The Unholy Consult (Aspect-Emperor #4)

“The skin-spy …” Mo?nghus called to his father. “She wanted you to throw the Tribes across the plain?”

“Aye,” Cnaiür urs Skiotha replied, gnawing on his ration of amicut.

“To seize the breaches before the Ordeal could defend them?”

The Scylvendi King-of-Tribes leaned to spit a wayward fragment of bone. He wiped his mouth with a swazond-ribbed forearm, glared at his son with a murderous intensity.

“Aye.”

The young man did not flinch from his scrutiny—and why should he, dwelling as he had beneath the D?nyain’s bloodless gaze?

“Then the People would have been fed to the Horde?”

Cnaiür urs Skiotha spat again, this time for the sake of spitting, then peered at the High Horn’s shadow through ponderous skirts of chalk and ochre.

“Everything,” he said, “will be eaten here.”





CHAPTER

EIGHTEEN


The Golden Room


Nay, the world is not equal in the eyes of the God.





—Scholars 7:16 Tractate

Fall together, land alone.

—Ainoni saying





Early Autumn, 20 New Imperial Year (4132, Year-of-the-Tusk), Golgotterath.

Earth and sky wailed, a chorus so featureless as to sound angelic, so titanic as to become the voice of every Man who dared open his mouth to breathe, let alone howl against it.

Dusk lay watches away. But for some reason the chalk dust of Shigogli, which had been pale as bone upon the ground, blackened as it hung in the Shroud, spinning a pall that had blotted the day and unleashed the night. Dragonheads vomited brilliance both within and beneath the Canted Horn’s immense, metallic husk, fire that seethed gold across wracked heights and feathered the Shrial Knights in endless parade of fading shadows. Nibelene Lightning glared and flickered from points across ?gorrior, illuminating the Sons of the Middle-North in fluttering white. While along the western ramparts, myriad Gnostic Abstractions waxed and smouldered, throwing incandescent blue like paint, bending shadows about the Eumarnan’s booted feet.

Golgotterath had become an island of slaughtering lights.

Inhuman thousands scaled the ramparts at any given time, but the surfaces were too treacherous for the creatures to overwhelm the parapets. Individual Schoolmen roamed the heights, and were quick to visit destruction upon any Sranc threatening to test the defenders. The battle turned on the breaches, on the Men assembled across pitches of gore and debris, and on the sorcerers singing in cracked voices above, wracking the murky throngs with meanings damned by God. It was a battle of violent surges, great waves crashing across breakers of sorcery and iron, the survivors slinking back in thin sheets as the Horde recoiled to surge forward anew. Again and again, the Men of the Ordeal stymied the foul onslaught, crying out the names of Gods and loved ones in voices they could not hear. Again and again, they slumped to knees or staggered against their fellows in the gasping wake.

The logic was simple: those who grew too weary, fell. The ferocity of the Sranc combined with the thrashing density of their bodies, required enduring strength, a tenacity that not all Men, no matter how inveterate, possessed. None other than King Hoga Hogrim died this way, electing to remain at the tumultuous fore with his Men despite his sapped limbs. A hulking creature barrelled into the Believer-King, knocked his greatshield to the side, then clove his thigh to the bone. The nephew of the famous Gothyelk fell gouting blood, shaking uncontrollably as the immediacy of his circumstances drained away. Dismayed faces floated above him for a time, then death came spiralling down …

Bore him wailing to the fire.

Only a minority of the Yimaleti clans carried javelins—and archery was all but unknown to them. But periodically, concatenations of these Sranc came against the breaches, and the Men of the Ordeal found themselves enduring absurd showers of the weapons. As crude as they were, the black, fire-sharpened shafts always managed to murder a select handful through a variety of cruel flukes. This was how King Coithus Narnol was maimed and forced to retire back to the Canal, and how Thane Sosering Rauchurl was felled from the heights of Gwergiruh. He was grinning to his compatriots when the missile dropped from the void of his left, piercing his cheek, breaking his teeth, and pitching him headlong into the frenzied threshing below. Death came spiralling down …

Bore him wondering to the brace of Gilga?l.

The Sorcerers of the Circumfix hung immune for the most part, but they did not escape unscathed. Seven among the most elderly Schoolmen, all hailing from different Schools, simply slumped from the air, undone by their exertions. Along the breaches facing ?gorrior, where the bulk of the Chorae Hoard plundered from Sakarpus had been expended to neuter the ensorcelled walls, more than two dozen Mysunsai were struck from the sky over time. The sheer number of carcasses had raised a second ground upon the ground, one far more grisly, and far more treacherous to stand upon. At some point, the Sranc trapped in the press began hacking their dead cousins into pieces, hurling them remarkable distances, either ineffectually at the Schoolmen punishing them from above, or across the armoured ranks arrayed against them. Soon, torrents of limbs and spinning heads—even organs and roping entrails—rained down upon the Men of the Ordeal. Roiling among themselves, the Sranc had begun hurling themselves. Sheets of slicked meat fell upon the Mysunsai triunes especially, a charnel deluge, and periodically, either by happenstance or for some witless cunning, a Chorae would find itself within the soaring mire …

The brilliant and irascible Hagnar the Elder was felled this way, his leg salted to the bone. As was Parsalates, one of the Mikka Surconsuls, and some twenty others. Points of nothingness pricked the macabre hail, Wards became as fumes, and Schoolmen were tossed into the infernal pit …

Darker and darker the Shroud grew, even though the sun was mere watches past its zenith. The chalk dust blackened, biting eyes and throats, obscuring more and more of the sepulchral tracts, until each Man found himself stranded within a dwindling island of turbulent visibility. And with the encroaching black came a horror and a dismay, a premonition of doom that no heroism or fervour could dispel, that for more and more souls resolved into the breathless tingle of futility that was the certainty of defeat.

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