“To the parapets,” he commanded the Knights who propped him in the battle’s aftermath.
With no little dread, he ascended the stair, climbed into dust-filtered sunlight. The vast cylinder of the Horn lay bellied across the Scab, looming mountainous over the shattered walls, and strewn into a vast, golden cordillera across the plate of Shigogli. One of his retinue cried out at the sight of the naked woman curled in the southeast corner of the tower, still breathing despite the horrific burns that ulcerated her skin. The Men gathered incredulous about her. Lord Ussiliar was the first to fall to his knees.
“Princess Imperial,” he called, daring to reach for an alabaster shoulder. “Exalt-Magus …”
Anasûrimbor Serwa seized the Shrial Grandmaster’s wrist, then floated to her feet as if thrown by hands. She peered at the contortions of gold towering above, then swept her gaze out across the tortured distance, the numberless white-skinned wretches. Incredulity passed into assurance without residue. The Shrial Knights fell to their knees, pressed their faces to the stone as much out of horror as respect, for she was clothed only in anguish. Her once-luxurious hair had been burnt to shags. Her right arm was greased in weeping ulcers from shoulder to fingertip. The intact portions of her face, once the image of aquiline perfection, formed the outline of a hand about her eyes and nose. Everything else, her brow, her cheek, had been cracked and welted, including her mouth. Only her shanks and the downy curse of her sex had been entirely spared.
“Lord Ussiliar,” she said, her voice somehow untouched by the rising clamour. “Recruit every soul still breathing. Leave the walls to the wounded. Defend the ruin with the hale … Make sure nothing passes through the wreckage of the Horn!” She leapt upon the battlements with feline ease. “Quickly!” she barked in sudden anger. “While your voice can still be heard!”
And with that her eyes and ruined mouth flared brilliance, and the Exalt-Magus of the Great Ordeal strode out across empty air.
Nemukus Mirshoa and his Kishyati had battled their way deep into the High Cwol ere the Felling of the Canted Horn. They pressed down shattered hallways, cleared reeking storage chambers, long barracks crowded with refuse and offal. All was grunting strain and threshing fury in the murk, notched swords beating down black iron cleavers. The Men knew nothing of what transpired under the sun, for Ursranc packed the gloomy halls, their ferocity waxing more violent with every cubit they surrendered. The contest possessed no clear front. The devastation wrought by the original Ciphrang assault had complicated the labyrinthine interior, linking levels with shattered ceilings and floors, mazing corridors with blasted walls. What was more, they encountered Ursranc of a different breed, more mannish in stature, far less given to frenzied demonstrations, more want to rely on skill and grim determination. These were the dreaded Inversi, palatials armed with swords looted from the crypts and reliquaries of Ishterebinth, decked in iron-scaled hauberks and bearing shields emblazoned with a golden tracery of upside-down flames. More and more the Sons of High Ainon found themselves battling foes as lethal as themselves—even moreso, given the Ursranc’s greater stamina. What had been a steady advance ground into vicious stalemate. Urdrûsû Marsalees, the once-obese Palatine of Kûtapileth, renowned for his mighty cudgel, fell to an Ursranc bearing an ensorcelled Cûnuroi blade, the famed Pitiril, which sliced through his shield as if it were paper. Grinar Halikimmû, Sacred Hewer, the famed caste-menial champion of the Sranc Pits, was likewise felled by an arcane relic of the ancient Cûno-Inchoroi Wars, immolated by Isiramûlis, the eldest of the Six Cinderswords known to be forged by Emilidis.
Death came swirling down.
The High Cwol was given over to screams and slaughter. The Men were driven relentlessly forward by the masses surging behind them, until they found themselves on the masticating front, straining cheek to jowl with the Ursranc, stabbing, grappling, killing and being killed. Ever at the fore, Mirshoa and his Kishyati kinsmen found themselves battling across the bottom of a well that had been smashed through five different floors. Melees of varying intensities knotted each of the floors exposed above, and the Kishyati, ghoulish for the white paint smeared across their faces, endured a continuous rain of projectiles. Mirshoa lost his right ear to an Inversi Captain after a block cast from above robbed him of both his balance and helm. The young man would have perished, had not a second block struck the creature as it lunged for the kill.
