Those defending the western walls—exhausted Nansur Columnaries, Eumarnan Grandees, and others—watched the Sranc recoil from the stronghold of their Makers, race as shoals of fish beneath the retreating haze of the Shroud. “So the Soulless bolt,” General Inrilil ab Cinganjehoi bellowed in rapture, “from the wrath of the Souled!”
More than a million carcasses webbed the ashen plain, very nearly all Sranc, heaped into slopes and gutters about the gold-fanged ramparts, strewn in vast, radiating skeins. Bodies burned as bonfires at dozens of points, trailing smoke like black hair in water. Golgotterath rose as a burnt canker from the mayhem, the chambered socket of the High Horn, which soared into impossible clarity once again, dazzling for the fingers of the sun. The Canted Horn lay sectioned and shattered across the Shigogli below, a range of burnished wrack and ruin.
Dispersed across the blasted circus of the interior, the Men of the Great Ordeal cawed and wept for relief, for triumph—for salvation. Exhortations rang raw at different stations throughout the fell enclosure, cheers rising from one quarter of the fortress to blot the cheers rising from others … all the different tribes of Golgotterath.
Then the keen-eyed spied Him, and jousting cheers became a tempest of ecstasy and adulation.
The Holy Aspect-Emperor stood upon the Vigil, high on the eastward face of the surviving Horn. In their thousands, Men peered, the maimed as much as the hale, each crying out as their eyes fastened upon his heavenly figure, casting their voices as lots into the singular roar. And He stood sheltered in the Horn’s shadow, gazing down upon them as though from a mountain summit—and they could see that He was glad.
What had been ecstatic became crazed, frenzied even.
Passion maddened the air. The thunder of thousands rang across the soaring curvatures of Inchoroi gold. It warbled only when they saw the Holy Aspect-Emperor step from the Vigil into void … only to be redoubled when He floated rather then plummeted, descended as dandelion fluff in motionless air.
A war-trumpet peeled across the heights about the Horn’s base, ringing crisp and bright. The martial call for Temple. In the wondering lull, a solitary Conriyan Knight stranded on the gold-fanged parapets to the north began singing the famed Warrior Hymn,
By the waters of Siol,
we hung our lyres upon the willows,
and abandoned song with our mountain.
Perhaps it was the quaver in his voice, or simply the haunting intonations of the hymn itself, which seemed to thread the very bourne of melancholy and joy …
Ere the doom of Trysë,
we hoisted our sons upon our knees,
and counted scabs upon our hands and heart.
For it leapt from soul to soul with unnatural alacrity, radiated out and across the blasted tracts of Golgotterath, absorbing voice after cracked voice, transforming thousands of mudded droplets into a single lucid pool. They were Men who had seen the God’s will through. They were and would forever be Ordealmen. They understood the way, knew the harshest toll, and this song was for such as them …
In the fields of Cenei,
we broke bread that we had stolen,
and tasted the love of those who were dead.
So the New Inrithi sang as Anasûrimbor Kellhus, the Most Holy Aspect-Emperor of the Three Seas, floated down from the heights, for it was the want of Men to surrender their borders in song, to cease to be and so to cease to be alone. They sang to their Prophet to be indistinguishable from one another.
In the absence of edges lies the sum of divine grace. Fields of open palms were raised to brush his distal form. And they screeched as much as they cried the ultimate verse, for it bound the horrific sum of the toll they had paid …
Beneath the Ark of horrors,
we saw the sun rise upon gold as night fell,
and mourned the captivity of tomorrow.
How many times had they sung this? How many dreary watches had they spent cycling through the Warrior Hymn’s countless verses, always irresistibly drawn back to this very one, the words bearing the weight of their water, their experience, boiled down to a single fraught verse. How many times had they squinted through the shifting thickets toward the horizon and wondered at this very moment?
For here they stood, hands raised …
Witnessing their salvation.
Salvation … such a peculiar word.
