The enormous fronds of the Shroud consumed everything save the pastel flash and flicker of their lights.
The Schoolmen vanished, and the Sranc burned.
Rather than fanning out as they did when Culling, the sorcerers climbed in fearsome procession, followed the fractured spine of the Urokkas into masses of the Horde. The Exalt-Magus, Saccarees, took the lead with his Mandate, blasting the heights, gutting the ravines with Gnostic geometries. Temus Enhorû and the Saik followed close behind, with Obwë Gûswuran and the Mysunsai arrayed behind him. The Blind Necromancer Heramari Iyokus followed in the van with the Scarlet Spires. Nothing save the lay of the mountains opposed them. The crowns themselves had been battered into domes, but their torsos were a welter of broken stone and gravel enormities. Even though sorcerers could smooth their passage by picking between echoes of the ground beneath, precipitous terrain was often lethal. For this reason, the Schoolmen abandoned the sky as soon as the Sranc were cleared beneath and found that real ground was treacherous footing enough.
And so the sorcerers of the great Southron Schools began seizing the high places—four mountains that were in reality a dozen in their decrepitude. Yawreg was the first and lowest, a ramp for the others, gathering the edges that clench land into fists. The second, Mantigol, was the highest. Here, Saccarees witnessed the dread majesty of the Horde entire, the Shroud rearing, bulging summits of ochre, the blighted tracts beneath, the insect stain, innumerable clans herded by rage and terror across the very curvature of the World. The weak shoulders and splintered head of the third, Oloreg, provided a veritable maze of passes linking the northern to the southern slopes. And lastly, Ingol, whose bulk crowded the Sea, possessing a humped summit that gazed down upon slovenly Antareg—and Dagliash.
Across unkempt leagues they pressed, each School taking a summit as a violent station, each summit perpetually besieged. Lightning bleached the slopes, blinding threads that took seizing bodies for beads. Crested heads reared, apparitions spewing fire that lit skinnies as candles. At times it was absurd, the sight of old men tottering up the slopes, cursing skinned shins and palms. At times it was legendary, the vision of entire mountains surmounted in fire and light. Gullies, gorges, and slopes burned as though dowsed in pitch. Sranc were heaped for their own pyre, forming berms in places, twitching dunes too bloody to burn. The creatures themselves were emaciated—many raced naked, limbs bulbous for joints, torsos fluted for ribs, phalluses arched into scalloped abdomens—and crazed for it, gifted with a bird-like quickness, as though their bodies had consumed the contents of their bones. Many Schoolmen endured the terror of whole bands bounding through the catastrophes they wrought, falling directly upon their Wards, hacking like crazed monkeys. But the pallid creatures always relented, fleeing whatever direction safety afforded. And the Horde, possessing only the brute intelligence of mobs and herds, milled upon the foundations of the Urokkas, drawn in ever greater concentrations by the promise of rutting murder, but cowed by the displays of arcane destruction above. The Schoolmen garrisoned the passes and established eyries upon each of the summits, impromptu camps where the sorcerers could tend to their injured and recoup their strength. None could hear a mundane word, even when shouted into hands and ear. A cacophony of sorcerous cries never ceased to knot the freakish din, but otherwise nothing human could be heard.
The mountains were wrested from the Horde one-by-one. The Scarlet Schoolmen defended the bull-skull summit of Yawreg, watched in horror as the putrid masses overran their only path of retreat. The Mysunsai occupied the greater heights of Mantigol adjacent, their numbers thinned for assisting their Anagogic confreres. The Imperial Saik held the ruined archipelago of scarps that was Oloreg; they more than any others found themselves continuously embattled. Meanwhile the Mandate cleared the crawling heights of Ingol with razors of light, Abstractions, then draped their triunes as a sparking shawl about the mountain’s shoulders. Both the day and his men exhausted, the Exalt-Magus of the Great Ordeal finally halted his advance and took the measure of what he had achieved.
