s mightiest nation, Kûniüri, called on his tributaries and allies to join him in a holy war against Min-Uroikas, which Men now called Golgotterath. But his Ordeal foundered, and the might of the Norsirai perished. Seswatha fled south to the Ketyai nations of the Three Seas, bearing the greatest of the legendary Inchoroi weapons, the Heron Spear. With Anaxophus, the High King of Kyraneas, he met the No-God on the Plains of Mengedda, and by dint of valor and providence, overcame the dread Whirlwind.

The No-God was dead, but his slaves and his stronghold remained. Golgotterath had not fallen, and the Consult, blasted by ages of unnatural life, continued to plot salvation.

The years passed, centuries became millennia, and the Men of the Three Seas forgot the horrors endured by their fathers. Empires rose and empires fell. The Latter Prophet, Inri Sejenus, reinterpreted the Tusk, and over the course of centuries the faith of Inrithism—organized and administered by the Thousand Temples and its spiritual leader, the Shriah—came to dominate the entire Three Seas. The great Anagogic Schools arose in response to the Inrithi persecution of sorcery. Using Chorae, the Inrithi warred against them, attempting to silence their blasphemies.

Then Fane, the upstart Prophet of the so-called Solitary God, united the Kianene, the desert peoples of the Great Carathay, and declared war against the Tusk and the Thousand Temples. After centuries of jihad, the Fanim and their eyeless sorcerer-priests, the Cishaurim, conquered nearly all the western Three Seas, including the holy city of Shimeh, the birthplace of Inri Sejenus. Only the moribund remnants of the Nansur Empire continued to resist them.

War and strife ruled the South. The two great faiths of Inrithism and Fanimry skirmished, though trade and pilgrimage were tolerated when commercially convenient. The great families and nations vied for military and mercantile dominance. The minor and major Schools squabbled and plotted. And the Thousand Temples pursued earthly ambitions under the leadership of corrupt and ineffectual Shriahs.

The First Apocalypse had become little more than legend by this time. The Consult and the No-God had dwindled into myth, something old wives tell small children. After two thousand years, only the Schoolmen of the Mandate, who relived the Apocalypse each night through the eyes of Seswatha, could recall the horror of Mog-Pharau. Though the mighty and the learned considered them fools, the Mandate’s possession of the sorcery of the Ancient North, the Gnosis, commanded respect and mortal envy. Driven by nightmares, they wandered the labyrinths of power, scouring the Three Seas for signs of their ancient and implacable foe: the Consult.

And as always, they found nothing. Some argued that the Consult had finally succumbed to the toll of ages. Others, that they had turned inward, seeking less arduous means to forestall their damnation. But since the Sranc had multiplied across the northern wilds, no expedition could be sent to Golgotterath to settle the matter. The Mandate alone knew of the Nameless War. They alone stood guard, but they were both blind and a laughingstock.

Thus was the World when Maithanet was elected Shriah of the Thousand Temples and called the First Holy War, a great expedition to wrest Holy Shimeh from the Fanim. Word of his challenge spread across the Three Seas and beyond. Faithful from all the great Inrithi nations—Galeoth, Thunyerus, Ce Tydonn, Conriya, High Ainon and their tributaries—travelled to the city of Momemn, the capital of the Nansurium, to commend their strength and treasure to Inri Sejenus. To become Men of the Tusk.

Internal feuds plagued the First Holy War from the outset, for there was no shortage of those who would bend the campaign to their selfish ends. The Inrithi host marched victorious nonetheless, winning two great victories over the heretic Fanim at Mengedda and Anwurat. Only with the Second Siege of Caraskand and the Circumfixion of one of their own would the Men of the Tusk find common purpose. Only when they discovered a living prophet in their midst—a man who could see into the hearts of Men. A man like a god.

Anasûrimbor Kellhus.

Far to the north, in the very shadow of Golgotterath, a group of ascetics called the Dûnyain had concealed themselves in Ishuäl, the secret redoubt of the Kûniüric High Kings ere their destruction in the First Apocalypse. For two thousand years the Dûnyain had pursued their sacred study, breeding for reflex and intellect, training in the ways of limb, thought, and face—all for the sake of reason, the Logos. They had dedicated their entire existence to mastering the irrationalities of history, custom, and passion—all those things that determine human thought. In this way, they believed, they would eventually grasp what they called the Absolute, and so become true self-moving souls.

Some thirty years previous, Kellhus’s father, Anasûrimbor Moënghus, had fled Ishuäl. His reappearance in the dreams of the brethren fairly upended the order, given the Dûnyain repudiation of sorcery. Knowing only that Moënghus dwelt in a distant city called Shimeh, the elders dispatched Kellhus on an arduous journey through lands long abandoned by Men—to kill his apostate father.

But Moënghus knew the world in ways his cloistered brethren could not. He knew well the revelations that awaited his son, for they had been his revelations thirty years previous. He knew that Kellhus would discover sorcery, whose existence the forefathers of the Dûnyain had suppressed. He knew that given his abilities, Men would be little more than children to him, that Kellhus would see their thoughts in the nuances of their expression, and that with mere words he would be able to exact any devotion, any sacrifice. He knew, moreover, that eventually Kellhus would encounter the Consult, who hid behind faces that only Dûnyain eyes could see—that he would come to see what Men with their blinkered souls could not: the Nameless War.

The Consult had not been idle. For centuries they had eluded their old foe, the School of Mandate, using doppelgängers—spies who could take on any face, any voice, without resorting to sorcery and its telltale Mark. By capturing and torturing these abominations, Moënghus learned that the Consult had not abandoned their ancient plot to shut the world against Heaven, that within a score of years they would be able to resurrect the No-God and bring about a new war against Men, a Second Apocalypse. For years Moënghus walked the innumerable paths of the Probability Trance, plotting future after future, searching for the thread of act and consequence that would save the world. For years he crafted his Thousandfold Thought.

