His voice cracked the ribs of the horizon.
“Flee! Flee, Sons of Men!”
And for a heartbeat all the beleaguered and begrimed faces turned to him, gazed upon the pelt-heaped aspect of the Wizard. His arcane shout fell upon them as Heaven’s own Rod. Those already fleeing surged, while those yet loathe to run crumbled into the tide of their brothers. What had been erosion suddenly became a landslide, currents of men loosed within packed masses, spilling out and down, splashing into pitched battle across a descending array of blockages. Within heartbeats, castaway shields scaled the visible ground.
“The Second Apocalypse!”
He looked back to the astonished faces of the women he loved, saw their beauty flinch for the thunderclap that was his shining voice, the calamity that was his black declaration.
“The Second Apocalypse is upon us!”
And from the heights of the Oblitus, it seemed the ground moved backwards, so vast was the exodus to escape it.
Still floating, Drusas Achamian reached for Esmenet, who deftly joined him upon the phantom plate, slipping one hand about his waist, while holding her wailing grandson tight to her breast with the other. He turned to Mimara, grinned as Seswatha had always grinned in the twilight of ruin, a smile that only intimates of doom know, souls stripped to the bald fact of love.
She gawked at him, shrugged about a sob. How? her look did not so much ask as ache. How could this happen?
The Upright Horn towered, seized frost from the empty heart of the sky, a bulk that forever plucked the instinct to cringe. The Great Ordeal drained from the cracked black bowl that was Golgotterath, spilled toward the east. The winds crossed some threshold of violence, and Esmenet buried her face in the old Wizard’s pelted shoulder.
Mimara, for mad reasons all her own, endured the pinprick lashing, glared at the father of her child, weeping freely, asking how … Sweet Seju …
Why?
Achamian extended his hand. “Please,” he called across the bloating roar.
There is knowledge in our manner, ways to prove that utterly elude the apparent sunlight of speech. Sorcery does not exhaust the miracles of the voice: with one word, it seemed, he had demonstrated to her what tomes of disputation could never do.
Apocalypse was his birthright.
Horror yawed above them, a light that struck only souls. She pawed at her tears in fury, withdrew the pouch bearing her two Chorae, the one that had saved them in the bowel of Cil-Aujas, and the one she had looted from Kosoter’s corpse at Sauglish. In a single motion, she pulled the thread about her head and cast the pouch out over the void of the Oblitus. No eye followed their descent into the wrack and panic. Her last proof against him.
Anas?rimbor Mimara stepped teetering to the brink, then took his sorcerous hand.
The Aspect-Emperor was dead.
Never had Malowebi been so immobile, so windless within. To be bodiless and still is to cease to exist.
Memory retrieved him, hoisted him on the back of images across indeterminate cavities. Ajokli—the Four-Horned Brother!—not simply here, but inhabiting Anas?rimbor Kellhus. The clawing implications, the retching terror, the soundless shrieks, the intimation of slaughtered futures …
And then the little boy had appeared, Anas?rimbor Kelmomas … there he was, scampering between the skin-spies nailed to the floor by their Chorae …
Malowebi assumed, according to his terror, that the boy belonged to Ajokli … One of the Hundred stood manifest before him! Of course the boy was his!
Except that he wasn’t.
“He can’t see me either!” the little boy chortled.
The geyser of incandescence that housed the Grinning God’s visage sputtered …
The four remaining Mutilated watched with disfigured fascination. Aurax grovelled.
The glare vanished from the shoulders, leaving only Anas?rimbor Kellhus, blinking as any mortal man, swaying, peering at his youngest son …
“K-Kel? How di—”
The nearest skin-spy clapped the Chorae in its palm about his ankle.
And the Aspect-Emperor was no more.
“See!” the child gurgled, squealing for preposterous joy. “I told you! I told you! They can’t see me! The Gods! The Gods can’t see me!”
Unable to think, Malowebi witnessed, watched it all in golden reflection, how the Mutilated seized a begging Kelmomas, first with sorcery, then with hands lacking five fingers, how the child had wailed and kicked and shrieked, realizing he had traded one tyrant for four. Malowebi glimpsed the flutter of small limbs as the D?nyain thrust him into the great black sarcophagus, heard the porcine shrieks of bodily violations, the heartbreak of his blubbering, his whimpering cries, as the great face of the Carapace closed upon its ancient seal …
“Mu-mu-mum-meee …”
He could remember! The Carapace climbing soundlessly upright … The very root of the Horn roaring.
The Aspect-Emperor dead.
Never had Malowebi been so immobile, so windless within.
A vision like straps about your chest.
You see a chip shining black, hanging within the watery distortions pulsing about the remaining Horn. You see the dust devils have ceased their random scrawl, and now orbit the great black plate of the Shigogli. You see Men spilling like iron filings and grains of quartz, pouring through the very breaches they had wrought mere watches previous. You see Magi like seeds detaching in a different wind, this one blowing not around, but toward you. You see the Horde amassed upon the far line of the Occlusion, following the miracle of its retreat with the cataclysm of its return. You see the pallid stampede chasing the same, second wind.
And you know because you can feel it, the dimple in what Men cannot perceive, an absence beyond the sensible, beyond horror. You know the Whirlwind walks.
The No-God has returned.
“You must do something!”
You scream this, but your father stands stationary, like a statue, you would think, were it not for the way his immobility raved. Indifference, bottomless indifference, combined with an umbrage that could humble Gods. Your father’s grudge could not be more personal, more clotted with the blood and hair of human outrage, and yet, somehow, it remains apiece with the spectacle before them.
Tsurumah … Mursiris …. Mog-Pharau!
“What?” you cry scathing. “The great King-of-Tribes stands witless? Undone by the undoing of all things!”
And when your father—your true father—finally turns, you are taken aback, so keen is the edge in his gelid gaze, so murderous. His lips vanish, so wolfish is his sneer. His teeth are too small, too even, too white. And you understand, at last, that you are to this man what your brothers and sisters were to their true father, a lesser light wrapped in a coarser cloth.