The Unholy Consult by R. Scott Bakker
The speaker looked as if someone had skinned him in tempestuous seas, so webbed was he with the residue of near-fatal burns. His eyes glared from sockets lidless for whatever fiery maelstrom he had endured. Unable to blink, he pinched them between brow and cheek every few heartbeats, a convulsive flexion, unsettling for its speed.
“Since Dagliash,” the Anasûrimbor said. “But I have suspected this eventuality all along. I assumed Ishuäl would be found once my existence became known. I knew the Consult would assault it with due fury, and that our Garden would succumb, eventually …”
Question after frantic question lurched from a fog of Malowebi’s misapprehension. Who were these Men? How had they come to rule—rule!—the Ark?
And more horrifying still, why did the Anasûrimbor know them?
“How long did it take to purge the Thousand Thousand Halls?” the Aspect-Emperor asked.
“One thousand six-hundred and eleven days,” the second figure replied. He alone appeared unscarred and intact, though his attitude was so remote as to be cruel.
“We could not cope with the Erratics,” the third added. This one bore two great scars on his head: the first a vaginal pit in lieu of his right eye; and the second more subtle, a slash the length of a hand-scythe, rimming the perimeter of his head from crown to throat, as if someone had abandoned an attempt to remove his face.
“That is,” the Aspect-Emperor said, “until they took you captive.”
And it came to Malowebi on a bolt of numbing terror: Dûnyain.
These Men were Dûnyain …
The Thought-dancers described by Drusas Achamian in his heretical treatise.
“I always knew that some of you would be captured,” the Anasûrimbor explained, “that you would begin, as I began, by pandering to the conceits of your decrepit masters …”
Did that not mean they stood before five powers equal to Anasûrimbor Kellhus?
“I always knew that you would master your captivity, the way Dûnyain master all circumstances …”
Curse Likaro! Curse him and his conniving deceit!
“And very soon, conquer the Unholy Consult from within.”
“What do you eat?” Kayûtas asked. “Medicine?”
“Nil’giccas,” Serwa said without sparing him a glance. The powder was as chalk on her tongue, tasted of char and ash, no more. Even still, a tingling suffused her almost immediately …
It occurred to her that she would have her audience with the legendary Nonman King after all.
“What do you intend?” her brother pressed.
She tossed the pouch to the wary Exalt-General.
“To save our Father,” she said, finally matching his gaze. “Our World, Podi.”
In many respects, Serwa was much the same as her sister Theliopa, differing more in proportion than kind. If her intellect had never burned as bright, then neither had her passions entirely guttered. She had always been more their mother’s daughter. Where Thelli could only grasp the intricacies of human concourse in abstract outline, Serwa could feel the visceral tug of things like apprehension and regret …
Love and duty.
“Sister, no. I forbid it.”
As could Kayûtas.
They had always regarded each other as twins, even when their difference in age had yawned between them. Each had always known that the other dwelt in the same wan twilight … the point where caring, hurting, almost mattered.
“Who are you to gauge the compass of my power?” she asked.
His eyes clicked to her weeping skin, the lament and anguish of her nakedness.
“Serwa …”
“I know how to set aside bodily pain.”
Kayûtas … Kayû. He looked so much like Father, and yet he was so much less. It was the curse of the Anasûrimbor, to dwell perpetually overshadowed in one another’s eyes.
“Nevertheless, I forbid it.”
She graced him with a sad smile.
“You know better.”
Saccarees was yelling, berating those who gawked at the vision of the Exalt-Magus rather than keeping a vigilant eye on the Obmaw.
“Any fool can see that you’re dying, Sister.”
“Then what does it matter?”
She could feel him now, Nil’giccas, his ancient vitality kindling her marrow, palpating her tissues.
“Saccarees,” Kayûtas said to the scorched Grandmaster. “You will apprehend the Exalt-Magus should she attempt to enter the Intrinsic Ga—”
“What are you doing?” she cried. “Why do you think they have hidden a Wracu so great as Skuthula here?”
