Saccarees greeted Proyas upon the summit of Mantigol, his manner blank with incredulity. The eyrie resembled a scene embroidered across some heroic tapestry: survivors milling in the aftermath of catastrophe, damaged souls who would have been illustrious, were it not for the toll exacted. This was what Men did in the wake of disaster, be it the loss of a battle, the death of a loved one, or anything that knocked their lives from the pins of workaday assumption: they communed, if not with words then with looks or simple breathing.
Turning from the mute Exalt-Magus, Proyas gazed out over what seemed perfect circles of obliteration, rings burnt into the very frame of the Urokkas, flung outward across the floodplains. The earth itself burned where Dagliash had stood. Pelts of viscous smoke streamed upward, as if an upside-down World dangled its innards in ashen skies. The ground about this boiling centre had been burnt to chalk and obsidian. The first of the visible dead began some distance away, fields of char, little more than stumped torsos that became recognizable as remains in the shelter of ravines or depressions, which were choked with dead like gutters with rotted leaves. Farther still, near the rutted foundations of Oloreg, he glimpsed survivors crawling or shambling across otherwise lifeless slopes …
Naked souls stumbling, hands out.
Agongorea burned beyond the far shore, smoking like sodden rags thrown over a fire. The River Sursa spilled black as ink into the Sea. Great clots of Sranc clotted its course, rafts of interlocked carcasses bumping and rolling like scum across the surface of a sewer. This, at least, relaxed one of the many fists clenched within Proyas’s breast. The Ordeal had suffered, certainly, but the Horde was no more.
Cataclysm.
Lights that scratch blind. Cracks that swat deaf. Concussions that slap hale bodies into pulp and mist …
Cataclysm shows Men the truth of their pitiful proportion, how their pulse hangs upon the sufferance of more monstrous things.
If Golgotterath had such weapons or allies, what did it matter, the zeal of Men?
Proyas turned to the blanched faces about him, his dismay plain.
No one seemed capable of asking the obvious.
“Has anyone seen Him?” he called, sorting between them with his gaze.
Not a soul answered.
“Anyone!” he cried, his voice cracking.
“I-I saw him …” a feminine voice stammered. “Mmoments be-be”—an eye-fluttering wince—“before it … it-it happened.” One of the Swayali regarded him, teetering, her gowns burnt to a fluted husk, her once luxurious hair scorched to a shag.
Somehow he knew she would not live out the night.
“He-he … was w-warning us! Telling us to—”
Coughs battered her, spilling blood as bright as poppies across her chin.
“And since?” Proyas snapped, looking from face to face. “Has anyone seen Him since … since …” He raised a slack hand to the mountainous plume behind him.
Not a soul among them possessed words for what they had witnessed.
Dread silence. Someone on the periphery of the small crowd began sobbing. A twist in the wind swept the summit with the reek of ash and copper filings.
No, a small voice whispered within him.
Proyas swayed, took a numb step to recover, then fairly swooned for vertigo. Far more than his balance seemed to swing off the hooks and fly. Hopes. Nations. Someone—Saccarees?—caught his elbow, and he could feel his own obstinate weight yank against the grip, as if willing some kind of plummet. But the hand that held him was too strong—impossibly and thoughtlessly strong, like the clasp of a father retrieving his son from peril.
“I am here,” the glorious voice murmured.
And Proyas looked up into the beloved eyes of his Holy Aspect-Emperor.
A tattered chorus scratched the gaping spaces—gratitude and relief punched from stomach and lungs. In his periphery, Proyas saw the others fall to their faces, and, for an endless heartbeat, he longed only to join them, to fall and weep, to release the horror whose silent claws had so girdled his heart.
But Anas?rimbor Kellhus spoke world-consuming sorcery instead, not so much embracing as engulfing his disciple …
Proyas found himself elsewhere, tripping across different stones, different ground, hunching over his own vomit, grey puddles of Meat. He crouched hacking and trembling. When the nausea subsided, he looked up, swatting tears from his eyes. His Holy Aspect-Emperor stood several paces away with his back turned to him, staring out across the degrees of obliteration …
He spat at the taste of bile, realized they stood upon one of Oloreg’s precarious crowns.
“A great and tragic victory has been won here this day,” Kellhus declared, turning to him.
Proyas stared witlessly.
“But the land is polluted …” his Lord-and-Prophet continued. “Accursed. Viri has at last answered for her King’s ancient treachery.”
Bracing his palms against his knees, the Exalt-General pressed himself upright, battled to keep both his balance and the remaining contents of his stomach.
“Let no man stray upon it,” Kellhus commanded. “Let no man breathe the air that blows across it. Stay to the north, old friend.”