We, the sons of past sorrow,
We, the heirs of ancient trow,
We shall raise glory to the morrow,
And deliver fury to the now …
—“Hymn of the Pyre-King,” Shimeh Songs
Early Autumn, 20 New Imperial Year (4132, Year-of-the-Tusk), Golgotterath.
A chevron of geese drawn long and ragged fled across the bluing skies.
Daybreak. The sun blackened the scarped bulwarks of the Occlusion, burnished the gleaming enormity of the Horns. Gold lanced down the cracked heights, graced the encampment with the memory of its many-coloured splendour …
The highest of the high-hoisted Circumfixes flashed white.
The Interval tolled for the final time, a bright-humming resonance that hovered in the stationary air. The mazed thoroughfares of the encampment remained vacant for its duration. Spears and lances leaned in the sand. Lords and officers could be heard bawling out lonely commands from unseen quarters, but nothing more. Then the Men of the Ordeal issued forth, sluiced in their myriads into the tangled ways and byways. Silence became booming intercourse. Absence became teeming industry.
The Witches and Schoolmen formed up within the grounds of their respective enclaves, organized themselves into triunes. Given the colours of their billows, they seemed flowers to the pickets stationed across the heights of the Occlusion. Even the most aged and decrepit shimmered with vital glory. The mundane soldiery secured what sustenance they could, then joined the mass exodus to the encampment’s perimeter, where their kin and countrymen assembled beneath the stern regard of their commanders. The near distances bristled for the transport of arms, dazzled for the play of sunlight across polished miscellany. Everywhere, pockets of Men knelt in communal prayer. Hymns floated and filtered throughout the bustling tracts, songs of memory and distraction, praise and outrage. What Judges survived assisted the priests with Whelmings.
Despite all the grievous insults and injuries the Whore had meted, the Great Ordeal remained a martial wonder. Scarcely one-third of those who had embarked from Sakarpus had survived. A full quarter of their number had been lost at Irsûlor. Another quarter had perished at Dagliash, if not in the Scalding, then in its nightmarish consequence. The vagaries of disease, murder, and attrition had consumed the rest. And yet, fairly one hundred thousand souls assembled across the blasted tracts of Shigogli, half again as many Men as Anasûrimbor Celmomas had mustered in Far Antiquity, and at least three times the number of Cu’jara Cinmoi’s Ishroi.
The Host of Hosts formed up across the smoking leagues. For the sentinels across the Akeokinoi, it seemed time itself had been inverted, watching miraculous order congeal from the streams and clouds of Southron Men. Phalanx upon shining phalanx assembled across the waste, the flanks bowed about the sepulchral presence of Golgotterath in the distance. Signs and devices drawn from across the Three Seas adorned the formations. A thousand variants of the Circumfix hung slack in the morning chill.
The Host’s ponies had either been eaten, or lingered beyond the Occlusion starving, too weak to bear a child let alone an armoured knight. Only the Lords of the Ordeal remained mounted. Decked in those warlike accoutrements they had been able to salvage, they paced their formations, inspected and harangued their charges. Answering shouts boomed out over the desolation.
The Holy Aspect-Emperor had divided the Ordeal into three Trials, as he called them, each charged with its own violent objective. The Men of the Middle-North under King Coithus Narnol formed the centre, charged with assaulting Gwergiruh, the cyclopean gatehouse guarding the famed Ûbil Maw—the Black Mouth of Golgotterath. The Sons of Shir under the cruel King Nurbanû Soter formed the right flank, charged with taking the Tower of Corrunc north of Ûbil. And the Sons of Kyraneas under Prince Inrilil ab Cinganjehoi formed the left flank, charged with taking Domathuz, Corrunc’s monstrous sister to the south of the Gate.
The great shadow of the Occlusion shrunk from the gold-fanged parapets, and began its slow retreat to the lee of the scarps, not so much dark as ochre and saffron for the foul brilliance of the Horns. The clamour of assembly gradually faded into the hiss of the morning sun. Soon only the shouts of a few unruly souls could be heard. The Holy Aspect-Emperor himself could not be seen, but his banner stood high and visible to all at their fore, a black Circumfix once intact, but now an empty circle, having lost the image of their divine Prophet to the rigours of the sky. The gazes of all returned to it, and the hearts of all were comforted, for it was scourged as they were scourged, all their differences worn into a singular principle, one aptly signified by the perfection of the threadbare circle.
A lull settled across the Holy Host of Hosts. In one booming, gaseous voice, the Men of the Ordeal recited the Temple Prayer.
Sweet God of Gods, who dwell among us,
Hallowed by thy Many Names …
The chorus rumbled out across Shigogli, and the Men heard what their ancient forebears had once heard—as the Nonmen had heard before them: the way the Horns reflected shredded echoes, and so mocked all collective declaration. The voices of some faltered for puzzlement, but those who were strong continued, and by example incited their brothers to declaim even louder.
May your bread,
Silence our daily hunger.
Judge us not according to our trespasses,
But according to our temptations …
It was a prayer they had learned before they were born, words so well worn as to become invisible, and therefore immovable, stamped into them before they were themselves. So they were rooted as to the infinite as they recited it, and for all its vertiginous immensity the Ark seemed naught but a mummer’s conceit, a trick of perspective and foil.
Trumpets peeled across the desolation, fading into the onerous, oceanic groan of the ghus. As one, the armed and armoured fields began advancing, dark and brilliant against the powder of the Shigogli. The very floor of the World seemed to move, such was its extent. For those still breathing on the ruined circuit of the Akeokinoi, the Men seemed to dissolve into the obscurity of their own dust. The Great Ordeal became a host of shadowy apparitions, an assembly of wraiths, with only the rare wink of reflected sunlight to attest to their frail reality …
Thus did the Believer-Kings of the Three Seas advance westward, toward the pale, water-colour curtain of the Yimaleti Mountains beyond the Occlusion—and the grim and golden spectre of Golgotterath beneath.
So did the End of the World begin.
