Early Autumn, 20 New Imperial Year (4132, Year-of-the-Tusk), Golgotterath.
Far more souls would perish in the tribal wars subsequent to the Battle of Kiyuth than in the legendary contest itself. Infighting, hunger and squalor would all but consume the People of War. Across the Hallowed Steppe, the old mothers began openly cursing those bearing recent swazond, calling them the Fa’bakilut: those who grow fat on Misfortune.
Then Cnaiür urs Skiötha had ridden out of the smoke of the Carathay, a lone Utemot encased in scars from cheek to toenail, bearing more swazond than any among the People, past or present. His “Norsirai concubine,” far from blotting his honour, simply added to his mystique. She was a daughter of Lokung, he claimed, and none dared contradict him. The old mothers even began calling her Salma’loku, a name of legendary dread among the People. Rumours rode the winds, of course, tales of scandal and shame, but they impeached the tellers far more than the souls told. The Utemot had been scattered unto the corners of the Holy Steppe. And what was more, this man was so obviously the very incarnation of the Old Honour. A warrior who had reaved at Zirkirta, survived Kiyuth, and had struck out seeking to redeem the People, battling in Outland wars for Outland Kings, bathing in rivers of outland blood …
More importantly, he was the one the memorialists extolled in their tales of the Hated Battle, the solitary chieftain to dare raise his voice against Xunnurit the Accursed. And now he had returned bearing the death rattle of hundreds in his veins, on his skin, and declaring the People were one. Cnaiür urs Skiötha …
The Most Violent of all Men.
Some said he seized the Steppe in a single day, and though this was not at all the case, it was very nearly true, for none who resisted him possessed a fraction of his will, let alone his cunning or prestige. In the span of a single furious summer he crushed all who found advantage in fratricide, murdering only those who needed to be murdered. The blood of the People was too sacred, he said, to be squandered. He apportioned the widows to the mightiest, enslaved all who were barren. A tempest was upon them, he claimed, and the People would need all her Sons.
How the old mothers had crowed. They would weep for the privilege living so long to see his Coming. They would stoop to earth before him, clawing the grasses, baring the soil to his feet, so they might be one, the Steppe and the man they had called Wrencûx …
Redeemer.
A savage reflection of his sworn foe.
The soul, like the body, knows how to cringe and huddle, how to shelter itself within itself according to what is most tender or precious. And as with the body, it is the face that is always buried deepest. So Anasûrimbor Esmenet held her free arm over her face as she skidded and tripped, hauling her daughter. Her inability to witness had become the inability to expose, so ghastly had her world become.
Carcasses … burnt and eviscerated, mangled and amputated, a wan and beautiful vacancy in their faces, eyes limpid and dark, pools the size of pennies, gazing into mudded ground or scissored flesh or out across the blank face of Creation.
Carcasses … twitching like fish spilled across the docks.
And there, just beyond the riddled Wards, the surge of endless thousands from all directions, howling without sound, wagging weapons, then perishing in incandescent upheavals, becoming silhouettes within blooms of molten brilliance, slumping or flying apart.
And she picked her footing and hauled, picked her footing and hauled. She was a mother, and her daughter was all that mattered.
The daughter, that is, she dragged over carcasses. The daughter above, she failed to recognize.
She picked her footing, her sandalled feet sometimes sinking to the knee, and heaved her anguished daughter forward, always forward.
Until a treacherous fraction whispered, I know these beasts …
For she had been fending them the entirety of her life, their hunger as bestial as their judgment … Things naked and twitching.
She let slip Mimara’s arm to cast both arms across her face, only to lose her footing upon the macabre tangle. If she cried out no one heard it. She fell into the pockets of slick nudity, flailed at the wet skin, and at long last began kicking her dread and confusion.
You remember this …
The shriek was deafening.
Golgotterath became an island in a threshing inland sea.
The Horde crashed upon the western approaches, the greater part hying south, where it careened into the ruin of the Canted Horn, and was slowed to a trickle by the need to funnel through the gold-ribbed devastation or to circumnavigate it altogether. More and more of the clans hied to the north as a result, until the wicked stronghold—and the Great Ordeal within it—was engulfed in its entirety.
The long-suffering Soldiers of the Circumfix besieged and were themselves besieged. Everyone save the Sons of High Ainon were either called to the roiling perimeters, or assembled in reserve, lest any of their brothers falter. The last of the towers were cleared of Ursranc and manned. Shield walls were raised about the breaches, phalanxes arrayed dozens of Men deep in many cases.
The Knights-of-the-Tusk defended the southernmost breach, the gullet of the Canted Horn’s ruin. A vast, impossibly intact section of cylinder lay cracked upon the cliffs, overlooking the mountainous spine of shattered gold—or what could be seen of it through the Shroud. Draped in iron-mail, their Tusk-and-Circumfix shields interlocked, the Knights stood but a pace back from the edge, spearing and stabbing the endless upswell of inhuman faces rising from the lip. The interior of the section lay stacked in utter ruin behind them. Unbeknownst to them, however, the impact had crevassed the scarps below, producing defiles beneath the ruined segment, which otherwise lay braced against bowed and cracked curtain walls. Were it not for the prudence of their Grandmaster, who had stationed pickets through the cavernous ruin to guard against just such a contingency, the Shrial Knights would have been doomed. As it was, these pickets were quickly overrun, but a dozen survivors managed to gather across the lip of a shelf more than a hundred and fifty cubits above and behind where Lord Ussiliar had deployed, screaming, waving their arms, throwing debris, yet unable to gain the attention of any of their brothers in the titanic din. It was only when they began throwing themselves, leaping to their deaths, that Lord Ûssiliar at last saw them and fathomed the threat. Using tap-signals to communicate, the rear ranks were turned about so that the whole could form a tortoise thousands strong. An avalanche of missiles and debris crashed down across the carapace. Sranc surged from the gutted hollows, gushed in gesticulating streams. The Knights-of-the-Tusk knelt beneath their impromptu bulwark, propping their shields with their shoulders and their broadswords, and stabbed at the hacking clamour upon them with their Cepaloran long-knives. But shields and arms were broken, and more and more of the raving creatures cracked through, creating inlets and puddles of pitched melee. Men screamed unheard in the hunched and closeted gloom. Many muttered what they believed were their final curses and prayers, until they glimpsed the play of many-coloured lights between the joists of their shields. The Imperial Saik, once their most hated rivals, had saved them. Forsaking the edge, the Knights-of-the-Tusk fought their way into the ruin, deeper into the mountainous segment, gawking as the Schoolmen transformed the floor of the great hoop into a fiery cauldron behind them.
