Sorweel's eyes snapped open, the screeches of the Viturnal Nesting ringing in his ears. He actually swatted the empty air immediately before him, so vivid was the image of a sun-burnished stork standing upon his chest.
He sat up, blinking. They had leapt upon the treeless prow of a hill, so he could see immediately that he was alone. He could also see the surrounding sunlit miles, the creased terrain rendered as soft as ocean swells for the woollen canopies that clothed it. A land like an old woman.
He had fallen asleep on the shags of grass that edged the crude axe-blade of stone that capped the promontory. The shade had shifted while he slept so that he could feel the sun's burn upon his cheeks and hands. His hauberk, especially, radiated heat.
He peered into the adjacent gloom of the forest, blinking, searching for any sign of the Imperial siblings. A pang groped his breast when he realized their gear was missing as well.
Had they abandoned him?
He stood, shaking the fluff from his apparel and the grogginess from his limbs. Then he wandered into the wooded regions, following the uncertain line of the summit, hoping to find his keepers…
Hardened by the First Battle of the Horde, the Men of the South exacted a dreadful toll. When they looked out, they saw innumerable faces, white and cat-screaming, Sranc and more Sranc, wagging raucous arms, heaving across the basins below. When they looked back they saw the ranks of Men braced across the piled embankments, heights fenced in bright-painted shields and bristling with spears, standards torn ragged by javelins and freighted with snagged arrows. And they remembered the words of their Holy Prophet, that they would see sights awesome and horrific, that they would suffer unimaginable trials-that they would save the World.
And they believed.
The Sranc were speared and they were hammered. They were thrown from the bedlam slopes or pulled under by their howling kin. Soon the earth about the dead city was ramped with carcasses, to the point where many of the obscenities were simply trampled for want of footing, thrust stumbling and flailing into the spears and cudgels and swords above.
Their screeching resounded from the very ribs of Heaven.
High beneath the Fingers, King Umrapathur took heart, seeing that his host was too strongly situated to collapse, that it could only be ground to the nub. Soon, he reasoned, Saccarees and Carindusu would return, and with so many Sranc snagged upon Irsulor, mobbed to suffocation, the slaughter would be great.
Given his vantage, he was among the first to glimpse the great blemish on the Horde's seething skin, an almond of black, marching beneath umber skies, moving slowly through the ghoulish fields of Sranc, driving ever closer to the beleaguered Sons of Girgash. The height of the mass was the first detail he could discern: the creatures composing it towered over the Sranc. Then he realized the blackness of the thing was due to hair, great shaggy crowns upon heads like cauldrons. The fact of the creatures came to the King all at once, though his soul was long to comprehend their implication.
Bashrag.
Many saw their abominable approach, but like Umrapathur, all were powerless to communicate their horror and alarm. The Girgashi upon the embankment glimpsed them between frenzied assaults, hundreds of hideous frames rising above the Sranc tossing below, an iron-armoured formation, throwing and stamping the hordlings before them.
Bashrag. Three arms welded into one. Three ingrown chests. Three hands for fingers. They were an offence to the eyes, a sight that awed and sickened, such was their deformity. Idiot faces hanging from each grotesque cheek. Horse-tail moles springing from random skin.
Umrapathur saw the nature of the Consult trap instantly. Knowing the Horde would turn and strike at the Irshi, they needed only to wait in ambush and hope their foe would be so foolish as to send out their Schoolmen…
The Believer-King peered to the north, scanned the shrouded skies for sign of Saccarees or Carindusu.
The abominations lurched ever closer. The surviving Girgashi bowmen found their range. They pelted the fell legion with arrows. And for a moment, Umrapathur dared hope…
But the Bashrag advanced unscathed, quilled like porcupines. They climbed the slopes until they towered before the Men of Girgash.
King Urmakthi was among the first to be struck down, for he had stood at the fore of his kinsmen, his banner held high as a beacon to hearten his men. The Bashrag waded into their midst, sweeping their great axes and hammers. Shields were splintered. Arms were shattered. Heads were pulped. Whole bodies cartwheeled into the ranks behind. For all the courage of the Hetman and their tribal vassals, they were no match for the creatures clacking and bellowing above them. They crumpled as foil and were scattered.
