Nemukus Mirshoa and his Kishyati had battled their way deep into the High Cwol ere the Felling of the Canted Horn. They pressed down shattered hallways, cleared reeking storage chambers, long barracks crowded with refuse and offal. All was grunting strain and threshing fury in the murk, notched swords beating down black iron cleavers. The Men knew nothing of what transpired under the sun, for Ursranc packed the gloomy halls, their ferocity waxing more violent with every cubit they surrendered. The contest possessed no clear front. The devastation wrought by the original Ciphrang assault had complicated the labyrinthine interior, linking levels with shattered ceilings and floors, mazing corridors with blasted walls. What was more, they encountered Ursranc of a different breed, more mannish in stature, far less given to frenzied demonstrations, more want to rely on skill and grim determination. These were the dreaded Inversi, palatials armed with swords looted from the crypts and reliquaries of Ishterebinth, decked in iron-scaled hauberks and bearing shields emblazoned with a golden tracery of upside-down flames. More and more the Sons of High Ainon found themselves battling foes as lethal as themselves—even moreso, given the Ursranc’s greater stamina. What had been a steady advance ground into vicious stalemate. Urdr?s? Marsalees, the once-obese Palatine of K?tapileth, renowned for his mighty cudgel, fell to an Ursranc bearing an ensorcelled C?nuroi blade, the famed Pitiril, which sliced through his shield as if it were paper. Grinar Halikimm?, Sacred Hewer, the famed caste-menial champion of the Sranc Pits, was likewise felled by an arcane relic of the ancient C?no-Inchoroi Wars, immolated by Isiram?lis, the eldest of the Six Cinderswords known to be forged by Emilidis.
Death came swirling down.
The High Cwol was given over to screams and slaughter. The Men were driven relentlessly forward by the masses surging behind them, until they found themselves on the masticating front, straining cheek to jowl with the Ursranc, stabbing, grappling, killing and being killed. Ever at the fore, Mirshoa and his Kishyati kinsmen found themselves battling across the bottom of a well that had been smashed through five different floors. Melees of varying intensities knotted each of the floors exposed above, and the Kishyati, ghoulish for the white paint smeared across their faces, endured a continuous rain of projectiles. Mirshoa lost his right ear to an Inversi Captain after a block cast from above robbed him of both his balance and helm. The young man would have perished, had not a second block struck the creature as it lunged for the kill.
Then the floors slapped the bottoms of their boots.
The Inc?-Holoinas had tipped, such was the mass of the Canted Horn. The dead bounced. The living fell. Sheets of masonry sloughed from the ceiling, crashed down the walls. Mirshoa and his brothers scrambled to find their footing, only to be overthrown once again as the Canted Horn crashed across Shigogli. The roof of the well collapsed, a cataract of morticed debris that killed indiscriminately. Wan sunlight filtered down. The Soldiers of the Circumfix cried out for dread and horror, for the presentiment of disaster. The black-armoured Inversi saw only Men in disarray, sweet vulnerability, and with lust larded by hate, they threw themselves upon the dismayed Sons of High Ainon …
Screams and clanking reverberated through the cracked halls.
Suddenly Mirshoa and his kinsmen were battling for their very lives. Even as their brothers on the Oblitus roared in exultation, the Sons of High Ainon found themselves beaten backward throughout the High Cwol.
But they had not been forgotten. Apperens Saccarees, Grandmaster of the Imperial Mandate understood the importance of seizing the Intrinsic Gate. Even as the Ainoni faltered before the fury and weaponry of the Inversi, the first of Seswatha’s Heirs stepped singing through the sunlit aperture, and began floating down the well wreaking sorcerous ruin. Five were lost to Chorae—Mirshoa was himself nearly killed by the plummet of a Schoolman salted to the pith. But at every stage of their descent, the sorcerers blasted and scourged the exposed halls with intricacies of Gnostic light, until they at last they turned their dread regard upon the Ursranc palatials contesting the bottommost floor. “Vengeance!” Mirshoa howled to his kinsmen, who now numbered only in the dozens. The Inversi shrank from his leaping blade, then broke altogether, mewling and shrieking as they bolted. The slaughter was fierce. And among the Ursranc slain by Mirshoa was the fell creature who had struck down Halikimm? and so many more of his countrymen …
Thus did the young caste-noble come to possess the sword Isiram?lis—Hearth-slayer.
Some five Schoolmen pursued the fleeing Ursranc, and Mirshoa and his kinsmen pursued them in turn, plunging into the gloom of a broad, processional corridor, one already strewn with burnt and dismembered dead. The company of young knights whooped in triumph as they ran, crying, “The High Cwol! The High Cwol has fallen!” But their jubilation was almost instantly knocked from them. Without warning, the discharge of sorceries dazzled the throat of the processional before them, slicked the crude masonry with light. Then, abruptly, the five points of eerie illumination they pursued became four. The surviving Sons of Kishyat skidded to a halt, peered apprehensively. Mirshoa glimpsed what seemed a nimil hauberk about an elephantine chest, the portion of a pale leg longer than a man was tall …
Four lights became three.
Now it was the Mandate Schoolmen who raced toward them, fleeing whatever had extinguished the light of their two comrades. “Runnn!” one of them urged the mundane company. To a man they obliged, for what a sorcerer fled, only a fool would dare.
Mirshoa, however, remained.
He could scarce see in the wake of the sorcerers, but he need only desire light … Isiram?lis flared into sudden brilliance, striking his inhuman adversary from the darkness as much as illuminating him, revealing him in all his nightmarish particulars …