The Judging Eye comes to her knees amid the char and wet skin—looks up …
Sees a slender Ciphrang hanging as high as the future, showering the earth with death—a witch, wet with the fires of damnation, burns heaped upon her burns.
It turns … sees an old woman who beams angelic grace and an old man who wheezes fire, a thrice-damned cinder.
It glances out … sees the Sranc, though they are scarce more than apparitions sketched in coal, falling as black hair in the polluted radiance of the witch’s craft.
Then, at so very long last, it looks to her belly …
And is struck blind.
The breaches to the southeast were the easiest to secure and defend, at least in the early going. King Hoga Hogrim and his Tydonni Longbeards held the ruined foundations of Domathuz with battleaxe and kite-shield. Red-faced and roaring, the Thanes of Nangaelsa, Numaineiri, Plaideol and more, defended positions some thirty paces beyond the black ramparts, arrayed across heaps and swales of rubble. To the north, King Coithus Narnol and his Galeoth defended the ruins of Corrunc. Unlike her sister Domathuz, Corrunc had collapsed as a whole, producing a radial flange of debris that extended almost as an oblong bastion beyond the gold-fanged circuit, providing the bellicose Northmen the footing they needed to form a traditional phalanx, and thus a proper shield wall. And so they weathered the rabid, yammering assault with disciplined equanimity.
King Hringa Vûkyelt and his barbarous Thunyeri were charged with defending the most complicated, and therefore most treacherous, of the three breaches: the shell of Gwergiruh, the monstrous gatehouse of the Extrinsic Gate. Here the ruins afforded no obvious line of defense. The hindquarters of the gatehouse remained intact, with only the forward bastions battered down in differing degrees. Interior floors hung exposed. Blocks the size of hovels lay cracked. Intact sections of wall reared solitary and indefensible. Rather than deploy across the perimeter of the wreckage, the Thunyeri Believer-King elected to defend the ruined hulk instead, stationing his black-armoured Men through the very halls and chambers they had wrested from the Ursranc mere watches previous. This ad hoc deployment should have meant casualties, but the Thunyeri were weened on the blood of skinnies. By dint of upbringing and bloodthirsty temperament, they far preferred depending on their kinsmen’s axe over his shield. They knew how to shatter the Sranc stampede, how to hew into the rush in a manner that sent the creatures reeling, allowing them to reset. And so the gutted galleries of the Extrinsic Gate became a grisly abattoir.
But even their toll paled before that of the Mysunsai Schoolmen. Hanging in triunes above and about the breaches, they assailed the tormented plate of Ûgorrior with the dread Nibelene Lightning of yore. They were the first to spy the Exalt-Magus approaching through the leaves of the Shroud, gesticulating wildly, singing at the very pitch of her ability, drawing combs of exploding brilliance across the Sranc masses. Despite her straits, she moved with anxious sloth, as if pacing someone who crawled. Soon the glow of Gnostic Wards appeared on the ground below her, a luminous bowl that stumbled after the wreckage of her pulping, charring song.
Those upon any height of Gwergiruh could see it …
And then it inexplicably stalled.
Anasûrimbor Serwa hung as a living light above a living gyre, a landscape that scribbled and heaved, that relentlessly surged inward no matter how violently she gouged it. She wracked the earth, unleashed whipping parabolas of razor sharp light. Whole war-bands simply slumped upon their amputations, writhed across their thrashing kin, flailing.
The Men roared in voices that could not be heard, some in triumph, but more in warning, for any fool could see she merely dug sand underwater.
And as if hearing, the girl suddenly whirled to face them across the thronging plain.
“Your Empress needs you!”
Once again it was Lord Rauchurl who seized what favour the Whore had to offer. Without the least consultation, he led his Men in precarious file along the peak of the blasted inner wall of the Gatehouse, thence down to where they could leap directly into the thronging Sranc masses. One by one, the great-shouldered Holca landed, two hundred and thirteen in all, their skin as crimson as their hair for berserker rage, their blades blurring for whirlwind savagery, breakneck violence. With grim deliberation, the High-Thane of Holca led them into the shrieking bedlam of the plain. Nine triunes of Mysunsai shadowed their advanced, scoring the tumult with brilliant white swatches of Nibelene Lightning.
Thus did they slash and burn their way through the threshing tracts, a terrestrial circle of hacking barbarians beneath a floating ring of conjured shadows, all illuminated in flickering sheaves of lightning. The mighty Holca heaving to and fro, great arms snapping, battle-axes throwing blood that glowed violet when glimpsed against discharges. For those with the luxury to watch, standing upon Gwergiruh or the adjoining parapets, it seemed as much a horror as a miracle, a scrap of divine grace that made stark the scale of their plight. For some, all the World seemed to hinge upon the lunatic transit, for despite the unnatural strength and savagery of the Holca, nothing was assured. Not a breath passed, it seemed, without some glimpse of a warrior falling, bludgeoned and cloven, blooded faces dragged howling into the ghoulish frenzy. At any instant, it seemed, the battle-circle could implode beneath the rutting fury.
