He glanced back to Esmenet to communicate his alarm, saw the Canal beyond her—
Glimpsed the first of the skinnies leaping like apes above the shifting forests of Men.
Terror … stoked to such extremity as to be identical to agony. Had Malowebi possessed a body, he would have hung as if from a spike hammered into the back of his throat, kicked and clutched.
“You shall be my angels,” the Ciphrang-God grated in a voice that was the exhalation of countless damned.
The skin-spies heaved about them, the articulations of their obscene faces clenching for exertion, but their hands lay as welded to the obsidian floor. The reflected Inchoroi, Aurax, had scuttled from his dimple to cringe, behind the teeth-baring D?nyain upon the farthest stair, his wings raised in a pathetic canopy. The Mutilated stood absolutely immobile, transfixed by the infernal apparition churning ink and fire before them.
“You shall be my goad, the scourge of nations. Children shall keen for the simple rumour of your coming. Men shall rage and weep. And whatever horror and anguish you should sow, I shall reap.”
“He hides here,” the one-eyed D?nyain said, his face blank. “His siblings hunt him and he thinks he can hide fro—”
The God’s reflection raised a clawed hand, and the reflection of the D?nyain imploded as if upon a point, skull crumpling like foil, limbs cracking and bursting as if wrenched through a twig-thin embrasure. In a heartbeat, scarce more than mucous ruin remained.
“Four brothers,” the Prince of Hate mused. “Four Horns. Together we shall gore this World, drink of it as a pierced fruit raised high.”
The very frame of the Golden Room yawed about the diabolical intonations. The lament of ages filtered in from the encircling darkness.
The four remaining D?nyain exchanged looks.
“The Inverse Fire is naught but a window into my House,” the Dark God-Emperor said. “You have seen what awaits you. Adore me, or suffer eternal damnation …”
The Mutilated stared, their disfigurations their only expression. The skin-spies brayed, wagged and thrashed for terror. And Malowebi saw, impossibly, a little boy threading the spaces between their wild exertions, following a path that vanished behind the Grinning God’s infernal reflection. The Prince-Imperial? Several of the creatures began hacking at their pinned wrists.
Malowebi sobbed, thrashed and flailed against his captivity.
“I alone … Brothers …”
But nothingness and nothingness alone was his prison.
“I am the Absolute.”
What could not be grasped could not be broken.
CHAPTER
NINETEEN
Resumption
And she shall wail, cry out to Us in the Heavens.
For We would know what soul that mother hath delivered, and when.
—Canticles 38:2, The Chronicle of the Tusk
The King declared all revelation unlawful, citing the unrest of the masses and the lives wasted for fanatical distraction. Thus did water divination fall to the witches.
—The Annals of Cenei, CASIDAS
Early Autumn, 20 New Imperial Year (4132, Year-of-the-Tusk), Golgotterath.
There are places that Men are brought from which they may never be retrieved, irrevocable places that, no matter how distant in years or leagues, will forever shackle them to terror and desperation.
The old Wizard grasped a spear, hauled himself to his feet.
A son.
He managed to surmount the chest of a felled Bashrag. He teetered over the carnage, steadied, then stood peering down the Canal.
He had a son.
Sorcerous lights bloomed wondrous across the stepped walls of the Oblitus to his right. Fluttering white. Pulsing turquoise. Glowing vermillion. To his left, Gwergiruh stacked into the soot-black sky. Ingraulish axemen teemed across the wrack some forty paces or so before him, hastening to reinforce the great phalanx of their kinsmen bracing the throat of the Canal beyond. The Longbeards thrust and chopped across the fore of the black formation, toiling to stem the white-skinned deluge, Sranc masses leaping, popping like surf upon breakers, becoming a sizzle of maggots beyond the violet haze …
So many. Too many.
He had a son! Achamian realized.
Suddenly lights flashed within Golgotterath’s ramparts. The old Wizard watched awestruck as Quya strode from the breach of Domathuz into the regions above the thronging slot, their skulls ablaze with blasphemous meaning, the canyon below erupting for their lethal ministry.
The slaughter was absolute. The Canal was transformed into a great, rolling furnace, first engulfing, then incinerating the white masses. Panic overcame the remaining Sranc. Chaos dissolved into something more chaotic still. The Canal became a trough that boiled with ingrown lines of flight, a heaving in all directions. The iron-draped Ingrauls surged forward, hewing and thrusting.
The old Wizard stood agape, his own Cant forgotten. None other than Lord Vippol himself floated at the fore of the Quya, decked in his antique wire armour, singing with the fury of those insane for growing old … And there!—there was Cilc?liccas, the Lord of Swans, the far-famed slayer of the Knifedragon …
Kellhus had called on Ishterebinth, a numb fraction of him realized.
The creatures fell as millet before the scything Sons of Ingraul; they burned as pitch-sodden torches beneath the singing Sons of Eliriq?. Sword and fire consumed the remaining skinnies. The Ingrauls raised their gored weapons in triumph, began streaming over the long oven floor to retake the breach.
He had a son!
By some caprice, Achamian caught the eye of Lord Vippol hanging above. The darkling gaze held his for a heartbeat, then turned away in disorder …
And then it happened … the all-conquering roar of the Horde crashed into impossible silence.
Ringing ears.
A babe wailed … and it dizzied, so impossible was the sound.
The very ground seemed to yaw for unreality, so ambient and overwhelming had the sound been. Though it had stopped his ears for mere watches, it had become a thing primordial in that short time, a peer of Creation.
The old Wizard cast about bewildered, saw every other soul doing the same …
“It flees!” some Longbeard cried from the parapets above. “The Horde! Fleeeeees!”
A babe wailed into the wake of the man’s ravaged voice, a cry like a bleeding reed.
Achamian turned to the two women, Esmenet, crouched between the knees of her daughter, who grunted and keened. “D-do you he—?”
A thunderous explosion of masculine voices seized all that was visible. Cheers, Achamian realized. Cheering. The Men of the Three Seas threw out their arms, seized one another in disbelief, or simply dropped to their knees and wept. Golgotterath boomed and resounded. Exultation cracked into unhinged exhibitions of incredulity and joy. Men curled into keening, snuffling balls. Men huffed and bellowed like beasts, beat their chests, kicked and stomped carcasses. Men seized elbows and danced their grandmother’s jigs.