At the fore of the Raft, Kellhus stood facing backwards, facing them, his eyes sparking brilliance even in the direct sun. He held his arms out low to his side, as if balancing upon a beam. He alone neither swayed nor stumbled, but rather leaned and straightened as one with the timber deck. The golden discs about his hands could only be glimpsed intermittently; the halo about his head not at all. The wind whisked his hair into a golden snarl, tugged his silk robes into ancient skin, innumerable creases and lobes fluttering across the white gleam of the sun.
Who? Who was this man who had conquered so wide, so deep?
Timbers groaned as they tilted toward the west. A new distance rose up and around his godlike silhouette: the dishevelled bulk of the Urokkas—or what they could see of the mountains through the tailings of the Shroud. The Raft lurched toward them, toward Dagliash.
Who was Anas?rimbor Kellhus?
Had Achamian been right about him all along?
Hanging no higher than a carrack’s mast, they could feel the Nele?st on their skin, taste the ghost of brine and spray. The Sea swept out, and for all its torment below, receded into the featureless perfection of a geometer’s rule. The coastline lay on their right …
As did the Horde.
Dragged south by the prevailing winds, the Shroud extended miles out to Sea. It seemed a thing painted, immense strokes of ochre and dun daubed across the northern horizon. The shores in advance of the Ordeal were barren. They saw nothing save land that had been stamped and rooted and denuded, that is, aside from a lone company of Kidruhil, who cheered in miniature, brandishing lances and shields at their miraculous passage. The Shroud loomed ever higher, stacking hazes and plumes that cricked the neck for gazing. For a time their Holy Aspect-Emperor stood lucid and shining in the rising sun, framed by the gloom of caliginous, sky-spanning veils.
The million-throated howl breached the rush of wind and the boom of surf. Proyas noticed Siroyon pulling a kerchief to his mouth and nose. The Shroud swallowed them. Coughing obscurity. The barks and screams of innumerable throats, braided into a pitch that siphoned burning liquid into ears. The stench was intolerable, base and glutinous with rot, acrid with feces. Despite the foulness, the Lords of the Ordeal peered toward the shoreline to a man. Even Proyas could feel it, the sense of peeking behind curtains both monumental and forbidden, a clamour to glimpse the catastrophic fact of their foe …
The soul-numbing numbers.
His eyes watering, Proyas glimpsed the crawling tracts, disjointed visions of a thousand thousand caterwauling shadows. The land itself seemed to smoke, though nothing burned beyond the throats and stomachs of the onlookers.
Aside from Kellhus, only Kay?tas and Sibaw?l seemed unaffected. The latter actually turned to regard Proyas the instant of his glimpse, and it seemed mad that eyes could be so dead in a fume that pricked everything living. Most all present pawed at the corners of their eyes. Teeth ached for the loudness of the inhuman chorus. Skin tingled. King Hogrim hacked convulsively. Temus Enhor?, Grandmaster of the Saik, fell to his knees retching. Lord Soter did a comic jig to avoid the spatter, cried something in Ainoni about understanding sorcerers with no stomach for the sea.
The Shroud gradually thinned and parted, as did the feverish crescendo of the Horde’s roar. Armour that had flashed in the sun was now flat and pale. Grey soiled their plaited beards. Black wedged the corner of their mouths.
Men spat into the rushing Sea. The Urokkas leapt into clarity about their holy steersman, more squat and sullen than majestic.
“Hark!” Kellhus called through glaring light. “Witness the undoing of the Horde!”
His plan was every bit as simple as the cumbersome size of the Ordeal demanded. Inexorably retreating toward the River Sursa, the Horde had withdrawn about the Urokkas rather than into them. The idea was for the Schools to strike out across the low peaks, where they would defend the slopes against the bulk of the Horde to the north, drowning the passes and ravines in arcane fire. The Men of the Ordeal, meanwhile, would advance along the broken shores to the south, their flank secure. At some decisive instant, the Holy Aspect-Emperor would use the Raft to deliver a cohort of warriors into Dagliash, where, with the Swayali, he would transform the mountain the Nonmen called Iros, and the Norsirai, Antareg, into a beacon of death. “When the Fish collapse upon Dagliash as their final refuge,” their Lord-and-Prophet said, “they will find only iron and fire!”