King Hringa V?kyelt stood waiting, scanning the battlements, his grin fading into a frown. After several heartbeats, he shrugged, and slinging Wark over his shoulder, began strolling back to his brother Believer-Kings. Even as he turned a great, paint-and-fetish-adorned Sranc leapt from the blackness and cast a spear as thick as a weaver’s beam, shrieking, “Mirukaka hor’uruz!” in the corrupt tongue of his race.
This, the first glimpse of their enemy, astounded the Host. The shaft struck the Believer-King in the small, drove him to his face. Thousands among the Men gasped, certain he was dead. But Wark had preserved him, just as it had preserved his grandfather and his grandfather’s grandfather before him. Grimacing, the Believer-King of Thunyerus hoisted himself back to his feet.
Once again, the Great Ordeal roared.
“Is that ‘Yes’?” Hringa V?kyelt called to the lonely Ursranc, “or ‘No’?”
Stung by tears of hilarity, Men clutched their sides, even swatted their cheeks.
“Well?” the Thunyeri shouted to the creature.
Rather than speak, his foul interlocutor stiffened about a spasmodic start, spouted violet blood across the stone. He was heaved upward, his limbs flopping in unison. The Great Ordeal drew collective breath, for a Nonman held him high overhead, his face indistinguishable from his victim’s, but his nude form the very image of inflamed, porcelain perfection. He heaved the Sranc out over the parapets, laughing as he did so. The carcass crashed in a shamble to the ground, popped like rotted fruit.
Silence claimed the reaches of ?gorrior. The Nonman’s ridicule trailed into a crazed murmuring. He raised his face to the sun, turned it from side to side as if to warm either cheek.
“Who,” King Hringa V?kyelt cried, “speaks for the Unho—?”
“Yoouu!” the nude Nonman raged in deformed Sheyic. He raised a foot upon the battlement, scanned the whole of ?gorrior, glared for what seemed an eternal moment of incredulity. “You have wrecked me!”
The hard-bitten Thunyeri peered at the figure, scowling. “Don’t look at me! I have no idea what happened to your clothes!”
The gales of warlike laughter seemed to focus the Nonman’s attention. He stood bold, raked the distant formations with bald contempt. Then he made Hringa V?kyelt the prize of a sneering gaze, one that bespoke ten thousand years of racial contempt.
“The World holds no terror for me,” the Nonman said. “I stand naked as the falling sword!”
He closed his eyes, shook his head in pity. His body seemed oiled for beauty. “I am the terror … Yimral’emilias simpiraccas …”
Twin suns glared from his waxen skull. Great arcs of Gnostic energy encompassed him …
Hringa V?kyelt reached for his Chorae. But somehow, his Holy Aspect-Emperor was there, at his side, staying his han—
A dazzling tempest seized them, erupted across blind angles, Quyan assaults twisting and cracking across Gnostic defenses. The Men of the Ordeal blinked in the wake of the onslaught, their eyes adjusting …
The Holy Aspect-Emperor stood unharmed, his Believer-King kneeling at his side. A wild mane of scorching formed a perfect circle about them, blackened earth still smoking.
The Host of Hosts erupted in jubilant fury.
The Nonman looked to the cheering masses, imperious, but more for incapacity than presumption. Neither smiling nor sneering, he had the air of a drunk parsing suspicions of affront, one who imagined himself too cunning to yield any reaction. Let the World wait, he would be the one to decide …
Whatever it was that happened …
Anas?rimbor Kellhus commanded Hringa V?kyelt to clutch tight his Chorae and withdraw. Robbed of his swagger, the Thunyeri hastened back to his Household, leaving his Lord-and-Prophet alone beneath the dwarfing turrets of Gwergiruh.
“Cet’ingira!” the Holy Aspect-Emperor called up to the nude figure. His voice fell upon the air like a cudgel upon pottery. “Mekeritrig!”
An old and wicked name, attached to innumerable legends, a curse upon innumerable lips.
The Evil Siqu inclined his face downward, but his dark eyes lingered on the masses beyond.
“They laugh …” he finally called down, as though uncertain whether to be wounded or offended.
“Do you recall me, Man-traitor?”
The eyes clicked down. A lucid interval passed between them.
“You?”
Peering, as if vision were naught but memory. Then the dawning of delight.
“Yesssss,” the ancient Erratic said. “I remember …”
“Do you repent your obscene iniquity?” the Holy Aspect-Emperor boomed across the wastes of ?gorrior. “Will you embrace your damnation?”
Cet’ingira smiled. His eyelids fluttered. He rolled his chin upon his breastbone. “Can you mean such things?” he marvelled. “Or do you speak this for them?”
“Do! You! Repent!”
The Evil Siqu thrust out a cramped hand, a curious gesture toward the assembled masses. “So the nettle condemns the oak!”
“I am the voi—!”
“Pfah! You are scarcely a child! I am older than your languages, your histories, your duping Tusk! I am older than the names you give your tapeworm Gods! The soul that now regards you has witnessed Ages, mortal!” Deep laughter echoed down the ramparts, offensive for its sincerity. “And you would presume to be its Judge?”
Serene of mien and pose, the Holy Aspect-Emperor paused in the manner of those awaiting an interruption to end. All across ?gorrior, Men of the Ordeal caught their breath, for he seemed to glow in the instant, in a manner too profound for eyes. There he stood, the Warrior-Prophet, overshadowed by monstrous stoneworks, scorned as a child … and yet it was he who was the mightier by far.
He shrugged, raised his palms from his thighs. A nimbus of gold flashed about his outstretched fingers.
“I am,” he said, “but the vessel of the Lord.”
Cet’ingira cackled for what seemed a long time. “Oh, you are far, far more Anas?rimbor …”
There was a great thrum of bow-strings. Myriad negations of Creation pocked the open air, rising from points across the black ramparts and falling on a menagerie of arcs, climbing, falling, converging on the circle the Nonman had scorched upon the earth … striking as a furious hail.
But the Holy Aspect-Emperor was no longer there.
Cet’ingira snapped his gaze skyward, to a point just above the white stab of the sun …
For it was upon this angle that the Ciphrang fell roaring.