Within a hundred heartbeats the Bashrag had seized the embankment's summit. Umrapathur's heart caught. Only the Cironji Marines and their burnished shields stood between the beasts and his army's doom.
Gilded in shining gold, King Eselos Mursidides led their rush, rammed his spear into the gullet of the foremost beast, only to be beaten to the quivered earth by the great hammer of another. But the famed Marines did not falter. They threw themselves at the monstrosities, and a battle was fought unlike any since the days of the Ancient North. Fearless, skilled, armed with the finest weapons of Seleukaran steel, the Cironji stemmed the lumbering rush. But for heartbeats only. For every Bashrag they felled, dozens of their brothers perished. They were thrown shattered, little more than sacks of human skin.
Men mobilized everywhere through the tight-packed encampment: priests, Judges, water-bearers, the sick and the wounded-it did not matter. All came rushing…
But the Bashrag swatted them dead. Men vanished beneath inhuman strokes. It was like witnessing a massacre of children.
What followed happened so fast that those beneath the Fingers could scarce believe.
Innumerable Sranc scrambled through the breach wrought by the Bashrag, and shrieking masses of them spilled into the narrow ways behind the Inrithi phalanxes. To a man, the Zaudunyani had been trained to fight encircled, to form shield-walls about them-and survive. And indeed, some did precisely this, but panic seized many others, and Men were felled in thousands. Umrapathur stood immobile, his gaze flinching from atrocity after atrocity. Men wailing in horror. Men pulled down, grimacing. The fallen convulsing beneath rutting shadows.
The pavilions and baggage trains vanished. Within heartbeats the entirety of the lower city was overrun, and those formations that did not fly apart or dissolve stood engulfed, dwindling lozenges of human form and colour in a threshing sea of monstrosities.
Death came swirling down.
The Nilnameshi Believer-King gaped and stumbled. A stray arrow caught his hand and pierced the gauntlet.
He raised his skewered palm in disbelief, saw the first of the Schoolmen come striding on sheets of murdering light. Some solitary. Some in ragged, impromptu formations. Motes pricked with brilliance, passing through clouds of missiles, dragging gowns of lightning-bright ruin across the Horde. First dozens, then hundreds, Schoolmen, hanging miraculous in the low sky, walking beneath mountainous scarps and troughs of dust.
The whole North, it seemed, flared with sorcerous destruction.
But is was too late.
Men moaned in the dust. The World shrieked in inhuman triumph.
Sorweel walked through what seemed a peculiar fog, one that whined in his ears and yanked short his breath. The forest floor wheezed beneath his boots. Oaks and maples climbed high and mocking about him, splicing the sunlight.
He heard them before he saw them. Nearby.
He stood breathless, listening through the creak and click of the surrounding woodland.
"Yessssss…"
A different kind of vigilance seized him, and he crept forward peering between screens of undergrowth. His ears stood poised between the sounds of his approach and the passion that gasped through the skein of leaves.
Like a thief, he crept…
– | Seeing the devastation, the returning Mandati and Vokalati withdrew t
o the skies above the Fingers, formed a ring of floating, battle-maddened brothers. Their faces blackened for dust and tears, they sang out their hatred and spite, the Mandate Schoolmen wielding abstract architectures of light, the Vokalati shining phantoms. And they burned those who clawed and clambered the slopes. And they burned those fornicating with corpses of the fallen. And they burned those thronging through the multitudes.
The slopes became fields of thrashing silhouettes.
Saccarees turned to Carindusu and feared for the vacancy he glimpsed in the man's eyes. He bid his former rival to stand by his side, mouthing, "Let me show you what it is you shall win!" For nothing other than the Gnosis was the prize the Aspect-Emperor had offered the Anagogic Schools.
