Skuthula the Black.
Worm-Tyrant. Wingéd Conflagration. Glutton of Obmaw.
Keeper of the Intrinsic Gate.
Anguish has its ways. It can foreclose on the World, roll a harbouring soul into a little ball about itself. Or it can prick the bubble, peel back the membrane and cast the soul as paint across the spiny back of the Real.
“Run!” the old Wizard cries.
He is frantic for terror; Mimara is not.
“Do something!” her mother screeches over the ascending wail.
The things that should belong deny her, and the things that should deny her now belong. The empire of her body has dissolved, stranding her with limbs like so many provinces tipping into rebellion. And yet everything—the gold-thorned battlements, the climbing stages of the Oblitus, even the alien enormity of the Upright Horn—tingles like extensions of skin … until it seems she is as wide as Creation …
Mimara fleeing from Mimara into Mimara.
“Cast away those blasted Trinkets!” the old man snarls. “Let me save us!”
She sees the Sranc on the plain, twisting like maggots across ground-that-is-meat. But her gaze lolls away, across the intact Horn soaring upward, silken with sunlight. Slowly, gracefully, she draws the Shroud across its gracile immensity, for she is—and always has been—a modest whore.
The beautiful ones always are, you see.
She looks down upon the three desperate souls, as tiny as beetles clicking across the temple floor.
The little Mimara is screaming, hands about her burning, cramping, shrieking womb. There is life within her, and her body chokes and convulses about it.
The greater Mimara communes with God as God.
Malowebi watched the Shroud swallow the void that was light and deliver foetid darkness, gloom. The bottomless vista disappeared, leaving only their small platform stranded upon a vertical plane extending indefinitely in all directions. What relief Malowebi found in the reduction of riot to simple lines was overthrown by his terror. They stood upon the Vigil, he knew, a platform set high upon the eastern face of the Upright Horn—the very stoop, the ancient poets claimed, of the Golden Room …
The innermost sanctum of the Unholy Consult.
At least the gate appeared barred against him. A crude monolith of iron had been set into mirror gold, stamped in rows of script, tall enough to admit an Inchoroi’s high-hooking wings, broad enough to accommodate two men abreast. In terms of brute scale it seemed modest enough; metaphysically, however, Malowebi had scarcely seen anything more monumental. Its Mark boiled with the intimation of potent Wards, sorceries anchored to the iron’s very essence and thrown in fractal webs across the Horn’s curve.
The Inchoroi abomination lay curled unconscious at the Aspect-Emperor’s feet, carrion wings folded like hands in prayer, black veins pulsing beneath the intestinal skin, membranes fluting. The Anasûrimbor stepped over the powerful frame, pinning the wings beneath his right boot. Malowebi dangled above, so close to the body that both wings had been amputated before he even realized the Anasûrimbor had drawn his blade.
The creature awoke on an appalling shriek, snapped from a foetal hunch into a convulsive arch.
The Aspect-Emperor stepped out of reach. Malowebi bounced with his macabre perspective, alternately glimpsing void and the soaring casements of the Horn. Shadow and pallor animated the mirror polish, a murky, watercolour procession. The Inchoroi writhed on the platform, kicked, wailed into the ambient baying of the Horde. The thing seemed to recuperate in stages, finally climbing with puling breaths to kneel before its conqueror. The face embedded in the jaws of the greater skull turned up, slicked in mucous, twitching between boredom and a rictus of anguish …
He was watching Aurang, the Mbimayu Schoolman realized, the Horde-General so reviled by the Ancient Norsirai authors of The Sagas.
“I will love thee …” it exhaled.
And Malowebi glimpsed a dawning allure in the wretched and piteous face, a promising tenderness. Its strapped frame, which had repelled for the intimation of pallid rot mere moments before, suddenly emanated carnal glory. What had been foul mucosity became slick with the promise of oily congress. Malowebi glimpsed its pendulous member rising turgid across its thigh … and was not repelled.
If anything, the sight seized him, infused him with a curiosity that was at once a yearning, an innocent need to know, and charged with the giddy promise of release …
“Throw open the Portal,” the Anasûrimbor replied.
