What lay within the Inc?-Holoinas? What perversities of sense and reason?
He thought of the degenerate sins he had committed under the spell of the Meat, the atrocities against human decency and divine writ. He thought of his damnation, shuddered for the force of his revulsion, blinked tears …
A yawing creak issued through the black portal.
The young caste-noble fairly jumped. But in the receding flush of alarm, the old fury was returned to him, the one that barred all fear.
“‘And they quake in their wretched holes!’” he cried, quoting scripture for the want of any words of his own. “‘For they hear Judgment groan upon the planks of Creation!’”
He stood with Isiram?lis held high, watching the blackness between the iron doors … breathing.
He wondered at the ?meri runes engraved into the stone frame.
A monstrous snout materialized from the void, followed by jaws like skiffs and eyes like emeralds afire, beady beneath the horned flanges that passed for brows.
Wrac?.
Mirshoa stood transfixed.
The head rose with the soundless grace of a python, glittering black, revealing a mane of white spines as long as spears, and a serpentine neck as thick as a mastodon’s waist. It towered the height of a masthead, then lunged with the swiftness of a twitch, yanking its head back on a feline hiss. Incinerating fire engulfed the head of the bridge—consumed the witless young caste-noble.
And yet swept about and over Mirshoa as no more than a warm breeze. Stone cracked, popped like the joints of a living thing. The young Kishyati stood as before, crying out for wonder and terror.
The Great Wracu reared anew, the crimson of fury rimming the obsidian shields scaling its neck. The spines rose about its majestic crown, and began clattering as iron rods. It grinned, revealing teeth that wept smoking spittle. Mirshoa had assumed it would roar in outrage, but it spoke instead …
“Aunga?l pauth m?waryesi …”
The Kishyati caste-noble, who could scarce believe he still lived, laughed as an adolescent might after rising unharmed from a mortal tumble. Anagke did favour him!
He could hear the shouts of his kinsmen echoing down the processional behind him.
“Behold righteousness!” he bellowed at the Beast. “Only the wicked burn on this day!”
The malevolent Wracu regarded him by the incandescence of Isiram?lis, rising higher and higher against the vast golden plane, so immense that the young man’s body quailed beneath the skin of his shrill bravado, for where the soul hoped, the body knew …
“For they hear Judgment!” Mirshoa cried in tearful defiance. “Judgment groans upon th—!”
It struck with the eye-blink speed of a cobra, swinging down as a hammer strike, clapping its maw about the hapless boy—for that was all he was in the end. It paused for but a heartbeat, long enough for Mirshoa’s calves and right forearm to flop to the cobble. Then, just as quickly as it had struck, it shrunk back into the void of the Intrinsic Gate—vanished …
Skuthula the Black.
Worm-Tyrant. Wingéd Conflagration. Glutton of Obmaw.
Keeper of the Intrinsic Gate.
Anguish has its ways. It can foreclose on the World, roll a harbouring soul into a little ball about itself. Or it can prick the bubble, peel back the membrane and cast the soul as paint across the spiny back of the Real.
“Run!” the old Wizard cries.
He is frantic for terror; Mimara is not.
“Do something!” her mother screeches over the ascending wail.
The things that should belong deny her, and the things that should deny her now belong. The empire of her body has dissolved, stranding her with limbs like so many provinces tipping into rebellion. And yet everything—the gold-thorned battlements, the climbing stages of the Oblitus, even the alien enormity of the Upright Horn—tingles like extensions of skin … until it seems she is as wide as Creation …
Mimara fleeing from Mimara into Mimara.
“Cast away those blasted Trinkets!” the old man snarls. “Let me save us!”
She sees the Sranc on the plain, twisting like maggots across ground-that-is-meat. But her gaze lolls away, across the intact Horn soaring upward, silken with sunlight. Slowly, gracefully, she draws the Shroud across its gracile immensity, for she is—and always has been—a modest whore.
The beautiful ones always are, you see.
She looks down upon the three desperate souls, as tiny as beetles clicking across the temple floor.
The little Mimara is screaming, hands about her burning, cramping, shrieking womb. There is life within her, and her body chokes and convulses about it.
The greater Mimara communes with God as God.
Malowebi watched the Shroud swallow the void that was light and deliver foetid darkness, gloom. The bottomless vista disappeared, leaving only their small platform stranded upon a vertical plane extending indefinitely in all directions. What relief Malowebi found in the reduction of riot to simple lines was overthrown by his terror. They stood upon the Vigil, he knew, a platform set high upon the eastern face of the Upright Horn—the very stoop, the ancient poets claimed, of the Golden Room …
The innermost sanctum of the Unholy Consult.
At least the gate appeared barred against him. A crude monolith of iron had been set into mirror gold, stamped in rows of script, tall enough to admit an Inchoroi’s high-hooking wings, broad enough to accommodate two men abreast. In terms of brute scale it seemed modest enough; metaphysically, however, Malowebi had scarcely seen anything more monumental. Its Mark boiled with the intimation of potent Wards, sorceries anchored to the iron’s very essence and thrown in fractal webs across the Horn’s curve.
The Inchoroi abomination lay curled unconscious at the Aspect-Emperor’s feet, carrion wings folded like hands in prayer, black veins pulsing beneath the intestinal skin, membranes fluting. The Anas?rimbor stepped over the powerful frame, pinning the wings beneath his right boot. Malowebi dangled above, so close to the body that both wings had been amputated before he even realized the Anas?rimbor had drawn his blade.
The creature awoke on an appalling shriek, snapped from a foetal hunch into a convulsive arch.
The Aspect-Emperor stepped out of reach. Malowebi bounced with his macabre perspective, alternately glimpsing void and the soaring casements of the Horn. Shadow and pallor animated the mirror polish, a murky, watercolour procession. The Inchoroi writhed on the platform, kicked, wailed into the ambient baying of the Horde. The thing seemed to recuperate in stages, finally climbing with puling breaths to kneel before its conqueror. The face embedded in the jaws of the greater skull turned up, slicked in mucous, twitching between boredom and a rictus of anguish …
He was watching Aurang, the Mbimayu Schoolman realized, the Horde-General so reviled by the Ancient Norsirai authors of The Sagas.