Death, in the strict sense, cannot be defined, for whatever predicate we, the living, attribute to it necessarily belongs to Life. This means that Death, as a category, behaves in a manner indistinguishable from the Infinite, and from G.o.d.

-AJENCIS, THE THIRD a.n.a.lYTIC OF MEN

One cannot a.s.sume the truth of what one declares without presuming the falsity of all incongruous declarations. Since all men a.s.sume the truth of their declarations, this presumption becomes at best ironic and at worst outrageous. Given the infinity of possible claims, who could be so vain as to think their dismal claims true?

The tragedy, of course, is that we cannot but make declarations.

So it seems we must speak as G.o.ds to converse as Men.

-HATATIAN, EXHORTATIONS

Early Spring, 4112 Year-of-the-Tusk, Amoteu

Incu-Holoinas, the Nonmen had called it. The Ark-of-the-Skies.

After his ancient victory over the Inchoroi, Nil'giccas had ordered a census of the vessel, the results of which were recorded in the Isuphiryas, Isuphiryas, the great annal of the Nonmen. Three thousand cubits in length, over two thousand of which were buried with the prow in the mangled depths. Five hundred in width. Three hundred in depth ... the great annal of the Nonmen. Three thousand cubits in length, over two thousand of which were buried with the prow in the mangled depths. Five hundred in width. Three hundred in depth ...

It was a many-chambered mountain, wrought in a gold-gleaming metal that could not be scored, let alone broken. A city rolled into the warped planes of some misbegotten fish. A ruin that the world could not stomach, that the ages could not digest.

And, as Seswatha and Nau-Cayuti discovered, a great, gilded crypt.

They wandered its abandoned bowels, their steps creaking across the planks of rotted gopher wood that had been used to level the canted walls. Pa.s.sage after winding pa.s.sage, chamber after yawning chamber, some as wide as canyons. And everywhere they turned, they found bones-innumerable bones. Most were little more than chalk. They crumbled underfoot, hazing the air about their ankles with dust. The bones of Men or Nonmen, the remains of ancient warriors perhaps, or captives left to starve in the absolute dark. The fused bones of Bashrag, thick as a prophet's staff and grafted together in threes. The bones of Sranc, scattered like those of fish about an abandoned camp. And others they found impossible to identify, bones with singular shapes, some as small as earrings, others as long as a skiffs mast. They gleamed like oiled bronze, and could not be broken, despite the legendary strength of Nau-Cayuti's arms.

Never had Seswatha suffered such a horror, diffuse enough to ignore moment by moment, but possessing a tidal profundity, as though all that he cherished lay exposed, not just to harm, but to some horrifically contrary truth truth. Intellectually he understood the why and the wherefore, even as his viscera quailed. They walked the pits of Min-Uroikas, a place where the Inchoroi, in their wickedness, had gnawed at boundaries between the world and the Outside for thousands of years. And now the howl of their d.a.m.nation lay near ... very near.

This was a topos, a place where hard lines of reality had become shading. They could hear it in the cavernous echoes. Gibbering screams in the sc.r.a.pe of their steps. Groaning mult.i.tudes in the rattle of their coughs. Inhuman roaring in the ring of their voices. And they could see it, as though images had been st.i.tched to their periphery. Many-jawed faces, snapping out of the black. Weeping children ... Achamian lost count of the times he saw Nau-Cayuti abruptly whirl, trying to catch apparitions in the certainty of direct sight.

Where the going was not treacherous, Achamian staggered in Nau-Cayuti's wake, staring thoughtlessly at what little the light of his hooded lantern revealed. The husk of detritus, hanging in place like discarded skin. The walls of gold, their uterine curves skewed to the pitch of the Ark's final descent. The miniature panels of script stamped, it seemed, across every interior surface. Even their reflections, stretched grotesque across the surrounding walls and haloed with an unnatural nimbus of black.

Exhausted to the point of shambling steps and shaking hands, they finally paused, hoping to steal some furtive sleep. Achamian sat huddled in the crotch between bulkheads, at once drowsing and wringing his tight-clutched limbs in horror. He found himself revisiting every footstep, every gaping blackness, every mouldering pa.s.sage, wondering where his hope had at last guttered out. How could they ever escape such a place? Even if they found what he searched for ...

He could feel them, piling labyrinthine into the distances above and below him, the consuming hollows. It seemed h.e.l.l itself roared inaudible about them.

