After years campaigning at his side, Saubon knew well the sound of his arcane voice: at once deep and queerly fluted, as if two throats called through one mouth, a strange war of vocalities, as sourceless as any other arcane singing, but sounding even more distant—as well as more near. He need only glance at Gwanw? to see the religious awe it sparked in the Few, to know that Kellhus, despite all his demurrals, was more, a Shaman of Old, like those so violently condemned in the Tusk. At once Prophet and Sorcerer …
Gratitude and exultation beat like wings within him. Power. Such glorious power. To uproot one of the mighty places of the earth, to sing away a legendary stronghold. Pride throbbed through him, a savage conceit, held him turgid and immobile, aching …
For this more than anything was the sum of belonging, a submission that empowered, a grovelling that put flight to kings.
Kellhus did not sing alone. The Nuns had taken up stations all about the toothless parapets, hanging like gold-foil anemones in the sea. Saubon could see only a handful of them, so high were the walls fencing the Ribbaral. But he could hear their number in the piping chorus, and the carnage they wreaked in the Horde’s roar. Kellhus boomed, a chant as deep as earth, in tones like distant dragons battling, and the Swayali spun weird arias about him, fluting through the thunder of corruption …
These were the true hymns, the Believer-King of Caraskand realized …
Just as Dagliash was the one temple.
He would seize Proyas when he saw him. He would make the man wince, so tight would he clamp his arms! He would hold him, and he would explain what he witnessed this very moment—now—and more importantly, what he understood. He would make the fool see the womanish cast of his heart, how yearning for the simple and the pure was its own pollution …
Yes! The God was a spider!
But so too were Men—spiders unto themselves.
“Everything!” he would cry. “Everything eats!”
Ciworal, the famed Gauntleted Heart, stronghold of strongholds, crumbled skyward before his very eyes. It was like watching an edge devour the bastion, a plummet sideways to the real, blocks and fragments falling up and out before raining in a silent deluge across the baileys. He watched his Lord-and-Prophet eat, until even the monstrous foundation stones let go like rootless teeth, fell toppling into the Heavens—until great Ciworal was no more. Gwanw? seized his mailed forearm in her hands, but he could make no sense of her expression, let alone hear a word she said …
Looking back he could see it, a great circle sunk into the granite, the legendary Well of Viri. Ciworal, for all its cyclopean immensity, had been no more than a scab on a deeper wound—the same as Men, perhaps. The Holy Aspect-Emperor did not cease his labour; no seam marred his embalming song. The sideways plummet simply continued once it reached the ground, so that the ancient mouth seemed to spew the ruin that choked it, vomit a dark and mountainous geyser of wreckage into the sky. Exhilaration scooped the breath from Saubon’s chest, the sense of dangling above a torrential river flood.
Vertigo. The ground dipped beneath their feet in sensation, then shivered for clacking impacts in reality. And King Coithus Saubon found himself laughing in the teeth-baring manner of hyenas. It was the Meat, he knew, but it was the kind of careless knowing that belongs to drunks and disaster. Gwanw? still held one hand upon his forearm. A sudden longing to fuck the witch loped to the fore of his scrambled passions. He preferred slips to strong women, but the colour of her hair was so rare …
Together they watched the great, broken bones of Nogaral tumble skyward, little more than shadows between streamers of dust and lesser debris. The Aspect-Emperor floated above in the morning sun. Conviction fairly pulsed through the Believer-King.
What God worth worshipping was weak?
Power. Power was the Mark of transcendence. What did it matter if it was diabolical or divine or even mortal?
So long as it was greater.
One tomb plundered to fashion another. Shivers through oceanic stone.
The slip of fractures as old as old. The spit of dust from the ceilings.
Some halls collapsed, be they humble or majestic, rooves clapping down, pounding wails and velvet dust through all the forking, subterranean hollows. And the beasts beat their cheeks for the stinging of slovenly eyes. The mulish barks of the dying set them baying in their thousands, strung and clotted through the veined deep. Anguish and outrage popping through sputum. The bellowing of elephantine lungs.
Where were the Old Fathers?
It sailed across the ochre glow, tracing circles over the violent pitch of the Erengaw.
A vision that crippled thought, exhaled numbness as smoke through gut and limbs …
Saccarees stood riven before his sorcerous Lens, incredulous despite all that he had seen and horrified for everything he had Dreamed. The image dipped and dwindled, swung around to slowly bloat into clarity once again, dark and ragged, claws slack and twitching, scabrous wings hooked about unseen winds …
A sight that made old scars itch and sting. An Inchoroi. The bone of the greater skull plain through intestinal skin, the lesser skull nested within its flared mandible …
Evil Aurang, the Horde-General of old.