“I will love thee …” it exhaled.
And Malowebi glimpsed a dawning allure in the wretched and piteous face, a promising tenderness. Its strapped frame, which had repelled for the intimation of pallid rot mere moments before, suddenly emanated carnal glory. What had been foul mucosity became slick with the promise of oily congress. Malowebi glimpsed its pendulous member rising turgid across its thigh … and was not repelled.
If anything, the sight seized him, infused him with a curiosity that was at once a yearning, an innocent need to know, and charged with the giddy promise of release …
“Throw open the Portal,” the Anas?rimbor replied.
“I will adore thee!” it gasped. Images of ravishing and being ravished twined beneath his soul’s eye.
“Throw open the Portal, now, or join your Horde below.”
It stood as erect as its phallus, towered over the Aspect-Emperor, grinned as if conceding its inhuman ardour—as if yielding to corporeal desire. Even without hands, Malowebi instinctively made to clutch its member, to attend to its swollen needs.
Then it turned to the Portal, revealing the grievous amputations upon either shoulder …
And the back of Malowebi’s lewd madness was broken.
He felt the heave of phantom viscera, gagged for revulsion. The thing had ensorcelled him, he realized, picked his soul as a lock with some kind of wanton and loathsome glamour.
Malowebi wished a plague of boils upon Likaro and all his kin.
The alien abomination chipped talons across the iron barricade, lowered its elongated skull to mutter something inaudible. Tar oozed from the stumps upon its back, sheeting its backside. Energy pulsed through the great system of magicks—an ethereal heartbeat.
The dark World howled. The iron monolith glided to the left without sound.
The Portal was open.
The Vigil’s height was such that the sun could not be denied entirely. Light filtered into the rectangular maw, revealing the depth of the stone frame, the glimpse of shadowy, skewed golden surfaces beyond, but little else.
The Inc?-Holoinas …
The Ark of Apocalypse!
The Inchoroi slumped to one knee, its obscene life draining from the roots of its dismembered wings. The face in the great-grinning jaws turned from the ink of the entrance’s throat.
“Save me, Anas?rimbor,” it rasped through mucous and reeds. “I can show you … Death … damnation can be conquered!”
“Conquered?” the Holy Aspect-Emperor replied. “You are the terror of Hell made flesh, become terror in this World. Hell has conquered you in every way possible.”
A clicking that was carnal laughter. Milk-grey membranes shuttered eyes of oil and obsidian. “You will bleed,” the monstrosity wheezed, “such will be the intensity … the vigour …”
He could not see his captor, so Malowebi would never know precisely what happened, only that the shrouded World flew as if upon a string, the Vigil and the Horn bobbing on the margins of oblivion, and when all had settled, the Holy Aspect-Emperor stood alone on windswept heights.
He heard a diminishing shriek, an alien wail pursed in a far mightier roar.
Aurang, the ancient and malevolent Horde-General of Mog-Pharau, was no more.
Not like this …
But even as the thought occurred to him, Achamian understood this was precisely the fate Anagk? would apportion him. For his life had been nothing but a long march of perversities …
A death march, as the Whore would have it.
Mimara, he decided, had been deceived by the sheer immensity of Golgotterath—what other explanation could there be? The Horn leaning across the whole of Heaven, an impossible immensity. The gold-fanged ramparts half-again greater than those ringing Momemn. She had looked and, addled by her travail, decided they were closer to the refuge of the Great Ordeal than they in fact were, close enough to reach the nearest of the breaches before the masses of Sranc rising from the south.
Now the Shroud had engulfed the High Horn, and the first Sranc had gained the shattered remains of Corrunc. More followed—more than more! A veritable deluge of skinnies sluiced across the desolation, Sranc more brutish than any he had ever seen, bent on trampling all the Furnace Plain.
The three of them ran despite the manifest futility, cramps knifing their flanks, breathlessness scorching their throats, their limbs numb as loamed clay. They could no longer hear one another save for bellowing directly into hands cupped about ears. And it seemed a horror to the old Wizard, the sight of Mimara, teetering great with child, her cheeks shining for tears, her brow pinched for anguish, her mouth working about soundless cries.
Yet onward they hobbled. The old Wizard marvelled at the stubbornness—the delusional extremity! Anas?rimbor Mimara would joyfully lob the three of them—or four of them?—into the maw of certain death! She would sooner cast him to the Hells than heed him!
Skinnies in their tens of thousands flooded the intervening ground. The Shroud consumed the white spike of the sun, towered before them as a progression of phantom cliffs, ethereal faces as tall as the sky, compounding until the Upright Horn was naught but a shadowy silhouette, the only point of reference remaining. Spared the sun’s afflicting glare, the first of the Sranc spied them. Within heartbeats, the whole of the Horde—or what they could see of it, at least—bore directly toward them.
“Obstinate wench!” Achamian cried to the girl. “You’ve killed us all!”
But he couldn’t even hear himself.
Esmenet was weeping, her face averted from the mad spectacle. Achamian could not look away, staring as if transfixed by the brute fact of their foe, the canine heave, the violent jerk and gesticulation of pallid limbs, the endless progression of white faces, graven beauty imploding into expressions of lunatic lust and fury. The Horde crashed upon them, each raving figure a fragment of hurtling debris, lethal both individually and in monumental sum …
And still they limped onward …
Directly into the maelstrom.
Achamian fairly cast Mimara into Esmenet’s arms, raising his voice in arcane song before the two had even crashed to the dust. Flailing white bodies plastered the limits of his incipient Wards, skinnies crushed against his defenses by the irresistible surge of their wretched kin. Gnashing teeth. Grinding hips. Hacking limbs and weapons. The Blessed Empress of the Three Seas lay on her rump, clutching her riven daughter between her legs, sobbing as she threw her gaze about.