Then the floors slapped the bottoms of their boots.
The Incû-Holoinas had tipped, such was the mass of the Canted Horn. The dead bounced. The living fell. Sheets of masonry sloughed from the ceiling, crashed down the walls. Mirshoa and his brothers scrambled to find their footing, only to be overthrown once again as the Canted Horn crashed across Shigogli. The roof of the well collapsed, a cataract of morticed debris that killed indiscriminately. Wan sunlight filtered down. The Soldiers of the Circumfix cried out for dread and horror, for the presentiment of disaster. The black-armoured Inversi saw only Men in disarray, sweet vulnerability, and with lust larded by hate, they threw themselves upon the dismayed Sons of High Ainon …
Screams and clanking reverberated through the cracked halls.
Suddenly Mirshoa and his kinsmen were battling for their very lives. Even as their brothers on the Oblitus roared in exultation, the Sons of High Ainon found themselves beaten backward throughout the High Cwol.
But they had not been forgotten. Apperens Saccarees, Grandmaster of the Imperial Mandate understood the importance of seizing the Intrinsic Gate. Even as the Ainoni faltered before the fury and weaponry of the Inversi, the first of Seswatha’s Heirs stepped singing through the sunlit aperture, and began floating down the well wreaking sorcerous ruin. Five were lost to Chorae—Mirshoa was himself nearly killed by the plummet of a Schoolman salted to the pith. But at every stage of their descent, the sorcerers blasted and scourged the exposed halls with intricacies of Gnostic light, until they at last they turned their dread regard upon the Ursranc palatials contesting the bottommost floor. “Vengeance!” Mirshoa howled to his kinsmen, who now numbered only in the dozens. The Inversi shrank from his leaping blade, then broke altogether, mewling and shrieking as they bolted. The slaughter was fierce. And among the Ursranc slain by Mirshoa was the fell creature who had struck down Halikimmû and so many more of his countrymen …
Thus did the young caste-noble come to possess the sword Isiramûlis—Hearth-slayer.
Some five Schoolmen pursued the fleeing Ursranc, and Mirshoa and his kinsmen pursued them in turn, plunging into the gloom of a broad, processional corridor, one already strewn with burnt and dismembered dead. The company of young knights whooped in triumph as they ran, crying, “The High Cwol! The High Cwol has fallen!” But their jubilation was almost instantly knocked from them. Without warning, the discharge of sorceries dazzled the throat of the processional before them, slicked the crude masonry with light. Then, abruptly, the five points of eerie illumination they pursued became four. The surviving Sons of Kishyat skidded to a halt, peered apprehensively. Mirshoa glimpsed what seemed a nimil hauberk about an elephantine chest, the portion of a pale leg longer than a man was tall …
Four lights became three.
Now it was the Mandate Schoolmen who raced toward them, fleeing whatever had extinguished the light of their two comrades. “Runnn!” one of them urged the mundane company. To a man they obliged, for what a sorcerer fled, only a fool would dare.
Mirshoa, however, remained.
He could scarce see in the wake of the sorcerers, but he need only desire light … Isiramûlis flared into sudden brilliance, striking his inhuman adversary from the darkness as much as illuminating him, revealing him in all his nightmarish particulars …
A Nonman Erratic, at least two cubits taller than a Bashrag, draped in great skirts of scintillant nimil, wearing a helm like a fuller’s basin, and possessing hands that could dandle a man like toddler. The Cindersword’s sudden glare dazzled the giant, allowing Mirshoa to easily sidestep the swooping anvil that wa
s his cudgel. He whirled around as the iron carried the Ishroi’s swing, then leapt about the great frame, plunging his blade into the monstrous Erratic’s face. The point chipped across cheekbone, slipped into the eye-socket. The giant’s momentum carried him crashing forward, yanking Firebrand from Mirshoa’s hand.
Mirshoa raised himself winded from the floor, peered for utter blackness. He stumbled into the Cindersword across the uneven flagstones. At his touch the reflection of flames leapt brilliant across its length. Holding it as a torch before him, he continued alone down the carcass-strewn corridor, stalking the Intrinsic Gate.