“I will adore thee!” it gasped. Images of ravishing and being ravished twined beneath his soul’s eye.
“Throw open the Portal, now, or join your Horde below.”
It stood as erect as its phallus, towered over the Aspect-Emperor, grinned as if conceding its inhuman ardour—as if yielding to corporeal desire. Even without hands, Malowebi instinctively made to clutch its member, to attend to its swollen needs.
Then it turned to the Portal, revealing the grievous amputations upon either shoulder …
And the back of Malowebi’s lewd madness was broken.
He felt the heave of phantom viscera, gagged for revulsion. The thing had ensorcelled him, he realized, picked his soul as a lock with some kind of wanton and loathsome glamour.
Malowebi wished a plague of boils upon Likaro and all his kin.
The alien abomination chipped talons across the iron barricade, lowered its elongated skull to mutter something inaudible. Tar oozed from the stumps upon its back, sheeting its backside. Energy pulsed through the great system of magicks—an ethereal heartbeat.
The dark World howled. The iron monolith glided to the left without sound.
The Portal was open.
The Vigil’s height was such that the sun could not be denied entirely. Light filtered into the rectangular maw, revealing the depth of the stone frame, the glimpse of shadowy, skewed golden surfaces beyond, but little else.
The Incû-Holoinas …
The Ark of Apocalypse!
The Inchoroi slumped to one knee, its obscene life draining from the roots of its dismembered wings. The face in the great-grinning jaws turned from the ink of the entrance’s throat.
“Save me, Anasûrimbor,” it rasped through mucous and reeds. “I can show you … Death … damnation can be conquered!”
“Conquered?” the Holy Aspect-Emperor replied. “You are the terror of Hell made flesh, become terror in this World. Hell has conquered you in every way possible.”
A clicking that was carnal laughter. Milk-grey membranes shuttered eyes of oil and obsidian. “You will bleed,” the monstrosity wheezed, “such will be the intensity … the vigour …”
He could not see his captor, so Malowebi would never know precisely what happened, only that the shrouded World flew as if upon a string, the Vigil and the Horn bobbing on the margins of oblivion, and when all had settled, the Holy Aspect-Emperor stood alone on windswept heights.
He heard a diminishing shriek, an alien wail pursed in a far mightier roar.
Aurang, the ancient and malevolent Horde-General of Mog-Pharau, was no more.
Not like this …
But even as the thought occurred to him, Achamian understood this was precisely the fate Anagkë would apportion him. For his life had been nothing but a long march of perversities …
A death march, as the Whore would have it.
Mimara, he decided, had been deceived by the sheer immensity of Golgotterath—what other explanation could there be? The Horn leaning across the whole of Heaven, an impossible immensity. The gold-fanged ramparts half-again greater than those ringing Momemn. She had looked and, addled by her travail, decided they were closer to the refuge of the Great Ordeal than they in fact were, close enough to reach the nearest of the breaches before the masses of Sranc rising from the south.
Now the Shroud had engulfed the High Horn, and the first Sranc had gained the shattered remains of Corrunc. More followed—more than more! A veritable deluge of skinnies sluiced across the
desolation, Sranc more brutish than any he had ever seen, bent on trampling all the Furnace Plain.
The three of them ran despite the manifest futility, cramps knifing their flanks, breathlessness scorching their throats, their limbs numb as loamed clay. They could no longer hear one another save for bellowing directly into hands cupped about ears. And it seemed a horror to the old Wizard, the sight of Mimara, teetering great with child, her cheeks shining for tears, her brow pinched for anguish, her mouth working about soundless cries.
Yet onward they hobbled. The old Wizard marvelled at the stubbornness—the delusional extremity! Anasûrimbor Mimara would joyfully lob the three of them—or four of them?—into the maw of certain death! She would sooner cast him to the Hells than heed him!
