The blackness of the Shroud thinned about the back of the northern wind, became as smoked glass. A second daylight broke upon them, one not seen by mortal eyes in an age.
The babe wailed. The mother sobbed. The second birth would be mercifully quick.
Furtive in the celebratory uproar, Esmenet hurriedly cut the cord with Chipmunk, then bundled the blue slip in a swathe of cloth torn from a corpse. The old Wizard would never know what became of it, the dead twin.
Holding the first bundle to her chest, Mimara wept uncontrollably.
The old Wizard hobbled down from the Bashrag’s great chest, made a seat of its cauldron head. He propped his elbows on his knees, lay his eyes in his palms. Tremors wracked him.
When was a thing over? When was tribulation complete?
Drusas Achamian had a son.
Sunlight fell as a healer’s hand, fingers breaking through the tatters of the Shroud, blessing pockets of ruin with dulcet illumination. Those touched looked out and wondered, their faces blackened for soot and gore. They saw rays as enormous as the Horn only spectral and pure, threading slow mountains of smoke and dust that tumbled orange, black, and dun to the rib of the sky, glowing through septic fumes.
Those defending the western walls—exhausted Nansur Columnaries, Eumarnan Grandees, and others—watched the Sranc recoil from the stronghold of their Makers, race as shoals of fish beneath the retreating haze of the Shroud. “So the Soulless bolt,” General Inrilil ab Cinganjehoi bellowed in rapture, “from the wrath of the Souled!”
More than a million carcasses webbed the ashen plain, very nearly all Sranc, heaped into slopes and gutters about the gold-fanged ramparts, strewn in vast, radiating skeins. Bodies burned as bonfires at dozens of points, trailing smoke like black hair in water. Golgotterath rose as a burnt canker from the mayhem, the chambered socket of the High Horn, which soared into impossible clarity once again, dazzling for the fingers of the sun. The Canted Horn lay sectioned and shattered across the Shigogli below, a range of burnished wrack and ruin.
Dispersed across the blasted circus of the interior, the Men of the Great Ordeal cawed and wept for relief, for triumph—for salvation. Exhortations rang raw at different stations throughout the fell enclosure, cheers rising from one quarter of the fortress to blot the cheers rising from others … all the different tribes of Golgotterath.
Then the keen-eyed spied Him, and jousting cheers became a tempest of ecstasy and adulation.
The Holy Aspect-Emperor stood upon the Vigil, high on the eastward face of the surviving Horn. In their thousands, Men peered, the maimed as much as the hale, each crying out as their eyes fastened upon his heavenly figure, casting their voices as lots into the singular roar. And He stood sheltered in the Horn’s shadow, gazing down upon them as though from a mountain summit—and they could see that He was glad.
What had been ecstatic became crazed, frenzied even.
Passion maddened the air. The thunder of thousands rang across the soaring curvatures of Inchoroi gold. It warbled only when they saw the Holy Aspect-Emperor step from the Vigil into void … only to be redoubled when He floated rather then plummeted, descended as dandelion fluff in motionless air.
A war-trumpet peeled across the heights about the Horn’s base, ringing crisp and bright. The martial call for Temple. In the wondering lull, a solitary Conriyan Knight stranded on the gold-fanged parapets to the north began singing the famed Warrior Hymn,
By the waters of Siol,
we hung our lyres upon the willows,
and abandoned song with our mountain.
Perhaps it was the quaver in his voice, or simply the haunting intonations of the hymn itself, which seemed to thread the very bourne of melancholy and joy …
Ere the doom of Trys?,
we hoisted our sons upon our knees,
and counted scabs upon our hands and heart.
For it leapt from soul to soul with unnatural alacrity, radiated out and across the blasted tracts of Golgotterath, absorbing voice after cracked voice, transforming thousands of mudded droplets into a single lucid pool. They were Men who had seen the God’s will through. They were and would forever be Ordealmen. They understood the way, knew the harshest toll, and this song was for such as them …
In the fields of Cenei,
we broke bread that we had stolen,
and tasted the love of those who were dead.
So the New Inrithi sang as Anas?rimbor Kellhus, the Most Holy Aspect-Emperor of the Three Seas, floated down from the heights, for it was the want of Men to surrender their borders in song, to cease to be and so to cease to be alone. They sang to their Prophet to be indistinguishable from one another.
In the absence of edges lies the sum of divine grace. Fields of open palms were raised to brush his distal form. And they screeched as much as they cried the ultimate verse, for it bound the horrific sum of the toll they had paid …
Beneath the Ark of horrors,
we saw the sun rise upon gold as night fell,
and mourned the captivity of tomorrow.
How many times had they sung this? How many dreary watches had they spent cycling through the Warrior Hymn’s countless verses, always irresistibly drawn back to this very one, the words bearing the weight of their water, their experience, boiled down to a single fraught verse. How many times had they squinted through the shifting thickets toward the horizon and wondered at this very moment?
For here they stood, hands raised …
Witnessing their salvation.
Salvation … such a peculiar word.
One that made babes of Men.
For some, it was simply too much to bear, so much suffering and speculation come to such a finely honed point. They staggered, or even swooned outright.
But others found their passions even further inflamed. “Our salvation!” they began crying out to their Prophet, shouting, roaring, disjoint choruses resolving into thunderous clarity.
“Our salvation!”
“Our salvation!”
Men packed the terraces of the Oblitus, blood blackening their skin. Men gathered across the bulb of the Scab, crowded any section of the outer wall that afforded them a view. Some sixty thousand voices cried out in unison, engulfing their own porcelain echo, transforming the chant into something that struck, that punched and kicked the skies.
“Our salvation!”
“Our salvation!”
The Most Holy Aspect-Emperor fell as a mote through immobile air, seemed to flicker or waver for some otherworldly light.
“Our salvation!”
“Our salvation!”
He passed from the shadow of the Horn, flared with luminance in the gloaming sun …
“Our salvation!”
“Our salvation!”
And sank into the reverberations, his hands outstretched within discs of shining gold.
“Our salvation!”
“Our salvation!”
“Our salvation!”
Hands …
Hands bear her.
Mimara’s gaze lolls about the surface of the mad surge.
The very ground has become deranged with jubilation, faces pale and swart, all of them drugged with weariness and gloating exultation.