That is, save a Swayali witch, Valsarta.
What escaped her was the profundity of the Mysunsai’s turmoil. The sideways rain of Sranc was already pelting Golgotterath’s walls by time she realized they weren’t going to act at all. By time she sailed, her billows boiling about her, to the heights above the beleaguered Nangaels, it was already too late. The peril of being cast at had become the peril of being cast.
For Lord Woyengar, the Earl of Nangaelsa, the approach of the precipice was nothing short of surreal, Sranc pitched out on whatever direction their momentum carried them, as if they fell over some scarp’s edge, only from every point of the compass at once, each twisting and kicking down an impossible horizontal abyss. The Sranc assailing Woyengar’s forward rank slackened and thinned, then vanished altogether, and between iron helms of his vassals, the Earl of Nangaelsa watched the precipice step clear of the Horde …
The Red Ghoul emerged, S?jaranin miraculously intact, his crimson nimil gown agleam, his eyes and mouth windows into the furnace cauldron that was his Erratic soul. The Sranc shrieked and thronged behind him, a lunatic rush that saw each descending club and cleaver pitched with its possessor over some non-existent plummet. S?jaranin did not so much as pause at the sight of the grim Northmen, but continued stepping from carcass to carcass, directly into the first rank …
Lord Woyengar saw his Men raise shield and sword, then simply trip into the air and cartwheel into the occluded depths of the Horde. And then he himself was upon the mad Quya, standing where all others had been thrown—for the Chorae bound against his navel a fraction of him realized.
Cackling, the Erratic parried his swooping broadsword, chased the deflected impact into the Earl of Nangaelsa’s exposed face. He yanked his ancient blade clear. Howling Nangaels fell upon him from all angles, only to fall over the Immaculate Rim … topple headlong into their doom.
And so the Red Ghoul advanced across the heaped ruin, throwing all who rushed him deep into the nightmare heave of ?gorrior. By the simple act of walking, the mad Nonman cut a broad furrow in the Tydonni ranks …
The Yimaleti Sranc surged upon his catastrophic wake. They came as a yammering, threshing flood, instinctively gaining the flank then leaping deep into the shattered ranks, where they hacked with the nimble savagery of cats. In a matter of heartbeats, roiling violence had engulfed the Tydonni root and bough beyond the breach. Hanging above the chaos, Valsarta and the Mysunsai had no choice but to abandon the breach to S?jaranin. Saving the far greater numbers imperilled by his passage was more than toil enough.
And so the Red Ghoul climbed all but uncontested into the ragged socket that had once housed Domathuz. He stood upon the slung summit of the debris, sobbing and cackling for reasons thousands of years dead. He looked out across the appalled Longbeards, Plaide?lmen, forming in the Canal below.
“Why?” he thundered in Sheyic, shrugging aside the all consuming din. A grimace fluttered about, then consumed, his flawless white face.
“Why did you wait so long?”
Blinding white. A shaft with a Trinket affixed had struck him full upon the cheek—a “Spank” as Chorae Bowmen called it, an impact square enough to salt a sorcerer through to his marrow. Perfectly balanced at contact, S?jaranin remained standing in perfect salt effigy, his expression a rictus of chalked fury, his famed armour yet hanging in links of intricate crimson …
The infamous Red Ghoul was dead, this time forsooth.
The Sons of Plaide?l stood dumbstruck for wonder, somehow understanding the World had become less. They had yet to realize what was about to follow.
The statue bowled forward and toppled, trampled beneath the stampeding of horned feet.
The Breach of Domathuz had fallen. Like a chitinous flood of termites, the depravities gushed into the evil precincts of Golgotterath.
Once a vast crypt, the Atrium had become a scintillant furnace.
Wild with rage, the legendary Wracu whipped and struck and vomited fiery blindness. Skuthula hounded the young Grandmistress to the exclusion of all else, bent on punishing, on showing. Roaring with deranged saurian indignation, he pursued her into each gallery she vanished into, thrashing through Sranc, crushing them, consuming them—and burning them, burning them most of all, setting gallery after gallery alight. Lines and arcs and planes of Inchoroi gold bristled for reflected fire, while smoke boiled across the ceilings, streamed up into a cataract great enough to choke the vast skew of the shaft.
And she ran and danced not so much from as with those who would murder and desecrate, no more than a moment in a far greater automata, a system of systems …
She understood the truth of heroism, how it collapsed action into reaction, how it simply moved careless of fear or bravery.
She understood her father’s power.
The Ursranc Palatials hooped and screamed, many diving from the heights to crash like bundled leaves afire. Save for a scant handful, those wretches bearing Chorae now fled the fire and the dragon. She could feel each of the points of oblivion scattered across the Horn’s bowel, the ones that threatened jerking through spaces high and low, before falling still, joining those already laying fallow.
And a fraction of her counted.
Fourteen …
Thirteen …
The joists groaned for the bulk of the Wracu, wending like a monstrous serpent from level to level. Skuthula began using his immense length to herd her down to the trough of the Skew, where he tried to crush her with blind thrashing. The unearthly metal thrummed for titanic impacts …
She floated in flawless counterpoise, naked save for her burns and her Cindersword, passing as an apparition through perfumed sheets of flame. Time and again, Skuthula materialized from the fiery shrouds, reared with iron-hooked grace, lamellar scales rimmed in crimson wrath, lacquered in oily ghosts of the conflagration.
Time and again she held her ensorcelled sword tight …
Seven …
Six …
Isiram?lis … Hearth-slayer.
And she laughed, danced beyond the clacking violence of his jaws, like a moth dangling on a wire affixed to the mighty Wracu’s snout. She laughed with an implacable mirth, and in a voice honed to echo and resonate and filter throughout the great slanted gullet of the Atrium … the laughter of a little girl making sport of the most fearsome dragon to have ever lived.
Skuthula the Black howled and raged and flailed its immense, serpentine frame.
And Anas?rimbor Serwa slipped and eluded, counted the Ursranc dying and misfiring.
One …
Zero …
“Now!” she cried upon a sorcerous thunderclap, a voice that made a harp of the ancient Wracu’s roar.
Light.
Cold.
Terror …
Breath.
A convulsive wail of arrival …
Lost in the deluge of those departing.