But a monstrous wrath overcame the Grandmaster of the Vokalati, the lunacy of one who cannot dwell apart from his pride. His was the name that would be immortalized for infamy. His was the name his kin would strike from their ancestor lists. He called out sorceries with savage abandon, lashed the ground with cruel fire, killing Men and Sranc alike. The survivors below cried out, stunned and appalled.
Saccarees closed with the madman. To the horror of those watching, the two Grandmasters battled above the inhuman multitudes, an exchange of wicked lights, Abstractions against Analogies. Overmatched, Carindusu was struck from the skies, undone.
Not knowing what happened several Vokalati assailed Saccarees-then several more, until fairly half the Vokalati found themselves attacking for no reason save that their brothers had so turned in violence. And so did the Schools of Mandate and Vokalati consume each other in a final act of madness.
The surviving Men looked up from the looming Fingers. At first they could not credit their eyes. They gazed dismayed and incredulous, while all about them the Sranc surged up the smoking slopes. The frenzied creatures cast themselves upon the few hundred assembled against them, hacking and shrieking-a host that reached out to the obscured rim of the world.
And bloodied King Sasal Umrapathur saw that he was doomed. He fell to his knees and prayed that his Holy Prophet might prevail… that his beloved wife and many children might survive the horror to come.
He looked up and saw a sorcerer falling, his billows ablaze.
The Sranc seized him, raped him as he bled out his life remaining.
Sorweel could scarce breathe. His spit seemed gravel for swallowing.
Two pale forms against depths of grey and water-green, the one slight upon the one hard, locked in a clenching, quivering embrace.
Kissing as though the other possessed the sole breath.
Grinding, their groins famished, piercing and knowing.
Never had he witnessed such a thing, breath-stealing, filled with rage and horror and imperious lust. He was not who he was for seeing it. Not one of his concerns survived the trespass before him. Not his father. Not the Tear of God that would avenge him.
Nothing mattered save this…
The children of a god mating. The woman he loved betraying…
His little brother called out for him. He found him, grasped him, cold fingers opposite a burning palm.
And he coupled with the sinuous image writhing before him, arched in answer to the man's black-haired grunting, spilled his seed to the girl's high blonde cries.
The mounded heights of Irsulor smoked and crawled.
The Schoolmen hung in the air above, raining death upon their wicked foe. They wept even as they spoke hacking lights, for when they looked out, all creation whorled and seethed with foul Sranc. And of the tens of thousands who had been their brothers, all were dead and desecrated…
Shields trampled. Corpses pierced, clotted with rutting forms, like ants upon apple peels.
The Schoolmen scourged the embankments, pummelled the slopes, until Irsulor reared like a mountain burnt to the stub, sheeted in blasted, blackened dead. Man, Sranc, Bashrag…
And still the multitudes surged forward. The Horde reached out into obscurity, a cloak of twisting maggots thrown over the horizon, howling. Howling.
And the Schoolmen were so very alone.
His crimson billows black for filth and fire, Saccarees descended, set foot upon the charred summit in a heartbroken bid to recover Umrapathur's body. But he could scarce distinguish Sranc from Man, let alone man from man. He looked out, over the tiers of smoking carcasses, through the comb of brilliant sorceries, out across the tumult of the plains, and it seemed he gazed upon the future, what would become of the World should his Holy Prophet fail…
Raving. Vicious. Devoid of meaning or mercy.
The Schoolmen heard their Prophet before they saw him, shouting arcana in a voice like a thunderclap-the one voice that could shrug away the burden of the Horde's roar. He came from the west, the Aspect-Emperor, sparking a brilliant blue through miles of intervening filth. Where he walked the air, whole tracts of earth exploded beneath him, as though the God himself pummelled the powdered soil. Sranc were thrown in mangled thousands, flying hundreds of paces before raining across their inhuman brothers.
Anasurimbor Kellhus came to them and bid them follow him home.
She lowered her head to his chest in carnal exhaustion and lay there, her breasts kissing the barrel of his chest, her back bent to the arc of an oyster shell. Sorweel stared, held motionless by the shock of his dwindling ardour. Shame. Elation. Terror.