Im’vilaral, the Nonmen of Viri had called them so very many indignities ago, the “Horizon-that-has-teeth.” The High Norsirai purloined this name the way they had so many others, beat it until it became a thing of comfort on their tongues—if not their hearts. So Im’vilaral became “Yimaleti,” the name for the range of mountains that barricaded, for sheer immensity, the north against mortal reckoning.
To own a thing was to know it. All the World’s unplumbed pockets made the hearts of Men anxious, but few could claim to command the terror belonging to the Yimaleti Mountains, for they became, far more than Golgotterath, the true womb of the Sranc. The Nonmen had sought to cleanse them in the gouged aftermath of the Cûno-Inchoroi Wars. For years it was the lot of the most heroic Quya and Ishroi to climb into the scarps and hunt the miscreant progeny of their foe. But as years past and names vanished what had once been deemed a courageous undertaking came to seem reckless. And as so often happens, bravery found itself broken upon the boney knee of futility, and the strategy was abandoned.
The High Norsirai would seek to clear the monstrosities from the shoulders of the Yimaleti in their turn. For a time, no mercenaries in the World were so feared or so prized as the famed Emiorali, or the “Bronzemen,” so-called for their great gowns of bronze armour. Their Aorsi cousins from the plains, however, had another epithet, Kauwûttarim, or “Broken Strong”—a name originally given to those driven mad by battle. As quick as they were to invoke them as brothers in outland company, they eschewed the Emiorali otherwise, remained aloof in the brittle manner of weaker, yet far more numerous Men. Though the Bronzemen were notorious for stingy dealings, taciturn manner, and melancholic fury, the truth was that their kin begrudged their fame and feared their strength. “What is to stop them?” the suspicious asked about the failing way-hearths, when the faces of all grow crimson and the soul turns to things bloody and dark. “Men such as these … Why live the hard life? Why feed their sons to the scarps and gorges, when they need only pluck what is ours?” Thus did they render inevitable what they feigned to prevent, such is the madness of Men.
In the Codicil Councils of Shiarau, the wisest among the Aorsi had assumed that the Sranc population would eventually collapse, so great was the toll the Emiorali had exacted defending their Hooded Redoubts. Perhaps the creatures did dwindle for a time, but the fealty of the Emiorali to Shiarau dwindled quicker. The Bronzemen eventually grew impatient, even disgusted, with the fat ways and absurd condescension of their southern cousins. They became the stock of sedition, a people known for rampaging bandits and usurping generals. In 1808 Year-of-the-Tusk, High-King Anasûrimbor Nanor-Ukkerja VI finally decided the Sranc and Bashrag were the lesser evil: all ninety-nine of the Hooded Redoubts were abandoned, and the Yimaleti were ceded entirely to the Foe.
None knew why these mountains proved such fertile breeding grounds. They stood twice the height of the subdued Demua, as monstrous, as wricked and ragged as the Great Kayarsus itself, and pitted with numerous, largely barren vales. The most ancient Nonmen records spoke of an infinite wasteland of ice and snow beyond the Yimaleti; a continuation of what Men called the Vastwhite to the east. The Bashrag hunted game, but the Sranc sucked their meat from the very earth, and could not sustain themselves on land too long frozen. The Vastwhite was proof enough of this. Some Far Antique scholars claimed the secret lay with the western Ocean, citing mariners who had explored the seaward sockets of the western Yimaleti, daring souls who described innumerable, deep-barrelled fjords warmed by the Ocean and so overrun with Sranc that the very landscape itself shivered as with maggots. Pitarwum, they called them, Beast-cradles.
One of these scholars, a King-Temple Historian known to posterity only as Wraelinu, proposed that these Pitarwum anchored cycles of exploding population, which in turn drove endless migratory invasions across the northern back of the Yimaleti. This was why, he claimed, the Sranc in the eastern extremes of the range were invariably so much more emaciated than those spied in the west. And this was why the Yimaleti Sranc differed from their southern kin, shorter of stature, slower across open ground, but more powerful of limb, more ferocious than vicious; the Pitarwum, he argued, bred them the way herdsmen bred cattle. There they remained until exhaustion drove them forth into the mountains, which belonged, in sooth, to the Bashrag. It was this cycle that had proven so ruinous …
Only the greatest of mobbings, he claimed, could incite their pestilential descent upon Men.
The Great Ordeal traversed the intervening desolation.
There was foreboding among the Men, but there was exultation as well. Golgotterath hung in the distance before them, the trudging object, not just of their present exertions, but of anguished months of campaigning and toilsome years of preparation. Few pondered the fact explicitly, for doing so robbed the air of its sustenance, the will of its direction. Golgotterath—the end for which whole peoples had been put to the sword. Golgotterath—the warrant of so much peril, so many privations of the heart, spirit, and flesh. Golgotterath—the subject of so many outraged prayers, sinister tales, and anxious, nocturnal musings.
Golgotterath. Min-Uroikas.
The Wicked Ark.
The greatest evil the World had ever known, bloating by imperceptible degrees, step by dusty step.
There could be no denying the holiness of their undertaking. There could be no questioning the righteousness of raising arms against such a place—a cancer so foul, so obvious, that it compelled excision.
There could be no doubt.
The God of Gods walked with them—through them. The Holy Aspect-Emperor was His sceptre, and they were His rod, the very incarnation of His curse, His violent rebuke.
The song, when it arose, seemed to spark in all throats at once …
And it seemed a miracle within a miracle, a glorious compounding of Providence, that this, of all the lays they had committed to memory, would be the song to seize their hearts now: the Warrior’s Hymn.
Ere the doom of Trysë,
we hoisted our sons upon our knees,
and counted scabs upon our hands and heart
None knew its origins. It possessed as many verses as the World possessed bone-fields, which made its subtleties all the more remarkable: the melancholic honesty, the obstinate manner in which it sang around battles instead of about them, bundling the violence in depictions of respite. It never failed to move, even when raised during the most interminable of marches, for it sang to the commons between them, the vigil that all warriors kept in the shadow of atrocity. They sang as brothers, a vast assemblage of coincident souls, and they sang as sinners, the authors of abominable deeds, isolate and astray …
In the fields of Cenei,
we broke bread that we had stolen,
and tasted the love of those who were dead.
