The Shroud encompassed them.
Within heartbeats the skinnies had inundated the arcane hemisphere, and they were plunged into a gloom more terrifying than any they had known—far more so than the mobbings they had survived in K?niüri. The old Wizard sang with weeping abandon, knowing that it was only a matter of time before either his strength gave out or some Chorae-bearing skinny simply leapt into their midst. The semantic incandescence of his conjuring limned every surface—everything from mashing phalluses to the round of Mimara’s belly—in an eerie and indiscriminate blue light. He blasted the lunatic welter, threw them from his Wards as so many sodden leaves. He ignited the meat of them, transformed them into thrashing candles. He inscribed the spaces they occupied with geometries of Gnostic light, and left them twitching and dismembered. And yet more and more surged over the greased and smoking carcasses, threw themselves at his Wards with the same thrashing intensity.
Esmenet had lowered her chin to Mimara’s shoulder, and now rocked to and fro with her daughter, cheek to cheek. Dust clotted the tracks of their tears, painting black trees about eyes clamped against all that was visible.
Drusas Achamian watched them as he sang, saw their terror blunt for realizing, as he did, that it was not such a bad thing …
Dying in the arms of those one loved.
He set aside his song, fell to his knees beside them, gathered them in his embrace. Mimara clutched his hand. Esmenet cupped his grizzled cheek. The Sranc vaulted their smoking kin, flew at his Wards, each misbegotten form stealing an increment of murky light. Blackness engulfed them. Achamian pressed his face against their scalps, closed his eyes, and with the ease of an exhalation, surrendered whatever reserve of regret and resentment he yet possessed … He breathed deep the union of love and resignation.
Wept for gratitude …
For Esmenet. For Mimara.
These two, at least, had believed … had forgiven.
I have toiled long enough.
The Horde howled.
The light, when it came, was brilliant enough to shine through sealed lids. He opened his eyes blinking, threw an arm against the dazzling glare. Squinting, he saw her hanging against the shifting obscurities of the Shroud, a girlish slip clothed only in raiments of blistered, ulcerated skin, singing Gnostic Cants unlike anything he knew.
His beleaguered Wards had been cleared, as had been a great swathe of the raving tumult beyond, almost a ghastly road of sorts, paved in bulbous torsos, jutting limbs …
“Run!” her voice cracked across Creation.
To shout at what you see is to club what you do, to act otherwise. For days he had swung from the Anas?rimbor’s girdle, and even though his impotence was vertiginous for being so complete, he nevertheless found it impossible not to shout. Several times, now, he had thrown himself against the implacable course of the Anas?rimbor’s actions—but never so violently as he did now upon the Vigil.
They lure you! he cried into the silence of his captivity. The Consult beckons you!
Aurang was dead. The Portal had been thrown open.
Likaro was going to pay for this.
The Aspect-Emperor tarried upon the platform’s rim, singing sorceries the Mbimayu sorcerer could not fathom, but supposed were Metagnostic Wards of some kind. The man prepared.
You have won your Argument, Anas?rimbor!
Even though Malowebi knew he possessed no body, some fraction of his soul once again refused to countenance this knowledge. Even now it kicked and clawed at the encapsulating oblivion.
I know you can hear me! Why else bear me upon your hip?
Void yawed all about them, heights and pitches lost to the obscurity of the Shroud. The Horn’s burnished hull gleamed through the gauze, seemed endless for outrunning visibility, something that spanned the sum of Creation.
The Aspect-Emperor stepped before the threshold. It seemed they stared down a pit and not a corridor—into a more profound and horrific ground.
Nooo! Malowebi howled. This is folly! You have to know as much!
An obsidian floor extended mirror-black into the murk. The walls that flanked it for the first several cubits were both stone and square, rising to brace stone lintels, likewise square. But beyond this the interior world was at once golden and turned three quarters, with bulkheads rising at acute and obtuse angles, likening the floors to pitch pooled across the basin of a capsized vessel.
You play number-sticks with Apocalypse! The end of all things!
Then the impossible happened: the Anas?rimbor laid palm and fingers across the Decapitant’s cheek … The captive Schoolman could scarce feel the touch, but it triggered paroxysms of terror and grief still.
“Fear not, Iswazi,” the Holy Aspect-Emperor said—to him. “I am the greater mystery.”
Something flashed between the play of pale gleams down the hall, like a cuttlefish in the deep.
“I walk Conditioned Ground.”
And so was Second Negotiant Malowebi carried reeling into the horror of the Ark.
CHAPTER
SEVENTEEN
The Upright Horn
The more cunning the Lie, the more it exhibits the form of Truth, the more it lays bare the Truth of Truth. So do not fear the Scriptures of other Men!
To drink deep from the Cup of Lies as the Cup of Lies is to grow drunk on Truth.
—44 Epistles, EKYANNUS I
Early Autumn, 20 New Imperial Year (4132, Year-of-the-Tusk), Golgotterath.
Far more souls would perish in the tribal wars subsequent to the Battle of Kiyuth than in the legendary contest itself. Infighting, hunger and squalor would all but consume the People of War. Across the Hallowed Steppe, the old mothers began openly cursing those bearing recent swazond, calling them the Fa’bakilut: those who grow fat on Misfortune.
Then Cnaiür urs Ski?tha had ridden out of the smoke of the Carathay, a lone Utemot encased in scars from cheek to toenail, bearing more swazond than any among the People, past or present. His “Norsirai concubine,” far from blotting his honour, simply added to his mystique. She was a daughter of Lokung, he claimed, and none dared contradict him. The old mothers even began calling her Salma’loku, a name of legendary dread among the People. Rumours rode the winds, of course, tales of scandal and shame, but they impeached the tellers far more than the souls told. The Utemot had been scattered unto the corners of the Holy Steppe. And what was more, this man was so obviously the very incarnation of the Old Honour. A warrior who had reaved at Zirkirta, survived Kiyuth, and had struck out seeking to redeem the People, battling in Outland wars for Outland Kings, bathing in rivers of outland blood …
More importantly, he was the one the memorialists extolled in their tales of the Hated Battle, the solitary chieftain to dare raise his voice against Xunnurit the Accursed. And now he had returned bearing the death rattle of hundreds in his veins, on his skin, and declaring the People were one. Cnaiür urs Ski?tha …