Malowebi was no stranger to battle, unlike that craven Likaro. He understood its spasmodic rhythms, the tumble of complacency into panic, the passage of hacking violence into bleeding lull and then back again. The “Drunken Father,” Memgowa had famously called it, given the petty caprice of its punishments and rewards.
But this …
He would have babbled in idiot horror, were it not for the absurdity. He would have loosed his bowel had he possessed one.
One instant, he was watching one of Golgotterath’s Horns drop as though in water, unravel in cataclysmic ruin across leagues of thronging Sranc. The next he was dancing on an arc from the Anasûrimbor’s hip, toppling from a plummet, the stone-regimented earth swinging about his disorder, death flying upward—
Only to find himself plummeting from the absolute vault of the sky, so high that the whole the Occlusion could be glimpsed …
Falling, utterly helpless as the head that was his vessel floated and lolled. He glimpsed the other Decapitant, saw scaled cheeks and a line of iron horns jutting from black hair, orange eyes that could have been as dead or alive as his own. And he glimpsed the Aspect-Emperor, plaited beard climbing his cheeks, his mouth a furnace, his expression impossibly serene.
Falling and falling, until he felt a bubble, a soul tethered by a single infernal hair—
Only to be yanked to a violent standstill, his gaze wagging as he and the other Decapitant bounced like bangles from the Anasûrimbor’s waist, seeing only the obscurities of the Shroud—
Swinging about on his captor’s sudden whirl, his soaring field of vision dazzled by Gnostic geometries, lines sketched with the precision of compass and rule, inked with the brilliance of naked sunlight.
A winged shadow sparked through the weir—
Then they were plummeting from on high once again, the Shroud splayed like a cancerous smut across the breast of the World—
Only to slip through yet another impossible threshold and emerge in the chalk and ochre pall once again, this time mere lengths above a winged monstrosity, a creature with skin like spit hanging in water …
Inchoroi … Malowebi realized in horror.
And the Anasûrimbor hunted it.
The Mbimayu sorcerer had witnessed a pageant of legends since finding his soul captive, and as numb as he had become, this one pricked like no other …
There was no more doubting the intent of Anasûrimbor Kellhus.
The alien hung above the roiling multitudes, rising and falling with every beat of its ragged wings, its gaze twitching from point to point with anxious alacrity. Only the Aspect-Emperor’s Cant alerted the hideous creature to their presence. The uproar was such that only sorcery could be heard, intonations that travelled angles sideways to the Real. The thing whirled as if upon a wire. At first, Malowebi thought the creature blind, for the sockets upon the great, oblong skull were packed with bloodless flesh. Then he saw the misbegotten face cramped into the skull’s maw, the glitter of black eyes—suddenly glaring bright with semantic intent …
Perhaps the thing sought to strike, or perhaps to simply reinforce its Wards—Malowebi would never know. He had recognized little of the sorcery he had witnessed this day. The creature was too late either way. Threads of blue-white brilliance leapt from the aether, lines that extended across arcs, winding about unseen axes, forming spirals that etched, with greater and greater complexity, a sphere about the Inchoroi and its Gnostic Wards. Astonished, the Mbimayu sorcerer saw the Inchoroi begin to revolve …
It was as if space itself had been decapitated, snipped into a polyp of emptiness, something the Aspect-Emperor could spin like a top—and so overcome his foe without tearing a single Ward asunder.
The revolutions accelerated, turning became whipping, until the Inchoroi became little more than a shadowy blur within a sphere of pulsing, reticulate light, until its limbs and wings were pulled outwards in a grim parody of the Circumfix, their sockets yanked along infinite lines of flight.
The Anasûrimbor strode toward the uncanny spectacle, then, miraculously, into it, breaching the sphere, somehow seizing the blur, plucking it into grotesque immobility—
Tossing the Inchoroi senseless to a golden platform beneath their feet.
All was burnished brilliance, soaring planes of gold mirroring the sun. Heartbeats passed before Malowebi realized precisely where they stood.
No …
The Shroud engulfed the High Horn.
Sikswarû Maragûl, the Far Antique Sohonc scribes of Ûmerau had called it, distorting the name given to them by their Siqu teachers. The Obmaw.
The dread Intrinsic Gate, the terrestrial threshold of the Incû-Holoinas.