One that made babes of Men.
For some, it was simply too much to bear, so much suffering and speculation come to such a finely honed point. They staggered, or even swooned outright.
But others found their passions even further inflamed. “Our salvation!” they began crying out to their Prophet, shouting, roaring, disjoint choruses resolving into thunderous clarity.
“Our salvation!”
“Our salvation!”
Men packed the terraces of the Oblitus, blood blackening their skin. Men gathered across the bulb of the Scab, crowded any section of the outer wall that afforded them a view. Some sixty thousand voices cried out in unison, engulfing their own porcelain echo, transforming the chant into something that struck, that punched and kicked the skies.
“Our salvation!”
“Our salvation!”
The Most Holy Aspect-Emperor fell as a mote through immobile air, seemed to flicker or waver for some otherworldly light.
“Our salvation!”
“Our salvation!”
He passed from the shadow of the Horn, flared with luminance in the gloaming sun …
“Our salvation!”
“Our salvation!”
And sank into the reverberations, his hands outstretched within discs of shining gold.
“Our salvation!”
“Our salvation!”
“Our salvation!”
Hands …
Hands bear her.
Mimara’s gaze lolls about the surface of the mad surge.
The very ground has become deranged with jubilation, faces pale and swart, all of them drugged with weariness and gloating exultation.
“Our salvation!”
They have seized her, the brutish Men, lifted her upon lacerated arms, and now they are bearing her in the wake of her Imperial mother. The anguish of her loins is beyond describing, and she is paralytic with exhaustion, but she feels it, nevertheless, the residue of the Nonman King, like a wire strung through her from pith to extremity. She hangs from Nil’giccas as a beggar’s laundry.
“Our salvation!”
She turns, sees the old Wizard floating upon hands beside her, cursing his bearers, nearly lost in his rancid bundle of animal skin for struggling. She feels the nausea that is his Mark. She realizes he has been shouting her name.
“Our salvation!”
Her mother marches on foot with singular purpose before them, her grandson held tight to her breast. She is diminutive in the shadow of the Ingrauls wedging apart the masses before her.
“The Blessed Empress!” they bellow as they lurch to and fro. “Make way! Make way!”
“Our salvation!”
She sees them, the Men of the Ordeal, the pageant of damaged faces … falling to earth as their bodies drop them to their knees.
“Our salvation!”
Following the eyes of those more distant, she sees Him, glorious for the paint thrown by the setting sun, descending from on high.
“Our salvation!”
She sees the High Horn, its mirror immensity throwing sundogs across her periphery.
“Our salvation!”
She worries that she has just given birth, and yet feels no yearning for the bundle in her Empress mother’s arms. She wonders what has happened, and why, surrounded by such joyous extravagance, she feels only desolation.
“Our salvation!”
She sees the whorl of warriors across the battered terraces below, the gutter of coal and cinder that is the Canal. She sees the curtains walls, like a saw with golden teeth. She sees the smashed maw of Ûbil, the Extrinsic Gate, the barrows of debris where D
omathuz and Corrunc had once loomed impenetrable.
“Our salvation!”
She glimpses the great, deformed curve of the Fallen Horn hunched on a mountainous, gleaming arc over the back of the Scab. She sees a scatter of garnets taking flight … crows and vultures riding thermals.
“Our salvation!”
She stares out across what would be holy scripture.
She sees Him …
“Our salvation!”
Anasûrimbor Kellhus, the Most Holy Aspect-Emperor. She sees Him descend into fields of reaching …
The old Wizard is shouting her name.
The stupor of calamity is the stupor of an undertaking too enormous, the idiocy of not knowing where to begin. Achamian relinquished all thought, allowing his feet to step over bodies, his gaze to chase glimpses in the absence of intent or design. He stumbled after. He looked about witless. Puddled blood shivered for the violence of the Ordealmen and their demonstration …
“Our salvation!” like a hammer strike across Inchoroi gold.