Moënghus had prepared the way for his Dûnyain-born son, Kellhus. He sent out his world-born son, Maithanet, to seize the Thousand Temples from within, so that he might craft the First Holy War, the weapon Kellhus would need to seize absolute power, and so unite the Three Seas against the doom that was their future. What he did not know, could not know, was that Kellhus would see further than him, think beyond his Thousandfold Thought …

That he would go mad.

Little more than an impoverished wayfarer when he first joined the Holy War, Kellhus used his bearing, intellect, and insight to convince ever more Men of the Tusk that he was the Warrior-Prophet, come to save mankind. He understood that Men would render anything to him, so long as they believed he could save their souls. He also befriended the Schoolman the Mandate had dispatched to observe the Holy War, Drusas Achamian, knowing that the Gnosis, the sorcery of the Ancient North, would provide him with inestimable power. And he seduced Achamian’s lover, Esmenet, knowing that her intellect made her the ideal vessel for his seed—for sons strong enough to bear the onerous burden of Dûnyain blood.

By the time the battle-hardened remnants of the First Holy War laid siege to Shimeh, Kellhus had achieved absolute authority. The Men of the Tusk had become his Zaudunyani, his Tribe of Truth. While the Holy War assailed the city’s walls, he confronted his father, Moënghus, mortally wounding him, explaining that only his death could realize the Thousandfold Thought. Days later Anasûrimbor Kellhus was proclaimed Holy Aspect-Emperor—the first in a millennium—by none other than the Shriah of the Thousand Temples, his half-brother, Maithanet. Even the School of Mandate, who saw his coming as the fulfillment of their most hallowed prophecies, knelt and kissed his knee.

But Kellhus had made a mistake. Before reaching the Three Seas and the Holy War, his passage across Eärwa had delivered him to the lands of the Utemot, a Scylvendi tribe renowned for warlike cruelty. Here he had struck a murderous compact with the tribe’s chieftain, Cnaiür urs Skiötha. Moënghus had also fallen into the hands of the Utemot some thirty years prior, and had used the then adolescent Cnaiür to murder his chieftain father and effect his escape. The youth had spent tormented decades pondering what had happened and had come to guess the inhuman truth of the Dûnyain. So it was that Cnaiür and Cnaiür alone knew the dark secret of Anasûrimbor Kellhus. Before his disappearance, the barbarian revealed these truths to none other than Drusas Achamian, who had long harboured heartbreaking suspicions of his own. At the coronation, before the eyes of the entire Holy War, Achamian repudiated Kellhus, whom he had worshipped; Esmenet, whom he had loved; and the Mandate masters he had served. Then he fled into the wilderness, becoming the world’s only sorcerer without a school. A Wizard.

Now, after twenty years of war, conversion, and butchery, Anasûrimbor Kellhus prepares to realize the ultimate stage of his father’s Thousandfold Thought. His New Empire spans the entirety of the Three Seas, from the legendary fortress of Auvangshei on the frontiers of Zeum to the shrouded headwaters of the River Sayut, from the sweltering coasts of Kutnarmu to the wild rim of the Osthwai Mountains—all the lands that had once been Fanim or Inrithi. It was easily the equal of the old Ceneian Empire in terms of geographical extent, and far more populous. A hundred great cities, and almost as many languages. A dozen proud nations. Thousands of years of mangled history.

And the Nameless War is nameless no longer. Men call it the Great Ordeal.

THE ASPECT-EMPEROR

In the Year-of-the-Tusk, 4132, the Second Holy War crosses the Imperial frontier and besieges Sakarpus, the ancient vault of the Chorae Hoard. In twenty years, Anasûrimbor Kellhus has rebalanced the whole of the Three Seas upon the axis of his Great Ordeal, bent the labour of millions to forge this, the earthly spearhead of the Thousandfold Thought. History has never seen such a host, more than 300,000 souls drawn from the far-flung reaches of the New Empire. The finest warriors of every nation comprise it, led by their Kings and Princes and Heroes. All the Major Schools accompany it, the greatest mustering of sorcerous might ever witnessed.

Sakarpus falls and Sorweel, the grieving son of the slain King Harweel, becomes a hostage of the Holy Aspect-Emperor. But he is nowhere near so helpless as he believes. To play Prophet is to risk the wrath of the Gods: Yatwer herself, the Dread Mother of Birth, has taken umbrage with Anasûrimbor Kellhus, loosing the White-Luck upon him, the vengeance of the oppressed against the oppressor. And Sorweel discovers himself central to her design. A priest posing as a slave rubs Her spit into his cheeks, shielding him from the all-seeing Anasûrimbor, convincing Kellhus and his children, Serwa and Kayûtas, that Sorweel stands among the Empire’s most ardent Believer-Kings. She also provides a murder weapon: a pouch that conceals sorcery-killing Chorae from sorcerous eyes.

But the youth is conflicted, for evidence of the Aspect-Emperor’s cause encircles him, and he finds himself torn between the demands of Heaven and the testimony of his heart. The Goddess compels him. His father’s blood demands vengeance. Even his friend, Zsoronga, Prince of Zeum, counsels murder. And still he cannot but ask why … If the Unholy Consult were simply a fiction, why forge something so stupendous as the Great Ordeal?

Nonmen emissaries intercept the Host in transit, offering an alliance in return for three hostages. The Aspect-Emperor promptly sends Sorweel along with his daughter, Serwa, and his adoptive son, Moënghus—not realizing that Nil’giccas, the Nonman King, has fled the Mountain, and that Ishterebinth has fallen to the Consult.

