CHAPTER
FIFTEEN

Golgotterath

What trespass could be equal,
the woe you have brought upon us?
What sin could be so foul as to balance
our grief upon your ruthless Beam?
For we have praised thee, O Lord,
We have struck all that offends thee.
Why quicken our fields, our wombs,
only to set alight our granaries,
and crack our strong places asunder?
What sin could be so grievous,
that our children should be rendered,
to the raving of Sranc?

—Unknown, “The Kyranean Lament”

Early Autumn, 20 New Imperial Year (4132, Year-of-the-Tusk), Golgotterath.

The Sons of Shir raced forward. The mass deformed, stretching more and more into a spearhead as it neared the heaped foundations of Corrunc. The Mandate Triunes had struck ahead, and already assailed the lower terraces of the Oblitus, while the Scarlet Schoolmen had divided to attend to the intact walls on either flank. What few missiles that rained upon the rushing Men were sporadic and ineffectual. Those Ursranc that did not flee shrieking, burned such. The Scarlet Schoolmen clustered above the breach, laved the gold-fanged heights with golden fire, the brilliant issue of dozens of Dragonheads. The Sons of Shir gained the mounds below, led by the Knights of Conriya, whom the Holy Aspect-Emperor had tasked with redressing the shame of their King. They clambered up the ruin, roaring. The Marshal of Attrempus, Palatine Krijates Empharas, would be the first to crest the ruins of Corrunc, and the first to leap down, and thus, the first Man to set foot within Golgotterath. Shouting behind their silver warmasks, he and his household slaughtered what Ursranc they encountered. Glints of Gnostic destruction rolled like oil across their helms, shields, and hauberks.

The Sons of Shir streamed unmolested into Golgotterath. The Ark hung as a second, impervious ground above them, tracking the least detail in reflection. Beyond the curtain wall lay what the Ordealmen would come to call the Canal, a broad avenue finned with ruin and humped with refuse, and webbed with filthy hovels—warrens that the Schoolmen promptly set aflame. Smoke boiled toxic and black, its stench unmanning. Massed upon an isthmus of ruin surrounded by inferno, the Conriyans had no choice but to assail the far wall of the Canal, the First Riser, the lowest, fortified step of the Oblitus. Chains and hooks were called up, and the Southron warriors stormed onto the terrace unopposed, found the ground clotted with bodies burning as candles might. Their billows lacing the heights, the Mandate and Scarlet Schoolmen wracked the terraces above with catastrophic lights.

The ruins of Domathuz witnessed a different series of events. For reasons unknown, Temus Enhorû refused to lead his Imperial Saik against the Oblitus, electing instead to tarry above the breach and cleanse the flanking walls—the task assigned Obwë Gûswuran and his Mysunsai. The first Sons of Kyraneas to broach Golgotterath were Prince Cinganjehoi and his heavy-mailed Eumarnans. Unlike the Conriyans to the north, they found themselves pinned beneath a hail of missiles from the First Riser of the Oblitus and suffered grievously. Chaos ensued, with those at the rear forcing more and more of their kinsmen to brave the killing grounds below the Oblitus. Temus Enhorû only realized his error after Cinganjehoi ordered his Men to fire on the aging Saik Grandmaster from below. An inadvertent consequence of this was that the Sons of Kyraneas, bent on seeking cover, would be the first to seize the orphaned wall between Domathuz and the Evil Gate, where the javelin-bearing Nansur Columnaries, in particular, were able to inflict horrible losses on the Ursranc defending the First Riser.

They would also be the first to reach the imposing rump of Gwergiruh, where the Middlenorthmen found themselves stalled, locked in pitched melee with their bestial foe. Anasûrimbor Serwa and the Swayali had passed over the monstrous Gatehouse, thinking they pursued the defenders into the Oblitus. But the Unholy Consult, knowing the unreliability of their slaves, had gone so far as to chain some thousand Ursranc throughout Gwergiruh’s honeycombed interior. King Vûkyelt and his bellicose Thunyeri had clambered into what they had assumed was a vacant hulk, only to find themselves in the hacking thick of battle. As with the breach at Domathuz, the eagerness of those in the rear proved lethal. The roaring Thunyeri were pressed into the black cleavers of their foe—many died for simple want of room to swing axe or sword. The adventitious arrival of General Biaxi Tarpellas and his Columnaries from the south put a quick end to this tragic waste. The Ursranc, crazed for terror, all but threw themselves upon the Nansur spears. Vûkyelt, Believer-King of Thunyerus, and Tarpellas, Patridomos of House Biaxi, would embrace in the fell shadow of Ûbil itself, which, seized and strapped by evil sorceries, remained shut despite being overthrown.

The Men of the Circumfix thronged in their thousands across the First Riser and into the Canal, kicking over leprous shelters, stamping out flames. Tens of thousands more massed and clamoured about the breaches at Domathuz, Corrunc, and the overthrown Gatehouse of Ûbil Maw. Only the Chorae archers who had initiated the stupendous assault lingered upon Ûgorrior. The ramparts cleared, they scoured the skirts of the ruin, as well as the ground where the Holy Aspect-Emperor had parlayed with Mekeritrig, searching for exposed Chorae. Luthymae, the Collegians charged with managing and recovering the Chorae Hoard, paced the desolate plain across the entire range of Ursranc archery, pointing out those they sensed or sighted. Any bowman recovering a Holy Tear of God would immediately set to affixing it, using prepared shafts and kits. Soon a great number could be seen, one knee down in the dust, their hands working furiously.

They would be the only ones to escape unscathed.

The Exalt-Magus, Anasûrimbor Serwa, hung above the fray, her billows like an intricate lily suspended in sun and water. She did not hesitate.

“Ware the First Riser!” she cried on a sorcerous boom.

Fairly every soul in the Great Ordeal ceased what they had been doing.

Three Triunes of her Gnostic Sisters hung about her, billows agleam and undulating. Dozens of like formations extended like wings to either side. The Oblitus reared imposing before her, step by monumental step, a god-stair climbing to the base of something greater than gods. But for all the threat of its stacked ramparts, it was the First Riser some thirty cubits beneath her feet that commanded her attention. Something … No …

Nothing. She sensed nothingness … Moving nothingness.

And yet only ash and entrails remained of the skinnies who had stood upon the parapets …

“Assemble!” she cried. “Assemble against it!”

Her voice dropped like cudgels upon every soul visible. Those along the remaining sections of curtain wall had already set their shields against the rising Oblitus. Confusion ruled all others, however. Eager to join what had seemed easy slaughter, the Men of the Ordeal had fallen into disorder, pressing heedless into the Canal, the slum-choked interval between the cyclopean outer walls and the bottommost terrace of the Oblitus. They formed a vast, elongated bolus, a motley of nations, steaming for the smoke of stamped out fires, bristling with arms and bereft of purpose. She watched with cool wonder as they spontaneously formed into impromptu ranks, shield locked to shield, all facing the blank wall of the First Riser.

She scanned the air above the Host, searching for some sign of her father.

He would know.

At a thought, she dropped, alighted upon the first terrace, her billows drawn out behind her, across the burned and twisted carcasses. She closed her eyes, focussed on the tickles of oblivion floating like bubbles beneath her. Chorae, without any doubt, moving as if bound to things lumbering and alive …

She caught her breath.

“Bashrag!” she cried, her voice fractured into something inhuman by a conspiracy of masonry. “Concealed in the Ris—!”

Monstrous impacts. A series of them, erupting along the entire length of the Canal, here thudding, there cracking, shattering. Dust and grit exploded from mortices. Men cried out, raised arms to protect their eyes. Skirts of masonry exploded outward. Whole sections of wall sloughed away, disgorging horrors …

Dozens of orifices had been smashed across the sheer walls. Bashrag fell from them as vomit, leapt into the pallid ranks of Men, bull-bellowing, swinging pole-axes as thick as war-galley oars. They towered above their scrambling victims, obscene amalgams, motions hooked to their deformities, but no less deadly for it. Shields and arms exploded. Helms were stoved, rib-cages crushed. Armoured knights were thrown, sent like cartwheels above the massacre. The din was as instant as it was deafening. Serwa leapt back into the air, rejoined her witch sisters. The cunning of the attack was not lost upon her. Fairly all the Swayali gazed dumbstruck at the screaming turmoil below, the vision of Bashrag wading like monstrous adults into roiling mobs of children, reaping them as wheat, murdering them. And there was nothing to be done, no way to strike without killing their own. She saw the standard of Tarpellas fall. She saw the bearer and honour guard hammered to pulp against stone. Despite her Dûnyain blood, Anasûrimbor Serwa hesitated …

Where was Father?

The mere thought of him spurred the recovery of her senses. She whirled about to face the Oblitus, which had entirely fallen from the Host’s attention. She need not see to know the activity that brewed upon them. The Consult had not so much lost their legendary walls, she realized, as they had given them …

“Retreat!” she cried on a crack of thunder. “To Ûgorrior, Sisters!”

Like variations in the sound of a waterfall …

This was the most the Blessed Empress of the Three Seas could hear of the assault from within the chambered interior of the Umbilicus: a near featureless roar, a yawl woven across different registers of mass violence. A faraway cataract, booming with death instead of water.

Death and more death. Always death, these past twenty years. Even the lives she had delivered had simply added to the heap of murderers.

Only Mimara … the dazzling little girl who had so adored the smell of apples. Only she had been Esmenet’s one true gift to life.

So now it was her turn to die.

“He’ll return …”

Esmenet started. She had been sitting cross-legged to the side of the mattress, drifting in that upright way that made one feel like a sail pulled by unseen winds. She had thought her daughter unconscious, for the severity of her last travail as much the sleepless watches since her womb’s draining. She looked down upon the girl’s drawn face, noted, as she always noted, the saddle of freckles across the bridge of her nose—but one of so many things she had inherited from her whorish mother.

Too many.

“Mimara …”

She hesitated, found herself fixed in her firstborn’s brown-eyed gaze.

“I …”

Her wind failed her. She flinched, looked down and away, though it seemed her every fraction clamoured that she endure. Several heartbeats passed. Her daughter’s gaze became palpable, a tingle across her temple and cheek. She braved it once again, only to be overwhelmed by its implacable intensity—and to look down as she once had in the presence of caste-nobles.

Mimara reached out, caught her hand between her own.

“I never understood until now,” she said.

Esmenet looked up, meek in the way of failed mothers and lovers, her breath so shallow it hurt. Her daughter’s smile was dazzling—for its incongruity, its authenticity, yes, but for its certainty most of all.

“All that time, ever since you plucked me from Carythusal, I punished you. Everything I had suffered, I had heaped upon your name … upon the dim image of a mother exchanging her little daughter for coins …”

These words seized her heart within their fist.

