A Nonman Erratic, at least two cubits taller than a Bashrag, draped in great skirts of scintillant nimil, wearing a helm like a fuller’s basin, and possessing hands that could dandle a man like toddler. The Cindersword’s sudden glare dazzled the giant, allowing Mirshoa to easily sidestep the swooping anvil that was his cudgel. He whirled around as the iron carried the Ishroi’s swing, then leapt about the great frame, plunging his blade into the monstrous Erratic’s face. The point chipped across cheekbone, slipped into the eye-socket. The giant’s momentum carried him crashing forward, yanking Firebrand from Mirshoa’s hand.
Mirshoa raised himself winded from the floor, peered for utter blackness. He stumbled into the Cindersword across the uneven flagstones. At his touch the reflection of flames leapt brilliant across its length. Holding it as a torch before him, he continued alone down the carcass-strewn corridor, stalking the Intrinsic Gate.
Malowebi was no stranger to battle, unlike that craven Likaro. He understood its spasmodic rhythms, the tumble of complacency into panic, the passage of hacking violence into bleeding lull and then back again. The “Drunken Father,” Memgowa had famously called it, given the petty caprice of its punishments and rewards.
But this …
He would have babbled in idiot horror, were it not for the absurdity. He would have loosed his bowel had he possessed one.
One instant, he was watching one of Golgotterath’s Horns drop as though in water, unravel in cataclysmic ruin across leagues of thronging Sranc. The next he was dancing on an arc from the Anas?rimbor’s hip, toppling from a plummet, the stone-regimented earth swinging about his disorder, death flying upward—
Only to find himself plummeting from the absolute vault of the sky, so high that the whole the Occlusion could be glimpsed …
Falling, utterly helpless as the head that was his vessel floated and lolled. He glimpsed the other Decapitant, saw scaled cheeks and a line of iron horns jutting from black hair, orange eyes that could have been as dead or alive as his own. And he glimpsed the Aspect-Emperor, plaited beard climbing his cheeks, his mouth a furnace, his expression impossibly serene.
Falling and falling, until he felt a bubble, a soul tethered by a single infernal hair—
Only to be yanked to a violent standstill, his gaze wagging as he and the other Decapitant bounced like bangles from the Anas?rimbor’s waist, seeing only the obscurities of the Shroud—
Swinging about on his captor’s sudden whirl, his soaring field of vision dazzled by Gnostic geometries, lines sketched with the precision of compass and rule, inked with the brilliance of naked sunlight.
A winged shadow sparked through the weir—
Then they were plummeting from on high once again, the Shroud splayed like a cancerous smut across the breast of the World—
Only to slip through yet another impossible threshold and emerge in the chalk and ochre pall once again, this time mere lengths above a winged monstrosity, a creature with skin like spit hanging in water …
Inchoroi … Malowebi realized in horror.
And the Anas?rimbor hunted it.
The Mbimayu sorcerer had witnessed a pageant of legends since finding his soul captive, and as numb as he had become, this one pricked like no other …
There was no more doubting the intent of Anas?rimbor Kellhus.
The alien hung above the roiling multitudes, rising and falling with every beat of its ragged wings, its gaze twitching from point to point with anxious alacrity. Only the Aspect-Emperor’s Cant alerted the hideous creature to their presence. The uproar was such that only sorcery could be heard, intonations that travelled angles sideways to the Real. The thing whirled as if upon a wire. At first, Malowebi thought the creature blind, for the sockets upon the great, oblong skull were packed with bloodless flesh. Then he saw the misbegotten face cramped into the skull’s maw, the glitter of black eyes—suddenly glaring bright with semantic intent …
Perhaps the thing sought to strike, or perhaps to simply reinforce its Wards—Malowebi would never know. He had recognized little of the sorcery he had witnessed this day. The creature was too late either way. Threads of blue-white brilliance leapt from the aether, lines that extended across arcs, winding about unseen axes, forming spirals that etched, with greater and greater complexity, a sphere about the Inchoroi and its Gnostic Wards. Astonished, the Mbimayu sorcerer saw the Inchoroi begin to revolve …
It was as if space itself had been decapitated, snipped into a polyp of emptiness, something the Aspect-Emperor could spin like a top—and so overcome his foe without tearing a single Ward asunder.
The revolutions accelerated, turning became whipping, until the Inchoroi became little more than a shadowy blur within a sphere of pulsing, reticulate light, until its limbs and wings were pulled outwards in a grim parody of the Circumfix, their sockets yanked along infinite lines of flight.
The Anas?rimbor strode toward the uncanny spectacle, then, miraculously, into it, breaching the sphere, somehow seizing the blur, plucking it into grotesque immobility—
Tossing the Inchoroi senseless to a golden platform beneath their feet.
All was burnished brilliance, soaring planes of gold mirroring the sun. Heartbeats passed before Malowebi realized precisely where they stood.
No …
The Shroud engulfed the High Horn.
Sikswar? Marag?l, the Far Antique Sohonc scribes of ?merau had called it, distorting the name given to them by their Siqu teachers. The Obmaw.
The dread Intrinsic Gate, the terrestrial threshold of the Inc?-Holoinas.
Mirshoa strode into a great chamber, drawn forward by the reflection of his own light across what turned out to be the Ark’s golden hull. A great chasm, some fifty cubits wide, lay between it and the crude-cobbled floors. He halted before setting foot on the bridge—black stone girdered with gold—that spanned it, and so preserved his life from the Wards coiled as springs within it.
The unearthly metal of the High Horn’s shell soared high and low, outrunning the ceiling above and the light below. But where the golden surface followed curves smooth as juvenile skin elsewhere, here it had been buckled and breached. A rent as long as any of the Scarlet Spires were tall scored the hull on an angle. Black masonry, blocks as cyclopean as any in Golgotterath, sealed the gash in its entirety, crude compared to the immortal polish of the hull.
The Intrinsic Gate lay in the centre of this stonework …
Open.
The reek was palpable for being so raw, so alien, a putrescence that only his stomach, it seemed, could smell. The Kishyati noble caught his mouth and coughed, stood peering into the pitch-black maw, his jubilation bleeding into horror. The resolutions of young men are mercurial things, abstract for want of hard experience, and thus as weightless as any whim or fancy. He had charged the High Cwol …for what? To inspire his brothers. To discharge his sacred duty. To save his miscreant soul …
And yes, to be first.
The first to lay eyes upon the Intrinsic Gate.
The first to violate the Ark.
The prospect of consequences had not occurred to him—for like many young men he instinctively understood the way acting made irrevocable, how simple doing could throw a man beyond the pale of cowardice, strand him with courage and glory as his only companions.
And now he stood stranded … shieldless, bearing a magical sword, and wracked with fear and indecision.