Among the Quya, Cilc?liccas had guessed the intent of the Grandmaster’s approach and attempted to alert Vippol the Elder, but to no avail. The Madborn wracked the heaving press, screaming, crying the name of his long dead brother. And so it was with many others: Lost to whatever loss that trammelled their memory, they relived battles they had endured thousands of years past: Imogirion, Pir Minningial, Pir Pihal, and others. They hollered the names of the beloved dead, mourned and avenged calamities older than the languages of Men.
As the Whore would have it, the Red Ghoul would be the first to receive the Mysunsai Grandmaster. Given his legendary lust for destruction, S?jaranin had wandered far ahead of his fellows, alternately cackling and sobbing, hanging resplendent in his gown of ensorcelled crimson nimil, Orimuril, the famed “Immaculate Rim,” which the Men of the Three Seas had named the Scarp in fear and envy centuries past. He battered the earth with Viritic Inflationaries, flung Sranc on the back of exploding spheres, gouts of them, flying on arcs that fell mere cubits short of his sandalled feet. He seemed to notice the Schoolmen only when they were upon him, so deep had he fallen into the pit of himself. Frowning like a man just awoken, the Red Ghoul hung peering as the Mysunsai formed about him … then saw the gold-embroidered Compass adorning the chest of Obw? G?swuran …
The Grandmaster’s defensive Analogies, which he had cast only to shelter against mundane missiles, proved no match for the Abstractions of S?jaranin. Spectral stone crumbled into smoke, and Obw? G?swuran fell burning, his body kicking itself into portions about the scything white brilliance of Mimtis Rings.
Death came swirling down … bore his essence to the loins of Hell.
S?jaranin slew another Mysunsai in the astonished heartbeats that followed, felled two more as the remaining ten frantically sang to duel. The surviving eight turned as one upon the raving, crimson-armoured Nonman, wracked him with the Nibelene Lightning that had become their reflex, caged him in a thicket of blinding white threads, then sent him crashing into the raucous throngs below—for he too had cast only the Wards he had needed to turn aside spears.
The Red Ghoul was no more.
Like a mouse in the shadow of a fire-spitting cat, she darted across the carrion earth. Great stones clacked through Skuthula’s outraged roar. Molten sputum sloshed about her and the surrounding ground, mushroomed into whooshing brilliance.
She leapt beyond it.
“Maidenhead is all I smell!” she cried on a gasp. “Could it be yours?”
She clasped ropes, swung into the circus gloom of the second gallery.
Fire flooded after, roiling like a living, seeking thing. Isiram?lis firm in hand, she slipped as a ghost from the incendiary tentacles. The glare yanked a heartbeat of structure and detail from what had been no more than shreds of polish winking in the murk. She found herself on a battered catwalk, racing constellations of lucent orange beads, peering into a world as labyrinthine as it was crude. The skew was such that terraces and walkways had been strewn throughout, some heaped from stone and carcass dirt, others rendered out of wood so rotted in regions as to hang like cobwebs—the extent of all circumscribed by the pitch of the golden ceilings. In some cases, four or even five terraces occupied the length of any given slope, with two or three shrunken floors tucked beneath each. It was as if some savage world had parasitized the gut of a more fundamental and yet contradictory frame—an irretrievable hulk.
“The very ground reeks of cunny!” the magnificent serpent boomed on a croaking laugh.
She ran, skimming the plummet, as close to the atrium as she could manage. The bodies of the Palatials she had lured below burned with bonfire brilliance, etching her nude form in red and pastel orange. She added six to the Count this way … Seventy-four.
“They say ten million died in the Falling,” Skuthula roared, “laying earth such as this throughout our Mother’s womb!”
But even now, more Palatials swarmed across the decrepit network, racing to catch or intercept her.
“Our Most Holy Ark!”
Here—emerging clear enough for her to spy the upside-down flame adorning their shields. There—a flitting stream of shadows in the niggard light below. She ran as if seeking their embrace, ducking or leaping five more whistling Chorae that lanced from points across the void of the Atrium.
She leapt from the planked walk on the edge to one of dirt and stone lower down the Skew, and halted, stood motionless in a false pocket of calm, concealed from the Wrac?, but entirely visible to the upward-welling Ursranc. The vigour that was Nil’giccas lay like pins in her deepest veins, and it seemed she could sense it all, the swords and cleavers wagging on the run, the claws kicking the mire, the rattle of the crest, the ramming bulk shouldering aside putrid air. A bottomless host of telltale signs all closing upon this … one … place …
Conditioned ground.
She saw the Palatials scuttling up from the murk, their Nonmen faces disfigured by grinding malice and lascivious contempt. And somehow, she saw the ponderous crown of the Wrac? rise behind her in their counterfeit faces—the details of his aspect scattered across the myriad manifestations of shock and terror. She watched them skid and tumble to a halt. She clutched Isiram?lis to the cleft between her breasts, for she had seen the Wrac?’s fire in the gold glittering in their eyes.
Was this what it was like for Father?
Seeing behind the head.
The roaring vomit burst about her. She felt it tousle the remnants of her hair, buffet the remnants of her skin. She watched it consume the Ursranc as surely as any other instrument of her will …
The wretches screamed like drowning swine.
Then she was leaping out over the Skew, slipping the iron-clap of Skuthula’s jaws, brushing the ceiling, sailing over the wood and stone welter into the crotch of the gallery. Two of the Inversi she left behind had possessed Chorae …
“And pray tell what,” she cried, laughter lilting across vague armatures of gold, “would a Dragon know of cunny?”
Sixty-seven remained.
“Mog-Pharau,” the Anas?rimbor said.
The name fell hard.
A sorcerous mutter, curious for its cadence, gasped from all points. Light dazzled the image of the teeth-baring D?nyain, transformed his remaining lip into something drawn from a glassmaker’s furnace. The reflections of the Mutilated turned in unison to the darkness …
Malowebi saw it almost at once, emerging black from the black, soundless, a great sarcophagus some nine cubits by four, rendered of ceramic or some strange metal, floating in upon its obsidian reflection …
This was happening now, he realized. Happening!
The gleaming bulk whispered past each of the farthest three Mutilated. The distorted twist that was Aurax whinged at its passage, barked some kind of cough. It loomed monolithic before the Aspect-Emperor for a heartbeat, its inky surface veined and contoured with what seemed the shrunken effigy of some face or great city—and Malowebi squinted for the way the obscuring blackness in the Anas?rimbor’s reflection melded with the thing. But it tipped backward with the same soundless precision, until it was wholly horizontal, as deep as the Aspect-Emperor’s waist for hovering a hand above the floor.
The Carapace … Could it be? Most sources claimed that Chorae had been set into it …