But then they arrived, gained the bright beacon of the Exalt-Magus. They tarried for more than a dozen fraught heartbeats, and then began relentlessly cutting their way back to the shell of Gwergiruh, now moving even more quickly for Anasûrimbor Serwa and her astounding Metagnostic might.
Tears clotted the eyes of those Men who could see: The Blessed Empress was saved!
Sosering Rauchurl himself carried her cradled in his great arms, bore her over the blasted remnants of Evil Ûbil to the safety of the Canal.
Only one hundred and eleven of his Holca had survived to follow him.
The Incû-Holoinas.
The deeper the Anasûrimbor penetrated, the more Malowebi had the impression of sinking, as if they dove into a golden wreck at the bottom of some black sea, so viscous was his terror.
Everything was capsized, twisted so as to contradict down. But he could not, given the combination of gloom and his abject vantage, discern the limits of the space, let alone make sense of it. He knew only that they had entered a vast, golden room, one illuminated by what seemed a monstrous, upside-down brazier the size of the Healing Pools of Phembari, strung from great chains to form a ceiling of sorts above the polished obsidian floors. Pale wicks of flame roiled and twisted across its surface, blue waxing baleful orange and sparking white—only lapping downward …
Wonder had him straining at the margins of his vision to decode the flames at first, for in no way could he sense the stain of sorcery in the unnatural burning.
Avert your eyes … a presence instructed.
Whether the voice was his own or belonged to the Aspect-Emperor, he did not know, but it bent the arrow of his attention as if it were his own …
Away from the uncanny flames and across the mirror blackness of the floors to the spectre of a throne arising out of a massive array of horned cylinders and convoluted nodes and grills. The Chair-of-Hooks, he realized, the wicked Throne of Sil. It fluted out upon a myriad of angles, flaring into preposterous dimensions as it bulged into cavernous murk. The floors, he suddenly realized, ended just beyond the great seat, dropping into spaces too vast to be hidden from heaven. Gleams inhabited the abyss, etching the back of shadow with the intimation of staggering structure. Old Zabwiri had shown him the inner workings of a water-clock once, and Malowebi suffered that selfsame sense of peering into an unfathomable mechanism now, of seeing what had to be the joints and conduits of mundane force without the least inkling of what those forces might be …
Aside from unimaginably vast.
And the captive Zeumi Emmisary found himself wondering about the ancient Ishroi of Viri, mulling whether something similar had passed through Nin-janjin’s ghoulish veins upon first witnessing the wonders of the dread Ark. Had he experienced the selfsame awe? The same speechless incredulity? For this was the Tekne, the mundane mechanics that Malowebi and his ilk regarded with such contempt, only refined to pitches that beggared the intellect, made crude barbarity of their sorcerous barks. The dread Ark, he realized, was a water-clock of unimaginable subtlety, a titanic contrivance driven by its own principle of animation, causes tyrannizing effects, energies hounded through labyrinths, all arranged … just … so …
What fools they were! Malowebi could even see them cavorting in the Palace of Plumes, the Satakhan sorting nuts in his palm, Likaro decanting the poison he called wisdom at his side, and the rest of his cousin’s festooned inner circle, drinking themselves into oblivion, trading slanders in the pursuit of petty grudges—growing even more fat and stupid, all the while utterly convinced that they decided the fate of the World. Such idiot arrogance! Such conceit! Layabout, ingratiating souls, anchored to thighs and pillows, addled with wine and hashish, courting favour by calling out ribald condemnations of the Aspect-Emperor—by cursing their Saviour!
What shame! What disgrace they had called down upon High Holy Zeum! This was why he hung from the hip of the Anasûrimbor—why he was doomed! This was why Zsoronga was dead …
He gazed upon the dread ligaments from within. And his revelation upon witnessing the Incû-Holoinas from the promontory stood revealed as half-hearted, the skin of something far deeper. The “world” was murdered and the World rose up in its place, a new, deeper ground of believing. Unknown. Terrifying. Sharp where there had been murk, and impenetrable where there had been flattering phantasm. At last he understood what it was the preachers his cousin executed had experienced: the becoming myth of what had been scripture, and the becoming question of what had been myth.
What were the Inchoroi? The Nonmen said they descended from the Void, that they sculpted their flesh the way potters fashion clay. But what did that mean? What could it mean? Were they truly older than humanity?
And what was the Ark? A ship for sailing … between stars?
It was too much … Too much too fast.
This was why the last thing the Second Negotiant discerned in the gloom was what should have been the first: a ghost-white face peering from the hooded confines of the wicked Chair …
A hand floated up with a poet’s fey sloth, obscured the brow.
Mekeritrig, saying, “It was Sil who fashioned this place.”
The Grandmaster of the Imperial Mandate had no choice but to call on the Exalt-General—for he was at a loss as to how he and his Schoolmen might overcome the Intrinsic Gate. They began by attempting to clear the Wards on the bridge, only to watch it slump into the void of the chasm. Then they set upon foul Obmaw itself, wracking it and the adjacent stonework with a catastrophic array of sorceries. They battered the masonry into avalanches of debris, casting the ruin so as to choke upon a narrows in the chasm. The edges were cudgelled down. Wrack was blown as leaves, as the most powerful continued blasting the ensorcelled iron of the portal itself, Abstraction after battering Abstraction, until it too finally sloughed into the choked crevice, leaving only a gaping void where Sikswarû Maragûl had once barred their way …
The Ark had been pried open.
