He spake light and miraculously stepped into the glare gaping high above the ancient stronghold.
Saubon stood blinking and wondering. Though he loathed worship, despised kneeling as violently as he demanded it of others, he fairly shook for the gratitude welling through his veins, for the miracle of being here, at this moment. Here he stood, the Believer-King of Caraskand, within a fortress laurelled in ancient legends, raised upon an underworld city more ancient still, watching a living God set foot upon the sky …
Anas?rimbor Kellhus, the Holy Aspect-Emperor.
It struck him then, the beauty of his life—the sheer significance. And a low and vicious pocket of his soul cackled, hunched over the moment with a miser’s unbecoming glee. What did falsehood matter, when this was true? In the light of such power …
In the light of such power!
He turned, saw that Mepiro, Bogyar, Scraul and the others were laughing—laughing because he was laughing, Saubon realized. The wail of the Horde blotted all, of course, but no sound was required to hear the joy and the savagery of their amusement. They could see it, the mania of recognition, not only of fortunes shared, but of hungers, atrocities committed in fact and desire. Never, it seemed, had the World been so ferocious with communal portent. Bogyar’s face even flushed crimson, a sign that would have alarmed Saubon mere moments before, but simply piled another hilarity onto the heap now.
The Exalt-General howled into the miracle of his own silence. The Shroud hung like plague above the stumped walls. Charred Sranc sweetened the air. His ardour strained against his breeches, and his eyes strayed to Gwanw?, who also laughed, her manner as leering as any man’s.
The Meat …
A sorcerous crack—producing echoes like boulders tumbling down iron chutes. It should have knocked the mirth from the Company of the Raft, but instead they squinted up in grinning wonder, hooted and cheered soundlessly, watched dark monoliths thrown tumbling upward, into the sky …
There was so much more than proof in miracles; there was might.
Numbers. Mad numbers.
Mad lights.
Gazing out from above the summit of mount Ingol, the Exalt-Magus, Saccarees, could almost see it whole: an oceanic mass twining and involuting like a living thing, a leviathan as vast and terrible as anything out of his Dreams of the First Apocalypse, lashing entire mountains with tentacular fury.
The Horde.
When the Great Ordeal had marched divided across the vacant heart of the Istyuli, the inclination of the Sranc had been to envelop, to spill about the prow of the Holy Host of Hosts and harry its flanks. Ever since marching from Swaran?l, however, the creatures had not so much parted about the prow as turned aside. Their advance, as the mathematician Tusullian had put it, was causing the Horde to roll along the Nele?st coast, a vast gyre of screaming millions, armatures ponderously cycling north and then west before catching on the coast and drawing southward once again. One could even see the mechanism in the Shroud when one knew how to look. Some thought this dramatic change simply expressed the dramatic change in the land. Where those on the coast could only back into their raving kin, those inland simply had more latitude to flee. Others attributed the change to the knowledge they were now being eaten. If room for elbows determined where the Sranc fled, then the Host’s flank offered the most room of all. Depraved as they were, the beasts could still speak. Perhaps rumour drove them back—terror of larding the gullets of Men!
Though this transformation had rendered the Great Ordeal’s advance far less perilous, it served to remind all that the simplicity of the Sranc in no way made them predictable—any more than intellect made Men unpredictable. “The Horde must lay its belly upon your fire,” the Holy Aspect-Emperor had told him two nights previous. “If it chases any other danger, if it begins moving east, the day will go hard for the Ordeal.”
So the Exalt-Magus had studied more than battled, standing upon the highest echo Ingol offered. Age had yet to dull his eyes, so he peered for the most part, conjuring distance-bloating Lenses only to resolve ambiguities. He watched the Horde swarm and coalesce as far as the sepulchral curtains of the Shroud allowed. And given the time he had spent Culling, he could even reckon the migratory immensities that lay beyond. With guesses and glimpses, he tracked the far northern horn curling back upon the River Sursa like a slow-twisting nail. More importantly, he saw the masses to the east fall inward, then fold into the great black bolus that blotted the Erengaw Plain immediately below the mountains.
And he rejoiced in the knowledge that the Sranc, at least, had followed his Saviour’s bidding.
Unlike the Men.