And it was the same for all of them. The Knights of Hinnant, their faces white for paint, their eyes bred to the hazy expanses of the Secharib Plains and so strangely comforted by the flat plate of Shigogli. The iron-mailed Agmundrmen, carrying their longbows likes stocks across their shoulders, their wrists hooked high. The Massentian Columnaries, their shields like halved barrels emblazoned with the Circumfix and the Sheaf, yellow upon yellow. The two-hearted Holca tribesmen, conspicuous for their stature and the fiery crimson of their beards and manes, marching, as always, at the fore, where their battle-madness was both most useful and most safe.
Golgotterath! There before them! Inexorable and impossible. No matter what the nation, no matter what the names scrawled on the ancestor lists, it was the same for all. Golgotterath had become the World’s only portal, the one defile that could deliver them from Hell. They had pitched themselves from the precipice, leapt into the void …
And so the Wicked Stronghold loomed, sinister in aspect, as alien in scale as in appearance. The Horns reared impossible, commanding all, the two great Oars of the Ark goring the belly of the sky. Their golden skin roiled with morning brilliance, so bright as to cast palls of jaundiced light across the stoneworks below. Their hearts, which had been rooted in immobility, continuous with the very God, became progressively unmoored. Not a soul among them did not quail in some fashion, such was the premonition of enormity, of weights too vast hung upon heights too perilous. They became as gnats. And to a man they thought what every mortal had thought stumping across Shigogli’s bitter plate …
No Man belonged in such a place.
The proof of its manufacture was plain in the great abrasions marring the Canted Horn. All could see the radial beams through the stripped-away planking, glimpses of bulkheads and frames similar to those in wooden ships. The Incû-Holoinas, the dread Inchoroi Ark, was a contrivance, a Void-faring vessel, the product of innumerable, inhuman wrights and artisans … Aliens that revelled in filth and atrocity.
From where?
To a man they asked this, because to a man they instinctively understood the power of origins, that the truth of a thing lay in its genesis. But like the Nonmen, this thing, this mountainous Ark, had outrun its beginnings. It was enigmatic, incomprehensible, not merely in the way of miracles and cataclysms, but in the way of madness and mayhem. A thing from nowhere was a thing that should not be. And so the Ark, in their eyes, became an outrage against existence, an object so fundamentally accursed that hands became papyrus for simply gazing upon it …
An intrusion like no other … A violation.
The rapist that had despoiled the maidenhead of the World.
And so it was that disgust hooked their lips, revulsion propelled their voices, that abhorrence and loathing steeped their hearts as they cried out their battlesong. They gnashed their teeth, stamped their feet, beat sword and spear against their shields. Hatred and fury filled them, the lust to strangle, to cut and to burn and to blind. And they knew, with a conviction that made some weep, that to do evil to this place was to be holy. They became as cutthroats in the alley, murderers in the night, souls too dangerous, too deadly, to fear the machinations of any victim …
Even one so monstrous as this.
The Horns loomed ever more immense, the fortifications ever more near—close enough to reflect their shouting fury and so impart a demented, echoic resonance to their song. Soon the World rang as if across metal.
Beneath the Ark of horrors,
we saw the sun rise upon gold as night fell,
and mourned the captivity of tomorrow.
Trumpets crowed upon this, the ultimate verse, and the chorus cracked into the rumble of innumerable disjoint voices. The outer echelons of each Trial paused, then filed behind the centremost formations, creating three great, articulated squares. Thus the Host of Hosts arrayed itself across the plain the ancient Kûniüri had called Ûgorrior; and the Nonmen, Mirsurqûl, immediately below the jaws of the Ûbil Gate.
Golgotterath loomed wicked directly before them—at long last!—so close its stench hung as a corrupt emanation on the air. The Horns soared in hazy stages above, the alien traceries of the World-Curse clear for all to see. Abstract figures, unintelligible and vast, etched into the casing. Bands of evil symbol. From a distance, the fortifications below seemed a crude afterthought, the Horns so overshadowed them. But now the Men could see that they rivalled, even surpassed, those of the greatest Southron cities. The cataclysmic Fall of the Ark had occasioned some kind of igneous upheaval, creating a series of cliffs and scapular heights, black and blasted, about the submerged base of the Horns—what the ancient Kûniüri had called the Scab. A great curtain wall wandered its outer compass, towering more than fifty cubits in places, folded and knotted into a cunning series of bastions and bulwarks. The whole consisted of mighty black rocks hewn from the Scab’s interior heights, with the sole exception of the battlements, which had been adorned with tear-drop shanks of gold. The Lords of the Ordeal had reckoned they were some kind of salvage drawn from the Ark and affixed as a form of hoarding. Since no ancient texts made mention of them, the Men of the Ordeal dubbed them incisori—for the way they resembled golden fangs perched upon black-rotted gums.
The greatest gate in the evil circuit was also the only gate, the legendary Ûbil Maw, so named for the myriad Ishroi it had consumed during the Cûno-Inchoroi Wars. The Nonman had razed the hated original long, long ago, but the lay of the Scab was such that Golgotterath could possess but one orifice, one point of egress and ingress. Rugged cliffs skirted the black formation everywhere save the southwest, where it had been scalloped into a ramp very nearly as broad as the Sempis, one that eased from the very summit to the desolate plate of Shigogli. So while the walls upon the stronghold’s high perimeter had a plummet for their foundation—and were all but impregnable for it—those guarding the southwest stood upon Ûgorrior, the same dusty earth as the Men of the Ordeal, or very nearly so. Thus their cyclopean immensity. Thus the monstrous proportions of Gwergiruh, the infamous Gatehouse of Ûbil, which squatted every bit as immense as Atyersus. Thus the flanking towers, Corrunc and Domathuz, whose gold-fanged crowns reached as high as the summit of the Andiamine Heights. And thus the famed Oblitus, the network of ascending walls that terraced the slopes from Ûbil’s black iron to the horrific immensity of the High Cwol, the fortress raised about the fabled Intrinsic Gate—the terrestrial entrance to the Upright Horn.