And so, deep in the husk of the High Cwol, the Men of the Three Seas boomed celebration, save that the stench surpassed description; it bloomed through the chamber like a fog of rotten grease, silenced the cheer. Violent retching could be heard over the eerie resonance of the Horde.
The one hundred and fourteen surviving Schoolmen of the Imperial Mandate arrayed themselves, billows bound, in an intricate formation, facing the soaring golden wall above the chasm’s edge. The rent in the Ark emanated darkness as much as inhuman reek.
A causeway dropped from the footings of the hole, then climbed on a steep saddleback to the High Cwol. Five triunes advanced upon the black hole of the Obmaw, walking the arcane echo of the ridge of debris. They sang as they approached, layering their Gnostic Wards, for they knew that a mighty Wracu kept the gate. The breadth of the rupture was such that only one triune at a time could pass. The glory of the van was accorded to the triune of Iërus Ilimenni, a childhood prodigy who had recently become the youngest member of the Quorum. The remaining Mandati watched as the triunes passed as threaded pearls into the mouth and throat of the Intrinsic Gate. Sorcerous chanting hung upon the empty air, resonating, in its peculiar way, inward rather than out …
Brilliance flared from the Obmaw, followed by a breath-stealing whoosh. Shrieks pealed through the opening, cut short on some thunderous impact. “Hold!” Saccarees cried to keep the more impetuous in check. All present stood transfixed, anxiously peering …
A solitary Schoolman materialized from the blackness, running across mundane ground, arms flailing, billows ablaze. He staggered ten paces out upon the causeway then collapsed in an inert heap. Heedless of his own safety Saccarees raced out to attend to the man: Teüs Eskeles, who had been one of Ilimenni’s triunaries …
“Skuthula!” the man gasped, raising a hand that had been salted to the pith.
Death came swirling down.
Death lay heaped as midden throughout the Canal.
Bashrag rose like speared bales; Men webbed all the spaces between. Blood had drowned all the depressions, forming pools with cracked ceramic rinds.
The Exalt-Magus simply stood watching her wards. There was no talk, no reproaches or expostulations of gratitude, simply because there was no sound that could be heard through the monumental wail. The three refugees lay huddled, the two women upon some wall-hanging they had managed to rescue from the encampment, Drusas Achamian on blood-slicked stone. The old Wizard grimaced as he tore fabric from the corpse of an Imperial Columnary—to bind about his ankle, Serwa realized. Her mother lay slack and almost entirely witless against the wall. Mimara knelt at her side, attended to her despite the paroxysms of agony that wracked her. Serwa watched her pregnant sister thrust a finger into a leather pouch that she held cradled in a shuddering hand, withdraw it covered in dust, then press it between their mother’s lips …
This small task completed, Mimara slumped onto her rump, surrendered to her anguish …
Or was about to, for her look immediately fastened upon her younger sister standing above, clicked from point to point about her nude form, lingering on the blisters and ulcerations that were her only garb. Pity and horror. After a covert glance at the old Wizard, she proffered the pouch, wincing about some pang as she did so.
Serwa hesitated.
What is it? she asked with a look.
She need only see her elder sister’s lips to hear his name.
Malowebi struggled to recover his inner composure.
“Before Sil,” Mekeritrig said, “it was Ark who commanded, Ark who apportioned, Ark who judged …” A wan and predatory smile. “And the Holy Swarm hung upon It as a babe from the teat.”
The Evil Siqu leaned into the wavering fullness of the downward-burning light. He drew his hips forward, lowered a bare foot to the mirror-polish of the floor. There was a glory to his nude body, a perfection of manly form and proportion that was disconcerting. He reached to the left of the wicked Chair, stroked the long curve of what Malowebi saw was a scalp … the greater skull of another Inchoroi, resembling Aurang in every respect, save for its meek bearing. Where the Horde-General had imperiously consumed the space surrounding, this creature—Aurax, the Mbimayu sorcerer realized—shrank from it, as if simple emptiness were indistinguishable from mortal peril. It huddled against the Chair-of-Hooks as if stranded over a lethal fall.
“A machine,” Anasûrimbor Kellhus said. “The Inchoroi were ruled by a machine.”
Mekeritrig smiled. “Aye. But then the Inchoroi held that all are machines … not unlike the Dûnyain. Ark ruled simply because Ark was by far the mightier machine.”
“Until the Fall.”
The Nonman retrieved his hand, gazed without blinking at the Anasûrimbor. Aurax made as if to follow the caress, then shrank back to its grovelling station.
“They were wrecked for losses,” the Evil Siqu replied. “Yes. But they were wrecked for the ruin of Ark most of all. They had become—How would you say?—parasites … Yes. Worms in the vast gut of Ark.”
He stood to reveal the alabaster magnificence of his form—a beauty that rendered all mortality decrepit.
“It was Sil who first climbed free of their stupor, who rallied the Divine Inchoroi Swarm. It was Sil who fashioned this place …”
“Before Sil,” the Holy Aspect-Emperor said, “it was Ark who commanded.”
Malowebi found himself confused by the repetition, until he realized that the Anasûrimbor tested the ancient Erratic, probed the limits of what must have been an ailing memory.
A bleary, scowling look. An ancient indecision.
“It was Sil who raised the Inverse Fire from the Bowel,” Mekeritrig continued, “installed it here, so that all who petitioned him might fathom the Onus.”
“Yes …” the Anasûrimbor said with peculiar distraction. “The reason all mention of this room was struck from the Isûphiryas.”
