Trumpets crowed upon this, the ultimate verse, and the chorus cracked into the rumble of innumerable disjoint voices. The outer echelons of each Trial paused, then filed behind the centremost formations, creating three great, articulated squares. Thus the Host of Hosts arrayed itself across the plain the ancient K?niüri had called ?gorrior; and the Nonmen, Mirsurq?l, immediately below the jaws of the ?bil Gate.
Golgotterath loomed wicked directly before them—at long last!—so close its stench hung as a corrupt emanation on the air. The Horns soared in hazy stages above, the alien traceries of the World-Curse clear for all to see. Abstract figures, unintelligible and vast, etched into the casing. Bands of evil symbol. From a distance, the fortifications below seemed a crude afterthought, the Horns so overshadowed them. But now the Men could see that they rivalled, even surpassed, those of the greatest Southron cities. The cataclysmic Fall of the Ark had occasioned some kind of igneous upheaval, creating a series of cliffs and scapular heights, black and blasted, about the submerged base of the Horns—what the ancient K?niüri had called the Scab. A great curtain wall wandered its outer compass, towering more than fifty cubits in places, folded and knotted into a cunning series of bastions and bulwarks. The whole consisted of mighty black rocks hewn from the Scab’s interior heights, with the sole exception of the battlements, which had been adorned with tear-drop shanks of gold. The Lords of the Ordeal had reckoned they were some kind of salvage drawn from the Ark and affixed as a form of hoarding. Since no ancient texts made mention of them, the Men of the Ordeal dubbed them incisori—for the way they resembled golden fangs perched upon black-rotted gums.
The greatest gate in the evil circuit was also the only gate, the legendary ?bil Maw, so named for the myriad Ishroi it had consumed during the C?no-Inchoroi Wars. The Nonman had razed the hated original long, long ago, but the lay of the Scab was such that Golgotterath could possess but one orifice, one point of egress and ingress. Rugged cliffs skirted the black formation everywhere save the southwest, where it had been scalloped into a ramp very nearly as broad as the Sempis, one that eased from the very summit to the desolate plate of Shigogli. So while the walls upon the stronghold’s high perimeter had a plummet for their foundation—and were all but impregnable for it—those guarding the southwest stood upon ?gorrior, the same dusty earth as the Men of the Ordeal, or very nearly so. Thus their cyclopean immensity. Thus the monstrous proportions of Gwergiruh, the infamous Gatehouse of ?bil, which squatted every bit as immense as Atyersus. Thus the flanking towers, Corrunc and Domathuz, whose gold-fanged crowns reached as high as the summit of the Andiamine Heights. And thus the famed Oblitus, the network of ascending walls that terraced the slopes from ?bil’s black iron to the horrific immensity of the High Cwol, the fortress raised about the fabled Intrinsic Gate—the terrestrial entrance to the Upright Horn.
The stronghold hung in its evil sum upon this axis between inner and outer gateways. Thus the menacing immensity. Thus the iron-strapped stone. Thus the mad piling of Wards upon Wards—an arcane laminate so deep, so intricate, it stung the eyes of the Few.
For all their passion and conviction, the Men of the Ordeal were daunted. An attempt to rekindle the Hymn faltered, dissolved into a chorus of disparate shouts: individuals attempting to rekindle the ardour of their brothers.
They knew the tales. Short of stealth or captivity or collusion, no Man had ever gained Golgotterath. With the Sohonc, the Knights of Trys? had contested ?bil, the Extrinsic Gate, for the space of a single, ancient afternoon, but at a cost so grievous that Anas?rimbor Celmomas bid them withdraw before nightfall. Only the Nonmen, Nil’giccas and his allies, had managed to overrun this, the most wicked of all places.
An eerie, almost numb, silence fell across the entirety of the Great Ordeal. The morning sun climbed behind their backs. Their conjoined shadows, thrown long before them when they first assembled, shrunk to the height of grave-markers. The titanic gold of the Horns cast a yellow pall across skin, fabric, and sand.
Not a soul could be spied on the black ramparts. But the Ordealmen could feel them, it seemed, wet eyes watching, dog-chests panting, inhuman lips sucking drool …
The sentinels scattered across the heights of the Akeokinoi were all dead by this time. Near naked Scylvendi now watched in their stead, their skin painted the grey and white of the Occlusion.
Luminous, the Holy Aspect-Emperor rode to the fore of the host, paused upon the foot of the incline so that he and his retinue of Believer-Kings might be seen. Cheering erupted among the nearest ranks, then passed like a wave outward to the extremities. His head was bare, his leonine mane braided tight to the back of his neck. Unlike his warlike companions, he had no armour; he wore some kind of grand, scholastic billows instead, white silk so lambent it seemed mercurial, bound to his form with a serpentine black sash. Unlike his sorcerous advisors, he was armed; the pommel of his famed sword, Enshoiya, jutted above his left shoulder.
The Decapitants swayed from his hip, as always, smudges of black and thistle.
The roaring faded.
His back to Golgotterath, he assessed the mighty fruit of his labour, the Great Ordeal, and it seemed to those who were near that he wept, not for fear or regret or loss, but for wonder.
“Who?” he cried in a voice that somehow closed the distance between him and the most remote of his followers. “Who among my Kings will offer our Enemy terms?”
Hringa V?kyelt, Believer-King of Thunyerus, stepped forth from the Aspect-Emperor’s immediate entourage, keen to repeat and so secure his dead father’s glory. Passing his Lord-and-Prophet, he strode alone across the dusty interval, stopping beneath the monstrous shins of Gwergiruh. He wore his famed father’s coat of mail, which was black, and weighed two thousand kellics of copper. He hoisted his grandfather’s legendary shield, the ensorcelled Wark, an ancient heirloom of his family. He peered up at the parapets, and seeing nothing, allowed his eyes to roam the Horns, the breathtaking bulk, climbing into haze and heaven, higher and higher …
He feigned losing his balance, tripped into a mock pirouette.
The Men of the Ordeal roared, first for laughter, then for exaltation. The skies rang.
The Believer-King whirled from his pantomime, cried, “Yeeesss!” to the vacant parapets. “We laugh at you! We mock!” He turned back to grin at his hundred thousand brothers.
“The choice is simple!” he bellowed to the black heights. “Open this gate, live as slaves! Or huddle behind it”—he threw a glance over his shoulder—“and burn! In! Hell!”
?gorrior boomed with pounding shields and vibrant cheer.
The black parapets remained empty, the ramparts unmanned.
The Foe made no answer.