They could scarcely see one another in the murk; their billows transformed them into octopus shadows, their cowls concealed their light. Their singing seemed stolen from their lips, their lungs, and braided into the greater, choral impossibility. Each sang Ward after Ward, sheathing themselves and their Triune brothers in ethereal defenses, either abstract or metaphoric. Each silently counted the counterfeit steps taken …
Missiles fell as an indiscriminate hail, but more about them than upon. Each could sense the arc of Chorae through the air, small holes of nothingness whipping from obscurity into nowhere. One struck a Mysunsai sorcerer-of-rank, the bent-backed Keles Musyerius, upon his cowled head, and he simply dropped, salted to the pith, shattered across the ground. Three others were superficially salted by Chorae striking their billows, and had to be born back to the Ordeal by their comrades. The yammering parapets drew near, the sounds preposterously close, and more disconcerting still, falling from above, so colossal were Golgotterath’s defenses. Spears and javelins joined the violent downpour. Great, iron-tipped bolts cracked against the Wards of many. But the Triunes continued their blind advance, converging upon the one thing they could clearly sense in the swirling grey monotony: the fallen Trinkets of the Chorae Hoard, strewn about the base of the very stoneworks they had exposed and weakened …
The great cloud they had cast into the eyes of their enemy dissipated, enough for the defenders to discern their congregating shadows. The barrage of missiles concentrated, became a hellish racket. Seventeen Schoolmen toppled, flopped to earth, salted. Fifty-three others had to be carried back, some shrieking, thrashing, others immobile …
The massed remainder struck.
For the Men of the Ordeal, the gold-fanged crowns of Corrunc and Domathuz where the first structures to resolve from the screens of grey, little more than battlemented silhouettes against the far more enormous bulk of the Horns. They glimpsed the Ursranc clustered like white-skinned termites along the crest, frantically casting spears and loosing slings and bows at the unseen Schoolmen below. The sorcerous unison abruptly dissolved into a many-voiced clamour, one that swatted ears for booming urgency. Substance itself croaked in hellish tongues, including their own flesh. Lights flashed in rapid succession from the murk, white upon white … blue, crimson-violet, each revealing the mangled shadows of the Schoolmen and their billows. Clacking thunder tingled across bare and bearded cheeks, resounded over the whole of Shigogli.
And though many cheered, many more caught their breath, for they saw the summit of Corrunc slouch. The parapets dipped to the right, as though in mocking obeisance to the north, then simply toppled, first outward, then straight downward, as the evil bastion slumped into its own obliteration. The shock wave bulged, then blew out the last of the obscuring haze, revealing the Scarlet Schoolmen and the Mandati hanging about the crashing surf of Corrunc’s destruction, their Anagogic and Gnostic Wards pelted luminous for showering debris.
The Ursranc of Golgotterath shrieked and wailed across the adjoining turrets. The Sons of Shir cheered and bellowed like beasts, brandished spear and sword. Horns screeched through the residual rumble, and the swart Men of Ainon, Sansor, Conriya and Cengemis surged out across ?gorrior …
The Canted Horn reared on an ethereal scale behind the collapse—no less than a dozen souls were trampled for gawking at its heights. Gwegiruh hunched stubborn to their left, hulking works beneath a tempest of scything lights—the ministry of the Nuns. Mighty Domathuz beyond cracked even as they ran, sloughed its eastward walls—revealing stacked floors that crawled as a broken beehive, a glimpse of a thousand inhuman throes, before all dropped howling into the smoke and ruin below.
The Sons of Kyraneas loosed their own booming cheer, and the Men of Nansur and Shigek, Enathpaneah, Amoteu and Eumarna raced out across foul ?gorrior …
The Gatehouse of ?bil Maw alone remained standing. Half the height and twice the girth as Corrunc or Domathuz, evil Gwergiruh was simply too sturdy to collapse of its weight. Their billows twining into golden ligature, the Swayali were forced to pummel and to rend, to obliterate the ancient structure by degrees. They hung like fey swans about the monumental edifices, clawing at the bastion’s innards with geometries of light—the Third and Seventh Quyan Theorems, the Noviratic Warspike, and the High Titirgic Axiom. They scourged the scratching heights, blasted the smoking bowels, slicked the debris with violet ruin. Behind them, the battlehorns sounded, and the Middlenorthmen let out a mighty shout, the warcries of violent and gloomy nations, then charged in a single mass of 30,000 souls, the Sons of Galeoth and Cepalor, Thunyerus and Ce Tydonn, come to avenge their ancient kin …
The Ursranc upon the islands of intact wall screeched in terror, howled in lament. Lights erupted between the gold-fanged battlements.
And so the Great Ordeal accomplished what no other Mannish host could. The Extrinsic Gate was cast down in smoking ruin. For the first time in history, the belly of Golgotterath lay exposed to the licentious fury of Men.
The Umbilicus was entirely abandoned, but the old Wizard had already guessed as much. It was the emptiness of the encampment that terrified him, the sight of the slovenly precincts reaching out and out, a worn mosaic devoid of any sign of activity or life …
They were alone—stranded on the rim of Shigogli, no less!
But the Whore afforded him no more than heartbeats to ponder the consequences, for beyond the encampment, beyond the desolate tracts of the Furnace Plain, lay Golgotterath.
And it seemed he had heard it all along, the chorus of hundreds of Schoolmen singing.
Breathless, he gazed. He could see the Great Ordeal entire, massed in three great squares before a vast smear of smoke or dust. He could see the flicker of arcane lights, like discharges of lightning buried within a distant thunderhead only many-coloured: white, blue, and vermillion. Then he saw Corrunc stumble, tip and slump into smoke and oblivion …
Corrunc! Foul, murderous, and so tragically stubborn! The Eater-of-Sons destroyed!
The fraction of his soul that was Seswatha cried out for joy and terror, for it seemed impossible that he should witness something so hated, so unconquerable, overthrown. For it was he, Seswatha, who had convinced Celmomas to raise arms against the Consult, to dash the lives of noble thousands against its remorseless walls. It was he who had commanded the Sohonc to dare the Chorae Hail, who had sent so many of his beloved brothers to their doom. It was he, Seswatha, Lord Librarian, who bore the greatest portion of blame. And to see such a thing now … to witness …
It had to be some kind of cruel dream!
The old Wizard gasped, staggered. Up-welling passion cracked the strength of his legs, dropped him to his knees.
It was happening …
And Kellhus! He … He …
Blinking, peering, he saw Domathuz sheer in half, then topple into faraway ruin. Deferred thunder rumbled across the plain.