It seemed clear the Inverse Fire was the brazier hanging inverted and elephantine above them—as was the fact that the Anasûrimbor (whose face remained hidden) gazed into it. What perplexed and worried the Mbimayu sorcerer was the Evil Siqu’s triumphant sneer …
“I cannot but envy you,” Mekeritrig said, stalking about the gossamer phantasms reflected across the floors. “And mourn. Yesss … Seeing the Inverse Fire for the very first time.”
Aurax shuddered at his departure, lowered its chin to its feet, seemed to whimper.
“We entered from over there,” the Evil Siqu declared. He cast some Quyan version of a Surillic Point on an arcane whisper, threw it out upon a flung arm. The white light made liquid of the obsidian floors and fractured confusion of all else, thousands of shining white points slipping like oil across myriad intricacies of gold. It paused above the first in a series of six stairs that simply plummeted into the black sheen. The original golden room had been a juncture of some kind, Malowebi realized, opening onto a dozen or so corridors that, capsized, had become stairs, six descending from the level of the new floor to their left, and six ascending to their right.
“There were three of us,” Mekeritrig continued, raising his eyes to the Inverse Fire. “Wise Misariccas, cold and cruel Rûnidil, and myself. We were wary. Sil had managed to turn not just Nin-janjin, but all of the Viri—a people famed for their mulish will! We knew it had something to do with this place …”
The Nonman glanced back toward the Anasûrimbor in a covert manner—dark humour flashed in his eyes … and satisfaction.
“But nothing more.”
As far as the Mbimayu sorcerer could tell, the Aspect-Emperor continued peering into the flames …
What was happening here?
“How well I remember!” the Evil Siqu gasped, raising his face as if to some morning sun. “Such … glorious … horror …”
What was the Inverse Fire?
“Misariccas stood where you are standing … transfixed … unable to tear aside his gaze …”
Some kind of sinister weapon?
“Rûnidil—always so harsh, so contemptuous of display!—he fell there … began weeping, bawling … grovelling on his belly and crying out gibberish!”
Were they already doomed?
“And you?” the Anasûrimbor asked.
It was not manly, the gratitude that washed through him for hearing the man speak.
Look away! he cried in his thoughts. Turn down your eyes!
The smile that hooked the Nonman’s lips was as unseemly as any the Mbimayu sorcerer had ever seen. “Why … I laughed …” A sudden frown seized the porcelain features. “What else does one do, learning they had lived and murdered for the sake of lies?”
Mekeritrig gazed back up into the Inverse Fire with an attitude of sharing something sacred—miraculous.
“I am whole in its presence,” he said on a profound sigh. “Present.”
The Anasûrimbor remained conspicuously silent—and motionless.
He deceives you! Lulls you!
“You should have heard my stalwart Ishroi brothers rant upon our return! We’re deceived! We are deceived! We’re damned all of us! Condemned to eternal torment! The Inchoroi spake true!”
Laughter, peculiar for its fragility.
“Such fools! Speaking truth—unthinkable, unlivable Truth!—to power, any power, let alone that of a Nonman King! Oh, Nil’giccas was wroth, demanded that I, the silent one, the cryptic one, explain their blasphemy. And I looked to them, Misariccas and Rûnidil, their eyes so certain that I would confirm their manic claims, certain because we had become brothers the instant we had gazed up into these flames, brothers possessing a bond that no coincidence of blood and bone could rival. They looked to me … eager … dismayed and disordered … and I turned to my wise and noble King and said, ‘Kill them, for they have succumbed as Nin-janjin had succumbed …’”
Another laugh … this one intentionally false.
“And so was Truth saved …”
The Evil Siqu looked down once again, blinking as if at some arcane disorientation.
“For Nil’giccas would have murdered me as well, had I not.”
And it seemed to Malowebi that he floated, his every experience nothing more than a bubble drifting through cold horror. For he at last understood what it was, the Inverse Fire …
And the object of the Anasûrimbor’s enraptured gaze.
“What was I to tell him? That the hallow Between-Way was a fraud? That everyone he had lost, his comrades-in-arms, his son and daughters, his wife! Was I to tell him they all shrieked in Hell?
“Look!” the Evil Siqu cried, gazing upward, hands drawn up in horror and incredulity. “Look, Dûnyain! Look at the heinous madness of their crimes, the way they unravel you! Suck the grease of anguish from your very thread! Unthinkable trespasses! Raped to the being! Decanted into screams!”
“Nay …” he suddenly laughed, a mania shining through his gaze. “There was no explaining this. Not to Nil’giccas—or any Nonman King. That was what Misariccas and Rûnidil failed to reckon: the Inverse Fire cannot be told …”
Cet’ingira fixed his darkling gaze on the Anasûrimbor.
“It must be seen.”
“Skuthula!” the Exalt-General bellowed into the cracked throat of the Obmaw. “I would parlay with you!”
The sooty blackness remained every bit as inscrutable.
Apperens Saccarees stood at his side, but no one else, some twenty paces out on the saddled causeway. Over one hundred Ainoni Knights had just died attempting to swarm the Intrinsic Gate: their charred and smoking corpses matted the floors both about and within the blasted hole.
“Skuthula! Speak to me, Black Worm!”
A lesser man would have yelped at the sight of great, serpentine eyes opening in the darkness, black slashes for pupils, embedded in irises that flexed like a weave of golden blades. Even Saccarees shrank back a step before recalling himself. Anasûrimbor Kayûtas merely stood as inscrutable as before.
“Whooo?” the Wracu intoned on a gaseous croak. A malefic orange glow revealed the breadth of its jaws, made one hundred silhouettes of its scimitar teeth. “Who believes reason might prevail where sword and sorcery fail?” An incandescent grin, like a blazing furnace seen about a corner …
Laughter like tumbling heaps of coal.
