Not yet.
Even as the Schools secured their eyries across the Urokkas, the Great Ordeal had assembled into a massive column along the north shore of the Misty Sea. They began marching before dawn the day following, a procession city-broad and nation-deep hugging the northern shore, tilting ever more as the land ramped between the Urokkas and the Nele?st. The sun boiled from the misty rim of the Sea, dazzled the massed formations, transformed them into a river of silvered flotsam, great rafts of armour and arms flashing so bright as to pale the arcane diadems the Schools had slung about the mountains. Horns clawed what sky they could beneath the ascending roar of the Horde. To a man, they broke into a brisk trot, more than 150,000 righteous and violent souls.
They laughed for the vigour of their pace, raised their hearts in the fist of their voices, and thundered. Fields twinkled for shaking weapons.
Their inhuman foe shrank from their approach, yielded the boards of mount Yawreg, the first of the Urokkas. The Shroud thinned above, and the great cleft of clarity wrought by the mountains became visible. The Host of Hosts cried out in triumph once again, knowing the Horde had been halved, that the greater portion lay to the north of the Urokkas, trapped by lethal weirs of the Schoolmen, and that the lesser lay before them, backed against Dagliash and the Sea. And they laughed, playing monsters who had cornered children. The foremost among them could clearly spy their inhuman foe: seething, scabrous sheets of white from the shoulders of Mantigol, reeling from threads of arterial light, to the mountain’s hip, spitting and stamping in bestial indecision, to the drowning strand.
The Ordealmen continued their surge, encompassing the flanged hinter of Yawreg. The Scarlet Magi who had held the orbitals above the cliffs joined their brothers defending the mountain’s northern faces. More horns scratched the sky, scarcely audible. The Horde’s collective shriek now tapped a nail in every ear. Not one of the trotting Zaudunyani heeded the cry—indeed their pace quickened if anything. Men panted, but more for exhilaration than for want of wind. They coughed and cackled. They followed the mailed backs bouncing before them, tramped across the polluted swamps that had once been brooks, skidded into gullies, then hauled themselves out. The soil had been shallow enough to be torn away as flesh from deeper stone. Here, more than anywhere else, the Ordealmen could see the ground as a carcass, as the remains of something eaten.
Again and again the horns raked trowels across the high din, but the Men of the Circumfix would suffer no impediment to their rush. Instead, the Cepalorae, the solitary horsemen in their midst, galloped out in advance of their glittering, land-spanning flood, following none other than Sibaw?l Vaka.
It seemed ceremonial at first, more a suicidal demonstration of conviction than a stratagem. Less than a thousand of the blond horsemen had survived Wreoleth. They floated as loose strands across the intervening wastes, threads too fine to be bound into anything formidable. Beyond them, the cancerous enormity of the Horde infested the whole of the land from the mountains to the Sea, every glimpse churning, fizzing with homicidal fury. An unseemly glee animated the souls of the watching Ordealmen. The mad horsemen would be hacked into oblivion, and the masses cheered, bawled in tens of thousands, celebrating not the destruction, but the sacrifice of their haunted brothers.
None could imagine a more fitting way to begin a scripture—or feast.
The lines galloped across the ragged contours. High to the right, Sibaw?l and his doomed riders could see the great gorge where Yawreg’s shattered mandible rose from Mantigol’s chalk waist, the points of dipping light upon the rim, and the incendiary blossoms they vomited into the slots surging below. But they had eyes only for the obscenities raving before them …
There is a point in all battle where gazes meet, where “them” becomes you, and lives are honed to an edge. Some say it is the most decisive, that it is here, before a single blow has landed, that adversaries deem who lives and who dies. Some even think it a temple, the last interval before the terrible clamour of Gilga?l, the mad racket of War. From the high-sprawling slopes to the long blade of the strand, the Men of the Circumfix fell silent for recognizing that point from afar, and they peered after the Cepalorae and their glorious charge, knowing that in a heartbeat they would vanish as dust drifting from light to darkness …