The stronghold hung in its evil sum upon this axis between inner and outer gateways. Thus the menacing immensity. Thus the iron-strapped stone. Thus the mad piling of Wards upon Wards—an arcane laminate so deep, so intricate, it stung the eyes of the Few.
For all their passion and conviction, the Men of the Ordeal were daunted. An attempt to rekindle the Hymn faltered, dissolved into a chorus of disparate shouts: individuals attempting to rekindle the ardour of their brothers.
They knew the tales. Short of stealth or captivity or collusion, no Man had ever gained Golgotterath. With the Sohonc, the Knights of Trysë had contested Ûbil, the Extrinsic Gate, for the space of a single, ancient afternoon, but at a cost so grievous that Anasûrimbor Celmomas bid them withdraw before nightfall. Only the Nonmen, Nil’giccas and his allies, had managed to overrun this, the most wicked of all places.
An eerie, almost numb, silence fell across the entirety of the Great Ordeal. The morning sun climbed behind their backs. Their conjoined shadows, thrown long before them when they first assembled, shrunk to the height of grave-markers. The titanic gold of the Horns cast a yellow pall across skin, fabric, and sand.
Not a soul could be spied on the black ramparts. But the Ordealmen could feel them, it seemed, wet eyes watching, dog-chests panting, inhuman lips sucking drool …
The sentinels scattered across the heights of the Akeokinoi were all dead by this time. Near naked Scylvendi now watched in their stead, their skin painted the grey and white of the Occlusion.
Luminous, the Holy Aspect-Emperor rode to the fore of the host, paused upon the foot of the incline so that he and his retinue of Believer-Kings might be seen. Cheering erupted among the nearest ranks, then passed like a wave outward to the extremities. His head was bare, his leonine mane braided tight to the back of his neck. Unlike his warlike companions, he had no armour; he wore some kind of grand, scholastic billows instead, white silk so lambent it seemed mercurial, bound to his form with a serpentine black sash. Unlike his sorcerous advisors, he was armed; the pommel of his famed sword, Enshoiya, jutted above his left shoulder.
The Decapitants swayed from his hip, as always, smudges of black and thistle.
The roaring faded.
His back to Golgotterath, he assessed the mighty fruit of his labour, the Great Ordeal, and it seemed to those who were near that he wept, not for fear or regret or loss, but for wonder.
“Who?” he cried in a voice that somehow closed the distance between him and the most remote of his followers. “Who among my Kings will offer our Enemy terms?”
Hringa Vûkyelt, Believer-King of Thunyerus, stepped forth from the Aspect-Emperor’s immediate entourage, keen to repeat and so secure his dead father’s glory. Passing his Lord-and-Prophet, he strode alone across the dusty interval, stopping beneath the monstrous shins of Gwergiruh. He wore his famed father’s coat of mail, which was black, and weighed two thousand kellics of copper. He hoisted his grandfather’s legendary shield, the ensorcelled Wark, an ancient heirloom of his family. He peered up at the parapets, and seeing nothing, allowed his eyes to roam the Horns, the breathtaking bulk, climbing into haze and heaven, higher and higher …
He feigned losing his balance, tripped into a mock pirouette.
The Men of the Ordeal roared, first for laughter, then for exaltation. The skies rang.
The Believer-King whirled from his pantomime, cried, “Yeeesss!” to the vacant parapets. “We laugh at you! We mock!” He turned back to grin at his hundred thousand brothers.
“The choice is simple!” he bellowed to the black heights. “Open this gate, live as slaves! Or huddle behind it”—he threw a glance over his shoulder—“and burn! In! Hell!”
Ûgorrior boomed with pounding shields and vibrant cheer.
The black parapets remained empty, the ramparts unmanned.
The Foe made no answer.
King Hringa Vûkyelt stood waiting, scanning the battlements, his grin fading into a frown. After several heartbeats, he shrugged, and slinging Wark over his shoulder, began strolling back to his brother Believer-Kings. Even as he turned a great, paint-and-fetish-adorned Sranc leapt from the blackness and cast a spear as thick as a weaver’s beam, shrieking, “Mirukaka hor’uruz!” in the corrupt tongue of his race.
This, the first glimpse of their enemy, astounded the Host. The shaft struck the Believer-King in the small, drove him to his face. Thousands among the Men gasped, certain he was dead. But Wark had preserved him, just as it had preserved his grandfather and his grandfather’s grandfather before him. Grimacing, the Believer-King of Thunyerus hoisted himself back to his feet.
Once again, the Great Ordeal roared.
“Is that ‘Yes’?” Hringa Vûkyelt called to the lonely Ursranc, “or ‘No’?”
Stung by tears of hilarity, Men clutched their sides, even swatted their cheeks.
“Well?” the Thunyeri shouted to the creature.
Rather than speak, his foul interlocutor stiffened about a spasmodic start, spouted violet blood across the stone. He was heaved upward, his limbs flopping in unison. The Great Ordeal drew collective breath, for a Nonman held him high overhead, his face indistinguishable from his victim’s, but his nude form the very image of inflamed, porcelain perfection. He heaved the Sranc out over the parapets, laughing as he did so. The carcass crashed in a shamble to the ground, popped like rotted fruit.
Silence claimed the reaches of Ûgorrior. The Nonman’s ridicule trailed into a crazed murmuring. He raised his face to the sun, turned it from side to side as if to warm either cheek.
“Who,” King Hringa Vûkyelt cried, “speaks for the Unho—?”
“Yoouu!” the nude Nonman raged in deformed Sheyic. He raised a foot upon the battlement, scanned the whole of Ûgorrior, glared for what seemed an eternal moment of incredulity. “You have wrecked me!”
The hard-bitten Thunyeri peered at the figure, scowling. “Don’t look at me! I have no idea what happened to your clothes!”
The gales of warlike laughter seemed to focus the Nonman’s attention. He stood bold, raked the distant formations with bald contempt. Then he made Hringa Vûkyelt the prize of a sneering gaze, one that bespoke ten thousand years of racial contempt.
“The World holds no terror for me,” the Nonman said. “I stand naked as the falling sword!”