“They said you would be a weaver …” she found herself saying, “but I suppose I didn’t believe them.” Her eyes had become burning spikes. “The gold was just an accursed ornament. We-we were ropes, you and I … starved to the bloody gum, and I thought I was saving your life. They had food. You could see it in the fat on their faces. The grease staining their insufferable tunics … Their grin. I nearly swooned for thinking I could smell the food in them … isn’t that mad?”

How could it burn so, matching a child’s gaze?

“You speak as though to absolve,” Mimara said smiling, blinking tears, “to explain … even though you think you deserve neither absolution nor understanding …”

Ringing silence. Numbness.

“Yes …” she said, her heart beating cloth. “Kellhus said the same.”

“But Mother! I see you, Mother—I see you as the almighty God of Gods sees you!”

The Blessed Empress of the Three Seas flinched.

“That’s funny,” she said, reaching out to flatten bedding, “you sound just like Him …”

A smile, crazed and beatific. “Because he pretends to be what I am.”

“I liked you better when you were in pain,” Esmenet said.

Her daughter’s gaze did not so much catch as arrest her, absolutely, as if she only existed so far as Mimara could see her.

“You know …” the beloved face said. “You know what it is I’m going to say … and yet you cannot bear to hear it …”

Esmenet found herself standing, her back turned to her daughter, her whole skin bewildered and afire.

“Perhaps it is best, then,” she said stiffly, her voice nearly cracking on a sob that her breast refused to deliver.

“What is best?”

She turned, but could not bring herself to look directly at her prostrate daughter. She forced a smile.

“That we only have each other.”

Esmenet could do no more than stare at a point to the left of the pregnant woman, the prophetess—the stranger … She could only guess at the pity and adoration upon her face.

“Mother …”

Esmenet knelt, raised a bowl of water to Mimara’s lips, wondered when she had become so numb to the perversities of her lot. So many afflictions—too many, one would think, for any one soul to bear.

And yet here she was.

“Mother …” The woman’s look had a gentle urgency, a maternal conviction in certain things. She was the strong one now. The knowing one. From this moment, the mother would follow the daughter. “You can let it go, now, Mother.”

A narrow smile. “Hmm?”

“Mother …” Gelid brown eyes, seeing what no mortal should. “You are forgiven …”

Life slowed about its most inflamed gear.

“No …” Anasûrimbor Esmenet said on a smile far too honest for her liking. She wiped at her cheeks, expecting tears, found nothing save the grease of exhaustion and worry. Where? she wondered madly. Where had all the weeping gone?

“Not until I say so.”

The Soldiers of the Circumfix were hard Men, as inveterate as any in history. For a great many, the mad trek across Eärwa was but the most recent episode of an entire life spent embroiled in violence and war. They had celebrated triumphs. They had suffered reversals—even wholesale routs. They had ravished, plundered, and butchered innocents. They had made cruel sport of their captive foes. They had trudged through tempests of archery. They had thrown back the glittering charge of Orthodox knights, and they had been scattered, ridden to earth. They had been scorched. Many even bore the puckered and inflamed scars of sorcery.

So it was they suffered no true terror as they watched the wall of the First Riser bow and buckle. Swells of laughter could even be heard as wits called out ribald encouragement. A good number of Men grinned for anticipation as the sheets of masonry fell away. No experience they possessed could prepare them for what followed.

Of all the Inchoroi abominations, none were so unnatural as the Bashrag. They spilled from the cavities, poured like sewage into the gleaming stew of Mannish nations crammed into the Canal, shambling monstrosities, shagged with great black heads of hair, possessed of malformed, tripled limbs, armoured in gowns of iron weighing ten thousand kellics or more. The Men were scarce more than armed and armoured children before them. Even the tallest of the Tydonni stood no higher than their elbows. Only the Nansur Columnaries under General Tarpellas managed to impede their bellowing egress, releasing volleys of javelins in numbers that could bring down mastodons. But the breaches continued discharging the beasts, who leapt and stomped into their midst, squealing and grunting, heaving their shield-sized cleavers. Not a single grin survived that initial onslaught, but there was no shortage of bravery—at least at first. Men stabbed and hacked and speared. But the quarters were too close, the Bashrag too ferocious, too powerful, for them to slow, let alone contain, the rampage. Armour crumpled like foil. Skulls shattered like pottery. Shields were little more than vellum, things swatted and ripped away. The swinging axes halved Men where they stood, tossed whole torsos over the screaming tumult.

The Schoolmen watched from on high, dismayed for the mayhem, paralysed for want of any course of action. The cunning of their Foe was obvious, as was the objective. Attack the beasts from above, and they killed their own. Attack them from the ground, and they risked their own lives, for hundreds of the creatures bore Chorae. The ambush’s immediate objective was nothing more than to inflict losses, to murder as much of the Great Ordeal as possible on the doorstep of Golgotterath. Then Anasûrimbor Serwa, either succumbing to womanish fear or savvy to some other threat, commanded the Schools retreat …

Those who could looked up, saw the Grandmistress, her billows soiled with soot and violet, lead her Swayali back out over Ûgorrior. For all their hardness, panic seized the Men of the Ordeal.

Within heartbeats, it seemed, the Nasueret, Selial, and Circumfix Columns all but ceased to exist. The hallowed Nansur standard—the legendary breastplate of Kuxophus II, the last of the ancient Kyranean High Kings—was overthrown. Tarpellas, who stood upon the debris heaped against the rear of Gwergiruh bawling futile commands, was struck from the shoulder to the pelvis. Death came swirling down.

Maranjehoi, Grandee of Piralm and companion to Prince Inrilil, lost his right arm nearly at the shoulder, on a blow so swift that the dismemberment left him standing. He simply stumbled backward, fell onto his rump and back across the corpses of his kinsmen, gazed unblinking at the sky-hooking enormity of the Horns until he could do nothing else.

Bansipitas of Sepa-Gielgath fell. As did Orsuwick of Kalt and Wustamitas of Nangaelsa, both undone by anvil-sized hammers.

Death and more death, sweeping down and away …

Men began fleeing, or attempting to do so, for thousands found themselves trapped in the scrum about the breaches. Exultant, the Bashrag loosed a sinusoidal roar and stampeded into them, worked a great and grisly slaughter.

The surviving Believer-Kings in the Canal lamented, began crying out to heavens, calling for their Holy Aspect-Emperor …

A cry of masculine agony, muffled, yet near enough to hear the raw of it, the crack and gurgle of phlegm.

It yanked the Blessed Empress from her nodding reverie, sent her leaping to her feet. She stood blinking, listening, knowing in her bones that it had come from within the Umbilicus. She cursed Achamian, suddenly understanding that this was what had made his presence mandatory. No soul was more vulnerable than the birthing mother’s—save the infant she delivered.

She clasped the knife she had set aside for the birth-cord, crept to the threshold, pulled aside the image-panelled flaps.

“Mumma?” Mimara sobbed after her. Another seizure was nearing.

She shot an annoyed look at her daughter, raised a finger to her lips …

Then pressed through.

She crossed the antechamber. Her ears pricked, she strained to discern any sound over and above the background cataract, the distant chorus of killing and dying.

She slunk into the corridor, crept down its length, holding the knife point directly out before her.

She heard muttering voices … then a cough, apparently grievous for the pain it inflicted.

She slipped into the Eleven-Pole Chamber, crouched low behind her husband’s bench and dais, waited for her eyes to adjust. She crinkled her nose at the smell, noticed the Ekkinû Arras was missing …

“Here? Are you sure?”

She nearly cried out for recognition, but stifled her voice out of fugitive habit.

“I need … to keep … watching …”

She peered into the airy interior.

“But there are beds!”

“It is … better … to see …”

Indirect light streamed through the missing fourth wall, the one Kellhus had torn away to reveal the wicked glory of Golgotterath. It fell across the raised wooden tiers, too diffuse to cast shadows, yet concentrated enough to darken the gloom surrounding. With his back to her, Achamian sat high on the arm of tiers opposite the great rip … ministering to someone laying naked and prostrate across the planks, his head across the old Wizard’s folded knee.

“You … you were right … all along … Right about him.”

Proyas?

“No-no … my boy. I was wrong!”

Esmenet fairly convulsed for the intensity of her shame—and relief. Of course he had left—as she had feared. And of course, he had returned …

He was Drusas Achamian.

Even still, she found herself voiceless and immobile, spying upon yet another luminous clearing from yet another murky bower—hiding, as she always hid, loathe to afflict others with her fraudulent presence …

The lesser reality of her soul.

“But he is false …” the ailing King of Conriya gasped, “He is … Dûnyain … Just as you said!”

Achamian raised an arm to the brightness, revealed his wiry profile for the merest of instants. “Look for yourself … Golgotterath falls!”

She could see nothing of the spectacle, given her angle …

“Does it?” Proyas asked on a heaving shudder.

And it astonished, even appalled, to realize that she had turned her back on the Apocalypse …

“Well it certainly burns …”

Anasûrimbor Kellhus, her accursed husband, played number-sticks for the very World—and she did not care … so long as Mimara remained safe.

“Ah …” Proyas said, his voice regaining, even if only for a heartbeat, something of its old warmth and confidence. “Yes … It must be nectar … for you … Narcotic even … A spectacle … such as this.”

Achamian said nothing, continued daubing his old student’s face. Pallid light showered down upon them, inking their undersides, bleaching them of colour, etching them in the monochrome facts of their mortality. A king dying upon a sorcerer’s lap … as in days of old.

Esmenet swallowed at the ache of her cowardice, her abject inability to either reveal herself or steal away. She remembered spying him unawares in Amoteu so very long ago, after reading The Holy Sagas for the first time … after spurning him for the delirium of Kellhus’s bed. She remembered the heartbreak of finally understanding him, the beauty that was his all-too-human frailty …

And it seemed nothing compared to this.

“Can you—?” Proyas began, only to have his voice stolen by some whistling pain.

“Can I what, dear boy?”

“Can you … you … forgive me … Akka?”

An insincere laugh.

“A wife’s curse is as worthless as a sorcerer’s blessing. Isn’t that what you Conriyans sa—?”

“No!” the King cried, obviously preferring the anguish of violent exclamation to any demurral or making-trite. “My name …” he continued on a grimacing voice, “will be the name … the name … that my children … my children’s children … will curse in their prayers! Don’t you see? He did not simply betray my body! I’m damned, Ak—!”

“As am I!” the old Wizard cried in smiling contradiction. Esmenet saw his shoulders hitch in a helpless shrug. “But … one learns to muddle.”

She understood then what a gift this was, the ability to negotiate terms with death.