“To guard the Intrinsic Gate,” he replied scowling.
“But against whom?” she asked. “Certainly not Father.”
It seemed their souls merged on the hard look that followed. The Prince-Imperial looked down, the resignation in his eyes as profound as any grief she had witnessed this accursed day. It was always only a matter of time with the two of them, the sharing of unwanted insight.
Apperens Saccarees, however, was a different matter.
“What are you saying?”
For all his gifts, he was no Anasûrimbor.
“The Consult …” she explained. “They know the Great Ordeal stands or falls with its Holy Aspect-Emperor.”
“So this is a ploy?” he asked, wincing for the way his burns punished his frown. “They mean to hold us at bay, while … while …”
The man blanched.
Saccarees, she realized, had never honestly countenanced the possibility his cherished Lord-and-Prophet could fail. In his eyes, they did not so much stand stark upon the abyss as swaddled in the bleeding ink of scripture. Despite all his metaphysical erudition, despite all the lunatic tribulations he had endured, he was but another Believer in the end, committed unto death, assured unto idiocy …
Unlike her brother.
“Here …” Kayûtas said, drawing a broadsword—an ensorcelled broadsword—from his girdle and extending the pommel. It was Cûnuroi, pre-Tutelage—older than Ûmerau given the archaic triangularity of the blade and the absence of any hilt. She took it from him, testing the balance and heft while studying the intricacies of its Mark. She glanced back at her brother in wonder: there was no mistaking the craft of the Artisan, Emilidis, the Siqu Father of the Mihtrûlic, the School of Contrivers.
“Isiramûlis …” she murmured, reading the spidery Gilcûnya runes etched across the mirrored surface.
“A Cindersword,” Saccarees said, nodding.
She swept it high overhead, took satisfaction in the razor whisk.
“Truth shines,” Kayûtas said, commending her to whatever future remained with a lingering look.
She blinked at him in the old way, the way she would when making sport of some all-too-human combination of irony and folly. He merely nodded. Clasping the haft of Isiramûlis tight, she turned to the blasted orifice of the Obmaw, stalked the causeway. What cloth of skin she yet possessed tingled for the cool. Tears beaded across the deeper nakedness of her burns. The dead Nonman King flowered through her veins.
Deep in the ravaged shell of the High Cwol, the Sons of Men roared.
Bars of Heaven fixed the wicked stronghold with pillars of scalding white, snatching details from the swamping black. The High Horn towered mountainous, clearly visible for being skinned in a dozen brilliant reflections, the Bars bent to its vast and unnatural frame, skewed gibbous across its impossible bulk. The light glared outward, over the loathsome tracts, salvaging nightmare glimpses from the edges of steaming obscurity, Sranc shoaling, their alabaster skin shocking the gloom, their beauty horrid for the bestial throng, clans stamping upon invisible earth, alternately straining toad-forward or brought about by some pallid tide, howling lust and malice. Here and there seizures marred the ponderous gyre, gibbering multitudes that cohered against the grain of the greater Horde, shattering the spiral tow into clouds, regions that sizzled with furious, white-skinned gesticulation …
Golgotterath became as a
And they were not alone: different lights wandered the darkling plain.
The Saik Schoolmen were the first to glimpse them through the inky murk. They were obscure at first, wavering and delicate, ponderous and smeared, bruising more than illuminating the Shroud’s bowel, like the glower of candles through oiled linen. Those Saik within the vast throat of the Canted Horn saw nothing, such was the kaleidoscopic brilliance of their Dragonheads reflected across the reefs of gold that soared about them. Those stationed in the shadow of the hulk’s exterior, however, saw them clearly, exhalations of luminance moving in slow and random concert, like lightning buried in a faraway storm front …
But only for a time.
Velvet silence—though all the World spit and screamed about the Horn.
“We didn’t conquer the Consult …” the one-eyed figure said.