He closed his eyes, shook his head in pity. His body seemed oiled for beauty. “I am the terror … Yimral’emilias simpiraccas …”
Twin suns glared from his waxen skull. Great arcs of Gnostic energy encompassed him …
Hringa Vûkyelt reached for his Chorae. But somehow, his Holy Aspect-Emperor was there, at his side, staying his han—
A dazzling tempest seized them, erupted across blind angles, Quyan assaults twisting and cracking across Gnostic defenses. The Men of the Ordeal blinked in the wake of the onslaught, their eyes adjusting …
The Holy Aspect-Emperor stood unharmed, his Believer-King kneeling at his side. A wild mane of scorching formed a perfect circle about them, blackened earth still smoking.
The Host of Hosts erupted in jubilant fury.
The Nonman looked to the cheering masses, imperious, but more for incapacity than presumption. Neither smiling nor sneering, he had the air of a drunk parsing suspicions of affront, one who imagined himself too cunning to yield any reaction. Let the World wait, he would be the one to decide …
Whatever it was that happened …
Anasûrimbor Kellhus commanded Hringa Vûkyelt to clutch tight his Chorae and withdraw. Robbed of his swagger, the Thunyeri hastened back to his Household, leaving his Lord-and-Prophet alone beneath the dwarfing turrets of Gwergiruh.
“Cet’ingira!” the Holy Aspect-Emperor called up to the nude figure. His voice fell upon the air like a cudgel upon pottery. “Mekeritrig!”
An old and wicked name, attached to innumerable legends, a curse upon innumerable lips.
The Evil Siqu inclined his face downward, but his dark eyes lingered on the masses beyond.
“They laugh …” he finally called down, as though uncertain whether to be wounded or offended.
“Do you recall me, Man-traitor?”
The eyes clicked down. A lucid interval passed between them.
“You?”
Peering, as if vision were naught but memory. Then the dawning of delight.
“Yesssss,” the ancient Erratic said. “I remember …”
“Do you repent your obscene iniquity?” the Holy Aspect-Emperor boomed across the wastes of Ûgorrior. “Will you embrace your damnation?”
Cet’ingira smiled. His eyelids fluttered. He rolled his chin upon his breastbone. “Can you mean such things?” he marvelled. “Or do you speak this for them?”
“Do! You! Repent!”
The Evil Siqu thrust out a cramped hand, a curious gesture toward the assembled masses. “So the nettle condemns the oak!”
“I am the voi—!”
“Pfah! You are scarcely a child! I am older than your languages, your histories, your duping Tusk! I am older than the names you give your tapeworm Gods! The soul that now regards you has witnessed Ages, mortal!” Deep laughter echoed down the ramparts, offensive for its sincerity. “And you would presume to be its Judge?”
Serene of mien and pose, the Holy Aspect-Emperor paused in the manner of those awaiting an interruption to end. All across Ûgorrior, Men of the Ordeal caught their breath, for he seemed to glow in the instant, in a manner too profound for eyes. There he stood, the Warrior-Prophet, overshadowed by monstrous stoneworks, scorned as a child … and yet it was he who was the mightier by far.
He shrugged, raised his palms from his thighs. A nimbus of gold flashed about his outstretched fingers.
“I am,” he said, “but the vessel of the Lord.”
Cet’ingira cackled for what seemed a long time. “Oh, you are far, far more Anasûrimbor …”
There was a great thrum of bow-strings. Myriad negations of Creation pocked the open air, rising from points across the black ramparts and falling on a menagerie of arcs, climbing, falling, converging on the circle the Nonman had scorched upon the earth … striking as a furious hail.
But the Holy Aspect-Emperor was no longer there.
Cet’ingira snapped his gaze skyward, to a point just above the white stab of the sun …
For it was upon this angle that the Ciphrang fell roaring.
Shrieking, they plummeted, falling from the sun’s blinding white well, Ciphrang summoned from across the Hells, bound with cruel and subtle sorceries to the agony of the Created. Puskarat, Mother of Perversions; foul Hish, the Great-Jawed Glutton, who shambled as a living heap of fire and putrescence; and monstrous Hagazioz, the Feathered Worm of the Pit, a Godling the size of two galleys set end upon end; mighty Kakaliol, Reaper-of-Heroes, armoured in the glory of the damned; and appalling Urskrux, the vulturous Father-of-Carrion, whose vomit was pestilence—and two dozen other malformed demons from the abyss, slaves of the Daimos, arcane puppets of Iyokus and his Daimotic confreres. The Ciphrang hooked wide their folded wings, scooped wind to slow their descent. They swooped over Gwergiruh, screeching in a chorus that clutched the throat and clawed the ears, plucking every tone on the scale of human terror. A heartbeat saw them over the Oblitus, sailing to the root of the High Horn, where they fell shrieking upon the High Cwol, dropped as balls of iron through floors, igniting interlocking Wards …
The Men of the Ordeal stood dumbstruck, blinking, peering after glimpsed monstrosities, watching the blossoms of fire erupt across the High Cwol above the shoulder of Corrunc. One soul whooped … and the whole of Ûgorrior boomed in reply, a roar that was almost a collective scream, such was the passion vented.
It was happening. It was finally happening!
Somewhere deep in Golgotterath, bestial arms hammered gongs, and a cacophonous racket made hash of the skies. Their deception spent, the Ursranc surged onto the heights of Golgotterath’s walls, armoured in hauberks of black scale, their cheeks branded with Twin Horns, hooting in their corrupt tongue. But the holy ghus sounded also, so deep as to roll under all other sounds. Archers and crossbowmen burst from the forward ranks of each of the three great Trials: Agmundrmen for the Sons of the Middle-North; Eumarnans for the Sons of Kyraneas; and Antanamerans for the Sons of Shir. In what appeared an act of reckless lunacy they dashed out exposed onto the dust, and before their unruly Foe could organize, they nocked their shafts and bolts, raised their weapons—released …
The gold-fanged parapets seethed with activity, bristled with black iron. Howling white faces crowded the embrasures—but nary a shaft fell upon them. Without exception, the shafts and bolts fell short, clattering across the sheer faces and squat foundations of Corrunc, Domathuz, and Gwergiruh. White lights flared across the fortifications, implosions. And a sound climbed into the collective bewilderment, one unlike any heard by Mannish ears, like a thousand mastodons charging across the drum-skins of Soul and World …
Wards cracking, unravelling, dissolving.
