The Great Ordeal traversed the intervening desolation.
There was foreboding among the Men, but there was exultation as well. Golgotterath hung in the distance before them, the trudging object, not just of their present exertions, but of anguished months of campaigning and toilsome years of preparation. Few pondered the fact explicitly, for doing so robbed the air of its sustenance, the will of its direction. Golgotterath—the end for which whole peoples had been put to the sword. Golgotterath—the warrant of so much peril, so many privations of the heart, spirit, and flesh. Golgotterath—the subject of so many outraged prayers, sinister tales, and anxious, nocturnal musings.
Golgotterath. Min-Uroikas.
The Wicked Ark.
The greatest evil the World had ever known, bloating by imperceptible degrees, step by dusty step.
There could be no denying the holiness of their undertaking. There could be no questioning the righteousness of raising arms against such a place—a cancer so foul, so obvious, that it compelled excision.
There could be no doubt.
The God of Gods walked with them—through them. The Holy Aspect-Emperor was His sceptre, and they were His rod, the very incarnation of His curse, His violent rebuke.
The song, when it arose, seemed to spark in all throats at once …
By the waters of Siol,
we hung our lyres upon the willows,
and abandoned song with our mountain.
And it seemed a miracle within a miracle, a glorious compounding of Providence, that this, of all the lays they had committed to memory, would be the song to seize their hearts now: the Warrior’s Hymn.
Ere the doom of Trys?,
we hoisted our sons upon our knees,
and counted scabs upon our hands and heart
None knew its origins. It possessed as many verses as the World possessed bone-fields, which made its subtleties all the more remarkable: the melancholic honesty, the obstinate manner in which it sang around battles instead of about them, bundling the violence in depictions of respite. It never failed to move, even when raised during the most interminable of marches, for it sang to the commons between them, the vigil that all warriors kept in the shadow of atrocity. They sang as brothers, a vast assemblage of coincident souls, and they sang as sinners, the authors of abominable deeds, isolate and astray …
In the fields of Cenei,
we broke bread that we had stolen,
and tasted the love of those who were dead.
And it was the same for all of them. The Knights of Hinnant, their faces white for paint, their eyes bred to the hazy expanses of the Secharib Plains and so strangely comforted by the flat plate of Shigogli. The iron-mailed Agmundrmen, carrying their longbows likes stocks across their shoulders, their wrists hooked high. The Massentian Columnaries, their shields like halved barrels emblazoned with the Circumfix and the Sheaf, yellow upon yellow. The two-hearted Holca tribesmen, conspicuous for their stature and the fiery crimson of their beards and manes, marching, as always, at the fore, where their battle-madness was both most useful and most safe.
Golgotterath! There before them! Inexorable and impossible. No matter what the nation, no matter what the names scrawled on the ancestor lists, it was the same for all. Golgotterath had become the World’s only portal, the one defile that could deliver them from Hell. They had pitched themselves from the precipice, leapt into the void …
And so the Wicked Stronghold loomed, sinister in aspect, as alien in scale as in appearance. The Horns reared impossible, commanding all, the two great Oars of the Ark goring the belly of the sky. Their golden skin roiled with morning brilliance, so bright as to cast palls of jaundiced light across the stoneworks below. Their hearts, which had been rooted in immobility, continuous with the very God, became progressively unmoored. Not a soul among them did not quail in some fashion, such was the premonition of enormity, of weights too vast hung upon heights too perilous. They became as gnats. And to a man they thought what every mortal had thought stumping across Shigogli’s bitter plate …
No Man belonged in such a place.
The proof of its manufacture was plain in the great abrasions marring the Canted Horn. All could see the radial beams through the stripped-away planking, glimpses of bulkheads and frames similar to those in wooden ships. The Inc?-Holoinas, the dread Inchoroi Ark, was a contrivance, a Void-faring vessel, the product of innumerable, inhuman wrights and artisans … Aliens that revelled in filth and atrocity.
From where?
To a man they asked this, because to a man they instinctively understood the power of origins, that the truth of a thing lay in its genesis. But like the Nonmen, this thing, this mountainous Ark, had outrun its beginnings. It was enigmatic, incomprehensible, not merely in the way of miracles and cataclysms, but in the way of madness and mayhem. A thing from nowhere was a thing that should not be. And so the Ark, in their eyes, became an outrage against existence, an object so fundamentally accursed that hands became papyrus for simply gazing upon it …
An intrusion like no other … A violation.
The rapist that had despoiled the maidenhead of the World.
And so it was that disgust hooked their lips, revulsion propelled their voices, that abhorrence and loathing steeped their hearts as they cried out their battlesong. They gnashed their teeth, stamped their feet, beat sword and spear against their shields. Hatred and fury filled them, the lust to strangle, to cut and to burn and to blind. And they knew, with a conviction that made some weep, that to do evil to this place was to be holy. They became as cutthroats in the alley, murderers in the night, souls too dangerous, too deadly, to fear the machinations of any victim …
Even one so monstrous as this.
The Horns loomed ever more immense, the fortifications ever more near—close enough to reflect their shouting fury and so impart a demented, echoic resonance to their song. Soon the World rang as if across metal.
Beneath the Ark of horrors,
we saw the sun rise upon gold as night fell,
and mourned the captivity of tomorrow.