Moënghus barged between the last chieftains intervening, saw his father hoist her ear to his lips, murmur as much as rave: “I trained you as a beast!—trained you for this very moment!”
Moënghus blinked for the glimpse of smoke wafting from the ligature of swazond that encased his trembling arms.
“To wait out advantage …” the most violent of men gasped on a furious exhalation. “And wait …” he murmured, sucking air, titanic exertion creaking on his voice. “And waaait …”
He thrust her down as an axe or hammer …
“Until only death remained!”
The body folded like a marionette. A noise too meaty to be a crack—its neck …
Serwë’s angelic face fell open on glistening, knuckled articulations.
Cnaiür urs Skiötha stood so as to sweep arms to the uninvaded fractions of the sky. The Chieftains of the People roared in frenzied approval about him, even clasping one another in celebration.
Still lathered for his exertions, the breaker-of-horses-and-men turned to seize his girl-skinned son’s shoulders. The grasp firmed when Moënghus cringed.
“Leave my side again,” the Scylvendi King-of-Tribes grunted, “and your limbs shall be struck from you.”
It happened the instant Serwa had ordered the assault on the High Cwol. It lasted for a heartbeat, soundless for the din of battle.
A line of light, dazzling, as perfect as any Gnostic Cant, but crimson …
And in no way stained by the Mark.
A Scarlet Schoolman dropped, dragged his flaming billows into the ramparts of the Oblitus. Thirûmmû Sek was no more.
The whole of the Great Ordeal stopped for horror and wonder, including Anasûrimbor Serwa.
Another line, soundless and blinding, conjoined Myrathimi—another Scarlet Schoolman scourging the parapets—and a point hanging on the High Horn’s inner thigh, above the reach of any sorcery. A simple pulse, bright enough to induce warding arms, then she was watching Myrathimi plummeted between blinks.
Tekne.
“Sweet Seju!” Mirûnwe exclaimed in horror from her side. “The Heron Spear!”
A third pulse followed, and another Scarlet Schoolman, Ekompiras, spiralled to earth, his fiery billows breaking up like straw.
“Interpolate!” the Exalt-Magus cracked through the furore.
The triunes of her Command instantly began shrinking toward her. She was already singing with her flanking sisters …
A fourth pulse, like a sun become milk—light that gutted the haphazard Gnostic spheres, concussions that pinked cheeks for mere proximity. Air whooshing.
“Father!” she boomed.
A fifth pulse. Light striking with the force of Wûlri, the Gall-Spear of Hûsyelt, clapping Wards into smoke and splinters, punching breath from guts, igniting the extremities of their billows.
The Swayali continued singing, the blood weeping from their noses black for the light of their mouths.
A catastrophic sixth pulse, glaring across the back of hapless sorceries.
“Scatter!”
She cried this even as Kima toppled from the sky, a white moth afire. All their billows burned. The sunlight glared, and she glimpsed the Men of the Ordeal packed across the Oblitus, gazing up awe and horror. She pulled the sash binding her billows to her waist, slipped from her flaming gown …
Even as a seventh pulse passed through it as tissue.
She landed among a company of astounded Nangaels, already singing, simultaneously batting at the embers on her hair and shift. She expected the Men to flee, but they piled before her instead, shields raised in pitiful gallantry against the vast scarp of the High Horn.
But no eighth pulse came—not for her. An incandescent line conjoined the golden heights with a cluster of Mandati and Scarlet Schoolmen hanging before the black parapets of Cwol. Four burning figures plummeted from the arcane assembly, followed by a flailing fifth. She heard Saccarees command they scatter as well. She bid the bearded warrior behind her, a grim and strapping man wearing an iron hauberk, to raise his kite shield.
She did not see the ninth pulse, only her momentary shadow across flagstones.
She nodded to the Tydonni Knight, then leapt, using his shield to vault the summit of the Riser. Like an acrobat, she swung herself into a handstand, threw herself into a crouch on the precarious summit of the battlements. The Men on this terrace, Galeoth Gesindalmen, cried out for shock. She dashed out along the lip of the parapets, racing southward. So she ran the length of the Sixth Riser, sprinting like a gazelle with slender grace, her slippered feet making a blur of the crude battlements. To her right, the Soldiers of the Circumfix flew beneath and fell away, a gallery of gawking fools …
Those nearest died in the eleventh pulse.