Golgotterath had been raised with ensorcelled stone. Fell Quyan sorceries strapped and permeated the fortifications, some binding structure, others set like springs primed to burn and concuss, and many more applied like coats of arcane lacquer, shielding exposed faces from the violence of Cants. The Chorae Hoard rained upon and across them, each sparking a violent dissolution, explosions of salt. Blocks cracked. Joists groaned. The Ursranc on the parapets were thrown from their feet.
The Schoolmen had already begun their muttering song at the command of their Exalt-Magus, Anasûrimbor Serwa, the Witch Most Holy. Even as the bowmen fled back into the great phalanxes, hundreds of Triunes stepped from them, climbing into the vacant heights—the greatest concentration of sorcerous might the World had ever seen. One thousand Schoolmen, their faces—and thus the telltale light of their singing—obscured by deep cowls. One thousand Kites, as the Ordealmen had come to call them, fairly every sorcerer of rank the Major Schools of the Three Seas could muster.
The Mandati under Apperens Saccarees, their red billows monkish for their simplicity; the Imperial Saik under Temus Enhorû, their gold-trimmed gowns as black as ink, glossed with deep shades of violet, scored with the white of reflected sunlight; the Mysunsai under Obwë Gûswuran, their garb eclectic save for their cowls, which resembled those of Amoti shepherds, white striped with sky-blue; the decimated Vokalati, their white-and-violet numbers dwindled to a mere handful for the travesty of Irsûlor; the Scarlet Spires under Girûmmû Tansiri, their garb an iridescent play of crimson upon crimson, like blood upon autumnal leaves; and of course the Nuns, the Swayali Sisterhood, the most numerous and certainly the most bewitching in their gleaming saffron gowns, their voices complicating the ponderous, masculine chorus with a high-drawn, feminine keen.
One thousand Schoolmen, the greatest concentration of sorcerous might the World had ever seen. As one, they unfurled their silk billows, became as flowers in the gleaming sun.
The Men below roared in jubilation.
Brilliant explosions pimpled the distant ramparts of the High Cwol.
The Scylvendi assassins watched from afar upon the Occlusion, breathless for awe and dread.
The Triunes formed three lines at the fore of each phalanx, tentacular blooms hanging the height of mighty oaks. Their skulls cauldrons of light, the witches and sorcerers began singing in unison …
“Imrima kukaril ai’yirarsa …”
A sudden breeze whipped their hair about their faces, tugged at the extremities of their billows. Chaos and terror ruled the black walls and towers before them.
“Kilateri pir mirim hir …”
And as one the Schoolmen paused, inhaled, and blew, puffed as a child might blowing fluff from a dandelion …
A great gust of air exploded before them, blasting the hard floor of Ûgorrior, scooping vast quantities of sand and dust, tossing it into a vast pluming curtain that boiled upward and outward. Within heartbeats, Golgotterath’s savage defenders could see naught but grey. Even their fellows had been reduced to ragged silhouettes in the murk. The Ursranc howled in frustration and terror, for they knew the Schoolmen had merely begun their catastrophic song.
It knows not this place. The animals scurry from its smoking onslaught, squealing and grunting. Kakaliol shrieks for agony and fury, stamps them like rats beneath its horned feet, lays its lash upon them, lays them out as burning bundles, blistered pulps, flesh like paper thrashing in the flame.
Surcease! it screams.
The galling implacability, the needling obstinance, the knifing reality, cutting and cutting and cutting, sawing them, it, as a carpenter might, joint from joint, limb from limb, over and over and over again. What torment was the World—what shrieking agony! Pricking it point by point, every thimble of diabolical substance, pinning it to these monstrous solidities, these pealing, stabbing, details …
Surcease! the Carrion Prince bellows to the Blind Slaver within. Surceeease!
After your task is complete …
Blind worm! How I shall care for thee! Love and invert thee!
I fear more horrific souls have claimed me.
I shall kindle a furnace in thine heart! Sup on thi—!
Discharge your obligation!
Vile angel.
It screams, for the Slaver has spoken a word and the sharp-sharp needles of this World have answered. Kakaliol, the great and dreadful Reaper-of-Heroes, Seducer-of-Thieves, screams sulphur, weeps pitch for fury, and punishes the pageant of soulless meat, visits destruction on the mewling animals that scurry and squeal from its path. It stalks the great corridor, a crimson light in the smoking dark, trailing sizzling ruin in its wake. The flesh now flees before it, gibbering and yammering as if it were real. A different flesh replaces it, far greater in height and girth, draped in clanking gowns of iron. Bellowing they fall upon Kakaliol, spear and cudgel its scaled limbs, but they too fall away, puling hoarse and glutinous, burning and broken.
And it strides forward, stone cracking beneath its feet …
Vile angel.
The meat lies smashed and smoking about it. Nothing opposes it—save a lone hooded figure occupying the centre of the grand hall …
Beware … the Blind Slaver whispers.
A roar shivers up through rotted stone.
At last … Kakaliol croaks on a poisonous fume.
A soul.
Helplessness was fury for Men.
“She is your wife!” Esmenet cried.
Words meant to scratch the heart.
The old Wizard gazed at her incredulous. Despite everything he had endured, despite all the deprivations and indignities of the trail, it seemed nothing compared to the night he had suffered: the slurry of the watches, slipping into slumber only to be yanked clear, riven by alarm, gazing helpless as Mimara, stumbling to and fro to discharge Esmenet’s commands, sometimes barked, sometimes gentle, fetching water, boiling water, cleansing rags, wringing and applying, always confused, always anxious, always out of place, an interloper, always averting his eyes for no good reason, save the contradiction of the girl’s posture, whorish and natal, the lustful and lascivious turned inside out, transformed into something too round, too deep, not to pain the flat hearts of men, force unwanted wisdom upon them, knowledge of the primal, feminine toil that stood at the very origin of life, the mealy divinity, swollen and bleeding and anguished beyond masculine comprehension …
A World ending. A life beginning.
