The Schoolmen defended the very sky, or so it seemed. Never had the World witnessed such a battle: a string of a thousand Men—the Once-Accursed Few—defending mountain ramparts against the lunatic assault of a thousand thousand Sranc. As the creatures buckled beneath the Ordealmen on the coasts, the multitudes that blackened the Erengaw Plain assailed the ramparts of the Urokkas with fury and numbers that dwarfed anything the Schoolmen had hitherto seen. It was as if the creatures somehow knew the straits of their inhuman brothers to the south, understood the destruction they could wreak falling upon the unsuspecting Ordealmen from above.
Triunes hung singing above the passes, on ledges overlooking skewed slopes and high mountain trails. The most daring took positions endlessly pelted with black arrows; with their billows unfurled they seemed flowers set upon high-heaved stone. Others orchestrated their butchery from more remote vantages, their billows bound. And on and on, the leprous mobs surged beneath, shrieking outrage as they leapt and clambered, clawed and slavered.
Up to this point, the Southron Magi had left the steepest cliffs and precipices undefended. Now they discovered the obscenities scaling them, clinging to the plummets like swarms of frigid bees. One neck and two backs were broken in the rush to plug these precarious breaches; other stations were left undermanned. Two more arcane souls were lost for brute vertigo, missteps made for the illusion of grounds moving.
Sranc stormed the gorges and the crevasses, crept through the fractures, scrabbled over bulbous slopes. Conflagration enveloped it all, skeins of lightning, cords of decapitating light. Clan after clan surged up, through, and between the stacked heights only to vanish, consumed in squalls of radiance.
The Exalt-Magus suffered no illusions. The Ordealman’s rank disorder on the coasts below meant the consequences of failure were absolute. Saccarees had been at Irs?lor—survived the heartbreak. He knew what would happen should the Sranc win through.
He had garrisoned each of the mountains according to estimations of a peril that refused to remain fixed. He initially held fast on Ingol, dispatching what Mandate Schoolmen he could spare according to necessity. Oloreg, which was more the ruins of a mountain than a mountain, proved the greatest trial. He even removed his eyrie to Mantigol, so he might attend to the perpetually threatened mountain from a better vantage. With his own eyes he saw the blind cunning of the Horde, how it shrank westward across the Erengaw, funnelling vigorous thousands into the smashed mouth of Oloreg—their greatest point of vulnerability. Soon, fully half of the Mandate found itself positioned across the broken summit with Enhor? and his Imperial Saik. Crimson billows hung next to black. The glitter of Gnostic Abstractions threaded the baleful incandescence of the Anagogis. Dragon-heads vomited fire between the sweep of Cirroi Looms. Clouds of arrows—ineffectual against Wards—chipped and clattered across bare stone or quilled gravel inclines. Entire scarps teetered out into the void, crumbled into blood-slicked avalanches. Light greeted the ascending tide, sliced and consumed, pierced and exploded. Whole fields of gibbering obscenities perished, each figure a shining combustion.
The Schoolmen of the Three Seas cried out between their exertions, laughing, cackling. Weariness had addled them. They were at once children burning insects with lenses, stomping them in chortling fury, and old men coughing sorcerous words, hunched like lechers about illicit visions of destruction. Something crazed and ragged climbed into their cacophonous singing, a licentious barbarity that contradicted their exhaustion.
Those most taxed would be relieved, allowed to recline for a time upon one of the eyries, where they found water for their throats and salve for their burns. They found themselves gazing across the hanging voids at their brothers, fire-spitting motes suspended about neighbouring summits. They breathed deep the tainted air, closed their eyes, saw the sparking of mad afterimages. They listened to Cants they knew through the shrieking din, the whoosh and crack of sorceries both ancient and deadly. They gawked, despite the profundity of their erudition, that mountains could be skirted in living sheets of light, that the carcasses of their enemy could be heaped so high as to be visible across the convex curve of the Urokkas, like the blackened gums of scorched teeth …
They marvelled that they had come so far.
A Mandate Schoolman called Nume would be the first to see it, gazing out from the eyrie Saccarees had abandoned upon Ingol. Even as a boy Nume had taken pride in the sharpness of his eyes: he had dreamed of becoming an archer, ere the Mandate had spirited him away. He waved to his fellows for confirmation, pointed out over the festering distance, but they could only see that something rode the skies high above the roiling plate of the Horde.
A sorcerous Lens would claw all of them to their feet.
The slaughter beggared his heart as much as the intellect, but for proportion, not pity. Even lives that are meaningless can stab the conscience when heaped into mountains.
These were Sranc. Why should he not feel the joy—nay, rapture—that so unmanned all the others?