Serwa rode the shock wave, pirouetting, alighting like a swan, running with even more speed. The Galeoth on the terrace began casting their shields into the air behind her, seeking to obscure her passage.
She sang out on a luminous voice, still racing. Black roiled through empty air behind her, blooming like lobes of ink through water. The rope of the battlements shrank to nothing. She leapt, legs scissoring into emptiness …
The terminus of the Sixth Riser erupted behind and beneath her, slapped her spinning. The twelfth pulse.
But she caught the ground’s sorcerous echo, began walking over empty space, ascended the scarps of the Scab. The encampment floated across her periphery, distant slums and rubbish splayed across the feet of the southwest Occlusion. The pluming dust and flashing arms were what caught her attention—faraway tendrils and streams spilling down along multiple points, overrunning tents and pavilions.
Human … she realized.
Scylvendi?
But the Exalt-Magus turned away. She had no time. The arcane smoke had baffled the invisible Spearman merely—or so she had to assume. She soared over the black and broken heights of the Scab. The Canted Horn reared titanic before her, daylight glimmering through its chapped hull. The Horde had bloated far beyond its obscuring bulk, drawing a great curtain of darkness, ash, and ochre across the West. Hundreds of streamers radiated out from the tumult, the nearest fairly reaching Golgotterath’s ramparts: Sranc bands, she realized, the most famished and fleet. Behind them, the masses churned across what seemed the whole of the west, mob piling upon mob, a teeming that became ever more colourless and indistinct as the Shroud reared to consume everything, including the sky …
Even still, she glimpsed it: glimmering light, flashing from a socket in the twining screens and plumes.
“Father!” she boomed again, calling, beseeching, her voice cracking the distances asunder …
Just as the thirteenth pulse found her.
All Creation wailed. Dust vaulted into a high-hanging pall, swaddled them in shadow. The light of destruction became the only light, revealing Sranc, pale as fish in murky waters, packed unto trampling, howling, surging across the very bourne of visibility …
And it beggared Malowebi’s dispossessed soul.
The terror was a constant, as was the corporeal disorientation. Even though Malowebi knew he gazed from the sockets of a severed head, he felt his body nonetheless, dangling and paralytic, alternately dragged over earth and whipped about air like cords of weightless silk, a scribble across the face of the thronging plains …
The Horde.
Decanted across the great grey distance, flying in loose gales at the fore, surging into a tempest that encompassed heaven and earth, not so much covering the land as becoming it, mass upon frenzied mass, churning up plumes and veils that closed the distances, blotted the sun …
The Horde …
Smote by sorceries Malowebi could scarce conceive, Abstractions, like those belonging to the Gnosis, but unlike any Cant described in any text. Silvery hoops broad as bastion-towers, shaking everything within like images in kicked reflecting pools. Fractal blooms, lights replicating outwards, one become six, six become dozens, severing, detonating, laying out whole regions of dis
membered ruin.
The Horde.
Countless raving faces becoming smooth with white wonder as death and light falls. Nightmarish. Vertiginous in ways the Iswazi mage could never articulate, a captive soul, swinging as a purse from the dread Aspect-Emperor’s girdle, watching him cast the very sum of his might into the wretched, earth-eating multitudes.
In their thousands, the Sons of Men set about gaining the Scab and securing the black curtain walls. Others were tasked with barricading and manning the breaches. Though some Lords-of-the-Ordeal balked at the notion of defending Golgotterath, they need only glimpse the western reaches of Shigogli to grasp its mortal necessity …
Lord Sampë Ussiliar and his Shrial Knights had taken the vanguard in the south, racing across the parapets in the wake of the Imperial Saik, who burned and blasted any Ursranc too foolish or maddened to flee. Seizing the gold-fanged heights proved remarkably bloodless. The mayhem and grim butchery were confined to the towers, where nary a footfall went uncontested. Though nowhere near the size of their famed cousins overlooking Ûgorrior below, the structures were brutal affairs, at once squat and cyclopean, raised from blocks of crudely-hewn rock. Given the need for haste, the Saik Schoolmen were called on to scourge the halls and to blast the iron portals, clearing a path to the adjoining parapets so that the rush might continue while a force remained behind to finish clearing the structures. But the convoluted, almost hive-like, layout of the towers, combined with the raving ferocity of the Ursranc, transformed each into a pitched melee requiring hundreds of souls. The heavily armoured Shrial Knights howled and hacked their way down treacherous stairs and along narrow, lightless corridors. Those too reckless ran afoul traps and ambuscades, for the Ursranc were far more cunning than their wild kin. Men bled out in the corners, limbs tangled in the corpses of their foe. Grandmaster Ussiliar had scarce travelled five towers before the simple lack of manpower forced him to concede the advance to General Rash Soptet and his more lightly armoured Shigeki.