“I’ll be right back,” he explained. “I just-just need to see.”
Something was wrong. With Mimara, Esmenet was nothing but reassuring, cooing encouragement as the seizures waxed in cruelty, then telling stories of her own travails in the lulls between, especially regarding the birth of her beloved first, Mimara herself. She cajoled her terrified daughter, made her laugh and smile with whimsical appraisals of her fetal obstinance. “Two days!” she would cry, her look one of laughing adoration. “Two days you denied me! ‘Mimara!’ I would cry, ‘Please, my Sweet! Please be born!’ but, noooo …”
But for every indulgence she afforded her daughter, she exacted some penance from him, the man who had quickened her womb, the man she still loved. Several times now, at the grinding pinnacle of some particularly torturous seizure, she had all but stabbed him with her eyes, so hateful was her look. And each time, it seemed Achamian could read the movements of her soul as plainly as he could his own …
The stakes were mortal—he knew as much. The stakes were always mortal where childbirth was concerned. And for all the times Esmenet contradicted her daughter’s tearful protestations that something was wrong, it was plain that she too believed as much. Her daughter’s travail was too taxing, her seizures too ferocious …
Something was wrong. Horribly wrong.
And this made Drusas Achamian a murderer in waiting.
“I need you here!” Esmenet spat in reply, her indignation imperial. “Mimara needs you!”
As was often the case in familial feuds, exhaustion had become indistinguishable from selfish will.
“Which is why I’ll return!”
Esmenet blinked, obviously shocked. An answering wildness animated her look, but only for a heartbeat. At the draw of a single oar, she became remote, cool—looking down far more than up, as if he were but another petitioner begging favour at the foot of the Blessed Empress.
“You need to change out of that filth,” she said. “I need you to be clean …”
“I’m informing,” the furious old Wizard replied, “not begging your permission, Emp—!”
And with that, they found themselves standing in a different future, one where Esmenet had struck him. Hard enough to bloody his mouth …
So much lay between them. A lifetime bound by common desperations, the half-mad ferocity of souls that have nothing but each other. And then a second lifetime, constant in the manner of ascetics and potentates, bound by nothing save that continuity, be it the wilds of Hûnoreal, or the splendours of the Andiamine Heights. A new lifetime condemned to dwell in the ruins of the old.
And now here they stood … reunited in turmoil at long last.
Achamian wiped his mouth across a filthy sleeve.
“You owe me this,” Esmenet said softly.
“I fear you are the debtor,” he replied on a momentary glare.
“You owe me your life!” she exclaimed. “Why do you think Kellhus suff—?”
“Mother!”
It was Mimara, her voice frayed to the hemp for grunting and screaming. Both of them flinched for the realization that she lay watching.
“Leave him, Mother … Let him be …”
She had sensed it as well, Achamian realized. The smell of sorcery borne on a different wind.
“Mim …”
“Someone, Mother …” the girl gasped, at once irked and beseeching. “Someone must see.”
It fell upon their skin, seized them hair by hair. It rose from the nethers of their gullet, steamed from the margins of their sight. It fell as mist from the heavens, shivered up as tremors from the sands. It twisted hearing, bewildered heartbeats. It cracked thought wide open, allowed the ink of madness to seep in …
And it wrung light and destruction from vacant air.
Sorcery.
The Triunes advanced into the roiling veils they had swept into the air, vanished one by one. Not a soul among them hesitated. The long months fencing with the Horde had taught them how to estimate shrouded locations and distances, how to count off paces in the air. Their enemies screeched and clamoured across immovable walls, their positions fixed, known, while they ranged high and low, all but invisible.
They could scarcely see one another in the murk; their billows transformed them into octopus shadows, their cowls concealed their light. Their singing seemed stolen from their lips, their lungs, and braided into the greater, choral impossibility. Each sang Ward after Ward, sheathing themselves and their Triune brothers in ethereal defenses, either abstract or metaphoric. Each silently counted the counterfeit steps taken …
Missiles fell as an indiscriminate hail, but more about them than upon. Each could sense the arc of Chorae through the air, small holes of nothingness whipping from obscurity into nowhere. One struck a Mysunsai sorcerer-of-rank, the bent-backed Keles Musyerius, upon his cowled head, and he simply dropped, salted to the pith, shattered across the ground. Three others were superficially salted by Chorae striking their billows, and had to be born back to the Ordeal by their comrades. The yammering parapets drew near, the sounds preposterously close, and more disconcerting still, falling from above, so colossal were Golgotterath’s defenses. Spears and javelins joined the violent downpour. Great, iron-tipped bolts cracked against the Wards of many. But the Triunes continued their blind advance, converging upon the one thing they could clearly sense in the swirling grey monotony: the fallen Trinkets of the Chorae Hoard, strewn about the base of the very stoneworks they had exposed and weakened …
The great cloud they had cast into the eyes of their enemy dissipated, enough for the defenders to discern their congregating shadows. The barrage of missiles concentrated, became a hellish racket. Seventeen Schoolmen toppled, flopped to earth, salted. Fifty-three others had to be carried back, some shrieking, thrashing, others immobile …
The massed remainder struck.
For the Men of the Ordeal, the gold-fanged crowns of Corrunc and Domathuz where the first structures to resolve from the screens of grey, little more than battlemented silhouettes against the far more enormous bulk of the Horns. They glimpsed the Ursranc clustered like white-skinned termites along the crest, frantically casting spears and loosing slings and bows at the unseen Schoolmen below. The sorcerous unison abruptly dissolved into a many-voiced clamour, one that swatted ears for booming urgency. Substance itself croaked in hellish tongues, including their own flesh. Lights flashed in rapid succession from the murk, white upon white … blue, crimson-violet, each revealing the mangled shadows of the Schoolmen and their billows. Clacking thunder tingled across bare and bearded cheeks, resounded over the whole of Shigogli.
And though many cheered, many more caught their breath, for they saw the summit of Corrunc slouch. The parapets dipped to the right, as though in mocking obeisance to the north, then simply toppled, first outward, then straight downward, as the evil bastion slumped into its own obliteration. The shock wave bulged, then blew out the last of the obscuring haze, revealing the Scarlet Schoolmen and the Mandati hanging about the crashing surf of Corrunc’s destruction, their Anagogic and Gnostic Wards pelted luminous for showering debris.