“Yes …” Proyas replied, his voice once again wavering about the memory of an easy nature. “But this … Akka … This … is me …”

The old Wizard shook his head in slow incredulity. The two Men laughed, though only Proyas was punished for it. He gasped and wheezed about some pain, arched his back, revealing, for a heartbeat, the black maul of his pubis. The old Wizard clutched his beloved student’s scalp in his right hand, slowly drew his wetted cloth along the man’s chest, neck, and shoulders with his left. He continued doing this until the convulsions subsided—the same as she had done, and would continue to do, with Mimara.

Long moments passed in silence. Esmenet dropped from her crouch to her knees for discomfort.

“Such arrogance …” Proyas eventually said, his tone glassy, and alarming for it.

Achamian’s attention had drifted to what vistas his view afforded. “What?”

“Such … such arrogance … you would tell me … Such reckless, simple arrogance … to make guesses the measure … of worth …”

Achamian sighed, at last resigning himself to Proyas’s need to confess.

“Children often take me for wise. Children and idiots.”

“But I didn’t … I took you … for a fool …”

Achamian said nothing—evidence of some old and unaccounted bruise, Esmenet assumed. Such are the burdens we impose upon one another. Such are the plots we leaved unweeded, untilled.

“Can you …” Proyas asked on a tremulous voice forcefully breathed. “Can you forgive me … Akka?”

The old Wizard cleared his throat …

“Only if you hang on, my boy. Only if you li—”

But Proyas had pushed aside Achamian’s ministrations with the purple grotesquerie of a hand. He arched forward, gazing out to riot on the plain, only to be stalled by agony.

Esmenet caught her breath, loud enough to earn a momentary, backwards glance from Achamian.

Their eyes locked for but a heartbeat—two blank faces.

“Look!” Proyas groaned and gasped, waving an arm at Golgotterath, “Some-something … happens …”

She saw the old Wizard turn to the missing wall—and blanche.

Apart from the Scylvendi occupying the Akeokinoi, the Mysunsai and Saik Schoolmen reforming above Ûgorrior were the first to see … though initially many refused to credit it.

To the west, the Occlusion extended on a perfect arc, reaching out into hazy colourlessness, fencing all that was visible, until dwarfed by the wreckage-of-earth that was the Yimaleti piling white upon cerulean. None other than Obwë Gûswuran, Grandmaster of the Mysunsai, spied them, his eye drawn by a wick of dust or smoke …

Sranc, streaming down a gully in the western face of the Occlusion. More appeared at a different interval fairly a league to the south. More again at a point nearly between.

Then another greater mass to the north. An outpouring of thousands.

The Schoolmen traded shouts of alarm and consternation. Temus Enhorû dispatched triunes of Saik to inform Serwa, Kayûtas, and Saccarees. But it seemed they could already hear it, despite the hellish racket of battle below …

A titanic yammering, howling madness multiplied into a heaven-cracking sum.

The all-encompassing roar of the Horde.

Then, abruptly, like water breaking its bead, Sranc flooded the clefts and slopes of the far Occlusion, a writhing deluge of what seemed maggots in pitch. Teeming figures engulfed all save the most precipitous heights, in many places falling in sheets down cliffs and breakneck slopes, hundreds becoming thousands, thrown to their deaths by the vast surge. The dead and maimed tumbled down the mangled inclines, accumulated and accumulated, choking gullies, matting slopes, forming great ramps of carcasses, until those that toppled began leaping up, rejoining the rush—until the Occlusion became naught more than a collection of isolated summits in a cataract that heaved and rushed across leagues, pooling below and washing outward, a foul seepage of innumerable thousands …

The Schoolmen watched dismayed and incredulous. Some, those with more youthful eyes, sighted a lone figure standing upon Shigogli as if awaiting the torrents. They watched with wonder as the roiling masses advanced on him, raising plumes and curtains of dust …

Only when the ground beneath the floating figure began belching geysers of ashen sand, flinging Sranc in blooms of white and violet wreckage, did they recognize their Holy Aspect-Emperor …

Standing solitary against the Sranc Horde.

Vile angel.

Its triumphant screech brings down a haze of dust and flaked mortar.

Kakaliol, Reaper-of-Heroes, dandles the thing in its fiery talons. Lolling limbs, head hanging as if from a stocking. Soft skin blistered or abraded or shorn away, a bladder for gelatinous innards and absurd quantities of blood, like an unwrung rag.

But where? Where is the soul?

Cast it aside, the Blind Slaver commands.

I would keep it for my token.

It runs a claw across the porcelain scalp, skinning it like rotted fruit, seeking …

Discharge your task!

The Arch-Ciphrang roars, clacks and stamps in impotent defiance. How? How can it pain him so? A world like bread. Like soap or cake. A world filled with dolls of meat!

And yet impregnated with pins, edged with teeth.

The pleasures I could have rendered thee, mortal … The delights.

I render here.

The Seducer-of-Thieves stalks into vacant blackness, bearing the carcass across a horned shoulder. Its hide sheds a baleful circle of illumination, one that pulses larger upon each bull-huffing exhalation. But nothing more than crude-cobbled floors are revealed, so immense is the chamber. Only as the burning trail of its blood lengthens are the limits—and the purpose—of the great cavity revealed: the cyclopean blocks, the massive square pillars … and the vast wall of gold …

Vile angel.

Kakaliol pauses between two pillars, rakes the gloom with its infernal eyes. It allows its prize to slop sizzling to the floors.

Yes … the Blind Slaver murmurs.

They stand deep in the bowel of the High Cwol, the point where the ponderous stone of Golgotterath marries the impenetrable skin of the Inchoroi Ark. The curve of the High Horn climbs vast before the demon, liquid with reflected crimson and seething, scintillating gold. A great chasm, some thirty paces wide and too deep to be fathomed, separates it from the floors, so that it plummets as deep as it soars high. The surface, however, is far from intact. A bridge spans the abyss, black stone raised across girders of gold, linking the floors to a gigantic rent in the Ark’s shell, one sealed and barricaded by stone bulwarks as mighty as any in Golgotterath, as if masons had bricked shut a rupture in a ship’s hull.

Behold, the insidious whisper declares, Ûbil Noscisor …

The Intrinsic Gate.

The stench of human entrails permeated the air. The Canal convulsed the whole of its glutted length. Ordealmen in their thousands formed dark clouds about each of the three breaches, blots that twinkled for countless sharp edges. The Exalt-Magus led her sisters out over the mobbed ruin of Gwergiruh beyond the shattered circuit of Golgotterath’s outer defenses. The Scarlet Spires had surmounted the Scab and secured their right flank, while the Imperial Saik was in the course of doing so on their left. Even as her sisters stepped back onto Ûgorrior, the Mandate sheltered behind the northern island of intact wall, and the Mysunsai—those who heeded her call—did the same behind the monolithic southern. The Ordealmen cried out in dismay below, cursed them as craven, but Anasûrimbor Serwa had eyes only for the sinister stages of the Oblitus. The Bashrag attack was no mere contingency. The Unholy Consult had yielded evil Ûbil and her monstrous towers …

The ambush was part of a larger deception. A greater catastrophe loomed.

But where?

Dozens had ignored her call for a general retreat, most of them Mysunsai, but two of her own as well: Hûtta-mimot and Sapharal, older, headstrong souls, women who had pursued witchcraft under the threat of torture and death long before the Shrial Repeal and the founding of the Swayali. They lingered with their triunes as their sisters retreated, either loathe to abandon the Men dying below, or wedded to some course of action they thought decisive and heroic.

Serwa forbid any effort to contact them or their subordinates. For the nonce, knowledge was the paramount objective—her mission.

Plumes of smoke continued to rise from the gold-fanged parapets of the High Cwol, forming fans across the base of the Upright Horn, sheets of liquid black balding across mountainous gold. She conjured a Lens, scolded a handful of her sisters for wandering into her line of sight. Then Mirûnwe announced that the Mysunsai had spied another Horde spilling down the northwest slopes of the Occlusion. As catastrophic as these tidings were, Serwa had eyes only for her Lens and the image of Nonmen Erratics stepping from the parapets of the Ninth Riser—Quya, their skulls shadows for semantic incandescence.

Ghouls.

The tickle of oblivion drew her attention below: constellations of unseen Chorae borne by unseen hands. She waved the Lens down to the Third Riser, scrolled across loping companies of Ursranc archers.

“Stand fast!” she cracked across the cloudless heavens.

She barked orders to her triune, whom in turn signalled the other Grandmasters, as well as her brother Kayûtas, the Exalt-General, and the contingents of Chorae bowmen below.

Mannish shrieks and huffing Bashrag wrawls pealed through the air. The Ursranc archers formed batteries along the parapets rimming the third terrace.

Nothingness rained down on the malingering Witches and Schoolmen.

Serwa batted away the Lens. Hûtta-mimot and her triune vanished in flickering succession. Sapharal and her sisters fared far better, with only one, Herea, struck … in the mid-billows, it appeared.

But the Quyan Ghouls were instantly upon them. More than a hundred of them descended the Oblitus, some naked save for the beading of ceremonial scars or myriad lines of ink script, others garbed in Ishroi glory, agleam in silk and nimil, and still others bound in rot and rags—all howling their madness in geometries of light and fire.

The timing troubled the Exalt-Magus.

“Hold!” she boomed.

Of the stranded Swayali, only Sapharal hung with her billows fully extended. Mipharal, her sister in fact of blood as well as witchcraft, clutched the injured Herea. The woman looked up and found herself at the blinding intersection of two dozen Quyan Cants. The two Witches lasted scarcely ten heartbeats. Though spared the brunt, Sapharal fell back to the surviving section of wall between Domathuz and Gwergiruh. The Ghouls pursued her with howling light, a brilliant welter of Cants, Illarillic Primitives and Thimioni Aggressives, chosen less out of sense than fury. Sapharal fled the cataclysmic advance, her tattered Wards sailing ethereal about her. But the Ghouls closed, scraping and spearing and hammering at her with lights bright enough to throw shadows in the full sun, killing all the hapless Men she passed—the Men who did not matter.

Just then, the first of the rearmed Chorae archers began surmounting the stranded islands of wall, scuttling for what cover the wrack afforded, crouching and firing. Old beyond reckoning, lusting for ruin and heartbreak, the Quya Erratics had not sensed their Chorae through the wall’s intervening bulk. Many paused to regard the new threat, but many more continued hounding Sapharal, who dove beneath a golden fang laying wedged in debris.