“We subsumed,” the fourth of the figures continued on a voice like bundled reeds. He also possessed a myriad of scars, scars upon scars actually, but was most distinctive for the iron brackets scaffolding his head and shoulders.
“Shauriatis alone raised arms against us,” the fifth figure explained. Like his neighbour, countless scars puckered his visible skin, only smaller and more numerous, as if he had taken many more far less dramatic risks. But something grievous had happened, for nearly two thirds of his lower lip had been sheered away, revealing shining gum and teeth beneath the canopy of his upper lip.
“So Shauriatis alone was undone.”
“The others,” the unscathed one said, “merely found our Cause irresistible …”
“As will you,” the burnt one declared.
Dûnyain ruled Golgotterath—Dûnyain!
“But this is precisely the issue to be decided,” the Anasûrimbor replied. “One of us possesses the Greater Cause. Consult or Ordeal, one of us stands upon ground belonging to the other. And yet we both proceed on the presumption that we are that ground’s sole possessors.”
Though Malowebi scarcely understood the significance of what was being said, he understood enough to know that a genuine battle was being waged, not a metaphoric one.
“But the simple fact remains,” the unscathed Dûnyain said, “that we have scrutinized the Ark.”
“And you have not,” the burnt one concluded.
Where words were almost always dross among Men—the “convoluted costumes of avarice,” as Memgowa called them—here, among Dûnyain, they possessed the heft and hardness of iron tools. Bastions could be raised upon one breath and demolished on another for all parties.
There was something miraculous in that … and alarming.
“I concede as much,” the Anasûrimbor said—without the least reluctance.
The unscathed Dûnyain raised an arm—a gesture that startled for the strict immobility that preceded it—beckoned to the spaces beyond and behind the Aspect-Emperor. “Aurax!” he called. “Come!”
The Anasûrimbor turned from the waist—to assure nothing untoward had been signalled, Malowebi supposed. The Mbimayu sorcerer’s field of view hitched then rolled to an angle orthogonal to his bearer, so that when the man turned back to the Mutilated, Malowebi found himself facing the golden fin rising from the black floor—looking at his own image among the gold-tinted reflections.
“The Inchoroi have outlived their origins,” the one-eyed monk said.
There he was … Staring out from burlap skin, strung from hair like ink from Anasûrimbor Kellhus’s girdle …
Curse him! Curse Likaro! May all his wives become lepers!
“Where we raised walls against our history,” the wire-headed Dûnyain continued. “They rendered theirs irrelevant.”
It throttled the Iswazi mage, staring at what he had become, strangled with vertigo, the intimation of void where his throat and viscera should be. Curse him! Curse his conniving hide! He tore his gaze from the Decapitant, looked into the black and golden world as reflected across gold—the very glint of avarice multiplied into something cloying and vile. The Aspect-Emperor stood erect, his stance wide, his leonine head watery for imperfections in the metal, the long pommel of Enshoiya a slash of ink above his left shoulder, the immaculate white of his vestments refracted into shades of voluminous yellow. The Mutilated receded into the depths of the room before the Anasûrimbor, each more diminutive than the previous.
“Tell him, Aurax.”
The Inchoroi stood upon a dimple in the reflection and so looked both wretched and absurd, its torso hooked into a blade of grass, its claws drawn like melted wax.
“Wheeere?” it rasped upon a seditious moan. “Where is my brotheeeer?”
The melted image advanced a step, and a semblance of Aurang emerged from crazed distortion.
“Tossed upon the Horde,” the Anasûrimbor said.
The thing wheeled to the burnt figure. “Yoooou!” it shrieked. “You gave me your oath!”
But the thing’s defiance had crumbled into mewling servility even before the Dûnyain turned to regard it. It scuttled back into its dimple, its image bifurcating and balling into something crustacean.
Thought-dancers! Forming a new Consult!
One that had Inchoroi grovelling for terror …
“What you see,” the teeth-baring Dûnyain slurred, “is the fruit of the Tekne. The very structure of its flesh bears the imprint of intellect.”
