To smother sight is to strangle hope, for direction is the bounty of vision. At points across the ramparts and the breaches lone Swayali witches began to appear, Nuns with their billows bound and meaning flashing from their mouths. But rather than delving into the lunatic fray, they hung behind the bristling ranks of Men. One by one, blinding white pillars appeared between their outstretched arms, lancing up through the smothering locks of the Shroud …
Bars of Heaven anchored the circuit of Golgotterath’s mighty curtain walls, puncturing as much as glaring through the Shroud, throwing shadows of it across its own seething veils, and cutting wedges of visibility into the engulfing blackness, disrobing the heaving multitudes, the endless raving that was the Horde. Bright unto blinding, the incandescence made silhouettes of the Schoolmen, dazzled the eyes and blunted the viciousness of the endless inhuman surge.
And the Men clutched shoulders for wonder.
Dared to believe once again.
“How long have you known?” the nearest and perhaps most hideous figure asked.
They were Men, Malowebi realized. Mutilated Men.
They stood upon their individual stair some three steps from the floor, each garbed in quilted robes of grey silk. Each had recently shaved their scalps, and each was pallid for want of sun. But the similarities ended there—catastrophically so.
The speaker looked as if someone had skinned him in tempestuous seas, so webbed was he with the residue of near-fatal burns. His eyes glared from sockets lidless for whatever fiery maelstrom he had endured. Unable to blink, he pinched them between brow and cheek every few heartbeats, a convulsive flexion, unsettling for its speed.
“Since Dagliash,” the Anas?rimbor said. “But I have suspected this eventuality all along. I assumed Ishu?l would be found once my existence became known. I knew the Consult would assault it with due fury, and that our Garden would succumb, eventually …”
Question after frantic question lurched from a fog of Malowebi’s misapprehension. Who were these Men? How had they come to rule—rule!—the Ark?
And more horrifying still, why did the Anas?rimbor know them?
“How long did it take to purge the Thousand Thousand Halls?” the Aspect-Emperor asked.
“One thousand six-hundred and eleven days,” the second figure replied. He alone appeared unscarred and intact, though his attitude was so remote as to be cruel.
“We could not cope with the Erratics,” the third added. This one bore two great scars on his head: the first a vaginal pit in lieu of his right eye; and the second more subtle, a slash the length of a hand-scythe, rimming the perimeter of his head from crown to throat, as if someone had abandoned an attempt to remove his face.
“That is,” the Aspect-Emperor said, “until they took you captive.”
And it came to Malowebi on a bolt of numbing terror: D?nyain.
These Men were D?nyain …
The Thought-dancers described by Drusas Achamian in his heretical treatise.
“I always knew that some of you would be captured,” the Anas?rimbor explained, “that you would begin, as I began, by pandering to the conceits of your decrepit masters …”
Did that not mean they stood before five powers equal to Anas?rimbor Kellhus?
“I always knew that you would master your captivity, the way D?nyain master all circumstances …”
Curse Likaro! Curse him and his conniving deceit!
“And very soon, conquer the Unholy Consult from within.”
“What do you eat?” Kay?tas asked. “Medicine?”
“Nil’giccas,” Serwa said without sparing him a glance. The powder was as chalk on her tongue, tasted of char and ash, no more. Even still, a tingling suffused her almost immediately …
It occurred to her that she would have her audience with the legendary Nonman King after all.
“What do you intend?” her brother pressed.
She tossed the pouch to the wary Exalt-General.
“To save our Father,” she said, finally matching his gaze. “Our World, Podi.”
In many respects, Serwa was much the same as her sister Theliopa, differing more in proportion than kind. If her intellect had never burned as bright, then neither had her passions entirely guttered. She had always been more their mother’s daughter. Where Thelli could only grasp the intricacies of human concourse in abstract outline, Serwa could feel the visceral tug of things like apprehension and regret …
Love and duty.
“Sister, no. I forbid it.”
As could Kay?tas.
They had always regarded each other as twins, even when their difference in age had yawned between them. Each had always known that the other dwelt in the same wan twilight … the point where caring, hurting, almost mattered.
“Who are you to gauge the compass of my power?” she asked.
His eyes clicked to her weeping skin, the lament and anguish of her nakedness.
“Serwa …”
“I know how to set aside bodily pain.”
Kay?tas … Kay?. He looked so much like Father, and yet he was so much less. It was the curse of the Anas?rimbor, to dwell perpetually overshadowed in one another’s eyes.
“Nevertheless, I forbid it.”
She graced him with a sad smile.
“You know better.”
Saccarees was yelling, berating those who gawked at the vision of the Exalt-Magus rather than keeping a vigilant eye on the Obmaw.
“Any fool can see that you’re dying, Sister.”
“Then what does it matter?”
She could feel him now, Nil’giccas, his ancient vitality kindling her marrow, palpating her tissues.
“Saccarees,” Kay?tas said to the scorched Grandmaster. “You will apprehend the Exalt-Magus should she attempt to enter the Intrinsic Ga—”
“What are you doing?” she cried. “Why do you think they have hidden a Wracu so great as Skuthula here?”
“To guard the Intrinsic Gate,” he replied scowling.
“But against whom?” she asked. “Certainly not Father.”
It seemed their souls merged on the hard look that followed. The Prince-Imperial looked down, the resignation in his eyes as profound as any grief she had witnessed this accursed day. It was always only a matter of time with the two of them, the sharing of unwanted insight.
Apperens Saccarees, however, was a different matter.
“What are you saying?”
For all his gifts, he was no Anas?rimbor.
“The Consult …” she explained. “They know the Great Ordeal stands or falls with its Holy Aspect-Emperor.”
“So this is a ploy?” he asked, wincing for the way his burns punished his frown. “They mean to hold us at bay, while … while …”
The man blanched.
Saccarees, she realized, had never honestly countenanced the possibility his cherished Lord-and-Prophet could fail. In his eyes, they did not so much stand stark upon the abyss as swaddled in the bleeding ink of scripture. Despite all his metaphysical erudition, despite all the lunatic tribulations he had endured, he was but another Believer in the end, committed unto death, assured unto idiocy …
Unlike her brother.