The Madborn finally turned to his Intact kinsmen.
And so was one disaster averted even as another, greater catastrophe took root. Facing the prospect of sorcerous combat, all the Mysunsai about Domathuz had ceased scourging the roiling plain. Pitched melee churned the ranks across the spangled entirety of the breach. For the first time, the Sons of Ce Tydonn bore the hacking, thrashing brunt of the Horde entire. They had been trained for this, endlessly drilled, and they had endured such assaults previously, but the Sranc they faced were of a fiercer, more sturdy breed. They fell upon the Longbeards as rabid apes, stabbing, flailing as if afire. The shield wall dissolved into stabbing, grappling desperation. And so did the price of evil old Domathuz climb. Men fell, so quickly that the commanding Thanes began spanking the helms of whole companies, commanding them to advance.
But the Sons of Ce Tydonn did not break. And how could they, with the stacked glory of their nation packing the breach behind them? The Nangaels suffered the worst, for they held the foremost swale of debris beneath the sky Obw? G?swuran had occupied and then abandoned. Even when the Mysunsai resumed ransacking the plain with their arthritic skeins of light, the Nangaels remained exposed to the undiluted violence of the Horde. Death scraped at them as iron against coal, and even though they did not break—could not break—protracted loss sucked the marrow from their bones, afflicted them with the grim assurance of death no matter what outcome claimed the field.
Their Longbeard cousins, Canutishmen, were the first to begin pointing, perplexed as to what they were seeing. Buried in the agitated heave some hundred paces beyond the Nangael’s roiling position, out where endless white faces bayed and innumerable cleavers and clubs shivered like insect shadows, Sranc had begun … flying?
Or was it dropping?
From all points of the compass they rushed inward, as if assailing something in their midst, something that flung them airwards even as they hacked down, pitching them on a line that ran perfectly parallel to the plain, accelerating for more than a hundred paces. The scene baffled the eyes: a terrestrial nucleus of Sranc in their hundreds continually imploding about a point that hurled each of them above and out, as if down the face of a cliff. Scrabbling white figures plummeted in all directions as if over some kind of sorcerous edge, at last whipping with neck-breaking effect into the radial masses …
And it moved…
“Emilidis, the Accursed Smith, was cunny, and we knew him!”
The Dragon’s retch had sparked an inferno, for the wood was little more than tinder. Sealed in the bowel of the Ark, the ramshackle network of posts and platforms and catwalks had never seen moisture, aside from mould and urine, perhaps. But as quickly as the flame sprinted from point to point, the Exalt-Magus out-distanced it with ease, her feet slapping through the septic mire in the trough of the gallery.
“The tender wheeze of his meat!” the magnificent beast roared. “The brittle temper of his bones! We devoured the maker of your little sword!”
Her drumming feet kicked offal into a spray, cracked open fumes that would have overcome any other man. But she slipped through it all as though untouched—indeed, as something untouchable.
“Yesss …”
Never had her task been so clear.
“We …”
“Like …”
“Cunny …”
Despite her gifts, she had always fended clutter, always battled to keep pace with the World’s frenetic surge. Always and everywhere, she had been hemmed by things obstinate and mercurial, trapped within the urgent cage of what was here and what was now—forever thrown back upon herself by what was other.
“And so Skuthula woos Skuthula!” she cried, pitching her laughter to chime through the crackling roar.
Nothing could touch her simply because she was everything.
The white-glowing gash of the Obmaw. The mounded carcass earth. The Great Atrium, ascending on the Skew to fathomless heights, louvered by countless floors. The Ursranc Palatials clustering about the rim of the lowermost galleries, yammering and gesticulating, a thousand squints hungry for her merest sign …
And of course the Dragon.
“Insolent whore! We shall see what songs you sing when I pluck your legs from your hips!”
“You would not like my songs, dirtsnake!”
She backtracked the instant of her call, began leaping up the Skew, toward the whooshing bowers of the fire. She glimpsed a score of Ursranc shrieking and puling as they ran ablaze. Holding Isiram?lis tight, she plunged into the hairy brilliance, climbed timbers skinned in coals.
“A witch?” Skuthula croaked in saurian incredulity. “Of all the might the realms of Men have assembled, they send a scrag witch to test our might?”
The flame fell like wetted rose petals from her skin. The soot stained her, but the smoke was toothless, unable to bite her eyes or breath no matter how viscous the acrid swirl. In heartbeats, she emerged where she had vanished, standing upon the Great Atrium’s rim hundreds of paces from her adversaries’ expectation, her skin and burns wreathed in sluicing smoke.
The fire had made a vast, burning grin of the gallery, slicking every golden surface with replicas of its image, etching the void in reams of fractured light. Coiled before the aperture of the Obmaw, Skuthula the Black stood revealed, the enormity of his form glossed in the light of his own violent manufacture.
“Send us your Heroes!” the black monstrosity roared. “Send us your Men, so that we might martyr their courage, light them as votives to the True Holy!”
No soul living knew how the Inchoroi had spawned Dragons, the devious alchemy of their concoction, for like apples, their seed gave rise to different fruits, variations upon the same gargantuan theme. It was none other than Skuthula who had inspired the Nonmen of old to name their race “Worms,” for he was the most serpentine of the Wracu. His monstrous bulk hung barrelled about a frame that consisted almost entirely of spine and ribs, save for the spindly legs arrayed beneath, dozens of them, rising and falling in centipedal waves as the creature moved. He was skinned in countless black scales, the length and breadth of Norsirai shields across his length, shrinking to the size of broaches about the skittering articulations of its legs. His wings lay clasped as lateen sails about his elongated back, rising from two massive swales of muscle that alone lent shoulders to his dread form. Spear-long quills maned the back of his neck, a crest of stark white spines forming a thicket about his massive, gored crown.