Of all the Inchoroi abominations, none were so unnatural as the Bashrag. They spilled from the cavities, poured like sewage into the gleaming stew of Mannish nations crammed into the Canal, shambling monstrosities, shagged with great black heads of hair, possessed of malformed, tripled limbs, armoured in gowns of iron weighing ten thousand kellics or more. The Men were scarce more than armed and armoured children before them. Even the tallest of the Tydonni stood no higher than their elbows. Only the Nansur Columnaries under General Tarpellas managed to impede their bellowing egress, releasing volleys of javelins in numbers that could bring down mastodons. But the breaches continued discharging the beasts, who leapt and stomped into their midst, squealing and grunting, heaving their shield-sized cleavers. Not a single grin survived that initial onslaught, but there was no shortage of bravery—at least at first. Men stabbed and hacked and speared. But the quarters were too close, the Bashrag too ferocious, too powerful, for them to slow, let alone contain, the rampage. Armour crumpled like foil. Skulls shattered like pottery. Shields were little more than vellum, things swatted and ripped away. The swinging axes halved Men where they stood, tossed whole torsos over the screaming tumult.
The Schoolmen watched from on high, dismayed for the mayhem, paralysed for want of any course of action. The cunning of their Foe was obvious, as was the objective. Attack the beasts from above, and they killed their own. Attack them from the ground, and they risked their own lives, for hundreds of the creatures bore Chorae. The ambush’s immediate objective was nothing more than to inflict losses, to murder as much of the Great Ordeal as possible on the doorstep of Golgotterath. Then Anas?rimbor Serwa, either succumbing to womanish fear or savvy to some other threat, commanded the Schools retreat …
Those who could looked up, saw the Grandmistress, her billows soiled with soot and violet, lead her Swayali back out over ?gorrior. For all their hardness, panic seized the Men of the Ordeal.
Within heartbeats, it seemed, the Nasueret, Selial, and Circumfix Columns all but ceased to exist. The hallowed Nansur standard—the legendary breastplate of Kuxophus II, the last of the ancient Kyranean High Kings—was overthrown. Tarpellas, who stood upon the debris heaped against the rear of Gwergiruh bawling futile commands, was struck from the shoulder to the pelvis. Death came swirling down.
Maranjehoi, Grandee of Piralm and companion to Prince Inrilil, lost his right arm nearly at the shoulder, on a blow so swift that the dismemberment left him standing. He simply stumbled backward, fell onto his rump and back across the corpses of his kinsmen, gazed unblinking at the sky-hooking enormity of the Horns until he could do nothing else.
Bansipitas of Sepa-Gielgath fell. As did Orsuwick of Kalt and Wustamitas of Nangaelsa, both undone by anvil-sized hammers.
Death and more death, sweeping down and away …
Men began fleeing, or attempting to do so, for thousands found themselves trapped in the scrum about the breaches. Exultant, the Bashrag loosed a sinusoidal roar and stampeded into them, worked a great and grisly slaughter.
The surviving Believer-Kings in the Canal lamented, began crying out to heavens, calling for their Holy Aspect-Emperor …
A cry of masculine agony, muffled, yet near enough to hear the raw of it, the crack and gurgle of phlegm.
It yanked the Blessed Empress from her nodding reverie, sent her leaping to her feet. She stood blinking, listening, knowing in her bones that it had come from within the Umbilicus. She cursed Achamian, suddenly understanding that this was what had made his presence mandatory. No soul was more vulnerable than the birthing mother’s—save the infant she delivered.
She clasped the knife she had set aside for the birth-cord, crept to the threshold, pulled aside the image-panelled flaps.
“Mumma?” Mimara sobbed after her. Another seizure was nearing.
She shot an annoyed look at her daughter, raised a finger to her lips …
Then pressed through.
She crossed the antechamber. Her ears pricked, she strained to discern any sound over and above the background cataract, the distant chorus of killing and dying.
She slunk into the corridor, crept down its length, holding the knife point directly out before her.
She heard muttering voices … then a cough, apparently grievous for the pain it inflicted.
She slipped into the Eleven-Pole Chamber, crouched low behind her husband’s bench and dais, waited for her eyes to adjust. She crinkled her nose at the smell, noticed the Ekkin? Arras was missing …
“Here? Are you sure?”
She nearly cried out for recognition, but stifled her voice out of fugitive habit.
“I need … to keep … watching …”
She peered into the airy interior.
“But there are beds!”
“It is … better … to see …”
Indirect light streamed through the missing fourth wall, the one Kellhus had torn away to reveal the wicked glory of Golgotterath. It fell across the raised wooden tiers, too diffuse to cast shadows, yet concentrated enough to darken the gloom surrounding. With his back to her, Achamian sat high on the arm of tiers opposite the great rip … ministering to someone laying naked and prostrate across the planks, his head across the old Wizard’s folded knee.
“You … you were right … all along … Right about him.”
Proyas?
“No-no … my boy. I was wrong!”
Esmenet fairly convulsed for the intensity of her shame—and relief. Of course he had left—as she had feared. And of course, he had returned …
He was Drusas Achamian.
Even still, she found herself voiceless and immobile, spying upon yet another luminous clearing from yet another murky bower—hiding, as she always hid, loathe to afflict others with her fraudulent presence …
The lesser reality of her soul.
“But he is false …” the ailing King of Conriya gasped, “He is … D?nyain … Just as you said!”
Achamian raised an arm to the brightness, revealed his wiry profile for the merest of instants. “Look for yourself … Golgotterath falls!”
She could see nothing of the spectacle, given her angle …
“Does it?” Proyas asked on a heaving shudder.
And it astonished, even appalled, to realize that she had turned her back on the Apocalypse …
“Well it certainly burns …”
Anas?rimbor Kellhus, her accursed husband, played number-sticks for the very World—and she did not care … so long as Mimara remained safe.
“Ah …” Proyas said, his voice regaining, even if only for a heartbeat, something of its old warmth and confidence. “Yes … It must be nectar … for you … Narcotic even … A spectacle … such as this.”
Achamian said nothing, continued daubing his old student’s face. Pallid light showered down upon them, inking their undersides, bleaching them of colour, etching them in the monochrome facts of their mortality. A king dying upon a sorcerer’s lap … as in days of old.
Esmenet swallowed at the ache of her cowardice, her abject inability to either reveal herself or steal away. She remembered spying him unawares in Amoteu so very long ago, after reading The Holy Sagas for the first time … after spurning him for the delirium of Kellhus’s bed. She remembered the heartbreak of finally understanding him, the beauty that was his all-too-human frailty …
And it seemed nothing compared to this.
“Can you—?” Proyas began, only to have his voice stolen by some whistling pain.
“Can I what, dear boy?”
“Can you … you … forgive me … Akka?”
An insincere laugh.
“A wife’s curse is as worthless as a sorcerer’s blessing. Isn’t that what you Conriyans sa—?”
“No!” the King cried, obviously preferring the anguish of violent exclamation to any demurral or making-trite. “My name …” he continued on a grimacing voice, “will be the name … the name … that my children … my children’s children … will curse in their prayers! Don’t you see? He did not simply betray my body! I’m damned, Ak—!”
“As am I!” the old Wizard cried in smiling contradiction. Esmenet saw his shoulders hitch in a helpless shrug. “But … one learns to muddle.”