Skinnies in their tens of thousands flooded the intervening ground. The Shroud consumed the white spike of the sun, towered before them as a progression of phantom cliffs, ethereal faces as tall as the sky, compounding until the Upright Horn was naught but a shadowy silhouette, the only point of reference remaining. Spared the sun’s afflicting glare, the first of the Sranc spied them. Within heartbeats, the whole of the Horde—or what they could see of it, at least—bore directly toward them.
“Obstinate wench!” Achamian cried to the girl. “You’ve killed us all!”
But he couldn’t even hear himself.
Esmenet was weeping, her face averted from the mad spectacle. Achamian could not look away, staring as if transfixed by the brute fact of their foe, the canine heave, the violent jerk and gesticulation of pallid limbs, the endless progression of white faces, graven beauty imploding into expressions of lunatic lust and fury. The Horde crashed upon them, each raving figure a fragment of hurtling debris, lethal both individually and in monumental sum …
And still they limped onward …
Directly into the maelstrom.
Achamian fairly cast Mimara into Esmenet’s arms, raising his voice in arcane song before the two had even crashed to the dust. Flailing white bodies plastered the limits of his incipient Wards, skinnies crushed against his defenses by the irresistible surge of their wretched kin. Gnashing teeth. Grinding hips. Hacking limbs and weapons. The Blessed Empress of the Three Seas lay on her rump, clutching her riven daughter between her legs, sobbing as she threw her gaze about.
The Shroud encompassed them.
Within heartbeats the skinnies had inundated the arcane hemisphere, and they were plunged into a gloom more terrifying than any they had known—far more so than the mobbings they had survived in Kûniüri. The old Wizard sang with weeping abandon, knowing that it was only a matter of time before either his strength gave out or some Chorae-bearing skinny simply leapt into their midst. The semantic incandescence of his conjuring limned every surface—everything from mashing phalluses to the round of Mimara’s belly—in an eerie and indiscriminate blue light. He blasted the lunatic welter, threw them from his Wards as so many sodden leaves. He ignited the meat of them, transformed them into thrashing candles. He inscribed the spaces they occupied with geometries of Gnostic light, and left them twitching and dismembered. And yet more and more surged over the greased and smoking carcasses, threw themselves at his Wards with the same thrashing intensity.
Esmenet had lowered her chin to Mimara’s shoulder, and now rocked to and fro with her daughter, cheek to cheek. Dust clotted the tracks of their tears, painting black trees about eyes clamped against all that was visible.
Drusas Achamian watched them as he sang, saw their terror blunt for realizing, as he did, that it was not such a bad thing …
Dying in the arms of those one loved.
He set aside his song, fell to his knees beside them, gathered them in his embrace. Mimara clutched his hand. Esmenet cupped his grizzled cheek. The Sranc vaulted their smoking kin, flew at his Wards, each misbegotten form stealing an increment of murky light. Blackness engulfed them. Achamian pressed his face against their scalps, closed his eyes, and with the ease of an exhalation, surrendered whatever reserve of regret and resentment he yet possessed … He breathed deep the union of love and resignation.
Wept for gratitude …
For Esmenet. For Mimara.
These two, at least, had believed … had forgiven.
I have toiled long enough.
The Horde howled.
The light, when it came, was brilliant enough to shine through sealed lids. He opened his eyes blinking, threw an arm against the dazzling glare. Squinting, he saw her hanging against the shifting obscurities of the Shroud, a girlish slip clothed only in raiments of blistered, ulcerated skin, singing Gnostic Cants unlike anything he knew.
His beleaguered Wards had been cleared, as had been a great swathe of the raving tumult beyond, almost a ghastly road of sorts, paved in bulbous torsos, jutting limbs …
“Run!” her voice cracked across Creation.
To shout at what you see is to club what you do, to act otherwise. For days he had swung from the Anasûrimbor’s girdle, and even though his impotence was vertiginous for being so complete, he nevertheless found it impossible not to shout. Several times, now, he had thrown himself against the implacable course of the Anasûrimbor’s actions—but never so violently as he did now upon the Vigil.
They lure you! he cried into the silence of his captivity. The Consult beckons you!
Aurang was dead. The Portal had been thrown open.