What followed bruised the hearts of all those who Dreamed the First Apocalypse, and so knew the Ghouls as they once were—as Ishroi and Siqû, Cûnuroi of ancient old. Only the Anagogic Schoolmen were so callous as to cry out in exultation. The Chorae bowmen began finding their raving targets, and one by one the Quya began falling as salt and statuary, crashing across the First Riser or into the churning length of the Canal. The ghoulish sorcerers began shrieking their inhuman songs, raked the archers with torrents of fractal light, killing many for the violence of secondary, mundane forces. But for every one they killed, two more slipped between the battlements. And lo, the Men of the Three Seas loosed a second Chorae Hail, one avenging the tragedy of the first more than two thousand years ago.

“On them!” the Exalt-Magus thundered.

And with that she led her arcane sisters over the teeming ruins of Ûbil Maw, back into the cauldron of Golgotterath, even as the Mysunsai and the Mandate floated out across either flank, their skulls furnaces of meaning, their singing an existential cacophony, the song of five hundred stone-cracking Cants.

It was a sight unlike any seen. Slaughter become beauty and light.

Dazzling Primitives, ghostly Reality Lines and blinding Inessences … all of them snuffed for the fury of Abstractions and Analogies, winking into burning, blasting existence, then fading on the smoke of dropping, burning forms. So died Sos-Praniura, Lord-of-Poisons, accursed Founder of the Mangaecca; and Mimotil Cravenhearted, Bearer of the Copper Tree at Pir Minginnial; and the mercurial Cu’cûlol, the impossibly ancient kinsman of Cu’jara Cinmoi. So fell Risaphial, nephew of Gin’yursis, and so many others, in reckless immolation, battling for the very evil that had so scarred their hearts, murdering for memory’s sake.

So fell the remnants of an entire Age.

Fairly two dozen Ghouls survived that initial onslaught. They could have fled the advancing triunes of Men, but nearly all of them persisted, some laughing, booming taunts in their melodious tongues, others simply shrieking out Cants, battling wraiths from their past, perhaps, shadows of ancient heartbreak. Hanging resplendent in their billows, the Magi of the Three Seas laved them in killing lights, tore away Quyan Wards like tissue, knocked the Erratic Quya from the skies, sent their blazing corpses crashing to earth.

Even as Bashrag hacked and Men howled below their slippered feet.

It opens and closes now, the Eye …

Dilating with the arrival of her birthing pains then squinting at their passage, and sometimes, more rarely, blinking and peering in the calm between, like a napping dog noting unexpected arrivals.

Mimara seizes the hand of the luminous angel that is her mother, screams, though her voice is little more than rope, rigging on a beached wreck. She hears herself whimper, sob. She gazes into the angel’s diamond eyes, begging, not for anything tangible or intangible, not even to make the agony stop, just begging, beseeching without hope or object.

She does not need the Eye to know the Blessed Empress thinks her daughter is dying.

It seems she must be dying, so excruciating the pain has become, so fruitless the ordeal. Mimara had not thought such anguish possible, the piling on of ache and twisting cramp and laceration and bulbous rupture. Her womb has become a great claw, alien and relentless, clenching and unclenching about the palm of her belly, kneading and crushing her very centre, again and again and again, until her screams are the screams of a stranger.

The latest series relents, and she actually cackles, so out of proportion is the pain, so lunatic. Her mother shushes and soothes. She falls to panting. Her eyes flutter, and the leather-walled chamber—gritty gloom slicked in pale lantern light—reels and revolves in aching delirium. Her mother is talking, she realizes … to someone hidden behind the shadows battling like starlings across her periphery …

“No. Impossible. Her canal … It must unshut …”

Achamian, she realizes …

Akka!

She raises her head against the cramping, sees him at the foot of the mattress, bickering with Mother yet again. The ugliness of his Mark is enough to kick bile to the back of her throat, but the beauty of his presence is … is …

Enough.

You can come out now, little one. Father has returned.

The Blessed Empress does not share her relief. “I forbid it!” she is crying high and shrill. “You will no—!”

“Trust me!” the old Wizard booms in irascible fury.

Her mother flinches, notices her scrutiny. Achamian follows her gaze.

They are ashamed, she realizes, even though quarrelling over the dying has ever been the lot of those who love. She tries to smile, but can only feed the grimace that tyrannizes her face. “I … I t-told you …” she gasps to her Empress mother. “I told you … he would come …”

The old Wizard kneels at her side, his smell pungent and unforgiving. He is trying to smile. Without explanation he wets his finger, prods it into the pouch …

How could she forget it?

He pulls an ash-furred fingertip from the maw of the thing, proffers it …

“Akka!” her mother protests. “Mimara … don’t …”

Mimara looks to him, the one Man she has ever trusted with her weakness, her father, her lover …

Her first disciple.

He cannot bring himself to smile; they have travelled far, beyond the need for compassionate deceptions. He does not know whether the Qirri will harm her or her child. He knows only that she has no choice.

Are you sure?

His nod is almost imperceptible.

She takes his hand, swallows his finger to the second knuckle, sucks at what is bitter and strong.

Nil’giccas …

Priest of Waste and Wild.

The Canal had become an abattoir.

The Men had exhausted the initial, inhuman fury of the Bashrag—by dint of numbers if nothing else. The giants had sheered through the ranks effortlessly at first, hacking broad swathes clear of all save the dead. When the Men had taken to panic, they had trampled and hewn, chased the survivors into disparate clots of resistance, or to the great bladders of Men about the destroyed towers and gate. But as their ferocity lapsed into labour, the massacres evolved into battles, which became more and more pitched.

The violence of the assault had been far from even. The bulk of the attack had come in the centre, where the Bashrag appeared intent on retaking ruined Gwergiruh. But here they confronted the legendary Sosering Rauchurl, High-Thane of Holca, along with two hundred and seventy-three of his tribal kinsmen. The Holca were the fiercest of the Sons of Thunyerus, though their cousins scarcely thought them human. They were famed for many things: their fiery hair, their prodigious strength, their battle-madness—and the fact that each possessed two hearts. The lands of Holca lay on the very frontier of Mannish hegemony, high on the waters of the mighty Wernma, in the violent shadow of the Wilderness the scalpers called the Mop. They were suckled in the shadow of the Sranc, veterans of countless mobbings, and like very few Men, they counted Bashrag among their ancestral foes.

Their heads great, wiry swags, their limbs pocked with cancerous moles, the Bashrag cudgelled and cleaved their way through the crush about Gwergiruh, where Rauchurl had assembled his kinsmen along ruined heights. As the grotesqueries lurched neared the base, the Holca leapt upon them, a shouting rain of battleaxes and red-flushed limbs. Obscene skulls cracked. Violet gushed from great scale gowns of iron. The Bashrag wavered. Seized by a berserker fury, Rauchurl closed with foul Krû Gai, a chieftain renowned among his misbegotten kind. They roared at each other, Inchoroi obscenity and unnatural Man, the one lurching and dark, mucose and pallid, the other flushed with wild vitality, trembling with red-rimmed life, both screaming a fury more primal than thought or soul. Rauchurl leapt, swung his battle-axe wide on its leather strap … and caught the monstrosity’s jaw, portioning the vestigial faces on either cheek, sending the elephantine head backward. The High-Thane of the Holca did not so much holler in triumph as he screamed, adding his spittle to the descending haze of violet.

So the Holca closed with the Bashrag, leaping into them with hacking fury, hewing their tripled ankles, picking their chariot breasts, axing their cauldron skulls. They moved with the lethal alacrity of cats despite their hulking frames, possessed of a ferociousness that was as insane as it was unconquerable. Even disembowelled, they stood and raged and battled. The Sons of Holca fought crazed, and the Bashrag, in their dim way, were astonished. They croaked and mewled to their brothers. They assailed the Crimson Men in ever greater numbers and fell, grunting, pawing gouts of violet with three-handed hands.

The lumbering obscenities numbered at most some few thousand, and for all the punishment they had meted, their numbers had been whittled down. As more and more of the beasts answered the alarums raised by the Holca, the bloody contests began to turn across the entirety of the Canal.

So the battle hung poised when the Nuns and Schoolmen assailed the Quya. Be they black and rheumy or white and clear, all eyes turned upward to the vaulting of wicked lights, incandescent and ephemeral. And for a miraculous moment they simply stood wondering, Man and Bashrag, shedding shadows that spun about their feet. And as the Quyan Ghouls began dropping, blasted and burning, the soulless hulks were seized by terror. The Soldiers of the Circumfix let out a mighty shout, charged en masse, and began avenging the thousands that had been killed.

Not a soul among them at this point knew of the Horde descending from the west.

The foremost triunes stayed low, striding scarcely above the heads of the Men massed and advancing below. They sang continuously and in unison, their heads inclined to the threat of the Oblitus, great plumes of sorcerous smoke materializing from their outstretched hands, drawn high into obscuring shrouds on the wind. Perched on the islanded walls, meanwhile, the Chorae Bowmen began methodically pelting the terraces of the Oblitus with their Trinkets, bringing down vast systems of interlocking Wards. The Believer-Kings and their vassals surged onward and upward using hooks and chains, climbing from the carnage and shadow of the Canal, seizing first the Second and then the Third Riser, where their arms and armour flashed newborn in the nooning sun.

And they understood the wicked might of the Consult had been broken. Golgotterath lay open, helpless before their righteous fury. An eagerness seized them, a predatory knowledge that whetted their lust for blood and destruction. Men whooped, cried out triumphant, rushing over the abandoned tiers of the Oblitus. Anasûrimbor Serwa remained suspicious, even though she understood their conviction. Their Holy Aspect-Emperor had overthrown every place he had coveted. Why should Golgotterath prove any different?

Unless the ancient and monstrous intellects of the Consult played a far different game.

One that turned on timing.

She had already signalled her concerns to her elder brother, Kayûtas, who concurred. The newborn Horde was the cornerstone of the Consult’s design, not the gold-fanged bulwarks of Golgotterath, which need only occupy the Great Ordeal long enough for the Horde to descend upon it …

This was why Father stood alone upon Shigogli, luring, cowing, wreaking untold destruction.

To purchase her and her brother more time.

“Seize the heights!” the Exalt-Magus thundered, her voice resonating across the Horns. “Storm the High Cwol!”

A sovereign brilliance, one glaring more against the noon sun than for it …

The Holy Aspect-Emperor hung low and solitary above the desolate plate of Shigogli, facing the intersection of the Occlusion and the blue-towering Yimaleti.

The very vista before him crawled, teemed with masses so great as to baffle the eyes, dupe the immovable frame of sky and earth into decamping. Sranc and more Sranc, nude save for crusts of muck, gibbering and yammering, brandishing crude axes and cruder spears, their canine members taut across their abdomens, stained violet for blood. They had swamped the northwest Occlusion. Pallid cataracts now draped the shoulders of every summit, cascading down and flushing out across the wasted plain, a thousand strands of turbulence convolving into one vast and loping onslaught …

Into the Blessed Saviour’s furious light.