Wherever the World held dirt, it plumed skyward for the scribble of violent millions, but nowhere else. Saccarees peered out across a great hollow in the Shroud, a cavern as deep as the sky was tall, born of sea, stone, and stony earth. The clarity was unnatural, pure for the septic obscurity that caged it. The long, knifing curve of the River Sursa was scarcely visible. Dagliash seemed a monolithic bark upon Antareg below, a barge stripped to the hull, floating upon a Sranc tide. The intervening tracts sizzled for condensing so much fury—a thousand screeching faces in every tessera, a thousand shaking cleavers and a thousand bared teeth, on and on, forming a mosaic that vanished into the Shroud, into numbers that broke the back of reason.
Fearing the dismay the spectacle sparked within his own breast, Saccarees himself climbed Ingol’s highest echo to rally the other Schools. “I hope you’re hungry,” he signalled to his brother Grandmasters.
So much Meat.
Then he sent word to his Holy Aspect-Emperor …
What their Lord-and-God coveted, the Schools had seized. The heights above Dagliash had been taken. With the exception of Antareg, the Urokkas belonged to the Great Ordeal.
Assuring they remained such until the following dawn would prove a nightmarish toil, one that crowned each of the four mountains in glimpses of putrid masses rushing beneath weirs of slaying light. After sunset, the Ordealman knelt en masse upon the ravaged earth, and gazing upon the flaring summits, they beseeched the God to fortify their arcane brothers, lest the morrow end in ruin.
They would sleep in their armour that night.
Even if he is false, this … this is real …
Proyas and Kayûtas swayed side-by-side in their saddles, each trailing their respective entourages. Masses and columns of infantrymen trotted about them. The Sea reached into violet obscurity to the south beyond, a dark and endless procession of rollers, each bearing brilliant filaments of morning across its back. To the north on their right, the summits of the Urokkas piled westward, little more than sepulchre shadows through the Shroud. Scowling lights crowned them, the flicker of distant sorcery. A great river of Men, arms and banners flooded across everything between, the booted glory of the Three Seas, hastening with a vitality borne of the Meat into the jaws of more Meat.
This has to be real!
“What ails you, Uncle?”
Proyas gazed long and hard at his Lord-and-Prophet’s remarkable son, then looked away wordlessly.
Trust, he now knew, was but a form of blessed blindness. How many times had he ridden thus? How many times had he led simple souls to some complicated doom? He had always trusted then, in the greater cunning, the greater glory, and, most of all, the greater righteousness of his cause. He had simply known—known for not knowing otherwise!—and he had executed with an unfailing hand.
Now balling his hands into fists could scarcely quiet the tremors.
“I cannot see as far or as deep as Father,” the young man pressed. “But I can see enough, Uncle.”
His anger came upon Proyas suddenly. “The fact that you accompany me says enough,” he snapped in reply.
Kayûtas did not so much look at him as observe.
“You think Father has lost faith in you?”
The Exalt-General averted his gaze.
He could feel Kayûtas watch him, his eyes lucid and amused.
“You fear you have lost faith in Father …”
Proyas had known Kayûtas since infancy. He had spent more time with the boy than with his own wife, let alone either of his own children. The Prince-Imperial had even apprenticed under his command, learning things far too hard, he had thought, for such a tender age. It was not possible to relieve a child of so much innocence and not come to love him—at least for a soul such as his.
“Your father …” Proyas began, only to trail, horrified by the quaver in his voice.
This much is real! Real!
It had to be.
The Horde wa
rbled on the wind, a chorus spackled with nearer screams. He cast his eyes across his command, convinced himself he had no need to fear prying ears. Besides, Kayûtas would not have broached the matter otherwise. “We endlessly pondered him when we were children,” Kayûtas continued, speaking as if to while away long watches. “Me. Dodi. Thelli. Even Serwa when she was old enough. How we debated! And how could we not? when he loomed so large, and we saw him so very little.” The man fluttered his eyes in response to Proyas’s manic glare. “Father this,” he said, wagging his head in boyish sing-song. “Father that. Father-father-father …”
Proyas felt a smirk crack the numb planks of his face. There had always been an ease to Kayûtas, a kind of impervious assurance. Nothing troubled him—ever. And this, the very thing that made loving him so effortless, was also the thing that made it seem—on occasion, at least—that he would vanish like a coin if you turned him on his side.