The three youths are seized and interrogated upon their arrival, but when the Nonmen discover that Sorweel has been doomed to destroy the Aspect-Emperor, they release him to Oinaral Lastborn, who seeks to save his Mansion. At long last, the youth learns the wicked truth of Golgotterath, not simply from Oinaral, but from the Amiolas, a sorcerous artifact that allows Men to understand Nonman language via the trapped soul of Immiriccas. The youth need only remember the losses suffered by the long-dead Ishroi to understand the depravity of the Aspect-Emperor’s foe, and therefore the righteousness of his cause, the Great Ordeal.

At long last he embraces the faith of his Enemy. With Oinaral, he embarks on a quest to the very bowel of the Weeping Mountain to find the Lastborn’s hero father, Oirunas, intent on overthrowing Nin’ciljiras, the Consult pretender to Nil’giccas’s throne.

The Great Ordeal, meanwhile, continues crawling north toward the ever-withdrawing, ever-growing Sranc Horde. The desolation of the Istyuli gradually gives way to the knuckled landscape of ancient Sheneor, and the Ordealmen rejoice for finally reaching the outskirts of scripture. But if the Ordealmen find their conviction renewed, their Exalt-General, Proyas, finds his faith in his Aspect-Emperor challenged as it has never been challenged before—and by Kellhus himself, no less.

Supplies become ever more tentative, and the Sranc grow ever more desperate, ever more bold. Disaster strikes the westernmost contingent of the Host at Irsûlor, and the Great Ordeal loses a full quarter of their contingent, as well as the Vokalati, a Major School. At Swaranûl, the Holy Aspect-Emperor reveals the catastrophic truth: they have scarce travelled halfway and already they were out of food. Henceforth, he informs his astounded followers, the Men of the Circumfix will subsist upon their raving foe.

And so the Host of Hosts advances across the eastern shoulder of the Misty Sea, the Horde a roiling, retreating tide before them. The Ordealmen gorge upon their foe, feast about fires of Sranc carcasses. A darkness grows within them, consuming more and more of what comes before. Kellhus reveals the truth to Proyas in stages, first dismantling his certitude, then his faith, and finally, so it seems, his dignity and his heart.

At the derelict fortress of Dagliash, the Horde is cornered, and the might of the Great Ordeal is unleashed whole. But within the fortress itself, a Tekne artifact detonates and the very earth is Scalded. Thousands die, among them Saubon, who finds himself cast into the Hells.

Gazing upon the foul toadstool of smoke boiling above them, Kellhus tells Proyas that he must leave, that it is up to him to deliver the Great Ordeal to Golgotterath alone.

On the wild fringe of the Three Seas, meanwhile, Drusas Achamian has spent twenty years exploring his Dreams of the First Apocalypse. If he can find Ishuäl, he believes, he can answer the question that burns so bright in so many learned souls …

Who is the Aspect-Emperor?

Anasûrimbor Mimara, the step-daughter of his foe, arrives demanding he teach her sorcery. Her resemblance to her mother, Esmenet—who has become Empress of the Three Seas—returns the old Wizard to all the pains he sought to escape. Desperate to win his tutelage, Mimara seduces him.

This event casts a shadow over all that ensues, for not only does Mimara become quick with child, the Judging Eye—the ability to see the goodness and evil of things—fully awakens within her. Only in the shameful aftermath does she tell the old Wizard that Kellhus has already embarked on his quest to destroy the Consult and so save the world from a Second Apocalypse.

The old Wizard does not know where Ishuäl is, but thanks to his dreams, he knows the whereabouts of a map marking its location: in the famed Library of Sauglish, deep in the northern wilds. He contracts a company of Scalpers, hard men who make their living selling Sranc scalps to their Holy Aspect-Emperor, to accompany him on the quest: the Skin-eaters, renowned as much for their ruthless Captain, Lord Kosoter, as for his sorcerous companion, a Nonman Erratic known as Cleric. The outcast expedition sets out for the Library of Sauglish, fraught with grudge and rivalry from the beginning. The Judging Eye turns their trek into a march of the damned for Mimara, simply because not a soul among the company is saved—apart from her own. They pass through the ruined Nonman mansion of Cil-Aujas, and would have died there, were it not for Mimara and her cryptic use of her Chorae.

The journey across the Sranc-infested North harrows both the old Wizard and the Princess-Imperial alike, for they have come to increasingly depend on the Nonman, Cleric, and his dispensations of Qirri, the soul-quickening ashes of the legendary Cû’jara Cinmoi. After months of toiling, the expedition arrives at Sauglish maddened for both the drug and the deprivations it has enabled them to endure. Cleric is revealed as Nil’giccas, the Last Nonman King, bent on finding memory in betrayal and tragedy. The Skin-Eaters turn upon one another, and all are destroyed save Achamian and Mimara.

Together, they find the ancient map described in Achamian’s dreams, the map to Ishuäl—the hidden stronghold of the Dûnyain, the birthplace of the Holy Aspect-Emperor. They gather the ashes of Nil’giccas to replenish their supply of Qirri, then set out on the final leg of their journey. They persevere, gain the Demua Mountains, and surmount the glacier overlooking the vale of the Dûnyain. At long last, they see it, Ishuäl … ruined.

Beneath the toppled walls, they wander through the blasted galleries of the Thousand-Thousand Halls, across floors gravelled with the bones of Sranc. In the room of the Whale-mothers, the Judging-Eye opens and Mimara sees the dizzying evil of the Dûnyain. But does this mean Kellhus is evil? They realize their quest is not over until Mimara apprehends Kellhus with the Judging Eye.

They also find two survivors, the son and grandson of Kellhus himself, the former scarred beyond recognition. Mere days into their journey, he kills himself upon imbibing the Qirri, seeking the Absolute in annihilation. They glimpse the Scalding of Dagliash over the horizon, wonder at the pillar of ash. As they cross out of the mountains hying north, they are seized by Scylvendi outriders, and find themselves dragged before the insane regard of Cnaiür urs Skiötha, the King-of-Tribes …

The People of War shadow the Great Ordeal.

