Kellhus had spoken true.
Drusas Achamian wept and cackled, whooped with a wild, even lunatic joy. He leapt to his feet, danced a howling jig. He averted his gaze, then peered and peered again, like a besotted drunk testing the reality of his visions. And each time he dared gaze he saw Golgotterath falling … There! There! The twinkling ranks surging across ?gorrior; Men—tens of thousands of Men!—streaming through the breaches. Schoolmen in their hundreds raining incandescent destruction upon the stronghold’s interior—striding the very gullet of Min-Uroikas! He slapped his forehead in disbelief, hooked hesitant fingers in his hair, his beard—and he exulted, croaking and dancing like a mad old beggar with a diamond.
Sobriety came with the sound of Mimara’s wail rising hoarse from the Umbilicus behind him. His soul scrambled to recover its habitual decorum, its martyred air. Without quite realizing he had wetted a finger and poked it deep into the pouch, which he had somehow pilfered from Mimara’s belongings. Qirri … his cannibal vice. His old, old friend.
He sucked at the ash greedily—swallowing more than he had ever dared in Mimara’s critical presence.
He closed his eyes to calm his racing heart, steady his arrhythmic breathing. He savoured the earthen bitter, glimpsed Cleric—Nil’giccas—in his soul’s eye, melancholy and ruthless for the profundity of his confusion.
So much had happened. So much had yet to happen …
Steady old fool … Think.
Mimara shrieked once again, her voice frayed into anguished threads. The clack and roar of arcane ruin shivered out to the bowl of the Occlusion. Smoke swam about the monstrous foundation of the Horns. Sorcery sparked and glittered. Achamian did not move, captivated by the vision, arrested by what seemed innumerable claims upon his hope and attention.
And suddenly he understood Esmenet’s mulish resistance, why she had pressed with such vehemence to prevent him from standing in this very spot. She had always been the wiser, the soul more shrewd. She had always known him in ways he could only recognize afterward. He had dwelt his entire life in the punishing shadow of this moment, this time …
Now.
She knew he would stand where he stood.
And that the World would claim him.
CHAPTER
FIFTEEN
Golgotterath
What trespass could be equal,
the woe you have brought upon us?
What sin could be so foul as to balance
our grief upon your ruthless Beam?
For we have praised thee, O Lord,
We have struck all that offends thee.
Why quicken our fields, our wombs,
only to set alight our granaries,
and crack our strong places asunder?
What sin could be so grievous,
that our children should be rendered,
to the raving of Sranc?
—Unknown, “The Kyranean Lament”
Early Autumn, 20 New Imperial Year (4132, Year-of-the-Tusk), Golgotterath.
The Sons of Shir raced forward. The mass deformed, stretching more and more into a spearhead as it neared the heaped foundations of Corrunc. The Mandate Triunes had struck ahead, and already assailed the lower terraces of the Oblitus, while the Scarlet Schoolmen had divided to attend to the intact walls on either flank. What few missiles that rained upon the rushing Men were sporadic and ineffectual. Those Ursranc that did not flee shrieking, burned such. The Scarlet Schoolmen clustered above the breach, laved the gold-fanged heights with golden fire, the brilliant issue of dozens of Dragonheads. The Sons of Shir gained the mounds below, led by the Knights of Conriya, whom the Holy Aspect-Emperor had tasked with redressing the shame of their King. They clambered up the ruin, roaring. The Marshal of Attrempus, Palatine Krijates Empharas, would be the first to crest the ruins of Corrunc, and the first to leap down, and thus, the first Man to set foot within Golgotterath. Shouting behind their silver warmasks, he and his household slaughtered what Ursranc they encountered. Glints of Gnostic destruction rolled like oil across their helms, shields, and hauberks.
The Sons of Shir streamed unmolested into Golgotterath. The Ark hung as a second, impervious ground above them, tracking the least detail in reflection. Beyond the curtain wall lay what the Ordealmen would come to call the Canal, a broad avenue finned with ruin and humped with refuse, and webbed with filthy hovels—warrens that the Schoolmen promptly set aflame. Smoke boiled toxic and black, its stench unmanning. Massed upon an isthmus of ruin surrounded by inferno, the Conriyans had no choice but to assail the far wall of the Canal, the First Riser, the lowest, fortified step of the Oblitus. Chains and hooks were called up, and the Southron warriors stormed onto the terrace unopposed, found the ground clotted with bodies burning as candles might. Their billows lacing the heights, the Mandate and Scarlet Schoolmen wracked the terraces above with catastrophic lights.