Mirshoa strode into a great chamber, drawn forward by the reflection of his own light across what turned out to be the Ark’s golden hull. A great chasm, some fifty cubits wide, lay between it and the crude-cobbled floors. He halted before setting foot on the bridge—black stone girdered with gold—that spanned it, and so preserved his life from the Wards coiled as springs within it.
The unearthly metal of the High Horn’s shell soared high and low, outrunning the ceiling above and the light below. But where the golden surface followed curves smooth as juvenile skin elsewhere, here it had been buckled and breached. A rent as long as any of the Scarlet Spires were tall scored the hull on an angle. Black masonry, blocks as cyclopean as any in Golgotterath, sealed the gash in its entirety, crude compared to the immortal polish of the hull.
The Intrinsic Gate lay in the centre of this stonework …
Open.
The reek was palpable for being so raw, so alien, a putrescence that only his stomach, it seemed, could smell. The Kishyati noble caught his mouth and coughed, stood peering into the pitch-black maw, his jubilation bleeding into horror. The resolutions of young men are mercurial things, abstract for want of hard experience, and thus as weightless as any whim or fancy. He had charged the High Cwol …for what? To inspire his brothers. To discharge his sacred duty. To save his miscreant soul …
And yes, to be first.
The first to lay eyes upon the Intrinsic Gate.
The first to violate the Ark.
The prospect of consequences had not occurred to him—for like many young men he instinctively understood the way acting made irrevocable, how simple doing could throw a man beyond the pale of cowardice, strand him with courage and glory as his only companions.
And now he stood stranded … shieldless, bearing a magical sword, and wracked with fear and indecision.
What lay within the Incû-Holoinas? What perversities of sense and reason?
He thought of the degenerate sins he had committed under the spell of the Meat, the atrocities against human decency and divine writ. He thought of his damnation, shuddered for the force of his revulsion, blinked tears …
A yawing creak issued through the black portal.
The young caste-noble fairly jumped. But in the receding flush of alarm, the old fury was returned to him, the one that barred all fear.
“‘And they quake in their wretched holes!’” he cried, quoting scripture for the want of any words of his own. “‘For they hear Judgment groan upon the planks of Creation!’”
He stood with Isiramûlis held high, watching the blackness between the iron doors … breathing.
He wondered at the Ûmeri runes engraved into the stone frame.
A monstrous snout ma
terialized from the void, followed by jaws like skiffs and eyes like emeralds afire, beady beneath the horned flanges that passed for brows.
Wracû.
Mirshoa stood transfixed.
The head rose with the soundless grace of a python, glittering black, revealing a mane of white spines as long as spears, and a serpentine neck as thick as a mastodon’s waist. It towered the height of a masthead, then lunged with the swiftness of a twitch, yanking its head back on a feline hiss. Incinerating fire engulfed the head of the bridge—consumed the witless young caste-noble.
And yet swept about and over Mirshoa as no more than a warm breeze. Stone cracked, popped like the joints of a living thing. The young Kishyati stood as before, crying out for wonder and terror.
The Great Wracu reared anew, the crimson of fury rimming the obsidian shields scaling its neck. The spines rose about its majestic crown, and began clattering as iron rods. It grinned, revealing teeth that wept smoking spittle. Mirshoa had assumed it would roar in outrage, but it spoke instead …
“Aungaöl pauth mûwaryesi …”
The Kishyati caste-noble, who could scarce believe he still lived, laughed as an adolescent might after rising unharmed from a mortal tumble. Anagke did favour him!
He could hear the shouts of his kinsmen echoing down the processional behind him.
“Behold righteousness!” he bellowed at the Beast. “Only the wicked burn on this day!”
The malevolent Wracu regarded him by the incandescence of Isiramûlis, rising higher and higher against the vast golden plane, so immense that the young man’s body quailed beneath the skin of his shrill bravado, for where the soul hoped, the body knew …
“For they hear Judgment!” Mirshoa cried in tearful defiance. “Judgment groans upon th—!”
It struck with the eye-blink speed of a cobra, swinging down as a hammer strike, clapping its maw about the hapless boy—for that was all he was in the end. It paused for but a heartbeat, long enough for Mirshoa’s calves and right forearm to flop to the cobble. Then, just as quickly as it had struck, it shrunk back into the void of the Intrinsic Gate—vanished …