“And what were your scholarly conclusions?” Proyas asked.
Kayûtas groaned, shrugged. “We could never agree … For years we argued. We considered everything, even heretical possibilities …” The long face seemed to purse about the thought.
Dûnyain.
“Did you ever think to ask him?” Proyas said. Here he was, leading the flower of a faith he no longer believed into the jaws of a battle that poets would recount for the ages … and he found himself pinned breathless to a childhood anecdote …
What was happening to him?
“Ask Father?” Kayûtas laughed. “Sweet Sejenus, no. In a sense, though, we had no need to: he could see the debate in us. Whenever we dined with him, he would make some declaration that managed to contradict whatever theory we happened to fancy at the time. How it would drive Moënghus wild!”
In some ways, the young man’s resemblance to his father made their differences that much more stark. But in other ways … Proyas shuddered for sudden memories of his last encounter with Kellhus. He found his gaze shying from the nimil-draped image of the Prince-Imperial …
Lest he see.
“Of course it was Thelli who figured it all out,” Kayûtas continued. “She realized that we could not solve Father because he did not exist, that Father was, in point of fact, no one at all …”
A cold tongue licked the Exalt-General’s spine.
“What do you mean?”
Kayûtas appeared to scrutinize the climbing Shroud. “It sounds like blasphemous nonsense, I know … But I assure you it is anything but.” The blue eyes turned to appraise him, wet and iridescent. “Look … the thing to always remember about Father, Uncle, is that he is always—and only—what he needs to be. And that need is as ephemeral as Men are ephemeral, and as capricious as the World is capricious. He is what circumstances make of him. Only his end binds his myriad incarnations together. Only his mission prevents his soul from dissolving into the mad foam of what happens …”
Speech is impossible without breath, so Proyas clung to his pommel without reply. With the Ordeal in his periphery, it seemed they floated in the wreckage of a great flood. The rumble of sorcerous dispensations poked through the growing wail. Both of them peered at the grim shadow of the Urokkas, saw the flutter of rose luminance through the bowel of the black-and-ochre Shroud.
“Did you devils ever ponder the truth of me?”
The Prince-Imperial graced him with a wicked grin. “I fear you’ve only just become interesting.”
Of course. One never need ponder what one trusted.
“You dwell on your grievances,” Kayûtas added after a moment—a pale approximation of his father. “You’re dismayed because you’ve learned that Father isn’t what he claimed to be. But you’ve simply made the discovery that Thelli made—only without the benefit of her unerring sense of fashion. There is no such man as Anasûrimbor Kellhus … No such Prophet. Only an intricate web of deceptions and stratagems … bound by one inexorable—and as you know, quite ruthless—principle.”
“And that would be?”
Kayûtas’s look was mild.
“Salvation.”
The land that the Sons of Men came to call Yinwaul had leapt with life in those days, rugged and astringent. Boreal forests had darkened every horizon north of the Sea, cloaking the Erengaw Plain, sooting the shoulders of the Yimaleti. Lions had stalked deer in the meadows, ambushed muskox in the fens. Bears had swatted pickerel and salmon from the streams. Wolves had sung eternal songs beneath the Void.
And Nin’janjin had ruled in Viri.
Though populous, Viri lacked the monumental grandeur and ostentation that so characterized Mansions like Siöl, Ishoriöl, or Cil-Aujas. “Ji’milri,” Cu’jara Cinmoi would famously call her, “That Anthill.” Her Sons were peculiar also, at once ridiculed for their rustic ways and archaic legalism and revered for the spare profundity of their poets and philosophers. They cultivated a modesty that was indistinguishable from arrogance, that reflex to judge all things in excess as excessive. They eschewed ornamentation, despised gratuitous display. They scorned slavery, seeing a more shameful enslavement in the dependence of the master. They bent their backs and dirtied their hands, blackened their nails in ways that made their southern cousins chortle and sneer. They alone embraced the Starving and the Scalding, the sky and the sun that their race had taken as their bane. No matter where they travelled, the Sons of Viri were instantly known by the broad, wicker bowl of their hats.
