why you will never understand?'
'You are our father,' he had sobbed. 'And we are your headstrong sons.'
Zaudunyani.
The chamber was vacant. Even still, Proyas fell to his knees and lowered his face to the simple reed mats. He suffered a pang of shame, realizing that his own quarters possessed at least four times the baggage and so exacted four times the burden on the collective host. That would change, he resolved. And he would challenge all his officers to follow his parsimonious example.
'My Lord and Salvation?' he called to the empty air. The wheeze and pop of the hearth's fire filled the silence. Its light mottled the hanging walls with wavering patterns of light and dark. It almost seemed he could glimpse images in the dancing blur. Cities burning. Faces.
'Yes… Please, Proyas. Share my fire.'
And there he was, sitting cross-legged before the octagonal hearth. Anasurimbor Kellhus. The Holy Aspect- Emperor.
He sat with the slack repose of someone who had not moved for some time. The outer edges of his plaited beard and shoulder-length hair gleamed in counterpoint to the fire. He wore a simple robe of grey silk embroidered only about the hems. Aside from the faint haze of illumination about his hands, only his eyes seemed extraordinary.
'Is everything-?' Proyas began, only to catch himself in embarrassment.
'Ours has always been a convoluted bond,' Kellhus said smiling. 'Clad in ritual armour one moment, naked the next. The time has come for us to recline side by side as simple friends.'
He gestured for Proyas to sit beside him-on his right, the place of honour. 'Truth be told,' he said in his old, joking way. 'I prefer you clothed.'
'So all is well?' Proyas asked, crouching and crossing his legs.
'I remember when you laughed at my jokes,' the Aspect-Emperor said.
'You were funnier back then.'
'Back when?'
'Before you beat the World to the last laugh.'
The Aspect-Emperor grinned and frowned at once. ' That remains to be seen, my friend.'
Proyas often was astonished by the way Kellhus could, utterly and entirely, just be what he needed to be given the demands of circumstance. At this moment, he was simply an old and beloved friend, nothing more or less. Usually Proyas found it difficult-given all the miracles of might and intellect he had witnessed-to think of Kellhus as a creature of flesh and blood, as a man. Not so now.
'So all is not well?'
'Well enough,' Kellhus said, scratching his brow. 'The God has allowed me glimpses of the future, the true future, and thus far everything unfolds in accordance with those glimpses. But there are many dark decisions I must make, Proyas. Decisions I would rather not make alone.'
'I'm not sure I understand.'
A twinge of shame accompanied this admission, not for the fact of his ignorance, but for the way he had hedged in confessing. Proyas most certainly did not understand. Even after twenty years of devotion, he still succumbed to the stubborn instinct to raise his pride upon little falsehoods and so manage the impressions of others.
How hard it was to be an absolutely faithful soul.
Kellhus had ceased correcting these petty lapses; he no longer needed to. To stand before him was to stand before yourself, to know the warp and woof of your own soul, and to see all the snags and tears that beggared you.
'You are a king and a general,' Kellhus said. 'I would think you know well the peril of guesses.'
Proyas nodded and smiled. 'No one likes playing number-sticks alone.'
His Lord-and-God raised his eyebrows. 'Not with stakes so mad as these.'
By some trick of timing, the golden flames before them twirled, and again Proyas thought he glimpsed fiery doom flutter across the leather-panelled walls.
'I am yours, as always my Lor… Kellhus. What do you need of me?'
The leonine face nodded toward the fire. 'Kneel before my hearth,' the Aspect-Emperor said, the flint of command hardening his voice. 'Bow your face into the flame.'
Proyas surprised himself with his lack of hesitation. He came to his knees before the edge of the small iron hearth. The heat of the fire pricked him. He knew the famed story from the Tusk, where the God Husyelt asked Angeshrael to bow his face into his cooking fire. He knew, verbatim, the Sermon of the Ziggurat, where Kellhus had used this story to reveal his divinity to the First Holy War twenty years previous. He knew that 'Bowing into the Fire' had since become a metaphor for Zaudunyani revelation.
And he knew that innumerable madmen wandered the Three Seas, blinded and scarred for taking the metaphor literally.
Even still, he was on his knees, and he was bowing, doing exactly as his Prophet and Emperor commanded. He even managed to keep his eyes open. And a part of him watched and wondered that a devotion, any devotion, could run so deep as to throw a face into the furnace…
Across the crazed bourne of opposites. Into the lapping glitter. Into the needling agony.
Into the light.
His beard and hair whooshed into tinder. He expected agony. He expected to scream. But something was tugged from him, sloughed like flesh from overboiled bone… something… essential.
And he was looking out from the fire, into a thousand faces-and a thousand more. Enough to wrench the eyes, dazzle and bewilder the soul. And yet somehow he focused, turned from the battering complexity and took refuge in a single clutch of men, four long-bearded Men of the Ordeal, one gazing directly at him with a child's thoughtless fixity, the others bickering in Thunyeri… Something about rations. Hunger.
Then he was out, on his rump in Kellhus's gloomy chamber, blinking and sputtering.
And his Lord-and-God held him, soothed his face with a damp cloth. 'The absence of space,' he said with a rueful smile. 'Most souls find it difficult.'
Proyas padded his cheeks and forehead with fumbling fingertips, expecting to feel blasted skin, but found himself intact. Embarrassed, he bolted upright, squinting away the last of the fiery brightness. He glanced about and for some unaccountable reason felt surprised that the iron hearth burned exactly as before.
'Does it trouble you that I can watch men from their fires?' Kellhus asked.
'If anything, it heartens me…' he replied. 'I marched with you in the First Holy War, remember? I know full well the capricious humour of armies stranded far from home.'
Afterward, he would realize that his Aspect-Emperor had already known this, that Anasurimbor Kellhus knew his heart better than he himself could ever hope to. Afterward, he would question the whole intent of this intimate meeting.
'Indeed you do.'
'But why show me this? Do they speak of mutiny already?'
'No,' Kellhus replied. 'They speak of the thing that preoccupies all stranded men…'
The Aspect-Emperor resumed his position before the hearth, gestured for Proyas to do the same. A moment of silence passed as Kellhus poured him a bowl of wine from the wooden gourd at his side. Gratitude welled through the Exalt-General's breast. He drank from the bowl, watching Kellhus with questioning eyes.
'You mean home.'
'Home,' the Aspect-Emperor repeated in assent.
'And this is a problem?'
'Indeed. Even now our old enemies muster across the Three Seas. As the days pass they will grow ever more bold. I have always been the rod that held the New Empire together. I fear it will not survive my absence.'
Proyas frowned. 'And you think this will lead to desertion and mutiny?'
'I know it will.
'But these men are Zaudunyani… They would die for you! For the truth!'
The Aspect-Emperor lowered his face in the yes-but manner Proyas had seen countless times, though not for several years. They had been far closer, he realized, during the Unification Wars…
