The Most Violent of all Men.
Some said he seized the Steppe in a single day, and though this was not at all the case, it was very nearly true, for none who resisted him possessed a fraction of his will, let alone his cunning or prestige. In the span of a single furious summer he crushed all who found advantage in fratricide, murdering only those who needed to be murdered. The blood of the People was too sacred, he said, to be squandered. He apportioned the widows to the mightiest, enslaved all who were barren. A tempest was upon them, he claimed, and the People would need all her Sons.
How the old mothers had crowed. They would weep for the privilege living so long to see his Coming. They would stoop to earth before him, clawing the grasses, baring the soil to his feet, so they might be one, the Steppe and the man they had called Wrenc?x …
Redeemer.
A savage reflection of his sworn foe.
The soul, like the body, knows how to cringe and huddle, how to shelter itself within itself according to what is most tender or precious. And as with the body, it is the face that is always buried deepest. So Anas?rimbor Esmenet held her free arm over her face as she skidded and tripped, hauling her daughter. Her inability to witness had become the inability to expose, so ghastly had her world become.
Carcasses … burnt and eviscerated, mangled and amputated, a wan and beautiful vacancy in their faces, eyes limpid and dark, pools the size of pennies, gazing into mudded ground or scissored flesh or out across the blank face of Creation.
Carcasses … twitching like fish spilled across the docks.
And there, just beyond the riddled Wards, the surge of endless thousands from all directions, howling without sound, wagging weapons, then perishing in incandescent upheavals, becoming silhouettes within blooms of molten brilliance, slumping or flying apart.
And she picked her footing and hauled, picked her footing and hauled. She was a mother, and her daughter was all that mattered.
The daughter, that is, she dragged over carcasses. The daughter above, she failed to recognize.
She picked her footing, her sandalled feet sometimes sinking to the knee, and heaved her anguished daughter forward, always forward.
Until a treacherous fraction whispered, I know these beasts …
For she had been fending them the entirety of her life, their hunger as bestial as their judgment … Things naked and twitching.
She let slip Mimara’s arm to cast both arms across her face, only to lose her footing upon the macabre tangle. If she cried out no one heard it. She fell into the pockets of slick nudity, flailed at the wet skin, and at long last began kicking her dread and confusion.
You remember this …
The shriek was deafening.
Golgotterath became an island in a threshing inland sea.
The Horde crashed upon the western approaches, the greater part hying south, where it careened into the ruin of the Canted Horn, and was slowed to a trickle by the need to funnel through the gold-ribbed devastation or to circumnavigate it altogether. More and more of the clans hied to the north as a result, until the wicked stronghold—and the Great Ordeal within it—was engulfed in its entirety.
The long-suffering Soldiers of the Circumfix besieged and were themselves besieged. Everyone save the Sons of High Ainon were either called to the roiling perimeters, or assembled in reserve, lest any of their brothers falter. The last of the towers were cleared of Ursranc and manned. Shield walls were raised about the breaches, phalanxes arrayed dozens of Men deep in many cases.
The Knights-of-the-Tusk defended the southernmost breach, the gullet of the Canted Horn’s ruin. A vast, impossibly intact section of cylinder lay cracked upon the cliffs, overlooking the mountainous spine of shattered gold—or what could be seen of it through the Shroud. Draped in iron-mail, their Tusk-and-Circumfix shields interlocked, the Knights stood but a pace back from the edge, spearing and stabbing the endless upswell of inhuman faces rising from the lip. The interior of the section lay stacked in utter ruin behind them. Unbeknownst to them, however, the impact had crevassed the scarps below, producing defiles beneath the ruined segment, which otherwise lay braced against bowed and cracked curtain walls. Were it not for the prudence of their Grandmaster, who had stationed pickets through the cavernous ruin to guard against just such a contingency, the Shrial Knights would have been doomed. As it was, these pickets were quickly overrun, but a dozen survivors managed to gather across the lip of a shelf more than a hundred and fifty cubits above and behind where Lord Ussiliar had deployed, screaming, waving their arms, throwing debris, yet unable to gain the attention of any of their brothers in the titanic din. It was only when they began throwing themselves, leaping to their deaths, that Lord ?ssiliar at last saw them and fathomed the threat. Using tap-signals to communicate, the rear ranks were turned about so that the whole could form a tortoise thousands strong. An avalanche of missiles and debris crashed down across the carapace. Sranc surged from the gutted hollows, gushed in gesticulating streams. The Knights-of-the-Tusk knelt beneath their impromptu bulwark, propping their shields with their shoulders and their broadswords, and stabbed at the hacking clamour upon them with their Cepaloran long-knives. But shields and arms were broken, and more and more of the raving creatures cracked through, creating inlets and puddles of pitched melee. Men screamed unheard in the hunched and closeted gloom. Many muttered what they believed were their final curses and prayers, until they glimpsed the play of many-coloured lights between the joists of their shields. The Imperial Saik, once their most hated rivals, had saved them. Forsaking the edge, the Knights-of-the-Tusk fought their way into the ruin, deeper into the mountainous segment, gawking as the Schoolmen transformed the floor of the great hoop into a fiery cauldron behind them.
The Judging Eye comes to her knees amid the char and wet skin—looks up …
Sees a slender Ciphrang hanging as high as the future, showering the earth with death—a witch, wet with the fires of damnation, burns heaped upon her burns.
It turns … sees an old woman who beams angelic grace and an old man who wheezes fire, a thrice-damned cinder.
It glances out … sees the Sranc, though they are scarce more than apparitions sketched in coal, falling as black hair in the polluted radiance of the witch’s craft.
Then, at so very long last, it looks to her belly …
And is struck blind.