None could say precisely when it happened, when feast had become bacchanal, when dining had become something more than chewing and swallowing—something darker. At first, only the most sensitive souls among them could discern the difference, how a growl seemed to perpetually hang from the back of their throat, and a savagery from the back of their soul—a furious inkling that others seemed more and more prone to act out. Only they could sense that the Meat was changing them and their brothers—and not for the better. What had been wary became ever more reckless. What was measured became garish by imperceptible degrees.
Perhaps no event demonstrated this creeping transformation more dramatically than the matter of Sibaw?l te Nurwul. With the reunification of the Great Ordeal, the Cepaloran Chieftain-Prince found himself ever more irked by the bombast of his rival, Halas Siroyon, General of the Famiri auxiliaries. The Famiri had accumulated a fearsome reputation over the previous weeks. Their disdain for armour easily rendered them the swiftest of the Ordeal’s horsemen, and with Siroyon riding the legendary Phiolos at their fore, they had proven themselves peerless suppliers of Meat. Lord Sibaw?l begrudged even this modest glory. On occasion he could be heard complaining that the very thing that made them such effective “cattlemen”—their lack of armour—was also what made them useless in actual battle.
Hearing word of these complaints, Siroyon confronted his Norsirai counterpart, wagered that he could lead his Famiri deeper into the shadow of the Horde than the blond Cepaloran would ever dare. Sibaw?l agreed to the wager, even though it was not his nature to hazard the lives of his men over such obvious points of honour. He accepted because he and his cousins had spied the beginning of an interval opening in the circuit of the Horde the day previous, and he saw a means of redeeming himself in Siroyon’s petulance. His back had since healed, but his flogging several weeks previous had all but crippled his pride.
And indeed, the Whore smiled on him. The following dawn revealed a great cleft in the Horde’s horizon-engulfing line, a point where the gaseous ochre-and-black had been smeared into vacancy. For those who daily ranged the raucous margins of the Horde, the break was as plain as the morning sun, but Sibaw?l and his Cepalorae had set out before sunrise. By the time Siroyon grasped what his rival was doing, Sibaw?l was already flying into the bower of the Shroud, a distant point leading a distant rake of thousands. Bellowing, the General led his Famiri in pursuit, riding so hard that dozens were killed for being thrown. The land was dishevelled, scalloped by streams and humped with knolls of bared stone, some with the remains of ancient cairns teetering on their summits. The Horde had stamped the scrub into never-ending carpets of dust and twigs. Siroyon only managed to spy Sibaw?l and his Cepalorae from a few rare heights—enough to know he had lost his rash wager. He should have relented, but pride drove him forth, the kind indistinguishable from terror of shame. Even if he conceded the glory to Sibaw?l, he could at least outshine the man with descriptions of what they had seen. Sibaw?l had never been one to expound on his glories. As a student of jnan, Siroyon suffered no such scruple.
Lord Sibaw?l led his whooping Cepalorae into the very maw of the Horde, and it seemed a thing of madness to venture where hitherto only Schoolmen had dared tread. The howl deafened. The billowing heights of the Shroud encompassed them. The stampeded earth yielded to more and more desiccate grasses and scrub. Dead Sranc peppered the less-battered ground, limbs jutting about gaping mouths. This in itself was a shock, given that the creatures generally devoured their fallen. The horsemen almost instantly spied ruins draped ahead of them in the ochre gloom, structures like jaws snapped open across the earth, one inside another. They passed over the remnants of ancient walls, and a new dread claimed their hearts. The thanes rose their voices in futile query, even protest, understanding that the Horde had parted about a place that Sranc would sooner die than tread, a place famed in the Holy Sagas …
Wreoleth … the fabled Larder-of-Men.
But Lord Sibaw?l could not hear his champions, and rode ahead with the bearing of one who presumes the absolute loyalty of his beloved. So the horse-thanes of Cepalor followed their Lord-Chieftain into the accursed city, between the rotted black teeth of her walls, beneath the gutted skulls of her towers. Scrub webbed the ground, forcing their ponies to barge through bird-bone lattices. A kind black moss encrusted what stone and structure that survived, transforming the ruins into a sinister procession. The city seemed a pillaged necropolis, the many-chambered monument of a people who had not so much lived as dwelt.
The blond-braided horsemen filed through the ruin in columns, glancing about in numb incredulity. The Shroud climbed the neck-straining heights about them, plumes through mists, spilling like ink in water across the vault of heaven. Their lips tingled for the Horde’s yammering roar. Many held their cheeks to their horse’s neck, spitting or vomiting, so vile was the stench on the wind. A few hid their faces for weeping.