They were as reapers in the field, the blond-braided Sons of Cepalor. The masses shrank from them, exposing those skinnies too weak or too unlucky, those the horsemen speared like fish as they waded forward. Mobs heaved between, before, and now even behind them, Sranc screaming, shrinking in the simulacrum of terror, clawing kin to flee the vacant gaze of the Cepalorae.
Vaka himself was the first to lose his pony to the treacherous ground. He went down with his mount, slapped as a palm from a slack wrist, and for an instant the pocket about him lost its rind of inhuman panic. Slicked in violet, the Lord-Chieftain pulled himself from the ground, his head down and helmless, his flaxen hair swaying in tangled sheets. Wrack lay about his feet. His lamed pony kicked and bucked across the ground behind. His nimil corselet shimmered pristine in the sunlight. His eyes, when he revealed them, did not so much pinpoint the near as absorb the distance. Tails of hair formed a cage about his brow, scribbled nonsense against his beard. Without expression, he drew his father’s broadsword and sprinted into the pale-skinned surge to escape his terrible aspect.
The Shadow of Wreoleth.
To the Mysunsai ensconced above, the horsemen seemed unnerving violations, effects that floated without causes—magic—only without expense or consequence. Their impossible charge seemed as much a warning as a triumph. But to the Ordealmen bounding breathless in their wake, the Cepalorae were nothing less than instruments of the God, and the ruin they worked the wages so long awaited. Their miraculous charge could be nothing but the booming shout of Heaven!
The God Himself delivered the skinnies to their wrath.
The cloven ramps grew more steep about mount Mantigol, which, in addition to looming taller, crowded closer to the Misty Sea. Whether one stood on high or below, everything could be seen: the Horde shivering across the diminishing coasts to the west, the summits smoking above, sparking with hundreds of sorcerous dispensations, and the Great Ordeal spilling like a dragon’s hoard from the east. The delirium of the rush was such that some Men of the Circumfix far outpaced their brothers and barrelled swinging into the Sranc entirely alone. Most of these souls were cut down in moments—for Sranc do not tarry between terror and fury as Men. To a man they died astonished, panting about some cut or puncture, before being hacked and bludgeoned into darkness.
Death came swirling down.
The Sons of Men fell upon the pale obscenities, first in bellowing flurries, then en masse, faces red with exertion and fury, loins swollen. The Sranc answered fury with fury, but the Shining Men bayed and raged and hammered like souls possessed, spittle flying from ranting mouths. Melee engulfed the beam of the coast, a great twining ribbon that was more butchery than battle. A grunting, roaring, clatter. Shields cracked. Blades shattered. Warding hands rolled like spiders. The Ordealmen speared slots in crude armour, stamped heads, shouldered Sranc screaming to the ground. They bellowed in exultation, cast looping violet into clean morning blue.
The Southron Men fell into threshing lines. What resolve the Sranc possessed evaporated before them. Oiled eyes rolled. Fused teeth gnashed. Vicious to kill became vicious to flee. Clan heaved against clan, and witless panic embroiled those regions caught between the Cepalorae and the invincible thousands that followed. Men hollered for triumph, hacked their way into the frenzied mobs, lopping, stabbing, pulping what was wicked and soulless. Tempests of sorcerous light consumed the skinnies that bolted for the heights of Mantigol. Surf bowled those fleeing into the Sea, drowned the creatures in mats, threw them broken upon the rocks, rolled them onto the strand.
Vaka and his Cepalorae continued striding into the screaming tracts, sowing the disarray that would be reaped as millet and wheat behind them.
Here and there, in pockets scattered across the fray, the most base plundered their twitching foe, gorged on raw meat, lapped violet blood as dogs in the gutters of some massacre.
The Judges would execute only those they found coupling with the carcasses.