This? This was Shauriatis? The legendary Grandmaster of the Mangaecca?
Cet’ingira exploded from the Chair, his face as seamed for fury as any Sranc. Semantic brilliance waxed from the apertures of his face. An apricot glow charted the fork of veins through his cheeks and sockets.
Anas?rimbor Kellhus was utterly unsurprised, already turning, already seizing the Evil Siqu with a Metagnostic whisper that was a hairline of blinding white that leapt to the Nonman like lint to wool in winter, sheering through his Incipient Wards, then cinching his throat, an arcane noose hanging him nude and kicking beneath the wavering, infernal landscapes.
“I am Master here,” the Holy Aspect-Emperor said.
Malowebi whooped into the nowhere imprisoning his soul.
“Yesh …” one of the senile larva cooed from beyond the Mantraitor’s thrashing form.
“Our master …” another Larval croaked, his torso a swallowing throat.
The Anas?rimbor strode past the wheedling heels of Mekeritrig directly to the abomination that was Shauriatis. He fairly leaned over the near edge, so close that Malowebi could see everything: the trails of offal greasing the metal from the base of the chipped cradles to the bevel; the magisterial Inchoroi figures stamped across the gleaming curve; and varieties of skin, this one velvet and lobed like petals, that one harassed into fibrous wisps, this one dimpled with ruby lesions, that one drawn amphibian thin across veins like black string. He understood the nature of the contrivance at once, for the totem-lore of the Iswazi told of many Mbimayu who had sought to save their souls from damnation.
The legendary Shauriatis, the sorcerous architect of the Unholy Consult, did stand before them, his soul tumbling and forever deflected, roosting like a sparrow for but a breath in each wretch before capsizing into another. Such cunning! Dying vessels, denuded souls, gouged of some vital passion, allowing him to alight whole, rather than be drawn and divided across the Outside like other Proxies …
Shauriatis!—not so much the wretches themselves, as the intervals between.
“Tell me, Archidemu,” the Anas?rimbor said. “How long has it been since you were usurped?”
Usurped?
There the image was, the horrid obscenity that were the Larvals, as pitted with grisly detail as anything the Iswazi mage had ever seen, and he watched the Aspect-Emperor pass his haloed hand through them, saw miniatures of the scene sweep without the least substance across the man’s palm and fingers …
Less than smoke. Phantasm.
Malowebi cursed the Great Sage.
Tekne.
“Brother!” the Exalt-Magus cried upon seeing Kay?tas standing with Saccarees and Lord Soter.
“She lives!” one of the numerous Mandate Schoolmen cried. Hundreds of worried faces turned to follow her floating descent. Her passage over the crowded ranks of Ainoni had sparked commotion through the ruined halls of the High Cwol, for her prolonged absence had been noted by all. At some point the Soldiers of the Circumfix had begun falling to their knees and crying out, “Serwa! Serwa Memirr?!”—the antique Ainoni moniker for heroes reborn. She watched, with a kind of harried wonder, as the sorcerers took up the call in turn.
She came to ground immediately before her brother. His look fastened upon the grievous burns that she had taken as her garb. He too had survived some kind of fiery assault, but only his beard and crimson Kidruhil surcoat appeared to have suffered.
“Serwa—” he began.
“We have no time,” she interrupted. “I saw Father upon the Vigil.”
A heartbeat of passionless scrutiny.
“So soon?”
“We need to storm the Ark now!”
“Easily said,” Kay?tas said scowling. “A Wracu guards the threshold.”
“Then kill it!” she cried.
“Skuthula,” Saccarees croaked on a ragged breath. He too sported glistening burns, though nowhere near so severe as her own. “Skuthula the Black defends the Intrinsic Gate …”
She looked to the Mandate Grandmaster for a moment, then back to her brother. The legendary Black Worm had very nearly killed them, she realized. She turned to the battered maw of the Intrinsic Gate, and peering with her prodigious arcane sight, sensed Chorae … a faint constellation of voids hanging in spaces unseen.
“Father …” she said, thoughts racing.
A grave nod from her elder brother. “For the nonce, he confronts the Unholy Consult alone.”
The Aspect-Emperor strode into the visible reality of the Larvals, waded through the gold-gleaming intricacy of the floating shield, paused in the very centre of the wretches. The image hung impossibly static, with each of the grotesqueries caught upon some infirm expression.
“Reveal yourselves!” the Anas?rimbor cried out to the blackness.
Despite his turmoil, Malowebi could only marvel at the substance of the mirage, which was nothing at all, and yet somehow duped the eye into seeing onerous matter. Drool hung like ice, from the chin of the nearest, reflecting a past stage of the Inverse Fire on a molten thread.
“Set aside your vain ornaments!” the Anas?rimbor boomed into the metallic gloom.
As if in cryptic reply, the Larvals winked out of existence.
What was happening? Who did he think he was calling?
Aurang had been cast to its death. Aurax cowered against the Chair-of-Hooks, clinging to its knees, keening in terror, riven in the manner of dogs beaten unto madness. And the sounds of strangulation meant that Mekeritrig still hung kicking behind them …
Shauriatis?
“Cease this pantomime!” the Anas?rimbor cried.
Had the Consult indeed succumbed to the toll of ages? Grown so decrepit as this?
The man whirled to his right without warning, tossing Malowebi’s field of view on a precipitous arc. The Aspect-Emperor strode from the oily immediacy of the light, slowed to a pause beside a rising fin of golden metal: some kind of partition the ancient renovators had raised the obsidian floor around, rather than remove.
The gloom defeated Malowebi at first. One would think hanging Hell from the ceiling would afford better lighting! But the glints and contrasts slowly morphed into structure and detail the longer he peered. The mirror polish of the floors extended into the jaundiced murk, ending at a curved golden wall. Six equidistantly spaced shafts punctuated the intersection of the tipped floor and the suspended wall—corridors become stairways. Six sets of obsidian steps rose from the black polish to meet them, devoid of handrails or any other ornamentation.
Five forms descended them, moulting shadows step by relentless step … horrifying the Mbimayu Schoolman by stages.
Led by the King-of-Tribes and his girl-skinned son, a file of Scylvendi warriors on horseback finned the gravel heights of the Occlusion. The Umbilicus burned as a gutted ulcer amid the fields of smoking char below. The Horde enveloped Golgotterath in vast tentacular masses beyond, concealing all in chalk obscurity in its wake, lest anyone witness the inevitable atrocities committed.