“Our salvation!” mapping their Lord-and-Prophet’s descent, becoming a booming stair …
Until He alighted upon the ground belonging to all, and tranquillity stole across Golgotterath. His very image twitched for unearthly power, the lines of him scribbling for a heartbeat, then no more. Silence flew out across the Ordeal as a ripple in a pool.
“Our salvation!” resounded once more, absent any centre … then dissolved into an oceanic murmur.
Suddenly Men who had been too desperate to recognize let alone attend to the three refugees threw themselves to their knees amid the carcasses, begging to serve their Most Blessed Empress. Hobbled, Achamian could only stand and gape, watch blinking as Esmenet—holding his infant son bundled in her arms—commanded the Ingraul who had been their bulwark to convey them to her divine husband. He did not protest when the towering warriors hoisted him from his feet and began passing him across their heads. He should be thrown bodily as upon a flood, it seemed. Buoyant upon warlike hands, he remembered how he had floated thus some twenty years previous in Sumna … as the Holy Shriah railed against the iniquities of the Fanim.
He did not swoon as he had that day—or at least not in the same manner. Incredulity was but the margin of what he suffered. His life—and since seizing Seswatha’s Heart, his being—had been a creature of this place. For all our sovereign pretension, we are welded to what we fathom. The degree to which events knock us from ourselves is the degree to which we are indistinguishable from our knowledge.
Absent some horizon, a compass needle is no compass at all.
So he was bourne to the uttermost tier of the Oblitus, at once insensate and alert, alive to every excruciating detail of his transit. Wounds. The spirit-crushing bulk of the Horn above. Drying gore. He remembered crying out to Mimara, either at the behest of some agency other than his own, or out of stupid reflex for catching glimpses of her miraculous face.
The Ordealmen crowded across the steps of the Oblitus, eyes lunatic with exaltation, or dull with disbelief. The Schoolmen had alighted like crows along the protuberant heights of the Scab, many-coloured sorcerers-of-rank crowding the ledges with their sword-wielding brothers. Men knelt in prayer or exhaustion. Men sat transfixed, rigid about their own breathing. Men stood and craned their heads, straining for some glimpse of what transpired. Men milled and conversed, animate for joy and expectation. Here and there individuals pricked the old Wizard’s rolling gaze: a bloody-headed Galeoth whetting his blade, a Shigeki heaving the dead about to check faces, an Ainoni sitting and rocking as he repeatedly stabbed his own thigh.
So the old Wizard was passed as a coin from hand to hand. Hemp ropes draped the Risers, hoists either bound to wicker baskets or knotted into simple nooses. Thus he was hauled up scorched-stone faces. His handlers, no matter how savage their appearance, accorded him the same reverence they accorded their Blessed Empress. The vista of the Oblitus and the ruined hulk of Gwergiruh became more vertiginous with each tier he surmounted. As the Ordealmen heaved him up the penultimate wall, he saw Mimara below, a view so unobstructed, so lucid, that he could not but recall some portion of what was happening …
And who he was.
She looked up, hearing the one shout he had not voiced. He could weep for the dark oval of her face.
Then callused hands seized him once again, drew him about. He was lifted between battlements, wheeled around to stand on his good leg …
So that he might gaze dumbstruck across the summit of the Oblitus.
The sound of weeping larded the hush.
A Carythusali proffered him a spear he might use as a crutch. He took it.
Everything lay in the chill shadow of the Scab. Circumfix devices hung slack in the evening lull. Only the Men working the hoists stood and toiled—for their sakes, no less. Otherwise, a field of prostrate Men extended from his feet, radiated out to encompass the whole of the terrace. Shields and backs and bowed heads clotted his every glance. Believer-Kings beside Schoolmen. Caste-nobles wedged between menials.
A recess scalloped the black scarp that loomed over the uppermost tier, the Ninth, creating the likeness of hands cupped about something that might cut or burn. A great shard leaned out from the hollow …
His rostrum.