Wisi, the shipwright Sons of Illiserû called them—“Nails”.
Only on the hunt and in the subsequent feast did the Viroi yield to elhusioli, the Nonman daimos of excess. Their expeditions were things of song and legend, so much so that Hûsyelt, the Dark Hunter, was said to hunt them from time to time. The Hoar-Pelt, the great white bear-skin the Nonmen Kings of Viri wore in a crown’s stead, was held to be a gift of the jealous and mercurial God.
Nin’janjin’s astrologers had spied Imburil, the star that Men call the Nail of Heaven, long before it waxed. But they had no forewarning of the calamity to come three years following. How could they, when the very Gods had been confounded?
Arkfall changed everything.
Those who witnessed and survived the event claimed that the cataclysmic impact of the Ark somehow preceded the Ark, that the great golden vessel dropped no quicker than an apple into the flash and upheaval of an earlier, far more tumultuous strike. The sound blew around the World. Chroniclers from as far as Cil-Aujas record a tremendous crack, a noise that scrambled still waters, struck dust from mortices.
The flash blinded, the concussion deafened. Ground-quakes killed tens of thousands in the Mansion Deep. Those on the surface sought refuge in the Mansion, even as those in the Mansion battled to reach the surface. A conflagration expanded as a bubble of soap, an inferno flying on a perfect arc, consuming all land and sky in charring fire. Only those caught within the wrecked underworld Manse were saved.
Mountains were thrown up. Forests were levelled where not vaporized altogether. All that had thrived was either struck dead, or left stricken. A dozen tribes of Men vanished. The World burned for a thousand leagues in all directions, engulfing Ishoriöl, and reddening the skies as far away as Siöl.
As the Isûphiryas relates, Nin’janjin appealed to Cu’jara Cinmoi, whom he hated, such were the straits of the Sons of Viri:
The Sky has cracked into potter’s shards,
Fire sweeps the compass of Heaven,
The beasts flee, their hearts maddened,
The trees fall, their backs broken.
Ash has shrouded all sun, choked all seed,
The Halaroi howl piteously at the Gates,
Dread Famine stalks my Mansion.
Brother Siöl, Viri begs your pardon.
But Cu’jara Cinmoi, who prized vengeance before honour, shut his heart and his Mansion against his cousin. And so cruelty begot wickedness, and betrayal, betrayal. Nin’janjin and the surviving Viroi turned to the Ark. Wars raged. The Inchoroi forged weapons out of perverted life. A darker epoch passed, and Vir
i became but another name for folly and sorrow, the first and some say the deepest grave in the long shadow that the Incû-Holoinas has cast over this World.
When so much is so mad, what can become of proportion?
The Raft swept out over the Misty Sea, its deck crammed with Swayali witches wrapped in their golden billows, and Saubon’s householders, freighted for armour, bristling with arms. They seemed a motley band, the Knights of the Desert Lion, but no Believer-King could boast a more deadly collection of souls.
The World swayed and levelled about the platform’s beam. Saubon caught himself peering at his Lord-and-Prophet the same hunted way Proyas had the day previous, a look that did not so much seek to see as to solve, as though the image were a cipher revealing less invisible and more terrifying things. He tore his gaze away, glimpsed a naked white carcass, Man or Sranc, lurching in the black swells.
What was this adolescent mooning?
One does not clutch at ribbons tripping down a stair. Men reach for what is stronger—and that is simply the way. They flail for what is slow and great to better brace themselves against madness of the small and quick. Proyas had been overthrown for the same reason the sight of the Horde so offended the heart: for want of something greater that was not insane.
A meaning so vast as to be empty, so slow as to be dead.
A Frame.
But everything was quick and everything was small and only distance or delusion made it seem otherwise. What was the Horde if not the manifestation of this, the way obscenities could be piled upon obscenities and still be desired, even craved?