Progress in the south quickly ground to a halt. But once the first tower on the heights above the ruins of Domathuz had been cleared, Nansur Columnaries and Eumarnan Grandees began spilling onto the lobed back of the Scab. The initial plan had been to form up below the walls, then secure the heights in full array lest the Consult ambush and overwhelm them. But the Horde—which the assembling Men could see consuming more and more of Shigogli—denied them this tactical luxury. With General Biaxi Tarpellas dead, command of the Nansur Columns had fallen to General Ligesseras Arnius—though he would be some time learning as much. By all accounts an impulsive yet gifted field commander, he grasped the peril instantly. Who knew what secret gates the Consult might possess? He understood well the tragic lesson of Irsûlor: Should this new Horde gain the interior of Golgotterath, all would be lost. Trusting his example would count as communication enough, he led his Columnaries in a disorganized mob across the Scab, bearing beneath the crotch of the Canted Horn toward those towers directly overlooking the approaching Sranc menace. Quick to grasp his intent, General Inrilil ab Cinganjehoi commanded his mail-draped Eumarnans to do the same. To a man, his Grandees and their households gazed at the spark of white and turquoise light hanging above the nethers of the Shroud: their Holy Aspect-Emperor standing alone before the catastrophic onslaught. “To the western walls!” Lord Inrilil bellowed to his wondering kinsmen. “They have by far the better view!”
Despite its rampaging disorder, the Horde moved as if possessing a will and intent all its own. For those battling on the walls, the way it consumed ever more of the World between glances seemed a kind of nightmare. But rather than simply swallow Shigogli whole, it penetrated the desolate expanses, funnelled toward the southern extreme of the dread stronghold, winding into a tendril as vast as Carythusal, fields of commotion so immense that the Shigeki watching from the southern parapets felt the ramparts drift westward beneath their feet.
With such terror streaming below them, how could they know their doom hung above?
Kakaliol, Reaper-of-Heroes, stands gazing upon Ûbil Noscisor.
Vile angel.
Scales smoking. Wounds weeping pitch and fire for blood.
Beware, the Blind Slaver whispers. Great and terrible sorceries lie coiled within the bri—
What, it croaks on wheezing fire, is this place?
The Blind Slaver is taken aback. The Carrion Prince can feel his soul twist in momentary, febrile confusion, like a minnow thrashing on a string.
Kakaliol screams for the outrageous perversity. A world ruled by bladders of muck! A world where souls hang upon the sufferance of slop and meat! A world where lice drive lions!
Discharge your Ta—!
What is this place?
The Blind Slaver hesitates. And Kakaliol, the demon-godling of the diseased slums and gutters of Carythusal, can feel it: the indecision, the bewilderment, the dawning fear …
All the delicacies of mortal weakness.
You stand upon the threshold of the dread Ark … the Blind Slaver replies. The Incû-Holoinas.
Hard doth it lean upon the threshold … the Seducer-of-Thieves says, for it can feel the smouldering torsions, the remorseless yaw in directions orthogonal to the accursed lines of harsh reality, as though it were a coal upon a blanket, burning through, filament by despicable filament.
Yes …
Vile angel.
And it realizes. Kakaliol apprehends. It can feel it sinking, all about, like a hulk upon the waters. The Reaper-of-Heroes raises its scimitar talons, roars with laughter, expelling the shrieks of a thousand thousand souls.
All it need do is scratch, tear away the cutting paper of this accursed World …
Now discharge your Task.
Nay.
Discharge your Task!