This place.

"Bones," Nau-Cayuti spat between chattering teeth. "They had to be bones!"

Achamian cringed at the sound of his voice, looked to his forlorn shadow. The Prince hugged himself the same as he, as though shielding nakedness from blowing ice.

"There are some," Achamian whispered, "who argue that the entire Ark is a thing of bone, that vein and skin once pulsed across these walls."

"You mean the Ark once lived?"

Achamian nodded, even as he swallowed for dread. "The Inchoroi called themselves Children of the Ark. The most ancient Nonmen lays refer to them as the Orphans."

"So this thing ... this place ... mothered them?"

Seswatha smiled. "Or fathered ... The fact is, we haven't the words for such things. Even if we could pierce the shroud of millennia, I fear this place would remain beyond our understanding."

"But I understand full well," the young Prince said. "You're saying that Golgotterath is a dead is a dead womb womb."

Achamian stared at him, warred with the shame that threatened to break his gaze like lead upon gla.s.s.

"I suppose I am."

Nau-Cayuti peered through the surrounding gloom. "Obscenity," he muttered. "Obscenity. Why, Seswatha? Why would they bring war against us?"

"To close the world," seemed all he could muster.

To seal it shut.

The young man leapt forward, seized him about the shoulders. "She lives!" he hissed, his eyes bright with despair and suspicion. "You told me ... You promised!"

"She lives," Achamian lied. He even held the young man's cheek and smiled.

I've doomed us.

"Come," the High King's son said, standing tall in the dark. "I fear the dreams sleep might bring." Expressionless, he resumed picking his way through the black.

After a breath that seemed more ice than air, Seswatha stumbled after him, Nau-Cayuti, heir to Tryse, the greatest light of the dynasty that called itself Anasurimbor.

The greatest light of Men.

Kellhus reached ...

Out from the warmth of skin pressed in fabric, from the memory of arcane song ...

I have walked, Father, crossed the very world.

Ignoring the lacquered furniture, he sat cross-legged on the verandah floor, feeling the exhalation of stuffy rooms war with the cold air descending from the void of night. With sightless eyes he stared across the garden, which was both shadowy and haphazard, terraced and overgrown. The flower beds thronged with devil's claw and nettle. The cherry trees stood in thickets, the last of their delinquent blossoms hanging brown in the cool dew. There was the scent of caustic in the gutters where the slaves had poured wine that had gone to vinegar. There was the sharp musk of feral cats.

He reached ...

Through masonry and burnt brick, over haggard slopes, across the Shairizor Plains ...

I have followed the Shortest Path.

He saw not ceilings but distributions of hanging weights. He saw not walls but fears, a pageant of real and imagined enemies. He saw not a villa but a long-dead Imperial favour, the relic of a moribund race. Everywhere he turned, he apprehended the pillars among the pilasters, the ground beneath the scuffed floors ...

Everywhere he looked, he saw what came before.

Soon, Father. Soon I will darken your door.

Without warning, the drafts became humid with the scent of jasmine and feminine l.u.s.t. He heard bare feet-her bare feet-pad over marble. The bruise of sorcery was plain, almost rank, but he didn't turn to acknowledge her. He remained perfectly still, even when her shadow fell across his back. bare feet-pad over marble. The bruise of sorcery was plain, almost rank, but he didn't turn to acknowledge her. He remained perfectly still, even when her shadow fell across his back.

"Tell me," she said in ancient Kuniuric, both fluid and precise, "what are the Dunyain?"

Kellhus bent his thought backward, yoked the legion that was his soul. Likelihood chased likelihood, some to fruition, others to extinction. Esmenet, entwined in boiling light. Esmenet bleeding, broken at his feet. Words, winding and forking, calling out apocalypse and salvation. Of all his encounters since leaving Ishual, none demanded more ... exact.i.tude.

The Consult had come.

"We are Men," he replied. "Like other Men."

After looming over him for an instant, she turned and sashayed-quite naked-along the portico.

"I," she said as she reclined upon a black bamboo settee, "do not believe you."

In his periphery he saw her palm her b.r.e.a.s.t.s, press fingers down the slope of her belly. Her hands clawed her inner thighs. She drew up a knee, then with hooked fingers plumbed the depths of her s.e.x. She cooed in pleasure, as though tasting a rumoured delicacy for the first time. Then, smiling, she withdrew two glistening fingers, raised them to the hollow of her mouth.

