His groin thick for the promise of mayhem, he trotted to where his Lord-and-Prophet stood among the smoking dead. The most senior of the Swayali cohort, a sturdy Cepaloran woman named Gwanw?, stepped down from the heights to join them, hastily gathering her billows into an aureate bundle before her. Soot greased her temple and cheek.
“No Chorae!” Gwanw? cried over the rising clamour of the Horde. She gazed at her Holy Aspect-Emperor’s profile with an odd mixture of adoration and worry.
Saubon grasped the significance immediately: If you lacked the resources to hold a strong place, you crippled or destroyed it, lest it serve your enemy …
The fact that Dagliash still stood meant that it still served.
“The Chorae are below us,” Kellhus said, drawing his gaze up across the enormous walls of the citadel.
Saubon noticed the Decapitants askew against his white-felt thigh, black mouths working.
Gwanw? looked to the ground between the gnarled infantry boots shodding her feet. She could not feel the trinkets, the Exalt-General realized. “So they’ve reopened Viri?” she called.
“A trap!” Saubon snapped in dawning worry. “You need to flee this place, God-of-Men!”
The Aspect-Emperor turned in what seemed an aimless scrutiny. He reached out to either side, fingers held wide, as if flattened across the discs of phantom gold. Beyond the walls, across the slopes, the Sranc were coalescing about their intrusion. The roar piled ever louder, stunning the ear, and prodding the heart with the assurance of something titanic and impending. Sorcerous singing fluted through the air, unintelligible yet filled with dread import, like a secret whispered in unwilling ears. The Nuns had begun shoring the decrepit fortifications …
The Horde was coming.
Unconcerned, Kellhus lowered his gaze to the ground. Saubon had long since learned to follow his Lord-and-Prophet’s lead when it came to guessing threats. Gwanw?, however, could not stow her alarm. She called out to her Swayali sisters on the parapets immediately above—repeated the cry in more screeching tones when it failed to breach the waxing roar.
“A legion …” Kellhus interrupted, his tone miraculously peeling aside the obstructing din. “Thousands lie concealed in the wrecked Viritic halls beneath our feet. Bashrag, Sranc. Sequestered here for days—weeks. Their stench rises through Dagliash as a soiled cloth.”
Gwanw?, Saubon, everyone in the war-party, cast dumb looks at the ground.
“Perhaps they anticipated our gambit,” the Holy Aspect-Emperor surmised. “Perhaps they hoped to catch us unawares after overcoming the Horde …”
“Either way,” Saubon cried, “we are outwitted!”
Lightning cracked from elsewhere in the fortress. It seemed all the witches were singing now.
“We need only bar their exit,” Kellhus said.
Gwanw? hollered something, but her reply did not so much as dimple the hellish chorus. But Saubon knew her question for his own: How does one barricade the ground?
The Holy Aspect-Emperor of the Three Seas smiled in grim reassurance. “We set plow to the field,” he said in reply to her unheard question. The din had swallowed all mundane voices save his own.
“We make the ground anew.”
They wheezed and croaked in the dark, stamped and shuffled.
They had been fashioned from the muck of life, the filth and the offal. In an age when Men were nothing more than savages or slaves, they had been coaxed from machines that were too intricate to be called dead. Their architects began with a wicked craving, a soulless pit. About this they spun grotesqueries of flesh and bone, elephantine limbs and cauldron-skulls. They exulted in their revulsion, for they alone could see the beauty in all things. And they understood the power that was flesh, how it need only be loosed like a fish in a foreign stream to bring all prior life crashing to its knees.
Wheezing. Mucous snapping like lute strings. The stench of countless defecations.
They hid where such monstrosities always hid, in the deeper cracks of the World, waiting for the inevitable moment of horror, the one that swallows us all, ere the end.
The Bashrag waited with the impatience of the soulless. Little more than dim cunning glittered from their eyes …
Bottomless hunger.
Vaka, the Ordealmen began calling the Lord-Chieftain of the Cepalorae. Sibaw?l Vaka.
The cavalrymen of the Kidruhil dubbed him thus, after a form of archaic Ceneian shield that took its name in turn from scraped oyster shells. Other skirmishers quickly followed suit, until all those who dared the septic hem of the Shroud referred to him as such. One need only witness Sibaw?l and his horse-thanes ride against the skinnies to understand the aptness of the moniker. The infantrymen had heard the name and the attendant tales, of course, and to a man they believed the stories, but they could not understand, not truly …