“Anasûrimbor Kayûtas! Prince-Imperial of the New Empire! Exalt-General of the Great Ordeal!”
“Ahhhhh … Namesake of the Accursed Slayer.”
“What binds you, Wracû? How have you been enslaved?”
“You would bait me with your insolence …”
“You are chattel, a dog chained to the stoop of your master!”
“I am no more a slave than you are the Slayer.”
“Indeed, Wracu, I am not my namesake—any more than you are Skuthula the Black, the Great Obsidian Worm!”
The golden eyes snapped shut, then reopened narrow with malice, hatred, and suspicion.
“I shall savour thee, manling. Cunning makes the flesh swee—”
“What happened to the great and terrible Wracu of legend?” Kayûtas interrupted with shouting violence. “The Skuthula I know roosted upon the summit of mountains, tyrannized the very Heavens! Who is this imposter who skulks and snaps from a badger’s hole?”
The Exalt-General’s voice peeled across the soaring gold faces, hung for a heartbeat before vanishing into the Horde’s ambient wail.
The Wracu’s eyes narrowed ever further, became slits bent into shining bows. Orange light waxed behind the cage of teeth, limned the crocodilian scowl …
Then the leering visage disappeared.
The two Men stood waiting, peering.
“Just as the legends say,” the Mandate Grandmaster finally murmured. “Bodies scaled in iron, souls skinned in gauze …”
The Obmaw hung slack and ruined before them, utterly empty.
“Too much so,” Kayûtas said. “I fear he will die before relinquishing Obmaw now.”
“Perhaps not,” Saccarees replied. “Perhaps he has already abando—”
The twinkle of light in the portal’s black gullet stole the Grandmaster’s words …
Spewing, exploding brilliance engulfed all else.
“Have you found yourself?” the Evil Siqu asked, his voice silken and oceanic.
“Everyone who looks finds themselves, everyone who has dared any kind of greatness in this accursed World.”
The Mbimayu sorcerer howled in voiceless fury, as much for impotence as for what transpired.
Avert your eyes!
“Do you see, Dûnyain?” Mekeritrig screeched with sudden intensity. “Do you see the necessity of Resumption! Why Mog-Pharau must walk! Why the World must be shut!”
The Anasûrimbor had not moved in the slightest.
“Tell me that you see!”
Malowebi might as well have been bound to a post.
“I see … myself … Yes.”
A scowl hooked the Evil Siqu’s zeal into something less certain.
Malowebi found himself caught on wonder.
“But you feel it … like a memory that resides in your veins …”
Deny him! Please!
“Yes.”
What was happening? The Mbimayu sorcerer wanted to believe that the Anasûrimbor had somehow prepared for this threat. But Mekeritrig so utterly assumed the Inverse Fire would reveal … What? The truth? Could a deeper, far more horrific layer of revelation lay beneath what he had already grasped …
Could the Aspect-Emperor be deceived?
Schoolmen were loathe to ponder Hell. They built innumerable habits of avoidance into their lives.
The infamous Nonman Outlaw gazed back up to the Inverse Fire—what for Malowebi remained a play of spectral incandescences across the mirror-black floors. Convections cast shadows like liquid or smoke across the length of his chiselled white frame. After several heartbeats, an opiate glassiness emptied his look.
“After a time,” he said vacantly, “the sheer profundity of it, the monstrous scale of the anguish … it becomes soothing … sublime …”
The sluicing of firelight across white skin.
“And never … never repeating, always different … like some kind of broken arithmetic …”
Horror cracked the white enamel of his expression.
“We call it the Goad,” he continued, a ferocity cracking through his voice. “It is what has bound our Holy Consult these thousands of years …” A seizure of anguished fury. “To see the crimes committed against us! That is what drives us to blot the foul abomination that is this World! The torments revealed by the Inverse Fire!”
He had fairly screamed this, and now he stood riven, sinews finning his neck and arms, his hands clutching emptiness.
“But I suffer no torment,” the Anasûrimbor said.
Malowebi hung in numb oblivion. Mekeritrig was several heartbeats blinking before he could properly peer at him.
“So you think the Fire deceives?”
“No,” he replied. “This artifact senses the continuity of the Now with our souls as they exist outside of time. It siphons it like sap, boils it into an image the Now can comprehend. The Fire burns true.”
Pained scowl. “Then you see that you are my brother?”
The Golden Room swayed across the belly of Malowebi’s visual field: the Holy Aspect-Emperor had finally turned to face the founding soul of the Unholy Consult.
“No …” the Anasûrimbor replied once again. “Where you fall as fodder, I descend as hunger.”
Death.
So cool in the harem tangle. A Bashrag lay with its black-shag head in the crotch of its triune arm, like a child counting in a game of hide-and-seek. A Nansur Columnary sweated beneath, sprawled like something dropped from the sky. Another reclined almost as if snoozing, save for the unnatural crook of his neck where his head pressed against the trousered thigh of the former. A severed arm reached out, intent on tickling his ear …
And it all … tingled.
There was a simplicity to things dead, a stillness that was singular for perching within the husk of motion. And it struck her as the most beautiful thing, the immunity. To live was to grind possibility into an endless thread of actualities, to slough moments like a serpent shedding an infinite, anguished skin. But to die … to die was to be, to dwell with the ground as ground, an obdurate and impervious extension.
Imagine never having to breathe!
She gazed at the decapitated head of a handsome man, young, with fulsome lips and straight teeth set in a lantern jaw. How she had once prized young, handsome Men, wondered how even their filth could feel so clean. She imagined catching his eye in some gilded corridor on the Andiamine Heights, upbraiding him for some contrived oversight, a naughty old queen, flirting …
But then her gaze caught upon an Ursranc pinioned between human legs, and she found her fancy overthrown … for the creature was more handsome—and all the more repellent for it.
