The chorus rumbled out across Shigogli, and the Men heard what their ancient forebears had once heard—as the Nonmen had heard before them: the way the Horns reflected shredded echoes, and so mocked all collective declaration. The voices of some faltered for puzzlement, but those who were strong continued, and by example incited their brothers to declaim even louder.
May your bread,
Silence our daily hunger.
Judge us not according to our trespasses,
But according to our temptations …
It was a prayer they had learned before they were born, words so well worn as to become invisible, and therefore immovable, stamped into them before they were themselves. So they were rooted as to the infinite as they recited it, and for all its vertiginous immensity the Ark seemed naught but a mummer’s conceit, a trick of perspective and foil.
Trumpets peeled across the desolation, fading into the onerous, oceanic groan of the ghus. As one, the armed and armoured fields began advancing, dark and brilliant against the powder of the Shigogli. The very floor of the World seemed to move, such was its extent. For those still breathing on the ruined circuit of the Akeokinoi, the Men seemed to dissolve into the obscurity of their own dust. The Great Ordeal became a host of shadowy apparitions, an assembly of wraiths, with only the rare wink of reflected sunlight to attest to their frail reality …
Thus did the Believer-Kings of the Three Seas advance westward, toward the pale, water-colour curtain of the Yimaleti Mountains beyond the Occlusion—and the grim and golden spectre of Golgotterath beneath.
So did the End of the World begin.
Im’vilaral, the Nonmen of Viri had called them so very many indignities ago, the “Horizon-that-has-teeth.” The High Norsirai purloined this name the way they had so many others, beat it until it became a thing of comfort on their tongues—if not their hearts. So Im’vilaral became “Yimaleti,” the name for the range of mountains that barricaded, for sheer immensity, the north against mortal reckoning.
To own a thing was to know it. All the World’s unplumbed pockets made the hearts of Men anxious, but few could claim to command the terror belonging to the Yimaleti Mountains, for they became, far more than Golgotterath, the true womb of the Sranc. The Nonmen had sought to cleanse them in the gouged aftermath of the C?no-Inchoroi Wars. For years it was the lot of the most heroic Quya and Ishroi to climb into the scarps and hunt the miscreant progeny of their foe. But as years past and names vanished what had once been deemed a courageous undertaking came to seem reckless. And as so often happens, bravery found itself broken upon the boney knee of futility, and the strategy was abandoned.
The High Norsirai would seek to clear the monstrosities from the shoulders of the Yimaleti in their turn. For a time, no mercenaries in the World were so feared or so prized as the famed Emiorali, or the “Bronzemen,” so-called for their great gowns of bronze armour. Their Aorsi cousins from the plains, however, had another epithet, Kauw?ttarim, or “Broken Strong”—a name originally given to those driven mad by battle. As quick as they were to invoke them as brothers in outland company, they eschewed the Emiorali otherwise, remained aloof in the brittle manner of weaker, yet far more numerous Men. Though the Bronzemen were notorious for stingy dealings, taciturn manner, and melancholic fury, the truth was that their kin begrudged their fame and feared their strength. “What is to stop them?” the suspicious asked about the failing way-hearths, when the faces of all grow crimson and the soul turns to things bloody and dark. “Men such as these … Why live the hard life? Why feed their sons to the scarps and gorges, when they need only pluck what is ours?” Thus did they render inevitable what they feigned to prevent, such is the madness of Men.
In the Codicil Councils of Shiarau, the wisest among the Aorsi had assumed that the Sranc population would eventually collapse, so great was the toll the Emiorali had exacted defending their Hooded Redoubts. Perhaps the creatures did dwindle for a time, but the fealty of the Emiorali to Shiarau dwindled quicker. The Bronzemen eventually grew impatient, even disgusted, with the fat ways and absurd condescension of their southern cousins. They became the stock of sedition, a people known for rampaging bandits and usurping generals. In 1808 Year-of-the-Tusk, High-King Anas?rimbor Nanor-Ukkerja VI finally decided the Sranc and Bashrag were the lesser evil: all ninety-nine of the Hooded Redoubts were abandoned, and the Yimaleti were ceded entirely to the Foe.
None knew why these mountains proved such fertile breeding grounds. They stood twice the height of the subdued Demua, as monstrous, as wricked and ragged as the Great Kayarsus itself, and pitted with numerous, largely barren vales. The most ancient Nonmen records spoke of an infinite wasteland of ice and snow beyond the Yimaleti; a continuation of what Men called the Vastwhite to the east. The Bashrag hunted game, but the Sranc sucked their meat from the very earth, and could not sustain themselves on land too long frozen. The Vastwhite was proof enough of this. Some Far Antique scholars claimed the secret lay with the western Ocean, citing mariners who had explored the seaward sockets of the western Yimaleti, daring souls who described innumerable, deep-barrelled fjords warmed by the Ocean and so overrun with Sranc that the very landscape itself shivered as with maggots. Pitarwum, they called them, Beast-cradles.
One of these scholars, a King-Temple Historian known to posterity only as Wraelinu, proposed that these Pitarwum anchored cycles of exploding population, which in turn drove endless migratory invasions across the northern back of the Yimaleti. This was why, he claimed, the Sranc in the eastern extremes of the range were invariably so much more emaciated than those spied in the west. And this was why the Yimaleti Sranc differed from their southern kin, shorter of stature, slower across open ground, but more powerful of limb, more ferocious than vicious; the Pitarwum, he argued, bred them the way herdsmen bred cattle. There they remained until exhaustion drove them forth into the mountains, which belonged, in sooth, to the Bashrag. It was this cycle that had proven so ruinous …
Only the greatest of mobbings, he claimed, could incite their pestilential descent upon Men.