The River Sursa had quickened, taking on the dull grey of the barrens beyond. The shallows of Wair Chirsaul had slowly travelled north over the intervening centuries—a fact attested to by the league or so separating them from the ruins of the Wairing Wall, which had defended the crossing in Far Antiquity. Despite this remarkable pilgrimage, they remained much as the ancient authors had described: a field of rushing waters, cracked and combed into white by the stone beneath, here kicked into roostering geysers, there sucked into swift, ink-black channels. Only the famed bone-fields so eulogized in ancient days were missing; the fords appeared every bit as treacherous as described, otherwise.
A lassitude possessed the Ordealmen, the void of heart and manner that so often follows revels gone mad. The Great Scald had made plain the catastrophic beam of their Enemy’s power, and now their Lord-and-Prophet, their Holy Aspect-Emperor, had abandoned them. Word of his Will as declared by their Exalt-General had spread as wildfire through the encampment; they knew what they had to do, but they knew not how they should feel. And so they awoke, frightened by the dark and wanton turbulence kindled in their souls, by the rumours that they were becoming Sranc, and for the first time they realized how very far they had wandered from home.
For this was the great secret of faith, the making near of distant things, the making home in what was vast with cruelty and indifference. Had the Gods not existed, Men would have almost certainly made them up, if only to people what was endless and empty, to trust in what was inscrutable. With Anas?rimbor Kellhus leading them, they had marched the sacred way of Salvation, followed the Shortest Path. With King Nersei Proyas, a man like themselves, it seemed they walked as any man walked, naked to untold danger and temptation …
Only now in the absence of their Master could they fathom how utterly they were exposed. The leagues between them and their homes leaned heavy against their heart and for a time, at least, smothered the embers kindling there.
The Judges saw this apprehension, and so walked among the mucked tracks crying out their exhortations over the droning priests. “Rouse! Rouse! Rejoice, Brothers! For our trial draws to holy conclusion! Golgotterath—the very Blight!—lays upon the yonder!” Those they deemed mutinous they seized on charges of impiety as they always did. Only the number of charges laid and the severity of the penalties levied distinguished this morning from any other. Twenty-three Men of the Ordeal, including Baron Orsuwick of Low Kalt, would be staked to the lash, and another seven would be hung from the limbs of the monstrous willow that stood as an unlikely and arthritic sentinel overlooking the Wair. Three would vanish altogether, spawning rumours of ecclesiastic murder and cannibalism.
Were it not for the seven strung from the willow, these events might have vanished in the mass toil of the Crossing. The Exalt-General was not consulted (even though the Aspect-Emperor almost certainly would have been). The Judge who ordered the display, a Galeoth caste-noble named Chassain, had been too ingenious devising his admonition. The nude bodies were lashed to the great boughs not by the arms or torsos, but by the shins, so that the miscreants hung upside-down, their arms dangling in tireless supplication, exactly the way Sranc were hung to bleed. Thousands of Ordealmen either passed beneath or near them, a great fraction of those who had camped to the north of Wair Chirsaul. Not a soul failed to hear of them. And even though very few made the connection between their dead brothers and their butchered foe, the image roused no less conflict in their hearts. They denied harbouring any such worries, of course, made as they always did when confronted with the grim handiwork of the Ministrate. They played scoundrels, speculating on the offences committed, the punishments meted, and thought themselves holy for scorning dead sinners.
They named the tree the Blood Weeper, and its gloomy image would trouble them all in the wee hours of the following nights, beckoning as a whore might, warding as a leper must—the last tree they would ever see.
The Crossing required two full days. Five lines were strung across the wairing, each bound at intervals to iron poles that had been driven into the water-kicking rock; five tenuous threads that transformed the wairing into the neck of a wrecked lute, strings knotted by labouring, struggling forms, legs braced, steps infirm for the blast of waters, backs heaped with armour and supplies. Many bore the butchered arms and legs of Sranc, meat scavenged from the fields to the south. The limbs were bound at the wrists or ankles to short segments of rope that could be slung over shoulders or across necks, conspiring to create what, from a certain distance at least, appeared a most ghastly apparel, a swinging mantle of what seemed the arms and legs of women and children, given the creature’s lithe and pallid hairlessness. Those who fell from the upstream lines would often spin into others, creating a flailing avalanche, dozens of Men reaching out from wagging blooms of severed, Sranc limbs.
No fewer than three hundred and sixty-eight souls perished for mishap. Few names of note were lost, among them Mud Waigwa, a monstrous Holca thane who attempted to drag ten Sranc carcasses across the wairing with him; and Lord Urbomm? Hamazrel, one of Nurban? Soter’s martial advisors, who simply stumbled, let slip the rope, and was ripped away.
As the Ordealmen gained the mire of the far shore, their brothers pulled them gasping from the collapsed embankments. Still sodden, they were funnelled into packed avenues, hounded by shouts to keep moving, always keep moving. So they stumbled onward, wringing hair and beard, pawing brow and eyes. A more amorphous congregation engulfed them, an immense gyre of souls likewise lurching, sorting between backs and shoulders, calling out to unseen kinsmen. The lifeless ground beneath their feet would be all they could see of the legendary Field Appalling. And it seemed more carnival than invasion, at least until the bristling masses thinned and parted, yielding space to cast aside their grisly encumbrances and find breast-heaving respite either leaning against or dropping to their knees. To a soul they peered into the west, across the vacancy that was Agongorea seen from Agongorea.