What, it croaks on wheezing fire, is this place?
The Blind Slaver is taken aback. The Carrion Prince can feel his soul twist in momentary, febrile confusion, like a minnow thrashing on a string.
Kakaliol screams for the outrageous perversity. A world ruled by bladders of muck! A world where souls hang upon the sufferance of slop and meat! A world where lice drive lions!
Discharge your Ta—!
What is this place?
The Blind Slaver hesitates. And Kakaliol, the demon-godling of the diseased slums and gutters of Carythusal, can feel it: the indecision, the bewilderment, the dawning fear …
All the delicacies of mortal weakness.
You stand upon the threshold of the dread Ark … the Blind Slaver replies. The Inc?-Holoinas.
Hard doth it lean upon the threshold … the Seducer-of-Thieves says, for it can feel the smouldering torsions, the remorseless yaw in directions orthogonal to the accursed lines of harsh reality, as though it were a coal upon a blanket, burning through, filament by despicable filament.
Yes …
Vile angel.
And it realizes. Kakaliol apprehends. It can feel it sinking, all about, like a hulk upon the waters. The Reaper-of-Heroes raises its scimitar talons, roars with laughter, expelling the shrieks of a thousand thousand souls.
All it need do is scratch, tear away the cutting paper of this accursed World …
Now discharge your Task.
Nay.
Discharge your Task!
The Blind Slaver dares speak it, the word. And it can feel the torments the Manling would inflict upon it were it elsewhere in this accursed World. But here, in this place, Hell itself steeps the air, making whole what the frail sorcerer’s magicks had halved. Here, in this place, it cannot be sundered.
The Reaper-of-Heroes cackles, shrieks in diabolical triumph.
What does it matter, the punishing of a Desire identical with its Object?
Your Oath! the Blind Slaver cries upon blind panic. Your Oath is your Task!
Nay … the Carrion Prince rumbles across the edges of existence. Thou art my Task, mortal.
And upon this, Kalakiol, the Reaper-of-Heroes, involutes, reaches through itself, and seizes the Voice of the Blind Slaver, plucks the nubile wisp that is his soul. How the insect flails! Roaring exultant, it collapses into a writhing heap of centipedes, chitinous multitudes that spill out twitching and scratching across the floors, and begin boring through the flaking paint that is this World …
The vile angel is no more.
None other than Lord Soter had been the first to assemble his kinsmen beneath the turrets of the High Cwol. The Ainoni had taken up positions, preparing to follow the Schoolmen once the gold-fanged bulwarks had been entirely cracked asunder. The sky immediately above was fairly clotted with sorcerers and their silk-twining billows when the first pulse struck. Suddenly the air tasted of acrid things burning—smelled of pork. All was confusion, Men jerking their gaze to and fro in a panicked search for answers. Then Myrathimi fell burning, and shouting choruses erupted among the ranks. Those still baffled followed the arms and fingers pointing almost directly upward, to the hanging enormity of the High Horn …
Only to be nearly blinded by the third pulse.
Sorcerous singing clawed at the bowels. The Thousand Schoolmen were in disarray, some clustering to concentrate their defenses, others scattering—and all shrinking from the battered ramparts of the High Cwol. A young Ainoni caste-noble, Nemukus Mirshoa, was the first to realize the burden of Apocalypse had fallen upon them, the Soldiers of the Circumfix. While all others peered skyward, he cried out to his Kishyati kinsmen, shamed them for their sloth. Then shrieking their ancestral warcry, he charged forward, quite alone, into the black and blasted maw of the High Cwol.
Moved to wonder, the Men of Kishyat followed, first in scattered flurries, then en masse. Black arrows rained upon them, studding their shields and shoulders, but killing few, given their flaring helms and hauberks of heavy splint. They assailed a great breach due to the death throes of Hagazioz, labouring up pitched slopes of debris. There they found Mirshoa and his cousins battling scores of foul Ursranc in the gloom.
Lord Soter, a bellicose man by nature, immediately grasped Mirshoa’s impetuous wisdom. “As they reap, so are they reaped!” he cried to his vassals. “We cower behind sorcerers no more!”
So did the Palatines of High Ainon leave the Schoolmen to fend the unseen Spearman. On a disordered tide of shouts, they stormed the cracked bastions and scorched corridors of the High Cwol.
Since their presence had counted for naught, they were not missed. Seeing Serwa’s flight across the Oblitus, Apperens Saccarees commanded triunes of Mandate Schoolmen to surmount the High Cwol and rush the mountainous trunk of the High Horn. “Save her!” he cried. “Save the Daughter of the Lord!”
Upon the Cwol, the sorcerers saw the Horde, an endless deluge of Sranc descending upon the whole of the Furnace Plain, the Shroud churning skyward from the masses surging at the fore, steaming up to choke the very Vault. Fending horror and dismay, they threw themselves forward, crying out their ancient and holy inheritance, the Gnosis. They harangued their foe with Seswatha’s own Argument, the dark corpus of the School of Sohonc, the dread Cants of War. Great combs of brilliance swept up and scissored across the sheer, golden expanses—Third Looms, Thosolankan Intensities. Jaundiced reflections leapt and danced across the sheen in counterpoint, as if the Upright Horn had become a greased mirror. Radiance clawed ever higher up the cyclopean pitch, reaching for the Spearman’s perch …
But they could not so much as scorch the platform he stood upon, let alone test his Wards.
Nearly vertical pulses counted out the howling Schoolmen with combusting billows. Like flowers, they twirled to ground aflame.
The Men across the Oblitus watched spellbound, crying out curses and heavenly pleas. Frantic shouts across the Ninth Riser drew all eyes to a flickering above the Sixth—to the radiant glare that delivered the Holy Aspect-Emperor …
The Soldiers of the Circumfix roared in exultation.
He hung the height of a Netia pine, immaculate in his white gowns, gyres of smoke swirling out and about his miraculous coming-to-be. He held his hands palms up, flattened into blades, and his face bent skyward, so that it seemed he prayed as much as peered, searching for the dread Spearman …
A thread of crimson brilliance leapt between him and the High Horn.
For a span of two heartbeats, the brilliance and subsequent glare obscured him. Thousands cried out for premonition …
But their Saviour hung intact and unmoved, gazing precisely as before.
Another pulse, consuming vision and air. Men glimpsed the multiform apparition of his Wards, wicking energies, glowing across fathomless dimensions.