He pushed himself to his knees, despite the mountain across his shoulders.
He saw Bogyar, a red-skinned fury upon the parapet, one foot upon the battlements, his mouth watering blood, a javelin jutting from his mail-armoured shoulder. The Holca held his left arm extended to the heavens, a nude Sranc impaled through the jaw upon a broken sword, shaking over the abyss, erect even in its instant of death. His right arm carried his great battleaxe down, delivering gore and ruin to the pale beasts thronging about him. From nowhere, it seemed, a Sranc leapt onto his back, and hacking and shrieking carried the red-haired warrior over the plummet.
In the vacant place remaining, he saw a Sranc cresting the battlements, its face passive and porcelain, as beautiful as anything graven—until hatred crushed it into something inhuman.
A concussion sent him rolling. A crawling, encrusted World, thrown in sheets.
A sense of inner things leaking.
Kellhus …
Across a landscape of stamping legs and unshod, horned feet, he saw Mepiro’s face, blank beneath wild shadows, jerking to rhythmic thrusts.
No.
Something happened. Something …
Too loud to be sound. Too bright to be light …
So quick, so absolute as to circumvent perception.
Dagliash was gone—along with his breath, his heartbeat.
He suffered an absence of sensation that could only be called falling. Void was a spinning place, or so he learned, for he did not move, and it spun about him.
Then a mad, existential jarring, as if he had slipped from a precipice to be swatted motionless caught upon a ledge …
He opened eyes within already opened eyes … Cheek against the turf, shadows thrashing about and above, a scissoring forest of horse-legs … Men battling Men? Yes. Galeoth knights vying with golden-armoured Coyauri.
Mengedda?
By the God, his fury felt so empty, so frail against the earth …
He was already gazing across trampled turf. Motionless, he saw a young man fallen the same as he, heavily armoured in the old style, sandy-blond hair jutting from his mail hood. He watched him reach out in horror and confusion and grasp his own hand, squeeze the leathery fingers, the glass nails. He felt nothing …
A nightmarish moment of recognition, too surreal to be terrifying.
It was his face! His own hand had clasped him!
He tried to scream.
Nothing.
He tried to move, to twitch …
Absolute immobility encapsulated him. He felt only void across his exterior skin, but within … It seemed a door had swung or swollen open.
And he knew the way all the Dead knew, with the certainty of timeless recollection.
Hell … rising on a bubbling rush. Agony and wickedness chattering with famished glee …
Demons, come to pull his outside through his inside, to invert and expose, to bare his every tenderness to fire and gnashing teeth …
Damnation … in spite of everything.
There was no describing the horror.
He tried to clutch with dead fingers … to hold on …
Don’t! he tried to call across the space of a dead man’s reach. But his ribs were a breathless cage, his lips cold soil. Don’t let go …
Please! he screamed at his younger self, trying to communicate the whole of his life with sightless eyes … Fool! Ingrate!
Don’t trust Hi—
Flash of light.
So bright, so blinding, that it seemed nothing more than a peripheral flicker.
The image of Dagliash hung, a shadow wrapped about radiance, curtain walls blown to gaseous oblivion.
Air sucked to dizzying altitudes.
Ears shut to all sound.
Radiating concussions, blowing souls in their thousands from the crests and summits, puncturing the very clouds, blasting them outward, dilating the iris of the sky.
A moment of paradoxical sunlight.
Vast and luminous and golden. Lancing across emptiness, painting the back of the erupting earth, a pillar of particulate and ejecta—a mountain flying upward and out. Plumes like octopus arms, black about brilliance, surging into Heaven’s vacant arch. The cooling tendrils bowed outward, fanning, descending, while an inferno scaled the obscured heights within.
Circles and rings of obliteration. The swirling ash. The charcoal slopes, all the smoking forms thrown outward. The croaking regions, fingerless hands pawing. Burning Schoolmen, stumbling from the sky.
Then the fields of screaming, Men and Sranc, raising blistered faces, melted eyes, shaking skin from their arms, so that it seemed they warred with rags.
The smell of smoke and burnt lamb and cooking pig.
Mouths round with lamentation.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
The Demua Mountains
To be a Man is to take the frame of Man as firmament, to be immovable unto oneself. And to know Man as a Man is to be blind to this common frame, to be without knowing. Thus is knowing the corruption of being. And so to learn what it is to be a Man is to cease to be a Man.
—Treatise on Diremption, ANONYMOUS
Early Autumn, 20 New Imperial Year (4132, Year-of-the-Tusk), the Demua Mountains