“But we do not smell your maidenhead …”
Not one of the creatures had the least inkling of her presence, at least at first. She ran among them with the ease of a child popping bubbles. Isiram?lis leapt in acrobatic counterpoint. The Ursranc merely grunted or screamed, toppled to ground pawing mortal wounds. She had killed five before coming upon the lone Chorae bearer. He died every bit as witless, but his death throes summoned the others, who came rushing at once ridiculous and dangerous for the way they hacked blindly. With nothing left to hunt, she simply ran back the way she had come, chased by a riotous, caterwauling band …
“Are you a wife,” the mighty Wracu wheezed, “or are you a whore?”
Back out to the luminance shining through the ruined Obmaw—where she crouched for but a heartbeat, long enough to burn her slender image in the eyes of all those who would hunt her. She could feel the raising of Chorae across the galleries opposite, the aiming. She could hear the whisk of the Dragon’s horned crown, sense the shiver of his bulk. She could see the Inversi erupting from the gallery she had just fled, Nonman faces pinching in outrage …
She set herself, poised for the leap that would see her thread the Chorae and their intersecting trajectories.
“I am!” she cried with shrill calculation. “A witch!”
Fire. Fire boiled across everything about her, making glass of dirt, igniting fragments of bone, and immolating the company of leaping Palatials.
Hitherto she would have to contend with the light of burning bodies.
The count was now Eighty-seven.
He could remember her well, the Sawdilli whore he and Likaro had shared as youths. Ware that jackal! she once warned him. For he will be your doom!
Ferocious words, spoken with a weariness indistinguishable from wisdom. Even still, Malowebi doubted she had quite envisaged this.
Headless. Hostage to the Unholy Consult—or rather, the D?nyain terror that had consumed them.
Nothing less than humanity lay in the palm of their disputation, the sum of all love and toil. Arguments like gears and wheels, observations piling upon observations, assessed, not according to the jealousies and anxieties of the speaker, but in compliance with what was—no matter how it contradicted what was holy …
“Do you see, Brother? Logos is Tekne.”
The danger of comprehension was one that Second Negotiant Malowebi knew all too well having witnessed Likaro steer their addled royal cousin through decision after decision. To grasp was to be moved. To understand was to linger upon the threshold of belief …
“Do you see our Cause?”
He could feel it even now, mulling the possibility that the True and the Sacred were not the same. How Ajencis would have gloated and crowed!
“Damnation is the impediment …”
But as much as his Intellect balked, Malowebi’s Heart foundered upon what seemed an even more profound realization: These were not Men.
“The obstacle.”
As the Inchoroi were versions of the Sranc, bred to believe as they were wrought, so too were these Thought-dancers—these D?nyain—bred to the union of conquest and comprehension.
“The World must be Shut, Brother.”
To attain their enigmatic Absolute …
“The Will of the Ark must be realized.”
To become self-moving souls.
That poor wretch Drusas Achamian had said as much! All this time the Court had puzzled over the Aspect-Emperor, trying, again and again, to extract some kind of reason from his perplexing actions, attributing, again and again, crude motives belonging to their own souls. Had a demon possessed him? Was he the “Kucifra” that Fanayal and that Yatwerian monster had claimed? Not once had they considered the possibility that he embodied a principle, that he, like the Sranc, simply executed an imperative stamped into his soul’s foundation.
The eradication of everything other …
“The circuit of souls must be breached,” the teeth-baring D?nyain said, his miniature visage absurd for his solitary lip. “Mankind must be hunted to the edge of extinction.”
Mad, mad sausages! The Mbimayu Schoolman reeled, not so much because anything so insane could be conceived, but because anything so insane could be true. By far the greater terror was knowing the Anas?rimbor could be convinced—not by cunning, but by reason!
Could it be so desperate as this? Had delusion always been the bastion of Mankind—ignorance?
How heartbroken poor Zabwiri would have been …
“And this is why you woo me,” the Anas?rimbor’s reflection said. Heartbroken and amused.
“Yes,” the burnt D?nyain acknowledged, his webbed skin alarming even reflected in small. “To resurrect the No-God.”
The choral wail dimmed into something less than deafening.
Those Longbeards upon the ramparts dared the slots between the gold-fanged battlements, gazing out, while those arrayed about the breach, cried out for an unexpected respite. The tens of thousands of Sranc massed about ruined Domathuz had fallen silent. The Quya floated out from the steaming occlusions, a ragged line punctuated by semantic construct and corresponding explosions of terrestrial brilliance. The Mysunsai Triunes, meanwhile, hung upon their stations, their billows coiling like ink in water, their Nibelene Lightning whisking life from the ground with stark light. And the Sranc roiled like a vast school of fish between their arcane lines, darting both to and from the monolithic black walls, packed so thick that even the most anaemic Cants worked vivid slaughter. Despite the sorcerous sheen of the cleavers, it was butcher’s work all the same.
The Sons of Ce Tydonn howled in unison—a cry that they could hear. They began clapping axes and broadswords upon their raised shields.
Obw? G?swuran stepped forward, led his Triune toward the Ishterebinthi, believing it his prerogative and obligation. The Triunes stationed adjacent moved to accompany him. A vestment of lead-grey felt anchored the complexity of the Grandmaster’s billows, bearing the tripartite symbol of his School in iridescent gold embroidery: the Bent Scroll of the Oaranat above the Bow-and-Quill of the Nilitar between the Compass of the Mikka. Some fifteen of his Schoolmen strode the empty heights on either flank, many of them likewise adorned.