Far to the south in Momemn, the capital of the New Empire, Esmenet struggles to rule in her husband’s absence. With Kellhus and the bulk of his armed might faraway, the embers of insurrection have begun to ignite across the Three Seas. The Imperial Court regards her with condescension. Fanayal ab Kascamandri, the Padirajah of what had been the heathen Kianene Empire before the First Holy War, grows ever more bold on the fringes of the Great Carathay Desert. Psatma Nannaferi, the outlawed Mother-Supreme of the Cult of Yatwer, prophecies the coming of the White-Luck Warrior, the godsent assassin who will murder the Aspect-Emperor and his progeny. Even the Gods, it seems, plot against the Anasûrimbor Dynasty. Esmenet turns to her brother-in-law, Maithanet, the Shriah of the Thousand Temples, for his strength and clarity of vision, yet she wonders why her husband would leave the Mantle in her incapable hands, when his brother is Dûnyain like himself.

Even as the first rumours of this sedition reach his mother in Momemn, young Kelmomas continues his own devious insurrection. Where before he had driven Mimara away, now he engineers the death of his idiot twin, Samarmas, knowing that grief will make his mother even more desperate for his love. He secretly murders Sharacinth, High Priestess of the Yatwerians, an act that incites riots across the Three Seas. When he fears that his uncle, Maithanet, is beginning to suspect his double-game, he plots with his mad older brother, Inrilatas, to murder him as well, but the attempt goes awry, and Maithanet ends up killing Inrilatas instead.

War breaks out between Empress and Shriah. Grief-stricken and paranoid, Esmenet contracts a Narindar, a priest of the Four-Horned Brother, to murder her brother-in-law, not knowing that she parlays with the White-Luck Warrior. But Maithanet strikes first, storming and seizing the Andiamine Heights during her absence, and so Esmenet finds herself a fugitive in the very Empire she ruled, trapped with Naree, a prostitute living much as she had before marrying Kellhus and mothering his inhuman progeny. When she is finally captured and dragged in chains before Maithanet, he looks into her soul and sees the truth of the conflict between them. But before he can name Kelmomas, the White-Luck Warrior strikes him from the one place overlooked. As the sole remaining connection to her husband, she finds herself acclaimed as Holy Empress once again, even as Fanayal and his bandit army besiege the walls about Momemn.

She hastens to organize the city, showing the will her ailing subjects so desperately need to see. She invites the White-Luck Warrior, whom she still thinks is a mere Cultic assassin, to live with her and her surviving family in the Andiamine Heights. As much as his mother’s newfound strength dismays him, Kelmomas is more fascinated by the White-Luck Warrior, whom he sees as proof that Ajokli, the evil Four-Horned Brother, has chosen to be his protector. This conviction is confirmed when he watches the man bring about the death of his sister Theliopa—for she, after Maithanet, had been his greatest threat. But this triumph is instantly transformed into disaster when his mother, wild with grief, spies him celebrating his sister’s death.

A powerful earthquake strikes Momemn, laying low her walls and exposing her inhabitants to the desert fury of Fanayal and his Kianene. Psatma Nannaferi mocks the Padirajah as he readies himself for the assault, watched by an apprehensive Malowebi, the Emissary of the Zeumi Satakhan. Though the Mother-Supreme is Fanayal’s captive, the Goddess Yatwer has assured her mastery of the man. Without warning, Kellhus steps into their midst, killing both Fanayal and the Mother-Supreme. He overpowers Malowebi and severs his head, which he transforms into one of the Decapitants bound to his hip.

Aftershocks hammer the Imperial Capital. Kelmomas follows the White-Luck Warrior through the collapsing palace into the throne room, still thinking him a servant of Ajokli. But when he glimpses his father standing with his mother upon the dais, he realizes that the assassin hunts no less than the Aspect-Emperor—and at his mother’s behest. The little boy gains the assassin’s attention, hoping to assist, but the man gazes at him as though dumbstruck, as if a completely different soul has awakened behind his once implacable eyes.

The ceilings give way, and the boy learns that what is ruined can become more ruined still.

CHAPTER

ONE

The Western Three Seas

There’s a rumour they say,

that lures our husbands away,

from field and pillow,

and babe and willow,

to the Ark, to the Ark, to the Ark,

to the dark, to the dark, to the dark,

to the Idol more fearsome than its God.

—ancient Kûniüric Harvest Song

Mid-Autumn, 20 New Imperial Year (4132, Year-of-the-Tusk), Momemn.

His father sang into the tumbling world—a Metagnostic Cant of Translocation, Kelmomas realized. Sorcery scooped him whole, then cast him as grains across the face of nowhere. Light lanced through the sound of clacking thunder. Crashing, crushing darkness became the miracle of sky.

The Prince Imperial curled about convulsions. His ears roared for misery and cacophony both, but he could still hear his mother keen. Grit scored his cheek. Vomit clotted his hair. His fabled home shrugged and fissured in the distance, collapse dragging down collapse, all the taken-for-granted spaces clamped into ruin, the Andiamine Heights vanishing into mountainous, ashen billow. He spit and heaved, wondered that he had stood within those stone shells but heartbeats before …

Watching Ajokli murder his father.

How? How could this be happening? Theliopa was dead—was that not proof of the Four-Horned Brother’s will? Kelmomas had seen him, concealed in the cracks where no eyes strayed, preparing to strike his father the way he had struck his uncle—to murder the last soul that could sound him, threaten him. Mother would have been his! At long last, truly, utterly his! His!

Not fair. Not fair.

