The sight was one the Soldiers of the Circumfix simply could not credit. For many, standing beneath the Horns stirred memories of dozing at the root of some ancient tree, the trunk a great and heavy bulk upon their brow, the curvature climbing to obscure whole empires of the sky. The forces, the torsions did not matter. Permanence was utterly assured, such were the proportions. Mountains did not leap, and the Horns did not fall.
And yet, the Canted Horn shuddered, wagged like something suspended from a line, then dipped, no more than the slightest declination—what would be counted an insult in jnan—but catastrophic nonetheless.
The sky teetered.
A sound like a dog’s yawn groaned across all Creation. The pinnacle swayed out, sheering through the cloud hooked about its gleaming neck. The Horn toppled. The eyes of many simply refused to believe, such was the scale. The ground seemed to heave beneath their feet, yanked as cloth torn between dog and master. The structure revolved in a ponderous pirouette, then sailed on an imploding hinge out across the plain. The sun burnished its golden descent, a bead of brilliance drawn over leagues of unearthly gold. On the plain below, Sranc wailed in the sudden shadow, legions scattering for terror into countless other such scatterings. A sound like coins zipping across fine mail—an enormous, airy whisk. Then a series of yawing cracks, concussions that swatted exposed skin—deafened. And there, before infidel eyes, the very sky plummeted, a vast, deformed cylinder, ribbed like the hull of a ship, obliterating Golgotterath’s ramparts, thumping the plains with geologic violence …
Casting Sranc like dust into the erupting air.
The impact threw Men from their feet. Blood popped from their noses, flecked the whites of their eyes. The ground shook as though quaked for more than thirty heartbeats—the time required for the structure’s monstrous crown to join its monstrous nethers. The Canted Horn hammered the very drum-skin of the World, and all Creation resounded. As far away as Carythusal, napping babes started awake, began bawling.
The Horde fell silent. A great gust of lucid air galloped into the belly of the Shroud—revealing the endless, virulent masses … white-faced and agog.
The Men of the Ordeal did not have time to wonder—they scarce had time to regain their feet. Showers of ejecta followed hard upon the shock-wave’s clarity, a tempest of gravel and grit that pinched throats and pricked eyes. They milled in a stupor, coughed and called out, daubed noses or swatted ears. One by one, the Sons of Men squinted through the lifting screens, saw the Great Ordeal intact and the Horde grievously wounded. Prince Inrilil ab Cinganjehoi raised his eyes to his Holy Aspect-Emperor standing high upon the Spearman’s perch, shrieked in crazed and unmanly exultation.
And all the surviving Soldiers of Circumfix joined him.
CHAPTER
SIXTEEN
The Inc?-Holoinas
To understand beatings is to hate brave brothers.
—Celestial Aphorisms, MEMGOWA
Early Autumn, 20 New Imperial Year (4132, Year-of-the-Tusk), Golgotterath.
Cataclysm, crashing and golden.
The tink and clatter of debris trailed into the hiss of raining sand.
Astonished silence …
Across the terraces of the Oblitus, along the gold-fanged walls and the bulbous heights, the Soldiers of the Circumfix climbed to their feet coughing, squinting, peering across the devastation. The Canted Horn lay like a boned limb across the Shigogli, a train of shattered cylinders, some buckled, others impossibly intact, larded with vast, freestanding hoops, sections of skinless girding that reached higher than the Occlusion despite the calamity they had endured. Dead Sranc encircled the ruin, an enormous halo of carcasses tangled like string, bleached into a vast frieze for the dust settling across them.
Dawning comprehension.
Cries of triumph cascaded across the heights of Golgotterath, swelled into a single, booming roar. As one, the Men of the Ordeal turned to their Most Holy Aspect-Emperor standing high upon the Spearman’s pulpit, their voices broken for incredulity and adoration. Windswept, Anas?rimbor Kellhus raised the gleaming convolutions of the Spear above his head in reply.
The Men of the Ordeal howled in adulation, wept for jubilation.
Many glimpsed the rock plummeting down the length of the High Horn, gasped for incomprehension. The Holy Aspect-Emperor glanced up—
Hurtling granite exploded against unseen convexities—Wards—shattered into a wilting bloom of debris. The Soldiers of the Circumfix cried out.
Some saw the winged horror of the Horde-General flitting down and about, then darting like a sparrow into obscurity. Some saw the Aspect-Emperor slip like a coin from a slashed purse, only to vanish into the oblivion of sorcerous light. Some saw the Spear topple out into the void, trailing a rope attached to some kind of metallic coffer …
A yammering susurrus arose across the great plate of Shigogli, a raw and virulent murmuring. The Soldiers of the Circumfix looked to the packed leagues about Golgotterath—across the pale and rapacious millions. A sound like chattering teeth climbed into the very pith of the sky, the rattle of snakes without number. Then the crazed yowl resumed, lust bound to hatred bound famished frenzy, thread twisted into caterwauling thread …
The Lords of the Ordeal bellowed what commands they could.
The broken silhouette of Golgotterath loomed before the three ailing refugees.
“Get up …” the old Wizard wheezed—as much to himself as the others, for he hacked spittle on his hands and knees. He could scarce hear his own voice for the whine clawing at his ears. “Get up! Hurry!”
A shadow fell across him. He glanced up, saw Mimara towering across the hazed disc of the sun, her hand held out. Esmenet was already pressing herself to her feet, blank-faced and blasted white with chalk. The old Wizard clasped the pregnant girl’s wrist.
The three refugees stood gawking as the aftermath resolved from the dust.
“We should keep moving …” Achamian murmured.
No one so much as twitched.
“Is it possible?” Esmenet said in a flat voice.
Achamian had no wind to reply. He scarce had wind to conceive …
Ajencis famously spoke of the way the soul could make anything a marker of anything else—how all human signs were arbitrary. Even when it came to sorcery, he argued, what mattered were the meanings. But some symbols, Achamian knew, were indistinguishable from their meaning. Some symbols tyrannized, others galvanized, not by virtue of what they meant, but because of what they accomplished.
A sword was such a symbol. As was a shield, or a Circumfix …
The dust settled like sand kicked in a tidal pool, baring details that seemed nude for the brilliance of the sun and the dark contrast of the Shroud rearing beyond. Golgotterath lay exposed before them, like the skull of some mountain-headed beast, half-buried in desolation, only one great antler remaining …