“Here …” Kay?tas said, drawing a broadsword—an ensorcelled broadsword—from his girdle and extending the pommel. It was C?nuroi, pre-Tutelage—older than ?merau given the archaic triangularity of the blade and the absence of any hilt. She took it from him, testing the balance and heft while studying the intricacies of its Mark. She glanced back at her brother in wonder: there was no mistaking the craft of the Artisan, Emilidis, the Siqu Father of the Mihtr?lic, the School of Contrivers.
“Isiram?lis …” she murmured, reading the spidery Gilc?nya runes etched across the mirrored surface.
“A Cindersword,” Saccarees said, nodding.
She swept it high overhead, took satisfaction in the razor whisk.
“Truth shines,” Kay?tas said, commending her to whatever future remained with a lingering look.
She blinked at him in the old way, the way she would when making sport of some all-too-human combination of irony and folly. He merely nodded. Clasping the haft of Isiram?lis tight, she turned to the blasted orifice of the Obmaw, stalked the causeway. What cloth of skin she yet possessed tingled for the cool. Tears beaded across the deeper nakedness of her burns. The dead Nonman King flowered through her veins.
Deep in the ravaged shell of the High Cwol, the Sons of Men roared.
Bars of Heaven fixed the wicked stronghold with pillars of scalding white, snatching details from the swamping black. The High Horn towered mountainous, clearly visible for being skinned in a dozen brilliant reflections, the Bars bent to its vast and unnatural frame, skewed gibbous across its impossible bulk. The light glared outward, over the loathsome tracts, salvaging nightmare glimpses from the edges of steaming obscurity, Sranc shoaling, their alabaster skin shocking the gloom, their beauty horrid for the bestial throng, clans stamping upon invisible earth, alternately straining toad-forward or brought about by some pallid tide, howling lust and malice. Here and there seizures marred the ponderous gyre, gibbering multitudes that cohered against the grain of the greater Horde, shattering the spiral tow into clouds, regions that sizzled with furious, white-skinned gesticulation …
Golgotterath became as a raft upon a vicious, churning sea.
And they were not alone: different lights wandered the darkling plain.
The Saik Schoolmen were the first to glimpse them through the inky murk. They were obscure at first, wavering and delicate, ponderous and smeared, bruising more than illuminating the Shroud’s bowel, like the glower of candles through oiled linen. Those Saik within the vast throat of the Canted Horn saw nothing, such was the kaleidoscopic brilliance of their Dragonheads reflected across the reefs of gold that soared about them. Those stationed in the shadow of the hulk’s exterior, however, saw them clearly, exhalations of luminance moving in slow and random concert, like lightning buried in a faraway storm front …
But only for a time.
Velvet silence—though all the World spit and screamed about the Horn.
“We didn’t conquer the Consult …” the one-eyed figure said.
“We subsumed,” the fourth of the figures continued on a voice like bundled reeds. He also possessed a myriad of scars, scars upon scars actually, but was most distinctive for the iron brackets scaffolding his head and shoulders.
“Shauriatis alone raised arms against us,” the fifth figure explained. Like his neighbour, countless scars puckered his visible skin, only smaller and more numerous, as if he had taken many more far less dramatic risks. But something grievous had happened, for nearly two thirds of his lower lip had been sheered away, revealing shining gum and teeth beneath the canopy of his upper lip.
“So Shauriatis alone was undone.”
“The others,” the unscathed one said, “merely found our Cause irresistible …”
“As will you,” the burnt one declared.
D?nyain ruled Golgotterath—D?nyain!
“But this is precisely the issue to be decided,” the Anas?rimbor replied. “One of us possesses the Greater Cause. Consult or Ordeal, one of us stands upon ground belonging to the other. And yet we both proceed on the presumption that we are that ground’s sole possessors.”
Though Malowebi scarcely understood the significance of what was being said, he understood enough to know that a genuine battle was being waged, not a metaphoric one.
“But the simple fact remains,” the unscathed D?nyain said, “that we have scrutinized the Ark.”
“And you have not,” the burnt one concluded.
Where words were almost always dross among Men—the “convoluted costumes of avarice,” as Memgowa called them—here, among D?nyain, they possessed the heft and hardness of iron tools. Bastions could be raised upon one breath and demolished on another for all parties.
There was something miraculous in that … and alarming.
“I concede as much,” the Anas?rimbor said—without the least reluctance.
The unscathed D?nyain raised an arm—a gesture that startled for the strict immobility that preceded it—beckoned to the spaces beyond and behind the Aspect-Emperor. “Aurax!” he called. “Come!”
The Anas?rimbor turned from the waist—to assure nothing untoward had been signalled, Malowebi supposed. The Mbimayu sorcerer’s field of view hitched then rolled to an angle orthogonal to his bearer, so that when the man turned back to the Mutilated, Malowebi found himself facing the golden fin rising from the black floor—looking at his own image among the gold-tinted reflections.
“The Inchoroi have outlived their origins,” the one-eyed monk said.
There he was … Staring out from burlap skin, strung from hair like ink from Anas?rimbor Kellhus’s girdle …
Curse him! Curse Likaro! May all his wives become lepers!
“Where we raised walls against our history,” the wire-headed D?nyain continued. “They rendered theirs irrelevant.”
It throttled the Iswazi mage, staring at what he had become, strangled with vertigo, the intimation of void where his throat and viscera should be. Curse him! Curse his conniving hide! He tore his gaze from the Decapitant, looked into the black and golden world as reflected across gold—the very glint of avarice multiplied into something cloying and vile. The Aspect-Emperor stood erect, his stance wide, his leonine head watery for imperfections in the metal, the long pommel of Enshoiya a slash of ink above his left shoulder, the immaculate white of his vestments refracted into shades of voluminous yellow. The Mutilated receded into the depths of the room before the Anas?rimbor, each more diminutive than the previous.
“Tell him, Aurax.”
The Inchoroi stood upon a dimple in the reflection and so looked both wretched and absurd, its torso hooked into a blade of grass, its claws drawn like melted wax.
“Wheeere?” it rasped upon a seditious moan. “Where is my brotheeeer?”
The melted image advanced a step, and a semblance of Aurang emerged from crazed distortion.
“Tossed upon the Horde,” the Anas?rimbor said.
The thing wheeled to the burnt figure. “Yoooou!” it shrieked. “You gave me your oath!”
But the thing’s defiance had crumbled into mewling servility even before the D?nyain turned to regard it. It scuttled back into its dimple, its image bifurcating and balling into something crustacean.
Thought-dancers! Forming a new Consult!
One that had Inchoroi grovelling for terror …