In their rutting thousands, He smote them. And still they continued raging, continued running, tidal surges of innumerable, screeching faces, white beauty crushed into vicious, bestial inhumanity. They scratched and scrambled across the carcasses of the slain, leapt screaming into his armatures of scything light. Limbs and torsos erupted as autumn leaves about lines of brilliant white.

The Horde surged below and the Holy Aspect-Emperor hung above, flashing as a beacon, singing the only hymns the septic masses could reckon, genocidal Abstractions that carved tracts of ruin from the festering rush, Metagnostic disputations that consumed legions across the span of a league. Hearts exploded from myriad breasts. Skulls spontaneously imploded, wrung like rags. Wherever He walked, the Blessed Saviour trailed skirts of luminous destruction, plastering whole swathes of the plain with smoking, twitching dead. But they were pockets, merely, for the Sranc deluge swelled across the horizon, encompassed more and more of Shigogli.

Soon He stood stranded, hanging above an earth whose every ground had been overrun by white screams and raving appetites.

The Shroud engulfed first the Holy Aspect-Emperor, then his miraculous light in billowing obscurity. And for all his divine might, the Horde descended upon Golgotterath as if unhindered.

There are regions, places, gloaming tracts between the cruel edges and the mists—between the living and the dead. Hooks allowing the soul to linger beyond the moist endurance of the body.

Proyas lies breathing, naked and limbs askew upon the tiers, showered in the light of the very images that compel him.

The Horns soaring high as lightning. The black crab of Golgotterath, smoking.

The Shroud of another Horde, vast rags of ash roiling sunlit about gloom and darkness … nearing.

A silhouette appears below the spectacle, at the base of the breach in the leather wall—a physically powerful man, a warrior, sporting a Kianene helm. Even though he stands outside the Umbilicus, Proyas somehow knows the man belongs to the shadow play within, understands that he has always belonged, despite the madness and mayhem shouting the contrary.

The figure strides into the airy gloom, accumulating menace with warlike visibility. An entourage of armed wraiths follow, but they are obscured by his approach. Wild black mane. Stooped carriage. Scars upon scars upon scars—swazond without number. High cheekbones … and the eyes. His eyes. His unravelling look.

Cnaiür urs Skiotha strides up the tiers, rises to blot the smoke-roped vista of Min-Uroikas. His corded chest and torso lay bare in ritual display. Swazond are stacked in puckered sheaves across his entire skin, the record of his murderous life, shelling him. They encase his neck, a corded filigree that climbs the gunwale of his jaw, and reaches no higher than his lower lip … as if he were about to drown in his homicidal trophies.

The most violent of all Men.

Proyas gazes, blinking, but not for want of faith in his eyes. He lies beyond incredulity. Were it not for his anguish, he would have laughed.

He feels the thud of the man through the timber stringers. Cnaiür halts his climb upon him, as though he plans to prod him with his boot. Proyas could have been either blank earth or a murdered loved one, so titanic is the man’s gaze, so numb.

“I asked …” Proyas pants upon a grimace. “I-I asked … Him …”

The same eyes, irises blue unto white, pupils as bottomless as Carythusali greed. The same wild, ransacking gaze.

“Asked what?”

Even his voice has aged savage.

Proyas blinks, tries to swallow.

“How you died.”

The eyes narrow.

“And what did he say?”

“With glory.”

Another man would have balked at such a cryptic answer. Another man would have pressed, asked for details, laying out the entrails of the encounter, seeking to isolate some clear meaning. Not the most violent of all Men.

“He did this to you?”

A meeting of cracked lips. “Yes.”

There was something stronger than iron in their mutual regard, something heavier than ground.

The Scylvendi King-of-Tribes turned his head and spat.

“I was never such a fool as you.”

Again Proyas smiles, somehow anguished and serene.

“So … the argument … unfolds.”

The savage mien winced. “Aye. My feud is ongoing. But yours, Outland King, leaks from your insides.”

Proyas does laugh then, and weep. “Give it … time.”

The World is grey now, spaced in blurs of looming light … His mother giggles, teases him for having such lustrous curls … and there, clear as linen warming in sunlight, stands the Scylvendi barbarian who had delivered Anasûrimbor Kellhus to the Three Seas. Somehow stronger, the violence of his intensity more keen, for the leathery ruts about his eyes, the hide of beaded swazond, and the intervening decades of atrocity.

“From the beginning,” Cnaiür growls, “I hated.”

“And so … you were known …”

“He is the coal that kindles my wrath,” the Scylvendi retorts, “the knife that compels my will. Do you think I do not see this? Do you think I am numb to his depraved yoke? From the beginning! From the beginning he has ruled my obsession … And knowing this, I have thrown my own number-sticks. Knowing this, I have raised myself—by my own hair I have wrenched myself!—from his innumerable snares.”

And Proyas sees it, not so much the truth of the Scylvendi as the truth of tragedy, the doom of all doomed souls. To believe themselves set apart. To think all floods subside at their feet.

“He told me … He told me … you were coming …”

A look of sullen thoughtfulness.

“He is no God,” Cnaiür urs Skiotha said.

“And what is … he?”

A scowl.

“The same as me.”

Proyas understands the imperative to be wary, to measure the potential offense of each and every word in his savage presence. Malice flexes beneath his every movement, his every expression, a serpent awaiting the merest provocation to strike. His hulking stature and iron-strapped arms merely assure the outcome.

The Believer-King understands these threats, but feels nothing of their urgent clamour. It is a measure, he realizes, of where he stands on the circuit of death.

Proyas swallows, gasps against the plucking of something deep within his chest. “Do you truly … think … all this … is a ruse?”

Cnaiür drops as if to grapple or throttle, his teeth clenched, the pouched skin of his neck taut about flaring tendons.

“He!”

A granitic fist cracks the wood next to Proyas’s right ear.

“Is!”

A second thuds across the fabric spilled next to his left.

“Dûnyain!”

The most-violent-of-all-men arches like a lover over him.

“And I shall dog him! Snap at his heels! Bay through the watches of his sleep! I shall wait upon his outrageous arrogance, cast upon the obscene gluttony of his Mission! And when his diseased tools are spent, when he is battered and bereft, then—then!—I shall reveal the dread beam of my vengeance!”

“You … would risk … al—”

“What? Your great cities? Midden heaps! The fat of Three Seas? The People? Creation? Fool! You appeal to reason where there is none! You would put my hatred upon the balance with my desire—show me the mad wages of my design! But my hatred is my desire! My ribs are teeth, my heart a gut without bottom! I am fury incarnate, outrage become stalking sinew and flesh! My shadow cracks the earth, falls upon Hell itself! I smoke for the murder of innocents! And I shall sup upon his humiliation! I shall put out is eyes! Make adornments of his fingers! his manhood and his teeth! I shall hack him into the worm! the worm that is the truth!—truth!—of his nature! For he is naught but a maggot feasting upon carrion and corruption!

“The meat of you!” he howls, yanking high his knife …

Cnaiür urs Skiotha freezes, hangs as if upon the rawness of his own voice. And Proyas wonders at his own detachment, that he could see his life wobble upon a point, and not care, let alone fear.

The King-of-Tribes stands from his murderous crouch. “And you?” he spits, sheathing his knife. “Who are you to bandy reasons? You who have been trampled, you who have been thrown underfoot! When do the slain argue the righteousness of the slayer?”

The light greys. Proyas feels the empty air in his mouth, the absence of words or spittle. He sees … Serwë … standing two steps down. Unaged. Slight, waifish even, despite the barbarism of her costume. As beautiful as she was the day Sarcellus murdered her in Caraskand.

The mad King-of-Tribes bends his head from side to side in pursuit of a kink. The Sack of Golgotterath plays out in bright miniature against his profile, and Proyas finds his eyes drawn to what now seems a submarine drama. The Shroud of the Horde rears across the background, obscuring the far reaches of the Occlusion, challenging the Horns for the Heavens.

The light is dimming.

He glimpses intermittent threads of crimson, then the grilled face blots the spectacle once again, grimacing for perpetual disgust.

“He has used you up.”

And Proyas sees it across the encroaching gloom, images struck in the light of a less jaundiced sun. A different Age. A different Holy War. A Norsirai garbed like a beggar, mannered like a king—and a Scylvendi … “Yesss …”

And it seems impossible, the carelessness of that moment, that he had once held the Holy Aspect-Emperor and the Scylvendi King-of-Tribes within the compass of his mortal judgment. Had he felt it then, youthful fool that he was? Had he sensed the tickle of this mortal instant …

Way back then?

Turquoise scrutiny. Shit escapes the broken body below him, hangs animal. The light is dimming. The madman looks up into the gloom, his eyes counting the Circumfix-entangled insignia hanging from the void of the Eleven-Pole Chamber. He throws out his neck-breaking arms. “Burn it!” he roars, as if darkness and empty air were also his thralls. “Burn this place!”

Cnaiür urs Skiotha turns away, strides down to the grave shadows milling below—becomes a hulking silhouette once again. He barges through them, passes through the breach into swazond sunlight.

And Proyas lies breathing, as before, crafting each inhalation into shapes that might slip unnoticed between the swelling agonies.

He gazes through what seems a darkling glass.

Evil Golgotterath, like a wicked idol, squatting, watching beetles scurry about its horned feet.

Scylvendi throng in the foreground just outside, yelling, running, casting brands at the rotund walls of the Umbilicus … The light dims.

Moments pass before Proyas realizes one of Cnaiür’s spectral entourage has tarried …

Another silhouette. Another neck-breaking physique.

It approaches, parting smoke like ethereal waters. Once again, identity comes in stages. Once again, a familiar mien obscures the epic gleam of the Incû-Holoinas and the whorls of battle beneath. But this face is different, the ware of a more refined potter. The brutality bequeathed by the father has been tamed by the beauty of the mother, drawn into a more aquiline manliness.

“Mo-Moënghus?”

The dark Prince-Imperial nods. Obscurity plumes and bloats about his edges. The Shroud-of-the-Horde has become his halo.

“Uncle.”

And it seems proper, that this too, should be real. Geared in the accoutrements of the People, it is undeniable, the fact of what Moënghus is. So … something whispers within him. All truth shall be out this day …

“How?” he coughs. “What are … you doin—?”

“Shush, Uncle.”

Fire leaps through the Eleven-Pole Chamber. Anasûrimbor Moënghus hesitates, then raises a hand as great as his father’s, clamps it about Proyas’s mouth and nose.

“Shush …” he says with what seems an ancient melancholy. He has pondered this. He has resolved.

Convulsions wrack bloated flesh.