The Ursranc of Golgotterath shrieked and wailed across the adjoining turrets. The Sons of Shir cheered and bellowed like beasts, brandished spear and sword. Horns screeched through the residual rumble, and the swart Men of Ainon, Sansor, Conriya and Cengemis surged out across Ûgorrior …
The Canted Horn reared on an ethereal scale behind the collapse—no less than a dozen souls were trampled for gawking at its heights. Gwegiruh hunched stubborn to their left, hulking works beneath a tempest of scything lights—the ministry of the Nuns. Mighty Domathuz beyond cracked even as they ran, sloughed its eastward walls—revealing stacked floors that crawled as a broken beehive, a glimpse of a thousand inhuman throes, before all dropped howling into the smoke and ruin below.
The Sons of Kyraneas loosed their own booming cheer, and the Men of Nansur and Shigek, Enathpaneah, Amoteu and Eumarna raced out across foul Ûgorrior …
The Gatehouse of Ûbil Maw alone remained standing. Half the height and twice the girth as Corrunc or Domathuz, evil Gwergiruh was simply too sturdy to collapse of its weight. Their billows twining into golden ligature, the Swayali were forced to pummel and to rend, to obliterate the ancient structure by degrees. They hung like fey swans about the monumental edifices, clawing at the bastion’s innards with geometries of light—the Third and Seventh Quyan Theorems, the Noviratic Warspike, and the High Titirgic Axiom. They scourged the scratching heights, blasted the smoking bowels, slicked the debris with violet ruin. Behind them, the battlehorns sounded, and the Middlenorthmen let out a mighty shout, the warcries of violent and gloomy nations, then charged in a single mass of 30,000 souls, the Sons of Galeoth and Cepalor, Thunyerus and Ce Tydonn, come to avenge their ancient kin …
The Ursranc upon the islands of intact wall screeched in terror, howled in lament. Lights erupted between the gold-fanged battlements.
And so the Great Ordeal accomplished what no other Mannish host could. The Extrinsic Gate was cast down in smoking ruin. For the first time in history, the belly of Golgotterath lay exposed to the licentious fury of Men.
The Umbilicus was entirely abandoned, but the old Wizard had already guessed as much. It was the emptiness of the encampment that terrified him, the sight of the slovenly precincts reaching out and out, a worn mosaic devoid of any sign of activity or life …
They were alone—stranded on the rim of Shigogli, no less!
But the Whore afforded him no more than heartbeats to ponder the consequences, for beyond the encampment, beyond the desolate tracts of the Furnace Plain, lay Golgotterath.
And it seemed he had heard it all along, the chorus of hundreds of Schoolmen singing.
Breathless, he gazed. He could see the Great Ordeal entire, massed in three great squares before a vast smear of smoke or dust. He could see the flicker of arcane lights, like discharges of lightning buried within a distant thunderhead only many-coloured: white, blue, and vermillion. Then he saw Corrunc stumble, tip and slump into smoke and oblivion …
Corrunc! Foul, murderous, and so tragically stubborn! The Eater-of-Sons destroyed!
The fraction of his soul that was Seswatha cried out for joy and terror, for it seemed impossible that he should witness something so hated, so unconquerable, overthrown. For it was he, Seswatha, who had convinced Celmomas to raise arms against the Consult, to dash the lives of noble thousands against its remorseless walls. It was he who had commanded the Sohonc to dare the Chorae Hail, who had sent so many of his beloved brothers to their doom. It was he, Seswatha, Lord Librarian, who bore the greatest portion of blame. And to see such a thing now … to witness …
It had to be some kind of cruel dream!
The old Wizard gasped, staggered. Up-welling passion cracked the strength of his legs, dropped him to his knees.
It was happening …
And Kellhus! He … He …
Blinking, peering, he saw Domathuz sheer in half, then topple into faraway ruin. Deferred thunder rumbled across the plain.
Kellhus had spoken true.
Drusas Achamian wept and cackled, whooped with a wild, even lunatic joy. He leapt to his feet, danced a howling jig. He averted his gaze, then peered and peered again, like a besotted drunk testing the reality of his visions. And each time he dared gaze he saw Golgotterath falling … There! There! The twinkling ranks surging across Ûgorrior; Men—tens of thousands of Men!—streaming through the breaches. Schoolmen in their hundreds raining incandescent destruction upon the stronghold’s interior—striding the very gullet of Min-Uroikas! He slapped his forehead in disbelief, hooked hesitant fingers in his hair, his beard—and he exulted, croaking and dancing like a mad old beggar with a diamond.
Sobriety came with the sound of Mimara’s wail rising hoarse from the Umbilicus behind him. His soul scrambled to recover its habitual decorum, its martyred air. Without quite realizing he had wetted a finger and poked it deep into the pouch, which he had somehow pilfered from Mimara’s belongings. Qirri … his cannibal vice. His old, old friend.
He sucked at the ash greedily—swallowing more than he had ever dared in Mimara’s critical presence.
He closed his eyes to calm his racing heart, steady his arrhythmic breathing. He savoured the earthen bitter, glimpsed Cleric—Nil’giccas—in his soul’s eye, melancholy and ruthless for the profundity of his confusion.
So much had happened. So much had yet to happen …
Steady old fool … Think.
Mimara shrieked once again, her voice frayed into anguished threads. The clack and roar of arcane ruin shivered out to the bowl of the Occlusion. Smoke swam about the monstrous foundation of the Horns. Sorcery sparked and glittered. Achamian did not move, captivated by the vision, arrested by what seemed innumerable claims upon his hope and attention.
And suddenly he understood Esmenet’s mulish resistance, why she had pressed with such vehemence to prevent him from standing in this very spot. She had always been the wiser, the soul more shrewd. She had always known him in ways he could only recognize afterward. He had dwelt his entire life in the punishing shadow of this moment, this time …
Now.
She knew he would stand where he stood.
And that the World would claim him.