He turns to his chieftains, and too much seems to move, as if the countless cat-rib scars were in fact stitches, something binding him to his place. And on a bolt of horror you realize he is no longer a Son of Man, your father. Sin and hatred have cut his soul from his mortal frame, and now Hell suffuses the whole.
“It matters not,” he tells his proud chieftains, “what you see when you look upon this boy. He! He is your King-of-Tribes, now.”
He swivels his gaze, grinning at each many-scarred warrior in turn. You don’t see madness so much as the limits of reason shining in his turquoise eyes.
“Dare not doubt me … Look! Gaze upon me, my cousins, admit what you have always known, what your drunken kinsmen murmur when the fires burn low. Look upon me and know the fell potency of my curse. Dare betray him, blood of my blood, and I shall visit thee!”
The words pinch your heart between thumb and forefinger. He turns his back on all things, it seems, and you stand every bit as astonished as the others and even more confused. Together you watch him, your legendary sire, Cnaiür urs Ski?tha, the breaker-of-horses-and-men, descend the inner rim of the Occlusion and walk out alone into vast and distant machinations of doom. You even weep.
Only their terror of your father keeps you alive.
No knowledge runs so deep as knowledge of calamity; no name is more primal—or final. It is what infants wail and homicides rave. It is what old men groan as sight dwindles, and what mothers weep. It is what poets lavish with spit and pearl. Tribulation is our maker, the foe that so hounds us as to craft us like clay. Think on it! Tales of murder would not so enthrall us, were we not the children of survivors.
The Men of the Ordeal could feel it in the crescendo of the winds, the confluence. They could feel it in the groan that tingled through all substance. And they could feel it in the nauseous void pressed against their spine, always there no matter how far they managed to run, the premonition that something … something …
The vast flock of the Aspect-Emperor hobbled and sprinted across the Black Furnace Plain, casting aside weapons, sawing at armour. For many, shock precluded the possibility of emotion, left them little more than automata shambling across the flats. Others wept, bawled and raged as little ones bereft of some childish prize. Still others clenched their jaw against the gibbering extremes, refusing to unlock the passions rocking them.
Sheets of blasting grit soon swept the whole of Shigogli. Blood became black as oil. Grimaces were inked into faces, down to the blackened teeth, so that each was at once wretched and a mummer mocking the wretched. More and more fell to their knees convulsing for the taste.
Thus the Ordealmen fled, ever more obscure, ever more harrowed, a great mob drawn as a comet across the Black Furnace Plain, the infirm and the unlucky trailing the hale and the lucky, all of them running to the encampment they had seen burning. The Horde closed upon Golgotterath behind them, a chitinous rush across all that could be seen. The Whirlwind seized upon the sky-high billowing of the Shroud, began to feed upon it, and rags of blackness began scribbling about Golgotterath and the Upright Horn. An obese funnel climbed from great sweeping skirts of noxious black, obscuring the glint of the Carapace. The roar battered aside all hearing, save …
TELL ME …
Howled through the throats of thousands upon thousands of Sranc, a flood inexorably encompassing the interval separating them from the injured and the encumbered. These wretches were doomed—clouds and clots of them stumbling, even crawling through the trampled dust. The Witches and the Schoolmen, the only souls that could hope to save them, had leapt so far ahead they could no longer be seen.
Those Ordealmen at the fore of the rout called out in dismay, and stopped in the smoking ruins of their encampment. Climbing echelons of them were transfixed for the image of the Whirlwind about the Horn, gouging the Shroud from the Horde to the Vault of Heaven. They could not move. The encampment was not so much a vestige of home, the illusion of security that comes with familiarity, as a point requiring decision, and no one knew where they should go or what they should do. And so was each refugee undone by the indecision he found awaiting him. The bands of congestion grew deeper across the encampment’s scrag perimeter.
“Run!” a sorcerous voice cracked—the same voice that had chased them from Golgotterath. “For the Occlusion!”
And rolling eyes found a figure, fur-bedecked and hermit-wild, hanging above the fugitive fields. The Holy Tutor …
The Wizard.
“Run for your lives!”
Once, when Cnaiür was a child, a whirlwind had roared through the Utemot encampment, its shoulders in the clouds, yaksh, cattle, and lives swirling like skirts about its feet. He had watched it from a distance, wailing, clutching his father’s rigid waist. Then it had vanished, like sand settling in water. He could remember his father running through the hail to assist his kinsmen. He could remember beginning to follow, then stumbling to a halt, transfixed by the vista before him as though the scale of the transformation had dwarfed his eyes’ ability to believe. The great rambling web of tracks, pens, and yaksh had been utterly rewritten, as though some mountain-tall child had drawn sweeping circles with a stick. Horror had replaced familiarity, but order had replaced order.
This was a different whirlwind.
And he was no longer that child.
He was of the People, one who had so eaten of the Land as to become the Land. He was a Chieftain of the People, one who had put so many souls to dirt as to confound numbers! He was a King of the Chieftains, a descendant of ?thgai who smashed ancient-old Kyraneas as pottery; and of Hori?tha, who burned Imperial Cenei as a pyre. Their blood was his blood! Their bones were his bones! Utemot, the most wild and holy of the many tribes of the People.
Cnaiür urs Ski?tha strode down the slopes and out across the flats heedless of the refugee masses parting about him. He stared only at it as he walked, his long knife in hand, cutting away his own armour and clothing piece by piece, revealing the horrendous sum of what he had taken from the World, the thousand sons and daughters violated, the thousand hearts stopped, the thousand eyes blinded. Finally he pressed his blade down his hairless pubis, and sliced away his loincloth, baring his manhood to the sting. And so he walked, a solitary man, naked save for the swazond grilling his limbs and torso, numberless totems of those murdered and not merely killed.
The wind scoured his striate skin, wricked his black mane. Existence was caterwaul and thunder, darkness and obscurity, vast discharges of brilliance high above, and whipping, knifing obscurities below. Existence turned upon and against the cyclopean gyre, corruption whipping blurred about glimpses of the Upright Horn.
Squinting against the maelstrom, he plunged forward. Smoke coiled from his swazond like blood from gills in rushing waters.