Wherever the World held dirt, it plumed skyward for the scribble of violent millions, but nowhere else. Saccarees peered out across a great hollow in the Shroud, a cavern as deep as the sky was tall, born of sea, stone, and stony earth. The clarity was unnatural, pure for the septic obscurity that caged it. The long, knifing curve of the River Sursa was scarcely visible. Dagliash seemed a monolithic bark upon Antareg below, a barge stripped to the hull, floating upon a Sranc tide. The intervening tracts sizzled for condensing so much fury—a thousand screeching faces in every tessera, a thousand shaking cleavers and a thousand bared teeth, on and on, forming a mosaic that vanished into the Shroud, into numbers that broke the back of reason.
Fearing the dismay the spectacle sparked within his own breast, Saccarees himself climbed Ingol’s highest echo to rally the other Schools. “I hope you’re hungry,” he signalled to his brother Grandmasters.
So much Meat.
Then he sent word to his Holy Aspect-Emperor …
What their Lord-and-God coveted, the Schools had seized. The heights above Dagliash had been taken. With the exception of Antareg, the Urokkas belonged to the Great Ordeal.
Assuring they remained such until the following dawn would prove a nightmarish toil, one that crowned each of the four mountains in glimpses of putrid masses rushing beneath weirs of slaying light. After sunset, the Ordealman knelt en masse upon the ravaged earth, and gazing upon the flaring summits, they beseeched the God to fortify their arcane brothers, lest the morrow end in ruin.
They would sleep in their armour that night.
Even if he is false, this … this is real …
Proyas and Kay?tas swayed side-by-side in their saddles, each trailing their respective entourages. Masses and columns of infantrymen trotted about them. The Sea reached into violet obscurity to the south beyond, a dark and endless procession of rollers, each bearing brilliant filaments of morning across its back. To the north on their right, the summits of the Urokkas piled westward, little more than sepulchre shadows through the Shroud. Scowling lights crowned them, the flicker of distant sorcery. A great river of Men, arms and banners flooded across everything between, the booted glory of the Three Seas, hastening with a vitality borne of the Meat into the jaws of more Meat.
This has to be real!
“What ails you, Uncle?”
Proyas gazed long and hard at his Lord-and-Prophet’s remarkable son, then looked away wordlessly.
Trust, he now knew, was but a form of blessed blindness. How many times had he ridden thus? How many times had he led simple souls to some complicated doom? He had always trusted then, in the greater cunning, the greater glory, and, most of all, the greater righteousness of his cause. He had simply known—known for not knowing otherwise!—and he had executed with an unfailing hand.
Now balling his hands into fists could scarcely quiet the tremors.
“I cannot see as far or as deep as Father,” the young man pressed. “But I can see enough, Uncle.”
His anger came upon Proyas suddenly. “The fact that you accompany me says enough,” he snapped in reply.
Kay?tas did not so much look at him as observe.
“You think Father has lost faith in you?”
The Exalt-General averted his gaze.
He could feel Kay?tas watch him, his eyes lucid and amused.
“You fear you have lost faith in Father …”
Proyas had known Kay?tas since infancy. He had spent more time with the boy than with his own wife, let alone either of his own children. The Prince-Imperial had even apprenticed under his command, learning things far too hard, he had thought, for such a tender age. It was not possible to relieve a child of so much innocence and not come to love him—at least for a soul such as his.
“Your father …” Proyas began, only to trail, horrified by the quaver in his voice.
This much is real! Real!
It had to be.
The Horde warbled on the wind, a chorus spackled with nearer screams. He cast his eyes across his command, convinced himself he had no need to fear prying ears. Besides, Kay?tas would not have broached the matter otherwise. “We endlessly pondered him when we were children,” Kay?tas continued, speaking as if to while away long watches. “Me. Dodi. Thelli. Even Serwa when she was old enough. How we debated! And how could we not? when he loomed so large, and we saw him so very little.” The man fluttered his eyes in response to Proyas’s manic glare. “Father this,” he said, wagging his head in boyish sing-song. “Father that. Father-father-father …”
Proyas felt a smirk crack the numb planks of his face. There had always been an ease to Kay?tas, a kind of impervious assurance. Nothing troubled him—ever. And this, the very thing that made loving him so effortless, was also the thing that made it seem—on occasion, at least—that he would vanish like a coin if you turned him on his side.
“And what were your scholarly conclusions?” Proyas asked.
Kay?tas groaned, shrugged. “We could never agree … For years we argued. We considered everything, even heretical possibilities …” The long face seemed to purse about the thought.
D?nyain.
“Did you ever think to ask him?” Proyas said. Here he was, leading the flower of a faith he no longer believed into the jaws of a battle that poets would recount for the ages … and he found himself pinned breathless to a childhood anecdote …