“They were a warrior-caste,” the burnt one continued, “bred to lust and to hunger for all forms of trespass, to heap such damnation upon themselves that the merest glimpse of the Inverse Fire would reignite their ardour.”
What good did cursing Likaro do?
“So they are themselves a kind of Sranc?” the Anasûrimbor asked.
But what else was there?
“Their mission,” the caged Dûnyain replied, “has likewise been branded into them.”
Better hatred than despair!
“Irrevocable belief has been branded into them,” his one-eyed brother added. “An Inverted Faith, one meant to hoard damnation as a goad to salvation.”
Even though it dwarfed the images of the Mutilated, the Aspect-Emperor’s reflection was somehow the least clear. It was as if globules of pitch lay suspended within the fin of Inchoroi gold, compressing elements of the man’s image.
“And how,” the Anasûrimbor asked, “had their ancient progenitors earned their collective damnation?”
“The Fathers of the Inchoroi?” the teeth-baring Dûnyain asked. “Surely you’ve already grasped the answer …”
“I fear I have not.”
The Mutilated paused to count one another’s eyes.
“For straying so near the Absolute,” the burnt one answered.
Absolute?
“I see,” the golden reflection of the Aspect-Emperor said.
Serwa began sprinting up the ragged ramp of the causeway, felt her burnt skin crack into island archipelagos, and though she could count out each blistered atoll, she begrudged them not, for she was as the wind, too fleet to be grappled to earth by pain. Her agony shambled after, incentive to run ever faster into the cobwebs her apprehension had spun before her. She saw her myriad shadows shrinking into a fluttering thicket before her, until absorbed into her alone: a slender girl conjugating blackness. She saw the savaged Obmaw gaping, then engulfing, battered black stone hanging and jutting from the flying golden veneer. She breathed a reek so noxious as to kick one cough from her—then two.
She was in the Ark.
She slowed in wonder, hesitated. She could barely hear the Horde.
Had she managed to slip through undetected?
A monstrous crocodilian face grinned in the light of its own vomit …
She threw her arms up, crouched to one knee.
Fire burst, flung through with saliva like naptha or exploding phosphor. It slipped as water from oilcloth about her ravaged skin and away, heat like a childhood memory, a terror from long ago. She leapt backward and to her right, kicking in a somersault that carrie
An inner earth of corpses.
Residual wicks of flame danced for small circles of admiring offal. A single grey lane emanated from the breached Intrinsic Gate. Otherwise, complete blackness inhaled all space, leaving only time and memory …
The only two things a child of Anasûrimbor Kellhus required.
A vast atrium lay beyond the Obmaw, a shaft some hundred paces across, enclosed by a tremendous scaffold of columns bearing floors stacked upon floors, all of them pitched like the deck of a foundering pleasure barge. Perhaps the place had been glorious once, some kind of iridescent testament; it was little more than rubbish and hovels strung about a missing mountain now. Midden and debris had levelled the floor she shared with Skuthula, but all else was draped, including endless batteries of rotted cloth and hide—hammocks—hanging from the pitched ceilings.
The Wracû coiled near the atrium’s vacant heart. At least a dozen companies of Ursranc palatials, Inversi, had assembled across the skewed heights and about the outskirts of the corrupt ground … Far more than she had hoped.
Eighty-eight Trinkets remained.
Absolute …
Ajencis had used the term to refer to the collapse of desire and object, Thought and Being.
Memgowa held that it was nothing other than Death, the reduction of being to the plurality of beings—the becoming thing of existence. But Malowebi had no clue what a Dûnyain meant by the term, aside that it was some kind of prize, the end shared by the Mutilated and the Anasûrimbor alike …
“The progenitors called it the Illumination,” the unscathed Dûnyain said, reflected in gilded miniature. “The age that saw the Tekne become their faith, the idol they raised above all others. They turned their back on their old Gods, their old temples, and raised new ones, great houses dedicated to unravelling the wellsprings of existence. Cause became their one and only God.”