Maithanet dead. Theliopa dead—her bitch skull hammered into a sack! And then when it came to his father—the only one that mattered—the Narindar had crashed from the Unerring Grace—and after glimpsing him no less! That was the mockery, wasn’t it? The Godspit, as the Shigeki slaves called it! Or like dramas written by slaves, where the heroes always perish by their own hand. But why? Why? Why would the Four Horned Brother give such a gift only to take everything away?

Cheat! Deceiver! He had committed everything! Gambled his very—

We’re dead! his inner brother wailed, for he towered above them both, their father, Anasûrimbor Kellhus, the Holy Aspect-Emperor. Abase yourself! Samarmas demanded. Grovel! But all Kelmomas could do was cramp about his nausea, expel the honeyed pork and onion he had last eaten. He glimpsed his mother kneeling on the far side of his father, gagging on her own misery.

They stood upon one of Momemn’s walls, near the Girgallic Gate. The city smoked below, levelled in places, reduced to shattered shells in others. Only ancient Xothei stood untouched, rising through the haze of ruin, a monumental miracle in fields of raked charcoal. Thousands streamed about, over and between the wreckage, crawling like bugs over their losses. Thousands wailed.

Momas is not finished, the Holy Aspect-Emperor called over the roar. The Sea comes.

The eye balked at the sight, the Meneanor rising such that the city whole seemed to drop down. The River Phayus swelled along its length, drowning first the piers and then the banks, pulsing monstrous through the canals, slipping black and shining into the alleyways and streets, clotting into muck with accumulated wreckage, engulfing bug after racing bug …

His nausea subsided in the wake of his wonder.

The boy glanced to his mother, who looked only to the calamity that was his father, her face raised in anguish, cheeks silver beneath black-smeared eyes. It was an image the little Prince-Imperial had seen many times before, either hewn from panels of wood or stone, or daubed in paint across plaster walls, the desolate mother, the soul who had given only to be ransacked. And there was joy even here, he realized. There was beauty.

Some losses could not be fathomed.

"The-Thel-Thel—" she stuttered, clenching bumbling hands together.

Thousands drowned below them, mother and sons pinned beneath the ruin, gagging, jerking, drowning. The water climbed the stages of the massive city, making a great sty of its lower environs. The Sea even broke across the eastern walls, rendering the heap that had been the Andiamine Heights an island.

"She’s dead!" his mother barked, her eyes pinched in anguish. She shook like something ancient and palsied, even as the violence of her grief made her seem young.

The little boy watched from across his father’s booted stance, possessed of a terror greater than any he had ever known. He watched her eyes pop open, fasten upon him in lunatic fury, pin him as certainly as a shipwright’s nail. The lips thinned into a venomous line.

"You."

His father gathered her in the crook of his right arm, then hoisted Kelmomas by the scruff, bundled him under his left. Language summoned light, and reality was passed from tongue to lip—and the little boy was pitched once again, cast headlong into pricking grasses. His gut balled his limbs into a wretched fist. He glimpsed Momemn even farther away, wrecked heights smoking.

His mother wept, shrieked, lamentations that continued leap after wrenching leap.

That night, he stared at the two of them through skeins of grass, Mother obscuring the firelight, rocking and keening as sorrow after incredulous sorrow kicked through her slight frame, Father sitting as an idol full in the twining flame, his hair and plaited beard striate with pulsing gold, his eyes flashing like blind jewels. Though Kelmomas lay with his ears pricked to their merest breath, he found he could not follow what was said, as if his soul had wandered too far from his ears to hear what had been heard.

"Y-you came back …"

"For yo—"

"For your Empire!" she barked.

Why did he still live? Why would they cling to him so, even when they understood the necessity of his destruction? What did it mean, parenthood, bags of meat birthing meat? He was the prodigal Viper the priests prattled about in Temple—Ku’kumammu, from the Tusk! The accursed Babe-with-teeth!

"The Empire has served its purpose. Only the Great Ordeal matters now."

"No … No!"

"Yes, Esmi. I returned for you."

Why not murder him! Or drive him away!

"And … and … Kelmomas …"

What source cares for its consequence? What sane soul weighs doom on the scales of love?

"He is the same as Inrilatas."

"But Maithanet murdered him!"

"Only to save himself from our sons."

"But Kel … K-Kel … he … he …"

"Even I was fooled, Esmi. No one could have known."

Her head hunched into the line of her shoulders, which bounced to the rhythm of her sobbing. His father watched, impassive and golden. And it seemed to the youngest Prince-Imperial that he was truly dead, that he had been cast from a cloud or a star to land upon this very spot, where he adhered shattered. A patch of warmth was all that remained of him. Dwindling warmth.

"He murdered all of them, Father was saying. Samarmas and Sharacinth by his own hand. Inrilatas through Maithanet, and Maithanet through …"

"Through me? Me?"

"Yes."

"No! she screeched. Noooo! Not him! Not him! She swiped at her husband’s face, fingers drawn into claws. Blood welled across his cheek, spilled into his flaxen beard. You! she raged, her eyes wide with horror at what she had done—at what he had permitted her to do. You’re the monster! The accursed deceiver! Akka saw it! Akka knew all along!"

The Holy Aspect-Emperor closed his eyes then opened them.

"You’re right, Esmi. I am a monster … The monster this World needs. Our son—"

"Shut up! Shut up!"

"Our son is a different kind of abomination."

And his mother’s wail rose as something high and lilting against the silence of the night. Something beloved. Something true to the honed edge of hope.

The little boy lay broken, watching, breathing.

Willing his mother to break.