“You have lingered overlong.”

His strength scarcely seems human.

“And I will not let you burn.”

The Skeptic-King of Conriya suffocates. Light and image dissolve. His lungs cramp. A burning flashes from his bones. His flailing astonishes him, for he had counted his body dead.

But then the animal within never ceases battling, never quite abandons hope … Faith.

No soul is so fanatic as the darkness that comes before.

This is the lesson we each take to our grave—and to hell.

None knew who had stacked the great basalt megaliths upon the summit of the Upright Horn. For watches, the Horde-General had crouched beneath the greatest of them, sheltered from the sun under the veined canopy of his wings, gazing down over the burnished rim of the plummet, watching the play of pieces great and small across the immense, circular benjuka plate below. The Canted Horn reared vast to the south, his only companion in the yawning vacancy of the sky, a stooped and stunted sister, hazed more than obscured by the scant clouds breaking upon it.

How long had he waited? Even for a being so deformed, the passage of time seemed no less miraculous. Millennia had become centuries, and centuries had become years … and, now, mere watches remained. The sun would set upon their Salvation … at long last. Resumption.

The ancient Inchoroi terror stood erect upon the summit, heedless of the plummet, little more than a wick against the oceanic onset of the Shroud. His Horde had engulfed the western plains, drawing the dark promise of the Shroud across the western skies. Soon, so very soon, it would put out the cruel eye of the sun. Soon, so very soon, the Derived would fall raving upon the Trespassers, mount their labile corpses, and cleanse their filth from the stoop of the hallowed Ark.

Their chorus inflamed him. Chill wind scoured the golden pitch, knifed at his great lungs. On a whim, he raised his wings, allowed it to buffet him as a kite, raise him to the pinnacle of the massive stone. Looking out, he could see the very curve of the World, and he moaned for a sudden yearning to be raised higher, ever higher—to be pitched into the bosom of the infinite Void …

To walk above and between worlds.

A thread of scintillant crimson yanked his regard back to the beetles beneath him.

Fire consumed the Umbilicus, flames binding like momentary muscle, wrapping and unwrapping liquid bones. Anasûrimbor Moënghus wandered the perimeter of the conflagration, clenching and relaxing hands that would not cease shaking—especially his right, which still tingled for the mash of his Uncle’s beard. And he wondered at the smoking skin of the pavilion, how it heaved upon sheets of clean fire and plumes of noxious black, how it trembled and writhed as a living thing.

It was, he decided, a fitting pyre for King Nersei Proyas.

The Holy King-of-Tribes had led his barbaric entourage higher on the slope, where they now stood fairly encircled by more burning wrack, the rubbish that remained of the Great Ordeal’s belongings. Either custom or madness had granted his father three paces, for he stood encircled as much as accompanied, stripped to the waist save his nimil vest. Only grizzled Harlikarut, eldest living son of Oknai One-Eye, dared stand at his side. His Consult mother, the thing-called-Serwë, stood apart for a change, gesturing toward the very thing tyrannizing their communal barbaric regard: Golgotterath.

The constellation of puzzled squints sparked no curiosity in the Prince-Imperial. He had just suffocated a beloved uncle—a fact that did not so much occupy his thoughts as obviate any need for them. Some fury is simply too great to be perceived, too deep of keel, too broad of beam not to vanish into life. And so Anasûrimbor Moënghus had not the least inkling that he was about to murder his father.

“You would burn him alive?” he heard himself scream as he approached. “The man who saved you twenty-years ago?”

Several faces turned to him, but only those nearest. His father, a beacon of brutality even in such brutal company, made no demonstration of hearing …

His wasn’t the only outrage, Moënghus realized, glimpsing his counterfeit mother gesticulating between the taller Men. The load of gazes blunted, then finally heaved his glare in their direction. He peered over the burning tracts of encampment out to Golgotterath, Horns gleaming beneath the sky-climbing Shroud.

A line of luminous red flickered from the thigh of the Upright Horn to the termite confusion below.

“That is the sign!” his false mother cried—and in Sheyic, no less. The assembled Chieftains scowled for incomprehension.

“The Holy Spear of Sil!”

Even swamped by roaring flame and whooping warbands, her words rang as clarions.

“You are sworn, Son of Skiotha! We must strike!”

The Prince-Imperial climbed among the outermost Chieftains, peering at the preposterous beauty of his mother, wiping his palms against his foul Scylvendi breeches.

The Holy King-of-Tribes loomed before her, banded limbs taut, hands clenching emptiness.

“You think I believe your nonsense?”

She seemed so slight in his overpowering shadow, so tragically beautiful, an emblem of a world desired, but never possessed … Never enough.

“Everything …” she cried, poised to flinch, to ward. “Everything you promised me! You swore an oath!”

The Holy King-of-Tribes reached out into her trembling aura, pinched an errant lock of her hair between thumb and forefinger.

“You think,” he grated, “your lies reek less? That you might succeed where a Dûnyain has failed?”

He clamped his right hand—scarred, burnt dark for cruel seasons of sun—about her swanish throat.

She gasped, raises ineffectual hands to the great wrist. “I am everything …” she coughed, “everything you need me to be!”

“You think I am so bent, so disordered?”

Both hands were about her neck now, thumbs digging not so much for her windpipe as her carotid.

“Lover!” she cried. “Assa—!”

“You think I beat you out of shame! Out of depravity?”

“Gnngh—!”

“Disgust!” the King-of-Tribes screamed, wrenching her neck. Shadow inked the crevices of his forearms, the striping of scars, the twining of veins. And he squeezed, driving thumbs like iron hooks, palms like grinding stone. “I battered you for obscenity’s sake!” he barked, his face a lunatic mask. “I tormented you to make you believe! Punished you to gull! To deceive!”

Her manhood arched turgid in her leggings. Noises cracked from her throat. Convulsions wracked her whipcord body. The alabaster perfection of her face perforated, flexed like some horrific gill …

Cnaiür urs Skiotha hunched over her now, corded as hemp, trembling with exertion, huffing air and spittle. His concubine’s body flailed cartilaginous for a heartbeat, an eruption of blind reflexes.

Moënghus barged between the last chieftains intervening, saw his father hoist her ear to his lips, murmur as much as rave: “I trained you as a beast!—trained you for this very moment!”

Moënghus blinked for the glimpse of smoke wafting from the ligature of swazond that encased his trembling arms.

“To wait out advantage …” the most violent of men gasped on a furious exhalation. “And wait …” he murmured, sucking air, titanic exertion creaking on his voice. “And waaait …”

He thrust her down as an axe or hammer …

“Until only death remained!”

The body folded like a marionette. A noise too meaty to be a crack—its neck …

Serwë’s angelic face fell open on glistening, knuckled articulations.

Cnaiür urs Skiötha stood so as to sweep arms to the uninvaded fractions of the sky. The Chieftains of the People roared in frenzied approval about him, even clasping one another in celebration.

Still lathered for his exertions, the breaker-of-horses-and-men turned to seize his girl-skinned son’s shoulders. The grasp firmed when Moënghus cringed.

“Leave my side again,” the Scylvendi King-of-Tribes grunted, “and your limbs shall be struck from you.”

It happened the instant Serwa had ordered the assault on the High Cwol. It lasted for a heartbeat, soundless for the din of battle.

A line of light, dazzling, as perfect as any Gnostic Cant, but crimson …

And in no way stained by the Mark.

A Scarlet Schoolman dropped, dragged his flaming billows into the ramparts of the Oblitus. Thirûmmû Sek was no more.

The whole of the Great Ordeal stopped for horror and wonder, including Anasûrimbor Serwa.

Another line, soundless and blinding, conjoined Myrathimi—another Scarlet Schoolman scourging the parapets—and a point hanging on the High Horn’s inner thigh, above the reach of any sorcery. A simple pulse, bright enough to induce warding arms, then she was watching Myrathimi plummeted between blinks.

Tekne.

“Sweet Seju!” Mirûnwe exclaimed in horror from her side. “The Heron Spear!”

A third pulse followed, and another Scarlet Schoolman, Ekompiras, spiralled to earth, his fiery billows breaking up like straw.

“Interpolate!” the Exalt-Magus cracked through the furore.

The triunes of her Command instantly began shrinking toward her. She was already singing with her flanking sisters …

A fourth pulse, like a sun become milk—light that gutted the haphazard Gnostic spheres, concussions that pinked cheeks for mere proximity. Air whooshing.

“Father!” she boomed.

A fifth pulse. Light striking with the force of Wûlri, the Gall-Spear of Hûsyelt, clapping Wards into smoke and splinters, punching breath from guts, igniting the extremities of their billows.

The Swayali continued singing, the blood weeping from their noses black for the light of their mouths.

A catastrophic sixth pulse, glaring across the back of hapless sorceries.

“Scatter!”

She cried this even as Kima toppled from the sky, a white moth afire. All their billows burned. The sunlight glared, and she glimpsed the Men of the Ordeal packed across the Oblitus, gazing up awe and horror. She pulled the sash binding her billows to her waist, slipped from her flaming gown …

Even as a seventh pulse passed through it as tissue.

She landed among a company of astounded Nangaels, already singing, simultaneously batting at the embers on her hair and shift. She expected the Men to flee, but they piled before her instead, shields raised in pitiful gallantry against the vast scarp of the High Horn.

But no eighth pulse came—not for her. An incandescent line conjoined the golden heights with a cluster of Mandati and Scarlet Schoolmen hanging before the black parapets of Cwol. Four burning figures plummeted from the arcane assembly, followed by a flailing fifth. She heard Saccarees command they scatter as well. She bid the bearded warrior behind her, a grim and strapping man wearing an iron hauberk, to raise his kite shield.

She did not see the ninth pulse, only her momentary shadow across flagstones.

She nodded to the Tydonni Knight, then leapt, using his shield to vault the summit of the Riser. Like an acrobat, she swung herself into a handstand, threw herself into a crouch on the precarious summit of the battlements. The Men on this terrace, Galeoth Gesindalmen, cried out for shock. She dashed out along the lip of the parapets, racing southward. So she ran the length of the Sixth Riser, sprinting like a gazelle with slender grace, her slippered feet making a blur of the crude battlements. To her right, the Soldiers of the Circumfix flew beneath and fell away, a gallery of gawking fools …

Those nearest died in the eleventh pulse.

Serwa rode the shock wave, pirouetting, alighting like a swan, running with even more speed. The Galeoth on the terrace began casting their shields into the air behind her, seeking to obscure her passage.

She sang out on a luminous voice, still racing. Black roiled through empty air behind her, blooming like lobes of ink through water. The rope of the battlements shrank to nothing. She leapt, legs scissoring into emptiness …

The terminus of the Sixth Riser erupted behind and beneath her, slapped her spinning. The twelfth pulse.

