Sibaw?l Vaka picked a solitary path through the inhuman tumult, staring forward with ghoulish vacancy. Rank after putrid rank peeled away before him, communally leapt and scratched and scurried from his approach. Paralysis seized those the crush delivered to his vicinity; they could do no more than twitch, blubber, and wheeze in his shadow. He speared them as he passed, piercing the joints in their crude armour, their necks and their faces … and continued onward.
A mile behind, the heedless run of the Great Ordeal had bogged into melee along the cleft demarcating the torsos of Ingol and Oloreg. Archery formed spectral tangles over the fighting. Sensing vulnerability, Mandate Schoolmen began burning their way down the slopes of Ingol, each a floating point disgorging light and fire. The Sranc melted before them. Their flank relieved, the Men of the Circumfix surged forward anew, beat the caterwauling skinnies to the shadows beneath their feet. Some hollering, some sobbing, they cut and hammered their way onto the greased pitch of Ingol. Men clutched wounds in grimacing silence. Sranc twitched and kicked where they fell.
A shout cracked Creation. Men and Sranc hesitated alike …
Ears whined for abrupt silence. Eyes rolled skyward. And then, over it all, a light appeared, like something dropped from an indescribable direction. White brilliance glaring from blue …
Becoming a man … the Holy Aspect-Emperor, hanging high and wind-blown beneath the blue vacancy of autumn, his edges smoking with otherworldly brilliance.
“Flee Dagliash!” his voice boomed. Across the Erengaw and the root of the Urokkas, the combatants looked up and wondered.
“Flee! Hide yourself from its sight!”
The Schoolmen turned immediately, striding the heights, abandoning all terrestrial plight. The Men of the Ordeal hesitated, wavered as more and more of their kinsmen abandoned the mobs behind them. The hard-hearted stood their ground, knowing that retreat meant doom. They fell into battling circles and squares as the formations about them dissolved in racing slaughter.
The Sranc hacked the earth, reconquered the sky with screeching ululation—and surged forward.
Kurwachal, the ancient A?rsi had called the squat tower, the “Altar”. With Ciworal destroyed, it was the mightiest bastion remaining—at least to the panicked eye. Saubon’s household had wasted the Horde’s silence bellowing at the Witches striding above the fortress, at first begging and then cursing their gold-ribboned passage. A handful looked askance as they fled, extending the gift of their pity perhaps, but no more. In an inkling, they were gone.
Saubon, meanwhile, concentrated on scaling the parapets to assess their straits. He hauled himself up wreckage heaped by Kellhus himself, stood upright upon a gantry wall enclosing the Ribbaral, surveyed the absurd proportions of their doom.
The Urokkas piled before him, bereft their diadems of ephemeral sorcerous light. The last of the Swayali blew as golden flakes across the raving multitudes. Even as he reeled for its preposterous extent, for the gnashing miles it encompassed, the Horde resumed its titanic wail, trammelled any hope of human sound. North. South. East. West. The land itself had been stippled in howling white faces.
He will come back, a fraction of him insisted.
You need only survive long enough.
He required no voice to direct his householders. The Knights of the Desert Lion had sought him out as soon as the last Nun had vanished over the walls. Even now they looked to him, grasped the doom reflected in his blue eyes. He pointed at Kurwachal. And so, from points scattered across the gutted heart of Dagliash, they mustered upon her last, truly mighty tower.
Hold on.
Saubon, who had to teeter picking his way along the interior wall, would be the last to gain the blunted summit. They set about securing the toothless parapets. Ingol heaved skyward to the east, as if the World were naught but a hide drawn over a mammoth tree stump. Oloreg was all but obscured, but Mantigol loomed in oceanic silhouette beyond, its flanks swagged with fire. The plate of the Nele?st extended southward, wind-scuffed and gleaming. To the north the Erengaw Plain flared out into the obscurity of the Shroud. Sranc smothered all the World between, from those screaming and raving directly below, to those clotting the distances, mutilated sheaves cast over bare stone and breathing earth. Maggot-teeming, worm-twisting …
He is coming.
They found themselves standing upon a different raft in far more perilous seas—one that was sinking. Riven with the others along the parapet, Saubon watched the leaping, scrabbling flood. His breath had become a rope of frayed hemp drawn to and fro, something that sawed at his heart. Swinging and bounding, the creatures swamped the outermost defences, bloomed in the baileys, gushed through the ruined inner gates. Saubon suffered the peculiar, dislocated sense of horror that comes with watching doom unfold at a distance—a cavernous knowledge … A recognition like a hole.
He will return!