Tingling … within her and without.
She drew a finger across her lips, and blinking, turned to the commotion to her right, saw her daughter, Mimara, screaming soundlessly at her side, and her lover, Achamian, holding the pregnant girl’s hand, shouting words no one would know. She reached out, laid a tentative palm across her distended abdomen, wondered that it was so warm …
Birth.
And on a sharp intake of breath, her macabre tranquillity was expelled, and all the riotous urgency of living crashed through her once again.
All the dead eyes about her, even those cooked to snot in blasted sockets, turned away.
The Evil Siqu regarded him narrowly.
“Subterfuge!”
“So I am the first?” the Aspect-Emperor asked. “Have no others resisted the Goad?”
Mekeritrig said nothing, retreated to the Chair and its frame of wicked hooks. He leaned upon one buttock, pulled his legs onto the cushion the way an adolescent girl might. Aside from a hand upon his knee, shadow obscured all save his forehead and brow.
“Not even the famed Nau-Cayûti,” the Nonman eventually replied from shadow. “The Great are always flawed. Always damned … I had assumed the same of you.”
Aurax bobbed its great crown at the Evil Siqu’s knees, like an abused dog seeking favour, only whispering scarcely audible syllables …
“Gassirraaaajaalrimri …”
Malowebi wanted to rejoice, but too many worries harried his thoughts—the fact that a window into Hell hung immediately above the least of them! What would he do, were he to witness the facts of his damnation? Embrace it?
Or embrace them?
The Anasûrimbor had said the Fire burned true, and he would know. He had been to Hell—or so his Three Seas enemies had claimed …
The Evil Siqu seemed to have no inkling of what he should do, as if his faith in the efficacy of the Inverse Fire had been complete. With silence, came the spectre of unrequited violence.
“Where is Shauriatis?” the Anasûrimbor demanded. “Where is your Halaroi master?”
Mekeritrig leaned from the Chair’s shadowy hood. “That will avail you nothing,” he said. “Baiting.”
“Why?”
“Because I am eight thousand years too old.”
“And still chained to the post,” the Aspect-Emperor snapped. “I tire of this shallow posturing. Tell me, witless Cûnuroi dog, where is Shauriatis?”
The alabaster figure remained motionless, save for the pulse of a single vein high on his illuminated forehead …
Then, as if draped across cobwebs, a new voice fell upon the room.
“Calm … old friend …”
Followed by another voice …
“He knows all the ancient legends …”
Also frail, as if spoken on breathing’s final allotment.
“And you all but told him …”
“How the Inverse Fire rekindles your zeal …”
Five different voices had spoken, each cast of its own alloy and yet scratched into the unanimity of rust by hoary age. The Anasûrimbor had remained motionless, as if absorbed in some arcane scrutiny of their content or timbre. Now a subtle shift in position told Malowebi that he returned his gaze to the Chair-of-Hooks, and to the golden platform that floated down from the void above it … resolved as if growing as much as nearing.
Shauriatis?
The platform was the length and breadth of a skiff, shaped and curved like a great shield, but far too large to be wielded as such by human arms. At first it appeared to bear ten great candles set in a circle, wax gutted and knobbed and pale as bacon fat, each set within a stone pedestal … Except these candles clearly moved, and possessed (as quickly became obvious) living faces, rutted and as hairless as prunes, mouths like masticating sphincters, eyes like sparks set in mucoid shadow. The pedestals, he realized, were in fact perverse cradles, stone sconces for bodies bereft of limbs …
Ten senescent, larval forms had been welded upon the back of some great soggomantic shield …
The revulsion intensified as the thing neared, then settled next to the Chair-of-Hooks—just beyond the ghostly reflection of the Inverse Fire across the floors. Aurax grovelled beneath Mekeritrig’s feet.
“At lasht …” one of the ancient worms crooned.
“Our disparate Empires meet …” another gasped in completion.
This? This was Shauriatis? The legendary Grandmaster of the Mangaecca?
Cet’ingira exploded from the Chair, his face as seamed for fury as any Sranc. Semantic brilliance waxed from the apertures of his face. An apricot glow charted the fork of veins through his cheeks and sockets.
Anasûrimbor Kellhus was utterly unsurprised, already turning, already seizing the Evil Siqu with a Metagnostic whisper that was a hairline of blinding white that leapt to the Nonman like lint to wool in winter, sheering through his Incipient Wards, then cinching his throat, an arcane noose hanging him nude and kicking beneath the wavering, infernal landscapes.
“I am Master here,” the Holy Aspect-Emperor said.
Malowebi whooped into the nowhere imprisoning his soul.
“Yesh …” one of the senile larva cooed from beyond the Mantraitor’s thrashing form.
“Our master …” another Larval croaked, his torso a swallowing throat.
The Anasûrimbor strode past the wheedling heels of Mekeritrig directly to the abomination that was Shauriatis. He fairly leaned over the near edge, so close that Malowebi could see everything: the trails of offal greasing the metal from the base of the chipped cradles to the bevel; the magisterial Inchoroi figures stamped across the gleaming curve; and varieties of skin, this one velvet and lobed like petals, that one harassed into fibrous wisps, this one dimpled with ruby lesions, that one drawn amphibian thin across veins like black string. He understood the nature of the contrivance at once, for the totem-lore of the Iswazi told of many Mbimayu who had sought to save their souls from damnation.