But she caught the ground’s sorcerous echo, began walking over empty space, ascended the scarps of the Scab. The encampment floated across her periphery, distant slums and rubbish splayed across the feet of the southwest Occlusion. The pluming dust and flashing arms were what caught her attention—faraway tendrils and streams spilling down along multiple points, overrunning tents and pavilions.

Human … she realized.

Scylvendi?

But the Exalt-Magus turned away. She had no time. The arcane smoke had baffled the invisible Spearman merely—or so she had to assume. She soared over the black and broken heights of the Scab. The Canted Horn reared titanic before her, daylight glimmering through its chapped hull. The Horde had bloated far beyond its obscuring bulk, drawing a great curtain of darkness, ash, and ochre across the West. Hundreds of streamers radiated out from the tumult, the nearest fairly reaching Golgotterath’s ramparts: Sranc bands, she realized, the most famished and fleet. Behind them, the masses churned across what seemed the whole of the west, mob piling upon mob, a teeming that became ever more colourless and indistinct as the Shroud reared to consume everything, including the sky …

Even still, she glimpsed it: glimmering light, flashing from a socket in the twining screens and plumes.

“Father!” she boomed again, calling, beseeching, her voice cracking the distances asunder …

Just as the thirteenth pulse found her.

All Creation wailed. Dust vaulted into a high-hanging pall, swaddled them in shadow. The light of destruction became the only light, revealing Sranc, pale as fish in murky waters, packed unto trampling, howling, surging across the very bourne of visibility …

And it beggared Malowebi’s dispossessed soul.

The terror was a constant, as was the corporeal disorientation. Even though Malowebi knew he gazed from the sockets of a severed head, he felt his body nonetheless, dangling and paralytic, alternately dragged over earth and whipped about air like cords of weightless silk, a scribble across the face of the thronging plains …

The Horde.

Decanted across the great grey distance, flying in loose gales at the fore, surging into a tempest that encompassed heaven and earth, not so much covering the land as becoming it, mass upon frenzied mass, churning up plumes and veils that closed the distances, blotted the sun …

The Horde …

Smote by sorceries Malowebi could scarce conceive, Abstractions, like those belonging to the Gnosis, but unlike any Cant described in any text. Silvery hoops broad as bastion-towers, shaking everything within like images in kicked reflecting pools. Fractal blooms, lights replicating outwards, one become six, six become dozens, severing, detonating, laying out whole regions of dismembered ruin.

The Horde.

Countless raving faces becoming smooth with white wonder as death and light falls. Nightmarish. Vertiginous in ways the Iswazi mage could never articulate, a captive soul, swinging as a purse from the dread Aspect-Emperor’s girdle, watching him cast the very sum of his might into the wretched, earth-eating multitudes.

In their thousands, the Sons of Men set about gaining the Scab and securing the black curtain walls. Others were tasked with barricading and manning the breaches. Though some Lords-of-the-Ordeal balked at the notion of defending Golgotterath, they need only glimpse the western reaches of Shigogli to grasp its mortal necessity …

Lord Sampë Ussiliar and his Shrial Knights had taken the vanguard in the south, racing across the parapets in the wake of the Imperial Saik, who burned and blasted any Ursranc too foolish or maddened to flee. Seizing the gold-fanged heights proved remarkably bloodless. The mayhem and grim butchery were confined to the towers, where nary a footfall went uncontested. Though nowhere near the size of their famed cousins overlooking Ûgorrior below, the structures were brutal affairs, at once squat and cyclopean, raised from blocks of crudely-hewn rock. Given the need for haste, the Saik Schoolmen were called on to scourge the halls and to blast the iron portals, clearing a path to the adjoining parapets so that the rush might continue while a force remained behind to finish clearing the structures. But the convoluted, almost hive-like, layout of the towers, combined with the raving ferocity of the Ursranc, transformed each into a pitched melee requiring hundreds of souls. The heavily armoured Shrial Knights howled and hacked their way down treacherous stairs and along narrow, lightless corridors. Those too reckless ran afoul traps and ambuscades, for the Ursranc were far more cunning than their wild kin. Men bled out in the corners, limbs tangled in the corpses of their foe. Grandmaster Ussiliar had scarce travelled five towers before the simple lack of manpower forced him to concede the advance to General Rash Soptet and his more lightly armoured Shigeki.

Progress in the south quickly ground to a halt. But once the first tower on the heights above the ruins of Domathuz had been cleared, Nansur Columnaries and Eumarnan Grandees began spilling onto the lobed back of the Scab. The initial plan had been to form up below the walls, then secure the heights in full array lest the Consult ambush and overwhelm them. But the Horde—which the assembling Men could see consuming more and more of Shigogli—denied them this tactical luxury. With General Biaxi Tarpellas dead, command of the Nansur Columns had fallen to General Ligesseras Arnius—though he would be some time learning as much. By all accounts an impulsive yet gifted field commander, he grasped the peril instantly. Who knew what secret gates the Consult might possess? He understood well the tragic lesson of Irsûlor: Should this new Horde gain the interior of Golgotterath, all would be lost. Trusting his example would count as communication enough, he led his Columnaries in a disorganized mob across the Scab, bearing beneath the crotch of the Canted Horn toward those towers directly overlooking the approaching Sranc menace. Quick to grasp his intent, General Inrilil ab Cinganjehoi commanded his mail-draped Eumarnans to do the same. To a man, his Grandees and their households gazed at the spark of white and turquoise light hanging above the nethers of the Shroud: their Holy Aspect-Emperor standing alone before the catastrophic onslaught. “To the western walls!” Lord Inrilil bellowed to his wondering kinsmen. “They have by far the better view!”

Despite its rampaging disorder, the Horde moved as if possessing a will and intent all its own. For those battling on the walls, the way it consumed ever more of the World between glances seemed a kind of nightmare. But rather than simply swallow Shigogli whole, it penetrated the desolate expanses, funnelled toward the southern extreme of the dread stronghold, winding into a tendril as vast as Carythusal, fields of commotion so immense that the Shigeki watching from the southern parapets felt the ramparts drift westward beneath their feet.

With such terror streaming below them, how could they know their doom hung above?

Kakaliol, Reaper-of-Heroes, stands gazing upon Ûbil Noscisor.

Vile angel.

Scales smoking. Wounds weeping pitch and fire for blood.

Beware, the Blind Slaver whispers. Great and terrible sorceries lie coiled within the bri—

What, it croaks on wheezing fire, is this place?

The Blind Slaver is taken aback. The Carrion Prince can feel his soul twist in momentary, febrile confusion, like a minnow thrashing on a string.

Kakaliol screams for the outrageous perversity. A world ruled by bladders of muck! A world where souls hang upon the sufferance of slop and meat! A world where lice drive lions!

Discharge your Ta—!

What is this place?

The Blind Slaver hesitates. And Kakaliol, the demon-godling of the diseased slums and gutters of Carythusal, can feel it: the indecision, the bewilderment, the dawning fear …

All the delicacies of mortal weakness.

You stand upon the threshold of the dread Ark … the Blind Slaver replies. The Incû-Holoinas.

Hard doth it lean upon the threshold … the Seducer-of-Thieves says, for it can feel the smouldering torsions, the remorseless yaw in directions orthogonal to the accursed lines of harsh reality, as though it were a coal upon a blanket, burning through, filament by despicable filament.

Yes …

Vile angel.

And it realizes. Kakaliol apprehends. It can feel it sinking, all about, like a hulk upon the waters. The Reaper-of-Heroes raises its scimitar talons, roars with laughter, expelling the shrieks of a thousand thousand souls.

All it need do is scratch, tear away the cutting paper of this accursed World …

Now discharge your Task.

Nay.

Discharge your Task!

The Blind Slaver dares speak it, the word. And it can feel the torments the Manling would inflict upon it were it elsewhere in this accursed World. But here, in this place, Hell itself steeps the air, making whole what the frail sorcerer’s magicks had halved. Here, in this place, it cannot be sundered.

The Reaper-of-Heroes cackles, shrieks in diabolical triumph.

What does it matter, the punishing of a Desire identical with its Object?

Your Oath! the Blind Slaver cries upon blind panic. Your Oath is your Task!

Nay … the Carrion Prince rumbles across the edges of existence. Thou art my Task, mortal.

And upon this, Kalakiol, the Reaper-of-Heroes, involutes, reaches through itself, and seizes the Voice of the Blind Slaver, plucks the nubile wisp that is his soul. How the insect flails! Roaring exultant, it collapses into a writhing heap of centipedes, chitinous multitudes that spill out twitching and scratching across the floors, and begin boring through the flaking paint that is this World …

The vile angel is no more.

None other than Lord Soter had been the first to assemble his kinsmen beneath the turrets of the High Cwol. The Ainoni had taken up positions, preparing to follow the Schoolmen once the gold-fanged bulwarks had been entirely cracked asunder. The sky immediately above was fairly clotted with sorcerers and their silk-twining billows when the first pulse struck. Suddenly the air tasted of acrid things burning—smelled of pork. All was confusion, Men jerking their gaze to and fro in a panicked search for answers. Then Myrathimi fell burning, and shouting choruses erupted among the ranks. Those still baffled followed the arms and fingers pointing almost directly upward, to the hanging enormity of the High Horn …

Only to be nearly blinded by the third pulse.

Sorcerous singing clawed at the bowels. The Thousand Schoolmen were in disarray, some clustering to concentrate their defenses, others scattering—and all shrinking from the battered ramparts of the High Cwol. A young Ainoni caste-noble, Nemukus Mirshoa, was the first to realize the burden of Apocalypse had fallen upon them, the Soldiers of the Circumfix. While all others peered skyward, he cried out to his Kishyati kinsmen, shamed them for their sloth. Then shrieking their ancestral warcry, he charged forward, quite alone, into the black and blasted maw of the High Cwol.

Moved to wonder, the Men of Kishyat followed, first in scattered flurries, then en masse. Black arrows rained upon them, studding their shields and shoulders, but killing few, given their flaring helms and hauberks of heavy splint. They assailed a great breach due to the death throes of Hagazioz, labouring up pitched slopes of debris. There they found Mirshoa and his cousins battling scores of foul Ursranc in the gloom.

Lord Soter, a bellicose man by nature, immediately grasped Mirshoa’s impetuous wisdom. “As they reap, so are they reaped!” he cried to his vassals. “We cower behind sorcerers no more!”

So did the Palatines of High Ainon leave the Schoolmen to fend the unseen Spearman. On a disordered tide of shouts, they stormed the cracked bastions and scorched corridors of the High Cwol.