Exhaustion claimed Mother first, leaving only his father sitting upright before the dwindling flame. Anasûrimbor Kellhus, Holy Aspect-Emperor of the Three Seas. He had carried them bodily across more than a dozen horizons since Momemn, two sacks, each bearing their portion of terror, fury, and grief. Now he sat cross-legged, his silk gown taut between his knees, bloodstains mapping random islands and continents. The fire made shining hooks of the creases about his shoulders and elbows. One of the Decapitants lay akimbo across the other, so that its black-paper scrutiny repeated the implacable regard of his father, who stared directly at him, knowing full well the boy only pretended to sleep.

You lay defeated, his father said, his voice neither tender nor harsh, not because you are defeated, but because victory consists in appearing so when necessity demands. You feign a paralysis you think commensurate with your age and the disaster you have suffered …

He’s going to kill us! Flee!

The little boy lay as immobile as he had when spying upon the Narindar. Everything was as eggshells in the callused grip of Anasûrimbor Kellhus, be it cities or souls or lastborn sons. One need not fathom his designs to understand the mortal consequences of obstructing them.

There is no flight from one such as me, his Father said. Twin conflagrations glittered from his eyes, reflecting the fury that should have shook his voice.

Are you going kill me? Kelmomas finally asked. He could speak anything here, he understood, so long as it was to the point.

No.

He lies! Lies!

Why? Kelmomas croaked, a burning about his lips and eyes. Why spare me?

Because it would kill your mother.

Theliopa’s answer—and mistake.

Mother wants me dead.

The Aspect-Emperor shook his head. "I want you dead. Your mother … she wants me dead. I’m the one she blames for what you have done."

See! See! I told you!

Because she knows I truly lov—!

No, his father said, swatting aside his son’s voice without any perceptible increase in volume or intensity. She sees the surface of you, merely, and confuses this for love and innocence.

Rage flexed the Prince-Imperial bodily, hoisted him upright.

"I do love her! I do! I do!"

His father did not so much as blink at the display.

Some souls are broken in such a way as to think themselves whole, he said. The more they are flawed, the more they presume their own perfection.

And I’m so broken?

Though he had not so much as moved, his father had come to seem something titanic, a leviathan coiled into the limbs and heart of a mortal man.

You are the most flawed of my children.

The boy trembled for suppressing his scream.

So what will you do with me? he finally managed to ask.

As your mother wishes.

The boy’s eyes darted to the Empress curled in the grasses to the left of his father, pathetic for the delicacy of her finery … Why? Why would a man such as his father pin his life to such a feeble soul?

Should I be afraid?

The fire sputtered, becoming scarce more than a pile of golden coals. The featureless tracts of the Cepalor gained colourless substance, scarcely more than the corpse of a world beneath the Nail-of-Heaven.

Fear, his dread father said, has never been among the things you control.

Kelmomas lowered himself back to the prick and weave of prairie grasses, his thoughts a clamour, his accursed brother shrieking within, demanding he slip away in the deep of night, live among more bestial, more trustworthy things, an animal among animals, free from the sublime terror of his father, the idiot tyranny of his mother.

Flee! Run-run-run away!

But the Holy Aspect-Emperor watched over all, a gaze that paced horizons, worlds. The numbness eclipsed any the eight-year-old had ever experienced, until he seemed as inert as the chill earth beneath, little more than another mound of clay.

Afterward he would recognize it as despair.

Each leap had delivered them to a more tousled world, from skin-smooth plains to gnarled foothills to rutted mountains. Father deposited them beneath a mountain that, from a distance, had appeared bent about a broken arm, bones jutting from voluminous gowns of granite. The extent of the overhang only became visible after the Cant delivered them into its shadow. It no longer resembled anything in the mossy gloom; it merely loomed, vast heights hanging out and over—shelter from the rain gowning the foothills, as well as a source of nagging worry. One could raise a hundred ziggurats from the bulbous stone affixed above, a thousand. Kelmomas could feel the torsions emanating from the concavity, it seemed, the elemental need to slough and plummet, to fall as a million hammers.

No ground could hang such for long.

Father muttered for a time to his mother, explaining the need to secure provisions and clothes as quickly as possible. The boy watched with fascination, then dismay, as he unbound the Decapitants from his waist and set them upon an oyster-shaped stone. He curled the hair of each into a black nest then laid the desiccated things like sentinels surveying different directions. Mother peppered him with demands as he did so, insisting they go to Sumna to take command of the forces she had mustered there. She did not realize they raced for the Great Ordeal far more than they fled from the Empire. Rescuing them had come at a cost, the boy understood, one Father was now keen to recover as quickly as he could …

Was the Holy Host of Hosts nearing Golgotterath?

The Empress aborted her protest at her husband’s first sorcerous word, and stood watching dismayed as lines of brilliance ravelled about him, then cinched him into blinking absence. Kelmomas fairly trembled for the hatred he glimpsed in her eyes.

Father was right, Samarmas whispered.

The youngest living son of Anasûrimbor Kellhus very nearly wept, such was his relief. Only his hope kept his face blank. He feigned distraction just to be safe, gazing up at the cleft ceilings, peering out across the rain-shrouded foothills.

It was just the two of them … finally. Wonder. Joy. Horror.

How? his mother said, her gaze dead for losses. She sat upon heaped wrack some five paces below him, huddled in the ceremonial absurdity of her station, attire that made her seem a flower in winter. Tears flowed down her famous cheeks.

It was just the two of them … and the Decapitants.

Because … he said, feigning something he could neither express nor fathom. I love you.

He had hoped she would flinch; he had imagined that her gaze would flutter and her hands would fist.

She closed her eyes instead. The long blink of horror confirmed.

She believes! Samarmas cried.

Father had said as much: his life hung from a hair strung about her heart. Were it not for Mother, he would already be dead. The Holy Aspect-Emperor would not squander the Strength on cracked bowls. Only the intransigence of motherhood, the impossibility of his mother hating a soul hatched from her womb, vouchsafed his survival. Even now, her flesh angled to redeem him—he could see it in her!—even as her soul balked at the instincts his presence summoned.

