“And when the soul at last yielded its secrets to their scrutiny …”
And there he was, a beehive head slung from the Aspect-Emperor’s imperial reflection. How? How had he found himself in such wretched straits?
“They discovered their entire race damned.”
Curse Likaro!
About the ruins of Domathuz, the Bars’ brilliance threw the shadows of Men across the soulless thrash, toiling shadows, hacking and spearing, hunched shoulder to shield. Again and again they heaved the Sranc back, gore effigies more than Men, locks pasted about their cheeks, beards sodden about gasping mouths, eyes darting, caged by urgency, even panic. Again and again, the Sranc rushed heedless into the rakes of Nibelene sorcery, surged over the heaps and swales of charred dead, threw themselves upon the beleaguered Norsirai, slobbering, crazed and innumerable, narrow-shouldered frames hewn from pale wax, eyes shining like black olives in oil, their assault as much a rapine obscenity as a wailing fury. Soundless clatter. Soundless grunts and howls. Again and again, the creatures slumped or spun to the tangle beneath their horned feet, their pelvises counting out their final breaths.
It was here the wandering lights glimpsed by the Imperial Saik to the west reappeared. The Mysunsai Grandmaster himself, fierce Obw? G?swuran, would be among the first to spy the arrhythmic glow, flashes of dimension cutting hollows into the belly of the Shroud. He stood at the fore of ruined Domathuz, both where the Sons of Ce Tydonn were most sorely pressed and where the greatest number of his fellow Schoolmen had been felled by Chorae. He doubted his eyes at first, but a glance at his triunaries assured him the phantasms were very real.
Any fool could see the Mark. The lights multiplied in number and intensity, pocking the murk with swatches of detail, cavern glimpses of the Horde, regions shivering like countless maggots in ink …
Sorcerers … Dozens of them by the pyrotechnic density and intricacy of the approaching lights.
Obscure smouldering became a hazy glow, which soon waxed into Gnostic brilliance—or so the Grandmaster initially thought. And then, one by one, they emerged from the roiling plumes, walking some twenty cubits above the tortured plain, some naked for madness, others gowned in archaic and voluminous robes, the mouths and sockets of all shining with arcane brilliance as they blasted and wracked the raucous tracts below.
“Ishterebinth!” G?swuran’s voice cracked on arcane thunder. “Ishterebinth joins the Great Ordeal!”
The Quya advanced in a haphazard arc, drawing curtains of scintillant destruction across the far-flung heave. Mightiest among them were Vippol the Elder, Far Antique Siqu to Atrithau and the Sons of E?mnor. And Cilc?liccas, another true son of Ishterebinth—and among the Lastborn, so in possession of his faculties. It was he who struck down the fell Dragon of Knives, Murathaur the Silver, during the Investiture. And there was the notorious S?jaranin, an Ishroi of High Siol, who the ancient chroniclers had called Bloodless for the extremity of his pallor, and who had once wandered the nations of Men as the Red Ghoul, the Vizier to mortal Kings ere he became Erratic, and sought the pardon of Nil’giccas, King of the Last Mansion. He alone had some connection to the Mysunsai, for his Near Antique predations had motivated the founding of the Mikka Council, and his methods, though the Mysunsai knew it not, had inspired their mercenary mission. It was he who had first demanded a philter of blood from his patrons, holding it as hostage until remuneration was received—the selfsame practice of the Mysunsai. And it was his moniker that had inspired Men to refer to all Nonmen as ghouls, eaters of the dead.
None of the souls watching recognized any among the Quya, whose deeds were older than old. They saw only C?n?roi, the False Men of the Tusk, beings whose might and beauty shamed, and whose faces could not be distinguished from Sranc. Ghouls. Even still, the sheer glory of the display moved to wonder all those not embroiled in the squalor of pitched battle. These were no depraved Erratics such as those they first encountered, bent upon extracting shreds of torment they might remember. These were the last of the Intact, decked in ancient glory! The legendary wrath of the Quya had been roused!
The Nonmen of Ishterebinth had hearkened to the call of their Holy Aspect-Emperor!
Their songs flashing from their skulls, they sailed over the apoplectic fields assuming the antique posture, chest forward and arms back, as if pulled by their hearts through water. At the penultimate moment they would snap their arms forward, invert their pose as if catapulting their Abstractions. And Sranc died the way they once had died, when they were young and the obscenity of their Derivation lay fresh as atrocity. Parabolas of light whipped them into slop. Radiant combs ignited them as candles. And they shrieked as they had once shrieked, yowled at the floating spectres who were there fathers, their upward-turned faces imploding like silk clenched in fists, seeing and hating—as Men themselves hated—the existence of a more perfect rule.
But where abjection imposes uniformity, mastery affords diversity. Some thirty-three Quya advanced upon the breach, and for all the uncanny similarity of their features no two shared the same expression. Each was riven, be it by murderous cold, wailing grief, or convulsive laughter. Even the Intact displayed some besotted rictus, for the many Quya held that battle was Ri, beyond all law and restraint. Hunched above the brilliance of their Theorems, they wept and cackled, screamed and calculated, punished the white-roiling tracts beneath them.
Obw? G?swuran possessed the bravery of the thoughtless, famous sort, even more than was common among Men of his dour and domineering ilk. Where others wandered the labyrinth, he unerringly strode the golden path, turning, choosing, and stepping out of what he necessarily saw as necessity.
He was far quicker to perceive slight than to recognize peril.
The howl and clank of the Ursranc Palatials reverberated through the metallic void.
“Many times,” the great and terrible Skuthula croaked, “have we supped upon the virgin daughters of Man…”
Anas?rimbor Serwa whipped through the black, vaulting over the rubbish and debris revealed in the last guttering wicks of light, hearing the scrape and clap of some hundred or more Inversi spread across the very impenetrable gloom she hurtled into. The lowermost gallery was scarce more than a cave given the skew of the floors relative to the ground, which was gullied where it verged upon the canted original floors. The ceiling declined in parallel, leaving little more than a slot exposed to the great atrium where the ancient Wracu stomped and reared.