The Consult. What cunning could they hope to devise? What trickery or deceit?
The urge to communicate his joy seized him, and he turned to his household. His Holca Spearbearer, Bogyar, was roaring soundlessly to the others, his face shining crimson—the fearsome colour of the Flush. The Company of the Raft stood scattered about the Ribbaral, exchanging looks and staring agog at their Lord-and-Prophet atop his tower of sky-tumbling ruin. His angular Shieldbearer, ?ster Scraul, was the lone defector. Ever odd, he stood with his shoulders square to the spectre of Ingol heaving over the northeastern wall, with only his face turned to the pluming ejecta. However incidental his pose, his look exposed a soul roundly stumped, not by what he witnessed—the eyes would have to be focussed—but by what he did not, by the crushing sum.
The crimson-skinned Holca stood gesticulating before the upward torrent, his great fists balled and trembling, his shoulders as broad as the Swayali were tall. He bellowed, his face a crazed rictus, twisted with ferocity …
Alarm seized Saubon as a bolt through delirium. He lurched into action for action’s sake, clapped a firm hand upon Bogyar’s left shoulder, not so much to calm the giant as to gain time to think. The red-bearded Holca whirled violently, throwing spittle. He stood for a breathing instant, monstrous and looming, eyes pinned too wide to see anything but murder.
Only the Horde could be heard.
“Master yourself!” Saubon roared at his Spearbearer, only to find himself crashing backward. The insane Holca loomed above him, hefting his massive battleaxe. Incredulous, Saubon realized he was about to die …
Light flashed in his periphery—low and brilliant.
Then the Bashrag were upon them.
Rather than kill him, Bogyar saved him instead, leaping over his prostrate length into the misbegotten assault. The Holca swung his axe as a javelin thrown, leveraging his leap so that the blade snapped as a lash, chipped from iron, and lopped the goliath’s neck to the least tendon. The beasts stampeded into their midst. Great shags of hair. Lurching, shambling things, deformed in ways great and small. Their stench tinctured every breath with fish, rot, and feces. Saubon scrambled to his feet, saw Mepiro duck a crashing cudgel. The Exalt-General came about, broadsword drawn, saw the festering, lumbering rush, a wave of tottering, heaving obscenities, swinging crude axes and hammers, dead faces drooling from either cheek. He glimpsed Bogyar, a crimson dervish fending brackish limbs. He saw Gwanw? carved in miraculous white—realized the creatures bore Chorae. He saw fragments of stone, a crushing curtain, rain upon the obscenities lurching across the Ribbaral beyond. An abomination floated up out of the confusion, cudgel raised to twice his height, bull-snorting, rattling for its hauberk of iron-plates. Ulcerating moles pocking exposed skin. Furs so rotted as to grease its flesh. A senescence of motion declared the depravity of its composition. Saubon danced about the descending hammer, hacked the monstrosity high on the arm, a blow that would have amputated a human limb …
But merely severed one of the Bashrag’s trinity of bones. The foetid goliath squealed, crouched in a roar, struck out wildly.
Saubon ducked, heard the tink of pitted iron against his helm, and found himself laughing, shouting …
“Good!”
He thrust the point of his broadsword into its mangled knee, danced spinning from a second frenzied strike. He clove one of the mucoid faces upon its cheek, leaping forward as it staggered back, bearing the shrieking beast down, cleaving adulterine flesh.
“I’m tired of eating chicken!”
He whirled, roaring for the impiety of his wit. The Knights of the Desert Lion chopped at what seemed a copse of nightmarish trees about him. Saubon glimpsed Scraul turn too late to a dropping cudgel, vanish beneath it, even as Bogyar’s battleaxe struck the miscreant’s basin skull. The thing pedalled backward, tripped into the Well, only to be caught tumbling in the upward deluge.
A glint caught Saubon’s eye.
That was when he first saw it falling skyward from the gut of the Well, gleaming and intact in the helter of debris …
A golden coffer.
The Erengaw crawled with simmering multitudes, a foul pulver that matted all that could be seen. What had appeared a morass of indeterminate horrors now pricked with the glitter of eyes and teeth, fingers that could be counted. Mauls and cleavers shaking like epileptic sons.
Above it all, Aurang hung black and ragged, a flake of ash hooked high on brown winds.