The Blind Slaver dares speak it, the word. And it can feel the torments the Manling would inflict upon it were it elsewhere in this accursed World. But here, in this place, Hell itself steeps the air, making whole what the frail sorcerer’s magicks had halved. Here, in this place, it cannot be sundered.
The Reaper-of-Heroes cackles, shrieks in diabolical triumph.
What does it matter, the punishing of a Desire identical with its Object?
Your Oath! the Blind Slaver cries upon blind panic. Your Oath is your Task!
Nay … the Carrion Prince rumbles across the edges of existence. Thou art my Task, mortal.
And upon this, Kalakiol, the Reaper-of-Heroes, involutes, reaches through itself, and seizes the Voice of the Blind Slaver, plucks the nubile wisp that is his soul. How the insect flails! Roaring exultant, it collapses into a writhing heap of centipedes, chitinous multitudes that spill out twitching and scratching across the floors, and begin boring through the flaking paint that is this World …
The vile angel is no more.
None other than Lord Soter had been the first to assemble his kinsmen beneath the turrets of the High Cwol. The Ainoni had taken up positions, preparing to follow the Schoolmen once the gold-fanged bulwarks had been entirely cracked asunder. The sky immediately above was fairly clotted with sorcerers and their silk-twining billows when the first pulse struck. Suddenly the air tasted of acrid things burning—smelled of pork. All was confusion, Men jerking their gaze to and fro in a panicked search for answers. Then Myrathimi fell burning, and shouting choruses erupted among the ranks. Those still baffled followed the arms and fingers pointing almost directly upward, to the hanging enormity of the High Horn …
Only to be nearly blinded by the third pulse.
Sorcerous singing clawed at the bowels. The Thousand Schoolmen were in disarray, some clustering to concentrate their defenses, others scattering—and all shrinking from the battered ramparts of the High Cwol. A young Ainoni caste-noble, Nemukus Mirshoa, was the first to realize the burden of Apocalypse had fallen upon them, the Soldiers of the Circumfix. While all others peered skyward, he cried out to his Kishyati kinsmen, shamed them for their sloth. Then shrieking their ancestral warcry, he charged forwa
rd, quite alone, into the black and blasted maw of the High Cwol.
Moved to wonder, the Men of Kishyat followed, first in scattered flurries, then en masse. Black arrows rained upon them, studding their shields and shoulders, but killing few, given their flaring helms and hauberks of heavy splint. They assailed a great breach due to the death throes of Hagazioz, labouring up pitched slopes of debris. There they found Mirshoa and his cousins battling scores of foul Ursranc in the gloom.
Lord Soter, a bellicose man by nature, immediately grasped Mirshoa’s impetuous wisdom. “As they reap, so are they reaped!” he cried to his vassals. “We cower behind sorcerers no more!”
So did the Palatines of High Ainon leave the Schoolmen to fend the unseen Spearman. On a disordered tide of shouts, they stormed the cracked bastions and scorched corridors of the High Cwol.
Since their presence had counted for naught, they were not missed. Seeing Serwa’s flight across the Oblitus, Apperens Saccarees commanded triunes of Mandate Schoolmen to surmount the High Cwol and rush the mountainous trunk of the High Horn. “Save her!” he cried. “Save the Daughter of the Lord!”
Upon the Cwol, the sorcerers saw the Horde, an endless deluge of Sranc descending upon the whole of the Furnace Plain, the Shroud churning skyward from the masses surging at the fore, steaming up to choke the very Vault. Fending horror and dismay, they threw themselves forward, crying out their ancient and holy inheritance, the Gnosis. They harangued their foe with Seswatha’s own Argument, the dark corpus of the School of Sohonc, the dread Cants of War. Great combs of brilliance swept up and scissored across the sheer, golden expanses—Third Looms, Thosolankan Intensities. Jaundiced reflections leapt and danced across the sheen in counterpoint, as if the Upright Horn had become a greased mirror. Radiance clawed ever higher up the cyclopean pitch, reaching for the Spearman’s perch …
But they could not so much as scorch the platform he stood upon, let alone test his Wards.
Nearly vertical pulses counted out the howling Schoolmen with combusting billows. Like flowers, they twirled to ground aflame.