She swallowed them.

"Your seed," she murmured, "is bitter ..."

It means to provoke me.

He turned to her, drew her into the cauldron of his attention. Fluttering pulse. Shallow breath. Beads of sweat breaking into threads. He could smell her skin tingle in the night air, the residue of salt. He could even see the swelling of her b.r.e.a.s.t.s, the heat of her womb. But her thoughts ... It was as though the strings between her face and soul had been severed and refastened to something both sleek and alien.

Something not human.

Kellhus smiled as a father might when trying to teach a gentle lesson to an imperious child. "You cannot kill me," he said. "I'm beyond you."

She smirked. "How could you say this? You know nothing of me or my kind."

Though the roots of her tone and expression escaped him, the incipient sneer was unmistakable. It despised condescension.

It was proud.

She laughed. "Did you think Achamian's stories could prepare you? What the Mandate dream is but a sliver sliver of what I've lived-of what I've of what I've lived-of what I've seen seen. I've walked in the No-G.o.d's shadow. I've looked across the void and blotted your world by holding a fingertip before it ... No, you know nothing of me or my kind."

Pupils dilated. Nipples erect. An imperceptible flush about her neck and chest. Fingers curling the downy hair of her s.e.x. Kellhus thought of the Sranc and their rutting frenzy for blood, of Sarcellus hardening to the promise of violence that night about the Galeoth fire ...

So similar.

They were the template of their creations, he realized. They had implanted their own carnal longings, made their own appet.i.te the instrument of their domination.

"So what are you, then?" Kellhus asked. "What are the Inchoroi?"

"We," she cooed, "are a race of lovers."

The expected answer. Recollections cycled through his soul, not explicit and singular, but implicit and innumerable. Everything Achamian had said regarding these abominations ... He slackened his face in the simulacrum of profound sorrow. "And for this you are d.a.m.ned."

Flaring nostrils. A faint quickening of the pulse.

"We were born for d.a.m.nation's sake," she said with deceptive calm. "Our very nature is our transgression. Look at this exquisite body. The heights of her bosom. The temple of her s.e.x. I climb and I enter because I must." She fingered her pubis as she spoke, clutched tight her left breast. "And for this?" she gasped. "For this I am to heave and scream in lakes of fire? Because of boundaries of skin?"

Kellhus knew not the length or beam of its inhuman intelligence, but he knew it counted grievances. All souls, almost out of necessity, armed themselves with arguments and accusations of misunderstanding. A circle, after all, could have only one centre.

"Denial is the way," Kellhus said. "Boundaries are written into the order of things."

She matched his gaze in a way Esmenet never could, stared as though he were something pathetic and execrable. It sees what I'm trying to do It sees what I'm trying to do.

"But you," she said with breathless sarcasm, "you could rewrite the scripture of my doom, hmm, Prophet?" She barked with laughter.

"There is no absolution for your kind."

She had raised her hips to the liquid flutter of her fingers. "Oh, but there isssss ..."

"So you would destroy the world?"

She shuddered, her body afire with arousal. She lowered her b.u.t.tocks, crossed her legs about her fingers. "To save my soul, hmmm? So long as there are Men, there are crimes. So long as there are crimes, I am d.a.m.ned. Tell me, Dunyain, what track would you follow? What would you do to save your save your soul?" soul?"

Track, it had said ... The Scylvendi.

I should have killed him.

She grinned at his silence. "You already know, dont you? I can feel the memory of you, the sweet ache of having hung from your bronze hook. Rutting is merely the way of things. Hunger. Appet.i.te. Men gild. Men clothe. Men dance their blind pantomimes ... But it all comes to love love in the end." in the end."

She abruptly stood and strolled toward him. Her hands wandered over the patterns the settee had pressed into her skin.

"Love is the Way ... And yet these little demons you call G.o.ds decree otherwise? Dole out their rewards in proportion to our suffering suffering? No." She paused before him, her slight form magnificent in the play of gloom and light. "I would save my soul."

She reached out to trace his lips with a shining fingertip. Esmenet, burning for congress. For all his breeding, all his conditioning, Kellhus could feel the ancient instinct rise ... What kind of game? What kind of game?

He caught her wrist.

"She doesn't love you," she said, tugging her wrist free. "Not truly."

The words jarred-but why? What was this darkness?

Pain?

"She worships," Kellhus found himself replying, "and has yet to understand the difference."