Since their presence had counted for naught, they were not missed. Seeing Serwa’s flight across the Oblitus, Apperens Saccarees commanded triunes of Mandate Schoolmen to surmount the High Cwol and rush the mountainous trunk of the High Horn. “Save her!” he cried. “Save the Daughter of the Lord!”

Upon the Cwol, the sorcerers saw the Horde, an endless deluge of Sranc descending upon the whole of the Furnace Plain, the Shroud churning skyward from the masses surging at the fore, steaming up to choke the very Vault. Fending horror and dismay, they threw themselves forward, crying out their ancient and holy inheritance, the Gnosis. They harangued their foe with Seswatha’s own Argument, the dark corpus of the School of Sohonc, the dread Cants of War. Great combs of brilliance swept up and scissored across the sheer, golden expanses—Third Looms, Thosolankan Intensities. Jaundiced reflections leapt and danced across the sheen in counterpoint, as if the Upright Horn had become a greased mirror. Radiance clawed ever higher up the cyclopean pitch, reaching for the Spearman’s perch …

But they could not so much as scorch the platform he stood upon, let alone test his Wards.

Nearly vertical pulses counted out the howling Schoolmen with combusting billows. Like flowers, they twirled to ground aflame.

The Men across the Oblitus watched spellbound, crying out curses and heavenly pleas. Frantic shouts across the Ninth Riser drew all eyes to a flickering above the Sixth—to the radiant glare that delivered the Holy Aspect-Emperor …

The Soldiers of the Circumfix roared in exultation.

He hung the height of a Netia pine, immaculate in his white gowns, gyres of smoke swirling out and about his miraculous coming-to-be. He held his hands palms up, flattened into blades, and his face bent skyward, so that it seemed he prayed as much as peered, searching for the dread Spearman …

A thread of crimson brilliance leapt between him and the High Horn.

For a span of two heartbeats, the brilliance and subsequent glare obscured him. Thousands cried out for premonition …

But their Saviour hung intact and unmoved, gazing precisely as before.

Another pulse, consuming vision and air. Men glimpsed the multiform apparition of his Wards, wicking energies, glowing across fathomless dimensions.

Again the Spearman struck. The air crackled for errant discharges. The interplay of convexities waxed brighter, reducing the Holy Aspect-Emperor to a penitent silhouette.

And another pulse, this one obscuring him altogether. The Wards now hung glaring, an ethereal object that jarred the intellect as much as the eyes.

Only those gazing up at the dizzying immensity of the Horn saw the luminous point appear on the tubular heights …

Another crimson pulse.

The Wards crumbled into smoke about the point of impact, entropy cascading outward, through all the incandescent reticulations, spinning into spaces more profound than empty air. And the Great Ordeal cried out for terror, save for those few peering upward, who first gasped for wonder, then cried out in delirious triumph.

For they saw their Holy Aspect-Emperor step from the ether above the Spearman, standing upon the platform’s slim echo, bellowing his Metagnostic song. They saw the rain of catastrophic Abstractions, the cracking flare and shimmering implosion of the Erratic’s Wards. And they saw their Saviour fall as vengeance upon him, cast him shrieking from the impossible heights …

They watched their Holy Aspect-Emperor take up the Spear.

The Soldiers of the Circumfix boomed in triumph. Across the Oblitus and the captive walls, Men fell to their knees and gave praise. They cried out the hallowed name of Anasûrimbor Kellhus, their all-conquering Lord-and-Prophet.

The triumphant shout shrugged aside the caterwaul of the Horde, resounded deep into the shattered halls of the High Cwol, where it further inflamed the heart of Mirshoa and his Kishyati kinsmen. They hacked and hammered at the raving, Ursranc throngs, until their white-painted faces were all but violet for their foe’s blood. They battled down corridors narrow and wide, pressing ever closer to the Intrinsic Gate. Like all warriors alive in the moment, they could feel it, the leakage of their enemy’s resolve. And this incited them even more, until Mirshoa and his kin laughed and roared like gods having lethal sport.

Tumult had engulfed all that was visible. The Horde crashed upon the westward ramparts of Golgotterath, bearing south. Vast legions of Yimaleti Sranc encompassed all the western tracts of Shigogli, churning up vast curtains of dust, screens woven into the impenetrable obscurity of the Shroud. To the east, the encampment burned, and divisions of Scylvendi horsemen had formed across the outskirts—what looked to be thousands of them. Within Golgotterath, Men ran from all quarters, scrambling to seize and secure the outer walls.

The Holy Aspect-Emperor raised the Spear … cast it.

Greater and greater it loomed, a vista of ruined ramparts and smoking sockets beneath the surreal enormity of the Horns.

“Fleeing!” the old Wizard cried out in dismayed indignation. “Fleeing to Golgotterath!”

For madness it was. They hobbled across the waste with Mimara braced between them, in the Throes or between Throes—he did not know, for the Qirri had afforded her a vitality all her own. Golgotterath loomed nightmarishly before them, the Horns reaching, burnished unto blinding in the direct sunlight, the Shroud engulfing ever more of the skies beyond. Incredulity numbed him to the pit—to simply witness the image let alone scramble into it. For they desperately needed to reach the gold-fanged bulwarks and the security of the Great Ordeal. Achamian suffered a clutch of panic each time he made note of the Shroud’s progress. Even with the blessed ash, even with the cannibal vitality quickening his limbs, they had no hope of beating the Horde to the breach where ancient Corrunc had once stood.

They were too late. He could feel it in his bones.

They could have walked the sky, had Mimara been willing to relinquish her accursed Chorae. But she insisted that she needed them. He had relented without protest: the Scylvendi were already burning pavilions by that point, and his greatest concern was to slip from the encampment unnoticed.

But very soon now, she would have no choice.

Very soon.

“Someone pursues us!” Esmenet cried over the growing howl.

The old Wizard followed her terrified gaze. At first all he could see was contradiction, the contrast of the lean vista they fled from with the black and brooding turmoil they fled to. Then he saw the far precincts of the encampment burning, the Scylvendi myriads fanning through the whorls and clots of canvas hovels as though flushing game from a meadow …

And closer still, a war-party numbering in the hundreds, galloping hard on their trail.

“Move! Move!” he exclaimed.

Mimara cried out for anguish, and somehow they managed to quicken their pace. But a shambling, stumbling trot was not going to save them. Within heartbeats, the People of War had gained enough ground to begin testing their bows. A shaft sunk into the ash to the right of them—then another just behind. The third glanced his Wards, skidded burning. Then a continuous hail of archery began flashing across the back of his Gnostic defenses …

It was time.

“Cast aside your Chorae, Mim!”

“No!” she barked savagely.

“Stubborn wench!” the old Wizard cried, fairly tripping for disbelief. “Yield them or die! It is that sim—!”

“Wait!” Esmenet hollered, looking over her shoulder as she hustled. “They’re turning about! They’re … The—!”

“Look!” Mimara croaked on a hook of agony.

Achamian had already turned, his gaze compelled by a crimson dazzle across his periphery.

Even though leagues distant, the Horns of Golgotterath nonetheless loomed, impossibly monstrous. The Great Ordeal had overrun the fell stair of the Oblitus—a sight that was itself breathtaking—and was even now assailing the High Cwol—the great citadel of the Intrinsic Gate! And there it was: a glittering bloodred line, conjoining a point low on the profile of the High Horn with what had been a Schoolman. A light miraculously unpolluted by sorcery’s Mark … a killing light.

Tekne.

“What is it?” Mimara cried. “The Heron Spear?”

Could it be? No. The Heron Spear had frequented too many Dreams for him to mistake it.

“The colour is wrong …”

A different Inchoroi weapon of light? A different Spear?

Speechless, they limped and raced across Shigogli’s desolate beam. The Spear flashed and flashed again, counting out their progress with burning Schoolmen …

Until Kellhus at last appeared.

Suspended high, a thread of ruby brilliance pulled perfectly taut … striking not the lurid convolutions of the Horde, nor the turrets of the High Cwol, but the inner thigh of the Canted Horn—where the golden shell was most decrepit.

A crack slit the sky’s throat. The echo rumbled like Fanim drums-of-war.

The Holy Aspect-Emperor cast the Spear again.

And again.

The sight was one the Soldiers of the Circumfix simply could not credit. For many, standing beneath the Horns stirred memories of dozing at the root of some ancient tree, the trunk a great and heavy bulk upon their brow, the curvature climbing to obscure whole empires of the sky. The forces, the torsions did not matter. Permanence was utterly assured, such were the proportions. Mountains did not leap, and the Horns did not fall.

And yet, the Canted Horn shuddered, wagged like something suspended from a line, then dipped, no more than the slightest declination—what would be counted an insult in jnan—but catastrophic nonetheless.

The sky teetered.

A sound like a dog’s yawn groaned across all Creation. The pinnacle swayed out, sheering through the cloud hooked about its gleaming neck. The Horn toppled. The eyes of many simply refused to believe, such was the scale. The ground seemed to heave beneath their feet, yanked as cloth torn between dog and master. The structure revolved in a ponderous pirouette, then sailed on an imploding hinge out across the plain. The sun burnished its golden descent, a bead of brilliance drawn over leagues of unearthly gold. On the plain below, Sranc wailed in the sudden shadow, legions scattering for terror into countless other such scatterings. A sound like coins zipping across fine mail—an enormous, airy whisk. Then a series of yawing cracks, concussions that swatted exposed skin—deafened. And there, before infidel eyes, the very sky plummeted, a vast, deformed cylinder, ribbed like the hull of a ship, obliterating Golgotterath’s ramparts, thumping the plains with geologic violence …

Casting Sranc like dust into the erupting air.

The impact threw Men from their feet. Blood popped from their noses, flecked the whites of their eyes. The ground shook as though quaked for more than thirty heartbeats—the time required for the structure’s monstrous crown to join its monstrous nethers. The Canted Horn hammered the very drum-skin of the World, and all Creation resounded. As far away as Carythusal, napping babes started awake, began bawling.

The Horde fell silent. A great gust of lucid air galloped into the belly of the Shroud—revealing the endless, virulent masses … white-faced and agog.

The Men of the Ordeal did not have time to wonder—they scarce had time to regain their feet. Showers of ejecta followed hard upon the shock-wave’s clarity, a tempest of gravel and grit that pinched throats and pricked eyes. They milled in a stupor, coughed and called out, daubed noses or swatted ears. One by one, the Sons of Men squinted through the lifting screens, saw the Great Ordeal intact and the Horde grievously wounded. Prince Inrilil ab Cinganjehoi raised his eyes to his Holy Aspect-Emperor standing high upon the Spearman’s perch, shrieked in crazed and unmanly exultation.

And all the surviving Soldiers of Circumfix joined him.