The horrified Cepalorae gazed across the thrashing spectacle, the countless white faces, inhuman beauty clenching into puckered outrage, packed and receding, on and on, becoming watercolour impressions for the fog of fecal dust. Full-grown men wept, wondered that Fate would dangle them so near the end of all things. Others laughed, emboldened, despite their dread, to stand with such impunity before the geologic extent of their foe.
Those on the eastern flank cried out soundlessly, pointed to the glower of lights through the ochre sheers. The Culling, they realized—the Schoolmen had come! And they realized they looked upon what their sorcerous brother-in-arms always saw with the grinding of the days. The keen-sighted glimpsed a triune of dark-skinned sorcerers robed in billows striding the low skies in echelon, each wielding a phantom dragon. They were white and violet garbed Vokalati, those Sun-wailers, as they were called, who had survived Irs?lor and the madness of their Grandmaster, Carind?s?.
According to legend, this was when the Chieftain-Prince first glimpsed the Sranc masses surging to their southeast and grasped the shape of their new peril.
The arcane mutter of sorcery wormed through the gut of the Horde’s thunder. Even as the Cepalorae cheered, the Horde roiled, and dust erupted from the rabid tracts. The horsemen could even see the Sranc scooping dirt and gravel into the sky, creating a fog that obscured all but the brilliance of jetting and blooming fire. Silhouettes burned and flailed. Many among the horsemen raised a ragged cheer thinking the Vokalati had come to save them.
But Sibaw?l knew better, knew the Schoolmen had possibly sealed their doom. The Sranc instinctively spread out when afflicted from above, the way skirmishers might beneath a hail of archery. But where human formations counted the extra area taken in yards, the Horde encompassed miles. It ballooned and billowed across the desolate dimensions whenever the Schoolmen rained ruin down upon them. Many were the times he and his riders had retreated watching the Culling vanish into the Shroud.
The Horde was about to reclaim Wreoleth.
Sibaw?l galloped behind his warriors, slapping the rumps of their ponies with the flat of his blade, crying out words that could not be heard with an urgency that was easily seen. And so the Cepalorae fled, each man crouched low on his saddle, flaxen war-braids lashing his back and shoulder. They galloped down slots of ruin, blundered through copses of thistle, chalk juniper, and plains bracken. With horror, they watched the vast palms of dust close in prayer across the sky before them, the sun fade into a pale disc. Caterwauling thousands flooded into the passage the Men had followed not more than a watch before. Gloom fell across Wreoleth, at once septic and chill, and the proud horsemen of Cepalor called out for terror and despair.
Halas Siroyon, who had gained the interval’s mouth only to see its throat close, would glimpse Sibaw?l and his Cepalorae from afar, and it would seem that he gazed across worlds, from a terrain crabbed for density to one blurred for gaseous obscurity—a glimpse from a dream. He was driven back, and his bare-chested riders suffered grievously for the javelins and arrows of the loping Sranc. The chroniclers would write that Phiolos, the greatest of all horses, caught one shaft in the shoulder and another in the rump, while his less-renowned master flaunted one in his left thigh.
The Shroud closed about all knowledge of Lord Sibaw?l and his kinsmen. Wreoleth lay as an abscess in the viscera of the Horde.
A day and night passed before the Horde relinquished the accursed Larder. Accusations were traded in the Eleven Pole Chamber. The Believer-Kings petitioned their Holy Aspect-Emperor, who admonished them, saying, “Sibaw?l may be the fiercest among you, but the temper of the soul matters little when the peril is unnatural. The weak are spared, while the bravest are unmanned. Pray to the God of Gods, my brothers. Only fell Wreoleth can show what it has wrought.”
Grief-stricken, Siroyon would be the first to dare the second opening of the interval the following morning. He would find his rival—and the nine-hundred and twenty-three Cepalorae who survived with him—bereft of wit or calculation. Of the missing, nothing was ever learned, for the survivors refused to speak on any matter, let alone what they had endured. If they responded to hails at all, it would be to look through their interrogator, into whatever deeps and distances that had made slack rope of their souls.