She forbade his execution because she wanted him alive, because in some deranged fashion his life was more precious than her own. Mummy!

The only real mystery was why Father would care … or why he would bother returning to Momemn at all. For love?

"Madness!" his mother bawled, her voice so raw as to burn in his own throat.

The Decapitants lay akimbo to her left, the one husk leaning against the other. The mouth of the nearest gaped like a dreaming fish.

Were they watching? Could they see?

I-I … he began. He could almost feel the faux pang that broke his voice.

What? she nearly screamed. "What?"

I didn’t want to share, he said blankly. I could not abide the portion you had allotted.

And he wondered why it seemed all the same, lies and confession.

I am my father’s son.

Nothing to see. Nothing to hear or taste or smell or even touch. But he could recollect all these things, enough to ache for their absence.

Malowebi could remember.

The Holy Aspect-Emperor shining before him. A whirlwind roaring about them, a ruinous blur that had been Fanayal’s pavilion. His head tipping from his shoulders. His body still standing, spouting blood, voiding bowel. Anasûrimbor Kellhus singing, eyes like blown-upon coals, smoking with meaning as he chanted the terror of the Daimos …

The Daimos!

And though Malowebi had no voice, he screamed, thought crushed into thought, heartbeat fluttering into steam, a thread of anguished heat waving in the embalming cold, bottomless deep. Pursed! He had been pursed in the manner of Zeumi sailors sentenced to execution at sea, and now he drowned, sewn into a sack woven of oblivion, absolute insensitivity.

No limbs to kick.

Void for wind.

Glimpsing shadows of his suffering, merely.

And then, inexplicably, his eyes were open.

There was light in the dark, feeling. Cold pressed his cheek, but his body remained utterly insensate otherwise. He tried to draw breath, to cry out—for elation or for horror he did not know—but he could not feel any tongue, let alone taste any breath …

Something was wrong.

Malowebi saw milky firelight. He could make out heaped and hanging stone, twigs broken into insect-leg tangles … Where were his limbs? For that matter, where was his breathing?

His skin?

Something disastrous had happened!

Sparks twirled in skirts of smoke climbing to vanish against unfamiliar constellations. He heard voices—a man and a woman arguing some lament. The cherubic face of a young Norsirai boy bobbed into existence from the nocturnal verge …

Bearing a stick.

To be desolate is to be of a piece with things inanimate, to belong in a manner the joyful can never know. The little boy could feel the sum of the World in his embrace, that endless, rolling ache. His mother and father bickered about firelight several paces distant. He breathed like other little boys he had heard sleeping, the rhythm of rocks cooling in evening shadow. No matter how his thoughts raced, his heart beat slowly, like a thing made of mud.

And even still, his father said, He is not asleep.

His mother made a noise.

I care nothing for what he is.

Then let me do what needs to be done.

Mother hesitated. No …

"The boy needs to be destroyed, Esmi."

Destroyed. You make him sound like a sick dog. You do tha—

"I do that because he is not a little boy."

No, she said, her assurance absolute for exhaustion. "You do that to change the words from those belonging to a son to those belonging to an animal."

Father said nothing. A dead peashrub branch jutted from the intervening ground, forks dividing the orange image of his father not so much into pieces as possibilities. Kelmomas had marvelled at the Narindar, envied him his Unerring Grace, all the while forgetting the Grace belonging to his father, the unconquerable Anasûrimbor Kellhus I. He was the Shortest Path, a wave of inevitability flapped through the fabric of blind fortune. Not even the Gods could touch him! Not Ajokli, the wicked Four-Horned Brother. Not even Earth-cracking Momas!

Father had survived them …

But why even care what I say? Mother was saying. If he’s so dangerous, why not simply grab him and snap his neck?

His brother could not stop keening, Mummeee! Mummeee!

Father was implacable. Why come back to save you?

She held two fingers to her lips and mimed spitting to her side: a gesture she had learned from the dockmen in Sumna, Kelmomas knew.

You came to save your accursed Empire!

"And yet, here I am with you … fleeing the Empire."

Her glare faltered, but only for an instant. "Because you know there’s no holding it, not after Momas has struck down Momemn—his very namesake!—trying to kill you and yours. Empire! Pfah! Do you know how much blood runs in the streets, Kellhus? The Three Seas burns! Your Judges! Your Princes and your Believer-Kings! The mob feasts upon them all!"

Then mourn them if you must, Esmi. The Empire was but a ladder, a way to reach Golgotterath. It collapses in all incarnations of the Thousandfold Thought.

The little boy did not need to see his mother’s look, so loud was the silence.

And that’s … that’s why you … left it with me? Because it was doomed?

"Sin is real, Esmi. Damnation is real. I know because I have seen it. I bear those two grisly trophies to overawe, certainly, but to serve as a constant reminder as well. Knowledge is responsibility, and ignorance—though you and so many others abhor it—truly is innocence."

Mother glared in disbelief. "So you deceive me, keep me ignorant, to save me from sin?"

You … and all mankind.

The little boy thought of his father bearing the weight of every malicious act committed in his name, shuddered for the thought of damnations piled upon damnations.

Something insane rolled through the Blessed Empress’s look.

"The weight of sin is found in premeditation, Esmi, in the wilful use of others as tools. His gaze clicked to the flames. I have made this World my tool."

To destroy Golgotterath, she said, as if naming the solitary point of agreement.

Yes, her divine husband replied.

"Then why are you here? Why leave your precious Great Ordeal?"

The little boy gasped for the sheer beauty of it … the effortlessness of his mastery.

To save you.

Her ferocity dissolved, only to be reborn as something more violent and shrill. "Lies! Another to add to your pestilent heap—tall enough to shame Ajokli!"