Knowledge that he could not move without alerting them robbed him of the ability to breathe. He stood stupefied as she turned to him and smiled.
He ducked in abject panic and shame.
"Who are we," she called out in a drowsy laugh, "for you to abuse yourself so?"
He fumbled to fasten his breeches, then stood, knowing that the shadow of his lust could still be plainly seen. But it was almost as if their shamelessness demanded he be brazen in return. She climbed from her slack-limbed brother, stood in the dappled sunlight, entirely naked, and at one with the wilderness for it.
How? How could she do this to me?
Tears burned in his eyes. Did he love her? Was that it? Was the son of Harweel such an errant fool?
She stood utterly exposed before him, her limbs lithe, her hips narrow, her pale skin flushed for the violence of her passion. Sunlight drew the shadow of her breasts across her white ribs, made golden filaments of her sex.
"Well?" she asked, smiling.
Indifferent, Moenghus began dressing at his leisure behind her.
"But-!" Sorweel heard himself cry like a fool.
Her look was at once demure and arrogant. Moenghus glanced darkly over a muscled shoulder.
"You're brother and sister!" he blurted. "What you… you did… is a… is a…"
He could only stand and stare at them incredulously.
"Who are you to judge us?" she cried laughing. "We are the fruit of a far, far taller tree, Horse-King."
For the first time he realized the derision and contempt they concealed in that name.
"And if you get pregnant?"
She frowned and smiled, and for the first time Sorweel realized that whatever warmth she had showed him was mere pantomime. That for all the human blood coursing through her veins, she was, and always would be, Dunyain.
"Then I fear my Holy Father would have you killed," she said.
"Me? But I have done nothing!"
"But you have witnessed, Sorweel-your thigh is sticky for it! And that is far from nothing."
His breeches fastened, Moenghus strode behind his sister, reached about her to place a scarred paw upon her womb. He kissed the hot of her neck, twiddled the fine blonde strands of her sex between finger and thumb.
"She's right, Sorweel," he said, grinning as if entirely oblivious to the madness between them. "People have a habit of dying around us…"
The Sakarpi King stood squinting against his turmoil. His heart pumped outrage instead of blood.
"As do nations!" he spat before turning on his heel.
"A son!" the Grandmistress of the Swayali called out after him, her voice mellow and
bewitching. "A son. A daughter. And an enemy!"
He fairly convulsed, so violent was the shaking that overcame him. It wracked him all the way back to their camp on the promontory. He found himself fearing the drops beyond the edges. Never had he been so shamed… so humiliated.
Never had he hated with such dark intensity.
Though the Great Ordeal survived, though their inhuman enemy had been thrown back to the rim of the horizon, the Second Battle of the Horde was nothing less than a disaster. The Holy Aspect-Emperor declared the Breaking of the Ordeal undone and commanded the Armies of the West and the East to converge upon the Army of the Middle-North. None of the Believer-Kings doubted his decision, even though this most recent defeat of the Horde had increased the opportunities for forage. King Sasal Umrapathur, one of their number, was dead, as were his kinsmen and vassals. They felt his ruin keenly, for he had breathed as they breathed, ruled as they ruled, and, most importantly, believed as they believed. If they did not understand as much before, they appreciated the grim truth now: their faith was no surety.
"The righteous," King Proyas would remind his fellows, "bleed no less than the wicked."
The Armies gathered without fanfare or celebration, for the Men of the Circumfix were too hungry and astonished, and there were far too many absences among them. A pall had been drawn across the hosts, a shadow immune to the arid sun. Old friends were reunited in grief and lamentation. They traded stories of Irsulor between them, and the truth suffered little for the inevitable distortions. They had witnessed events so extreme as to outrun the possibility of exaggeration.
They had come to a land called Akirsual. In times of old it had been a frontier province of Kuniuri, sparsely populated, famed only for a hill called Swaranul, which rose solitary and inexplicable above broken flood plains. Swaranul was a place holy to the ancient High Norsirai, for it was here that the Gods had come to the chieftains of their many tribes and granted them tenure for all the lands within a thousand leagues.
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