There He stood.
There He stood, his smile canny, staring directly at him.
Anasûrimbor Kellhus.
The Holy Aspect-Emperor of the Three Seas.
Lord of Golgotterath …
His image fairly dazzled, cast tangles of gold across innumerable obsidian fractures, glimmered over myriad surfaces of metal and enamel.
It bore no Mark.
The old Wizard coughed to breathe … to sob. Hot tears flooded his cheeks.
He had been … cleansed …
Saved.
Achamian started at the small, warm hand that clasped his own. He tore his gaze from Kellhus, expecting to see Mimara, but found Esmenet instead, his son in her arms, her eyes wondrous … avid with the revelation they all shared. Tears coursed her cheeks, leaving lines that refracted the Holy Aspect-Emperor’s otherworldly light.
Something stepped through him—something greater than thought.
Could it be?
Could it be that all he had lost, all he had lamented … begrudged …
His School … His cause … His student …
His wife!
Had his throttling sacrifice … his heartbreak …
Had it saved the World?
He spoke true …
Drusas Achamian trembled as he had never trembled before.
It’s over …
The Holy Aspect-Emperor inclined his head to the two of them—a look that was an impossible blessing—then swept his cerulean gaze out over the assembled …
His will has been done.
The voice of Anasûrimbor Kellhus fell as warm rain, bracing even as it soothed …
“Man …”
It hummed across the mountainous nethers of the Horn, made warm what was vast and empty …
“… would sooner weep before God than his brother.”
Achamian made to join the impossible congregation, only to teeter. Esmenet caught him, helped him ease to his knees, then joined him. That was when Mimara staggered past, her look plundered. He reached out to clasp her sleeve, but his fingers fell short. Swaying for the rigours of her travail, she picked her way forward between the prone Men of the Ordeal.
“He cowers beneath the rod that never falls …”
Her babe gurgled in her mother’s arms.
“To better convict his brother of pride …”
Blood flushed the backside of her borrowed gown.
“To better beat him into submission.”
Her feet are bare …
It does not matter.
She lurches past Akka and her mother …
It does not matter.
She sees her brother approach from the High Cwol bearing her sister’s blaste
d body in his arms …
It does not matter.
The Judging Eye is open.
The Holy Aspect-Emperor speaks from a black dais …
Anasûrimbor Mimara advances through the kneelers, stumbling onto the backs of some, hauling herself onward without acknowledgement, let alone apology.
They do not matter.
At last the soles of her feet scuff across the inexplicable line where no soul dares approach further … no soul save her own. She cannot breathe. Heat drops through her, slipping like sheeted water from her crown to her toes. A hand clutches her elbow, tries to pull her about, but the gaze is unbreakable, as implacable as the sun …
So the old Wizard hobbles to her side instead, looks to the Most Holy Aspect-Emperor frowning down at them from above …
All the World has fallen silent.
“Mim …”
“Akka …” she replies, still staring into the golden regard of Anasûrimbor Kellhus.
A sob kicks through her, makes ropes of her bones. The old Wizard steadies her, turns her body about, though her eyes remain soldered to the image of her stepfather.
The assembled nations of Eärwa watch in wonder, the mightiest Sons of the Tusk.
“He spoke true, Mim …” Achamian murmurs. He slaps astounded hands to his wild hermit hair. He cackles for incredulous joy, cries, “The Consult has been destroyed!”
A ragged cheer erupts from the Soldiers and Schoolmen of the Circumfix. The Zaudunyani upon the debris heaped about the High Cwol, along the lip of the Scab some thirty cubits above, cry out.
“No …” she says.
But a crazed elation seizes the Host of Hosts, one that sends brutalized thousands to their knees, sobbing, reaching for the shining image of their Lord-and-Prophet, their all-conquering Holy Aspect-Emperor.
“Nooooooo!”
Achamian clutches her hand, his flush draining into pallor. “Mimara?”