Likaro was going to pay for this.
The Aspect-Emperor tarried upon the platform’s rim, singing sorceries the Mbimayu sorcerer could not fathom, but supposed were Metagnostic Wards of some kind. The man prepared.
You have won your Argument, Anasûrimbor!
Even though Malowebi knew he possessed no body, some fraction of his soul once again refused to countenance this knowledge. Even now it kicked and clawed at the encapsulating oblivion.
I know you can hear me! Why else bear me upon your hip?
Void yawed all about them, heights and pitches lost to the obscurity of the Shroud. The Horn’s burnished hull gleamed through the gauze, seemed endless for outrunning visibility, something that spanned the sum of Creation.
The Aspect-Emperor stepped before the threshold. It seemed they stared down a pit and not a corridor—into a more profound and horrific ground.
Nooo! Malowebi howled. This is folly! You have to know as much!
An obsidian floor extended mirror-black into the murk. The walls that flanked it for the first several cubits were both stone and square, rising to brace stone lintels, likewise square. But beyond this the interior world was at once golden and turned three quarters, with bulkheads rising at acute and obtuse angles, likening the floors to pitch pooled across the basin of a capsized vessel.
You play number-sticks with Apocalypse! The end of all things!
Then the impossible happened: the Anasûrimbor laid palm and fingers across the Decapitant’s cheek … The captive Schoolman could scarce feel the touch, but it triggered paroxysms of terror and grief still.
“Fear not, Iswazi,” the Holy Aspect-Emperor said—to him. “I am the greater mystery.”
Something flashed between the play of pale gleams down the hall, like a cuttlefish in the deep.
“I walk Conditioned Ground.”
And so was Second Negotiant Malowebi carried reeling into the horror of the Ark.
CHAPTER
SEVENTEEN
The Upright Horn
The more cunning the Lie, the more it exhibits the form of Truth, the more it lays bare the Truth of Truth. So do not fear the Scriptures of other Men!
To drink deep from the Cup of Lies as the Cup of Lies is to grow drunk on Truth.
—44 Epistles, EKYANNUS I
Early Autumn, 20 New Imperial Year (4132, Year-of-the-Tusk), Golgotterath.
Far more souls would perish in the tribal wars subsequent to the Battle of Kiyuth than in the legendary contest itself. Infighting, hunger and squalor would all but consume the People of War. Across the Hallowed Steppe, the old mothers began
openly cursing those bearing recent swazond, calling them the Fa’bakilut: those who grow fat on Misfortune.
Then Cnaiür urs Skiötha had ridden out of the smoke of the Carathay, a lone Utemot encased in scars from cheek to toenail, bearing more swazond than any among the People, past or present. His “Norsirai concubine,” far from blotting his honour, simply added to his mystique. She was a daughter of Lokung, he claimed, and none dared contradict him. The old mothers even began calling her Salma’loku, a name of legendary dread among the People. Rumours rode the winds, of course, tales of scandal and shame, but they impeached the tellers far more than the souls told. The Utemot had been scattered unto the corners of the Holy Steppe. And what was more, this man was so obviously the very incarnation of the Old Honour. A warrior who had reaved at Zirkirta, survived Kiyuth, and had struck out seeking to redeem the People, battling in Outland wars for Outland Kings, bathing in rivers of outland blood …
More importantly, he was the one the memorialists extolled in their tales of the Hated Battle, the solitary chieftain to dare raise his voice against Xunnurit the Accursed. And now he had returned bearing the death rattle of hundreds in his veins, on his skin, and declaring the People were one. Cnaiür urs Skiötha …
The Most Violent of all Men.
Some said he seized the Steppe in a single day, and though this was not at all the case, it was very nearly true, for none who resisted him possessed a fraction of his will, let alone his cunning or prestige. In the span of a single furious summer he crushed all who found advantage in fratricide, murdering only those who needed to be murdered. The blood of the People was too sacred, he said, to be squandered. He apportioned the widows to the mightiest, enslaved all who were barren. A tempest was upon them, he claimed, and the People would need all her Sons.