It could be none other.
Like any vulture, he wallowed in the sky, kiting upon gusts. He was more than abhorrent; his mere appearance panicked, somehow, did not so much set skin as bones crawling. There was something—a corruption in its pallor, perhaps, or an uncanniness of movement, manner—something that sickened for witnessing, unnerved for eluding clean human sensibility. The monstrosity peered down upon the gruesome multitudes when gliding northward, appraising the inscrutable, but as he swung to the south, he turned to the ramparts of the Urokkas—to the corpses belching black smoke, to the wink of murderous lights, and to Saccarees high upon Mantigol.
The Inchoroi even mouthed words in derision.
The Exalt-Magus should have signalled his Lord-and-Prophet. He and the other Lords of the Ordeal had spent watches discussing this very contingency. The Great Ordeal’s gravest peril, they had decided, lay in the deployment of the Schools. Once scattered across the Urokkas, there they must remain, lest the Horde descend upon the Ordeal’s nude flank and drive it into the Sea. This meant the Consult, who could never hope to match the sorcerous might of the Schools otherwise, could ignore them outright, throw their cunning or their might at some other weakness. And as Saccarees himself had seen at Irs?lor, a single breach was all that utter ruin required.
“They will come,” Kellhus had warned. “They will not abandon such might as the Horde manifests to our design. The Unholy Consult will intervene. At long last, my brothers, you will vie with our foe in the flesh, grapple with the Cause that moves you.”
Words that had balled hearts as fists!
At least it had then. Now Saccarees needed only turn on his heel to see Dagliash, to see his Lord-and-Prophet shining white from an exhaust of black ruin. He could have informed him, or any of his peers for that matter, in multiple ways … but he did not.
For all his power and erudition, he was a Man of the Circumfix the same as any other. And like other Men he had the sense of regions, the passage of places and powers. Home had dwindled in his intellect, becoming little more than a muffled spark, ink spilled upon a page. For the longest time they had marched across the interval between, twilight regions that recognized no power save brutality. But now … Now they had passed into the bower of their ancient and implacable enemy. And here … Here the earth answered to a will more wicked, more monstrously horrific, than any the World had known. The Great Ordeal stood upon the very threshold of Golgotterath … the outermost gate.
And like other Men of the Circumfix, a wildness had been kindled within Saccarees, a darkening of what was awake.
For he too had partaken of the Meat.
High upon Mantigol, gazing out over raving plains, Apperens Saccarees laughed heedless of his staring fellows, laughed in a voice the World had not heard for two thousand years …
Aurang … Aurang! Foul beast. Old foe.
At last.
Proyas had chosen the heights to station his command, where he could observe the Holy Host in a glance, but that had proven to be a mistake, particularly as the slopes reared ever more fractured and steep. The disaster Proyas had feared never came to pass. Even exhausted for running, pressed into blind mobs, the Ordealmen proved unstoppable, a hacking tide that swept into the roiling masses of Sranc and over, leaving fields of trampled violet in its wake. As individuals they roared and they cut and they hammered, but as a host they consumed, did not so much throw into flight as trammel. Proyas had lost three in his entourage in his attempts to pace the advance—for he could do nothing more, he had come to realize, than be where he needed to be when this headlong rush finally, inevitably sagged to its knees. And so he had struck for the beaches, driving his pony down the still-crowded slopes.
At last reaching the clotted beaches, he spurred his pony westward, trusting Kay?tas and the others would match his pace. He fairly cried out for relief, so clean was the sea breeze. But the sea itself was as soiled as could be, the breakers flapping with shining limbs, the retreating waters glinting black in silver sunlight, revealing its violet tincture in tidal pools. Sranc bobbed and bumped, knotted the waters like coagulum. The surf heaved carcasses into crashing gyres of slicked skin and fatted foam. The sight was almost narcotic, drowned faces rising from the blur, breaching the gleam, the waves rolling and dumping, dragging and engulfing, rolling and dumping …
Narrow lozenges of beach had been cleared by the shrugging waters, allowing Proyas’s sturdy little steed to chop unhindered across the sand flats, leaping the embroidery of dead along the line of the tide.