Indeed, it would be the wrong edge that would prove the most keen in the end. The No-God would end the millennial dispute. Dagliash would be wrecked. All the Bardic metaphors, the generational meanings, the midnight tales of dread and glory would burn with the cities of the High Norsirai. The River Sursa, to the extent it was referred to at all, became the “Chogiaz”, what the Sranc had named it in their obscene tongue. Two thousand years would pass ere Men breathed meaning into its spare aspect once again. Two thousand years would the Knife wait for the Great Ordeal to dare its ancient and murderous edges.
The Ordealman trudged onward, crossing the vast swamp the Horde had made of the River Migmarsa, so passing from High Illawor into Yinwaul—from a land scarcely mentioned in the Holy Sagas, to one mentioned as much as any other. The Horde continued its withdrawal, gathering and retreating before the shining hosts. The great smoke that had concealed it, the dust of a million stamping feet, thinned as the ground became stonier, so that it seemed the horizon steamed more than billowed before the pursuing horsemen. At times they could even glimpse the beasts, pale masses seething, multiplied until they matted the contours of the land. Hillocks and knolls overrun, vales choked, distances plumbed, encompassed. Everywhere great masses shifting and sloughing, as if the very world moulted. Men gazed stupefied, neither fearing nor wondering, for most lacked the means to truly comprehend what they witnessed. They knew only that they were dwarfed, little more than insignificant specks in the thrall of jealous enormities. Their lives, they understood, mattered only in their sum. And since this is the grim truth of all human life, the insight possessed the character of revelation.
And it came to seem holy, eating Sranc. To consume them was to partake of the Horde.
To eat meaning.
And so they rode, day in and day out, crossing the trampled, lifeless miles, pacing and pondering their innumerable foe. They watched the Schoolmen stride the low sky, a necklace of brilliant lights strung across the horizon. Their gazes danced from flash to flicker, point to burning point. Some took to watching the way the lights steeped and burnished the pluming veils above. Some watched the obscene thousands perishing below, mites engulfed in sweeping fire. Periodically, they turned in their saddles to study the columns of the Great Ordeal, the assemblies glittering in the high sunlight. The visions made fanatics of them all.
They had come to the ends of the earth. They did war to save the very World.
There could be no doubting in the penumbra of such mad spectacle …
The justness of their cause. The divinity of the Holy Aspect-Emperor.
Only their strength remained in question.
Gradually, so slow as to defeat the discrimination of many, a different pitch had crept into the Horde’s thundering howl, a plaintive edge, more panicked than crazed, almost as though the Sranc knew they were being eaten. The Schoolmen who strode the low skies in the Culling found they could now glimpse the seething fields they scoured, parsed, and blasted. Where for weeks and months the beasts had seemed to elude and frustrate the pursuing horsemen, now they seemed to genuinely flee.
“They fear us!” a joyous Siroyon declared in Council.
“No,” the Holy Aspect-Emperor said, ever quick to dispatch assumptions that might lead his men to dismiss their foe. “They scream according to their hunger and exertion and nothing more. Now that our bellies are full, our advance has quickened. We have merely twisted the lute-strings tight.”
But for many, there could be no denying the growing desperation of their Adversary. Time and again, the Holy Aspect-Emperor cautioned his Believer-Kings, reminding them that Sranc were not Men, that straits hardened them, that starvation fuelled their ferocity. Even still, a new daring took root among the more feckless skirmishers. They believed they knew their foe as well as any ancient Knight-Chieftain: his ebb, his flow, his more treacherous vicissitudes. And as always, the assumption of knowledge licensed a growing sense of impunity.
What was more, a dark and destructive will had impregnated their thoughts—all their thoughts—a need, a hunger, to visit catastrophic destruction upon their foe, to reap him as wheat, to gather him into infinite sheaves, and gorge upon him in ecstasy. “Think!” they would cry to one another in private. “Think of the feast!”
Seeing these dark inklings, the Holy Aspect-Emperor harangued them in council, upbraiding them for their recklessness. On several occasions he even went so far as to invoke the Martial Prohibitions, and condemned several caste-nobles to the lash. Time and again he called their attention to how far they had come. “Who?” he would cry, his voice booming through the Eleven Pole Chamber. “Who among you will be the first to have come so far only to perish in rank folly? Who among you shall earn the honour of that song?”
And then, when the Ordeal had reached the eastern frontier of Illawor, he stabbed his finger on the great, illuminated map his Believer-Kings so often bickered over, and drew his haloed finger down the Fish Knife, the fabled Harsunc, inked in bold black. It was too deep to be forded, too broad for Sranc to swim; even those not privy to the reports of the Imperial Trackers knew as much.
Soon, the Horde would be caught before them.
It would defend Dagliash no matter what.
“What feast,” the Holy Aspect-Emperor asked his Believer-Kings, “will be served up then?”