The legendary Shauriatis, the sorcerous architect of the Unholy Consult, did stand before them, his soul tumbling and forever deflected, roosting like a sparrow for but a breath in each wretch before capsizing into another. Such cunning! Dying vessels, denuded souls, gouged of some vital passion, allowing him to alight whole, rather than be drawn and divided across the Outside like other Proxies …
Shauriatis!—not so much the wretches themselves, as the intervals between.
“Tell me, Archidemu,” the Anasûrimbor said. “How long has it been since you were usurped?”
Usurped?
There the image was, the horrid obscenity that were the Larvals, as pitted with grisly detail as anything the Iswazi mage had ever seen, and he watched the Aspect-Emperor pass his haloed hand through them, saw miniatures of the scene sweep without the least substance across the man’s palm and fingers …
Less than smoke. Phantasm.
Malowebi cursed the Great Sage.
Tekne.
“Brother!” the Exalt-Magus cried upon seeing Kayûtas standing with Saccarees and Lord Soter.
“She lives!” one of the numerous Mandate Schoolmen cried. Hundreds of worried faces turned to follow her floating descent. Her passage over the crowded ranks of Ainoni had sparked commotion through the ruined halls of the High Cwol, for her prolonged absence had been noted by all. At some point the Soldiers of the Circumfix had begun falling to their knees and crying out, “Serwa! Serwa Memirrû!”—the antique Ainoni moniker for heroes reborn. She watched, with a kind of harried wonder, as the sorcerers took up the call in turn.
She came to ground immediately before her brother. His look fastened upon the grievous burns that she had taken as her garb. He too had survived some kind of fiery assault, but only his beard and crimson Kidruhil surcoat appeared to have suffered.
“Serwa—” he began.
“We have no time,” she interrupted. “I saw Father upon the Vigil.”
A heartbeat of passionless scrutiny.
“So soon?”
“We need to storm the Ark now!”
“Easily said,” Kayûtas said scowling. “A Wracu guards the threshold.”
“Then kill it!” she cried.
“Skuthula,” Saccarees croaked on a ragged breath. He too sported glistening burns, though nowhere near so severe as her own. “Skuthula the Black defends the Intrinsic Gate …”
She looked to the Mandate Grandmaster for a moment, then back to her brother. The legendary Black Worm had very nearly killed them, she realized. She turned to the battered maw of the Intrinsic Gate, and peering with her prodigious arcane sight, sensed Chorae … a faint constellation of voids hanging in spaces unseen.
“Father …” she said, thoughts racing.
A grave nod from her elder brother. “For the nonce, he confronts the Unholy Consult alone.”
The Aspect-Emperor strode into the visible reality of the Larvals, waded through the gold-gleaming intricacy of the floating shield, paused in the very centre of the wretches. The image hung impossibly static, with each of the grotesqueries caught upon some infirm expression.
“Reveal yourselves!” the Anasûrimbor cried out to the blackness.
Despite his turmoil, Malowebi could only marvel at the substance of the mirage, which was nothing at all, and yet somehow duped the eye into seeing onerous matter. Drool hung like ice, from the chin of the nearest, reflecting a past stage of the Inverse Fire on a molten thread.
“Set aside your vain ornaments!” the Anasûrimbor boomed into the metallic gloom.
As if in cryptic reply, the Larvals winked out of existence.
What was happening? Who did he think he was calling?
Aurang had been cast to its death. Aurax cowered against the Chair-of-Hooks, clinging to its knees, keening in terror, riven in the manner of dogs beaten unto madness. And the sounds of strangulation meant that Mekeritrig still hung kicking behind them …
Shauriatis?
“Cease this pantomime!” the Anasûrimbor cried.
Had the Consult indeed succumbed to the toll of ages? Grown so decrepit as this?
The man whirled to his right without warning, tossing Malowebi’s field of view on a precipitous arc. The Aspect-Emperor strode from the oily immediacy of the light, slowed to a pause beside a rising fin of golden metal: some kind of partition the ancient renovators had raised the obsidian floor around, rather than remove.
The gloom defeated Malowebi at first. One would think hanging Hell from the ceiling would afford better lighting! But the glints and contrasts slowly morphed into structure and detail the longer he peered. The mirror polish of the floors extended into the jaundiced murk, ending at a curved golden wall. Six equidistantly spaced shafts punctuated the intersection of the tipped floor and the suspended wall—corridors become stairways. Six sets of obsidian steps rose from the black polish to meet them, devoid of handrails or any other ornamentation.
Five forms descended them, moulting shadows step by relentless step … horrifying the Mbimayu Schoolman by stages.
Led by the King-of-Tribes and his girl-skinned son, a file of Scylvendi warriors on horseback finned the gravel heights of the Occlusion. The Umbilicus burned as a gutted ulcer amid the fields of smoking char below. The Horde enveloped Golgotterath in vast tentacular masses beyond, concealing all in chalk obscurity in its wake, lest anyone witness the inevitable atrocities committed.
“The skin-spy …” Moënghus called to his father. “She wanted you to throw the Tribes across the plain?”
“Aye,” Cnaiür urs Skiotha replied, gnawing on his ration of amicut.
“To seize the breaches before the Ordeal could defend them?”
The Scylvendi King-of-Tribes leaned to spit a wayward fragment of bone. He wiped his mouth with a swazond-ribbed forearm, glared at his son with a murderous intensity.
“Aye.”
The young man did not flinch from his scrutiny—and why should he, dwelling as he had beneath the Dûnyain’s bloodless gaze?
“Then the People would have been fed to the Horde?”
Cnaiür urs Skiotha spat again, this time for the sake of spitting, then peered at the High Horn’s shadow through ponderous skirts of chalk and ochre.
“Everything,” he said, “will be eaten here.”