“Feed us those who can bear the burden of our glory! Who can hoist our legend upon their shoulders—raise it by their measure!”
But his lethal magnificence lay more in his hue and grace than in the bald facts of physiognomy. His scales were at once nacreous—shattering light into an iridescent dance—and absolute, consuming illumination without residue, so that he seemed mirror shards strung about an absence, a phantasm lacquered across void. And he stole through space as an eel through water, here hanging slow like a frond, there little more than a blur upon a flexion. He did not so much move as pulse. Combined with the uncanny black, this made him seem more wraith than monstrous lizard, a thing of ink slipping across a greased world.
“Alas, that World is dead!” she hollered, “I fear Dragons are the stuff of little girls now!”
Screeches greeted her reappearance. The Sranc teeming about the downward-hanging rims of the galleries opposite began hooting and gesturing. Skuthula’s snout snapped toward her, the baleful green eyes narrowed.
“So says the delicacy,” the Scourge of Ages boomed, “to the teeth!”
And it was all … so … clear …
“So says the hero!” she cried with lilting derision.
Dangling jibes like lures of silver, baiting the reptilian intellect, slowing it with the need to calculate irrelevant points of honour …
Dangling her body like a dockside whore, baiting the Ursranc archers, a pale and brutalized temptation …
It was all so clear because she was that reptilian intellect, coiled vast about immemorial grudges, just as she was each and every one of the masticating archers, loins taut against her floating image, hunched about the raving promise of congress. The Qirri had flung her veins, nay, her bones, across all the intervening hollows, all the false holes in being that had rendered her isolate and vulnerable …
The Qirri had revealed what she was, what she had always been …
A waifish dance about Chorae, whistling from strings released by fingers aimed by eyes tracking a waifish dance …
A slender leap through an incinerating exhalation …
A wolfish lunge and a fleet sprint …
A clapping maw and a ducking roll …
Wheels spinning wheels. Anas?rimbor Serwa, Exalt-Magus of the Great Ordeal, divine daughter of the Holy Aspect-Emperor—she was what happened here.
She was this place.
And so was the Count whittled to twenty-one.
To live is to be sodden. There is nothing arid about existence, nothing laundered or distinct. To live is to reek, to forever seep into circumstances. All gateways to the human stink. The ears. The mouth as much as the anus, for some.
And the eyes, the eyes most of all.
To live is to consume and to exude, to excrete and to chew, to turn upon a thousand hidden alchemies, rheumy transformations of what we lust into what we abhor … or love.
And so life convulsed and life was expelled from the socket, drawn sheeted in blood from the suffocating real, the very muck of amniotic origin, and held exposed to the scrutiny of cold Void, the hospice of prayer …
So that some essence might alight …
Some breath be drawn and screamed.
The Mutilated told a different tale, how the Unholy Consult had never truly understood their faith, let alone the implements propping them. They knew only that the Carapace required a soul for the No-God to awaken. So they began feeding Subjects to the Object, chaining their captives in great lines, and dragging them across this very floor so they might be entombed in the Carapace—and killed by it—one after another. They did this for more than a millennia before the First Apocalypse, murdering tens of thousands, casting the corpses down the great shaft of the Abskinis, the Groundless Grave …
“And then,” the reflection of the burnt D?nyain said, “they inserted Nau-Cay?ti … the famed son of their mortal adversary.”
“My ancestor,” the Holy Aspect-Emperor said.
“That is the meaning of the Celmomian Prophecy,” the caged D?nyain explained.
His neighbour finished the thought without the least hesitation. “Your return augurs the No-God, brother, because you are the No-God.”
Absent limbs, Malowebi heaved and flailed.
“You are Mog-Pharau.”
Run! the Mbimayu Schoolman cried without voice. Flee this obscene place!
But the reflection of the Anas?rimbor across the golden fin stood motionless before the regard of the Mutilated.
“You are your own salvation,” the unscathed D?nyain said. “The salvation of us all!”
Horror pimpled the nape of a neck Malowebi no longer possessed.
Mog-Pharau …
“But I am already saved,” the Holy Aspect-Emperor said. “And I fear your souls are blasted beyond reclamation.”
Whatever relief these words occasioned for Malowebi was scuttled by the vision of figures slinking as silent as clawless cats over the obsidian floors behind the Anas?rimbor, each dressed in ashen black, each bearing a pinprick of oblivion bound to their palms.
“I have walked the infernal deep …” the Anas?rimbor said, either unaware or unconcerned. “I have struck treaties with the Pit.”
Each possessing pale aquatic fronds instead of a face—or rather, digits, Malowebi realized, long crone fingers extending, then clenching into crude human approximation, again and again.
“The Hells are blind to this place,” the burnt D?nyain declared. “Even if they watch you, they cannot see where you stand.”
Consult skin-spies … one after another, emerging from the black, more than a dozen that Malowebi could see—and that the Anas?rimbor could not.
The Lord-and-Prophet of the Three Seas actually smiled. “You seek to starve the very Gods,” his reflection said. “Brothers, things so great need no light to cast shadows.”
“How do you mean?” the teeth-baring D?nyain demanded.
“Some have always smelled your absence.”
“At most,” the unscathed figure retorted. “They Intuit rather than Reason. They lack the Intellect to question.”
Malowebi saw more black-garbed assassins surfacing from the darkness reflected in the fin. There had to be a hundred of the creatures now—spiderfaces!—all of them bearing Chorae in their palms. It scissored his senses, looking forward to see reflections of the vacancies he sensed floating behind him.
“Which is why,” the Holy Aspect-Emperor said, “they needed me.”
The Mutilated regarded him. The scores of faceless assassins paused where they crouched.
It seemed to Malowebi that nothing breathed.
“An Inverse Prophet,” Anas?rimbor Kellhus said. “A revelation … sent by the Living to the Dead, by the now to the Eternal.”
The Tydonni guarding the ruins of Domathuz warned one another with claps on the shoulder and pointing arms. A precipice of some kind walked through the Horde—toward the breach. Somehow, gravity was tipped and skinnies began falling horizontal, over their slavering kin, and in all directions. Streams of them began crashing into the Nangaels elevated upon the debris, pocking the ranks like catapult stones.
Among the Mysunsai, confusion reigned. Every bit as bewildered as the Tydonni, each assumed that someone knew better when no one did.