Father looked from the fire to her, his gaze both forthright and yielding, always promising forgiveness, space for the heart to recover. And this, he said, is why you enlisted the Narindar to kill me?

The little boy watched the Blessed Empress catch her breath at the fact of the question, then choke for the fact of the answer. Her eyes grew oily with grief. Her entire body seemed to wobble. The firelight painted her anguish in filaments, pulsing orange and crimson and rose shadow, beautiful as all things fundamental.

Why, Kellhus? she called across the interval between them. Why … persist … Her eyes had grown wide as her voice had grown small. Why … forgive?

I know not, Kellhus said, shifting his position. You are my only darkness, wife. He wrapped her within greater arms, pulled her into the warm blanket of his embrace.

The only place I can hide.

Kelmomas clung to the cold beneath, the World rolling beneath the Void, willing his flesh to become earth, his bones to become twig and bramble, his eyes wet stones. His brother shrieked and wailed, knowing his mother could deny his father nothing, and his father wanted them dead.

CHAPTER

TWO

Ishterebinth

One topples from events mighty and great

as from clouds and not mountains.

—TSILARCUS, The Sumptitudes

Early Autumn, 20 New Imperial Year (4132, Year-of-the-Tusk), Ishterebinth.

"The Anasûrimbor is almost certainly your Saviour …"

There was serenity in confusion when it was profound, a peace that comes from fathoming so few distinctions as to grasp contradictory things as one. Sorweel was a Man. He was a prince, and a Believer-King. He was an orphan. He was the instrument of Yatwer, the Dread Mother of Birth. He was a Son of Sakarpus, scarcely a man. He was Immiriccas, great among the Injori Ishroi, older than the ages.

He was stretched between life and damnation.

He was in love.

He lay panting as the world resolved into sensible form. The Weeping Mountain loomed, but more as a papyrus cutout than anything substantial. His face pricked for being naked, bald. Clots of Emwama raced through fog, frantic, running as fast as their stunted frames would allow. Memories came flooding back, images indistinguishable from panic. Descending through screeching halls. Oinaral dying in the Holy Deep. The Amiolas—

Sorweel clawed his cheeks, fingers hooked in dimpled skin. He was free! Free of the accursed thing!

And halved.

He remembered the swine-larded Haul, the descent down the Ingressus. He remembered Oinaral’s father, Oirûnas, the monstrous Lord of the Watch.

He remembered Serwa bound and gagged, reaching out, even as his eyes found her in the mayhem, standing wrapped in a bolt of black that lay like paint across her skin—Injori silk. Wind thrashed the gold from her hair. Ishterebinth climbed beyond her, obstructing all creation with recombinant imagery and ruin. Smoke issued from points across its immensity.

Sorweel made to call out, only to be choked silent by misapprehension. Did she know? Had the Ghouls told her of the Dread Mother? Did she know what he was?

What he was supposed to do?

With consciousness comes place. They lay upon the Cirrû-nol, he realized, the great mall before Ishterebinth’s shattered gates. He pressed himself from the stone, drew up one knee.

Wha-what happens? he croaked over the uproar.

She turned to him as if jolted from some disturbing reverie. Her left eye was a violet grin for swelling, but her right fixed him with characteristic clarity. His breath caught in joyous certainty that she knew as little of his part in what had happened as he knew of hers.

Even then, he began rehearsing his lies.

The Last Mansion dies, she called. The Intact war one against the other.

"Good!" a voice barked from behind Sorweel. The young Believer-King turned on a start, saw Moënghus sitting upon debris as though upon a latrine, slouched, great arms slung across his knees, black-mane obscuring his face. He, like his sister, was clothed only in a bolt of silk, black like hers, only embroidered with a crimson horse motif, and bound into a kilt about his waist. Blood dribbled from the fingers of his right hand.

"Good? Serwa asked. What could be good about such a thing?"

The Prince-Imperial did not look up. The wailing of the Emwama sounded like bleating sheep.

"I heard you, Sister …"

Blood continued to bead and drip from his fingertips.

"Between my screams … I heard you … sing …"

"Pain too has its sorcery," the Ghoul-most-hated had said.

They climbed the footings of the Weeping Mountain, as much fleeing those who fled the Soggomantic Gate as anything. Serwa led them into the graven heights, following the joints that welded the eastward ramparts to the greater bulk of Ishterebinth. The ways were guttered with shattered masonry, the slough from the faces and forms stamping the heights above. Smoke spewed from the countless shafts the Ghouls used to ventilate their obscene Mansion, streamers of grey and black, even white gilled with odious yellow. All of them had suffered, but Moënghus need only glance to know that his had been the greatest trial. They did not stumble and sway as he did, one thousand muscles warring over one hundred bones, a slouching motley of passions, grimacing about sobs, shuddering about breaths that stabbed for the ruin that inhaled them. They moved as singular souls possessing but one lever for their actions. They looked to the horizon, while he could only boggle at his naked feet. They had been tested, and their temper had rung true.

He had been sacrificed.

Mocked. Tortured. Possessed. Raped.

And now this … weeping?

No matter how far the High Floor dwindled behind and beneath them, the air nipped and nauseated for corruption. All of them blinked, periodically pestled their eyes with their thumbs for the sting. But only he sobbed. Only he shook for terrors buried a league below.

Who? Who was this little black-haired boy? Who was this child who drew the smirking eye of gossips wherever he pattered? Imperial Bastard, they had called him, a name he had even dared relish, for a time. Wear a thing long enough, and you will think it something earned.

Like the name Anasûrimbor.

The Weeping Mountain reeled about him, a vertical landscape of ghouls chiselled enormous and small, their poses unnatural, dead-eyed. Serwa found him huddling between great thighs of granite, somehow crouched,