She understood then what a gift this was, the ability to negotiate terms with death.
“Yes …” Proyas replied, his voice once again wavering about the memory of an easy nature. “But this … Akka … This … is me …”
The old Wizard shook his head in slow incredulity. The two Men laughed, though only Proyas was punished for it. He gasped and wheezed about some pain, arched his back, revealing, for a heartbeat, the black maul of his pubis. The old Wizard clutched his beloved student’s scalp in his right hand, slowly drew his wetted cloth along the man’s chest, neck, and shoulders with his left. He continued doing this until the convulsions subsided—the same as she had done, and would continue to do, with Mimara.
Long moments passed in silence. Esmenet dropped from her crouch to her knees for discomfort.
“Such arrogance …” Proyas eventually said, his tone glassy, and alarming for it.
Achamian’s attention had drifted to what vistas his view afforded. “What?”
“Such … such arrogance … you would tell me … Such reckless, simple arrogance … to make guesses the measure … of worth …”
Achamian sighed, at last resigning himself to Proyas’s need to confess.
“Children often take me for wise. Children and idiots.”
“But I didn’t … I took you … for a fool …”
Achamian said nothing—evidence of some old and unaccounted bruise, Esmenet assumed. Such are the burdens we impose upon one another. Such are the plots we leaved unweeded, untilled.
“Can you …” Proyas asked on a tremulous voice forcefully breathed. “Can you forgive me … Akka?”
The old Wizard cleared his throat …
“Only if you hang on, my boy. Only if you li—”
But Proyas had pushed aside Achamian’s ministrations with the purple grotesquerie of a hand. He arched forward, gazing out to riot on the plain, only to be stalled by agony.
Esmenet caught her breath, loud enough to earn a momentary, backwards glance from Achamian.
Their eyes locked for but a heartbeat—two blank faces.
“Look!” Proyas groaned and gasped, waving an arm at Golgotterath, “Some-something … happens …”
She saw the old Wizard turn to the missing wall—and blanche.
Apart from the Scylvendi occupying the Akeokinoi, the Mysunsai and Saik Schoolmen reforming above ?gorrior were the first to see … though initially many refused to credit it.
To the west, the Occlusion extended on a perfect arc, reaching out into hazy colourlessness, fencing all that was visible, until dwarfed by the wreckage-of-earth that was the Yimaleti piling white upon cerulean. None other than Obw? G?swuran, Grandmaster of the Mysunsai, spied them, his eye drawn by a wick of dust or smoke …
Sranc, streaming down a gully in the western face of the Occlusion. More appeared at a different interval fairly a league to the south. More again at a point nearly between.
Then another greater mass to the north. An outpouring of thousands.
The Schoolmen traded shouts of alarm and consternation. Temus Enhor? dispatched triunes of Saik to inform Serwa, Kay?tas, and Saccarees. But it seemed they could already hear it, despite the hellish racket of battle below …
A titanic yammering, howling madness multiplied into a heaven-cracking sum.
The all-encompassing roar of the Horde.
Then, abruptly, like water breaking its bead, Sranc flooded the clefts and slopes of the far Occlusion, a writhing deluge of what seemed maggots in pitch. Teeming figures engulfed all save the most precipitous heights, in many places falling in sheets down cliffs and breakneck slopes, hundreds becoming thousands, thrown to their deaths by the vast surge. The dead and maimed tumbled down the mangled inclines, accumulated and accumulated, choking gullies, matting slopes, forming great ramps of carcasses, until those that toppled began leaping up, rejoining the rush—until the Occlusion became naught more than a collection of isolated summits in a cataract that heaved and rushed across leagues, pooling below and washing outward, a foul seepage of innumerable thousands …
The Schoolmen watched dismayed and incredulous. Some, those with more youthful eyes, sighted a lone figure standing upon Shigogli as if awaiting the torrents. They watched with wonder as the roiling masses advanced on him, raising plumes and curtains of dust …
Only when the ground beneath the floating figure began belching geysers of ashen sand, flinging Sranc in blooms of white and violet wreckage, did they recognize their Holy Aspect-Emperor …
Standing solitary against the Sranc Horde.
Vile angel.
Its triumphant screech brings down a haze of dust and flaked mortar.
Kakaliol, Reaper-of-Heroes, dandles the thing in its fiery talons. Lolling limbs, head hanging as if from a stocking. Soft skin blistered or abraded or shorn away, a bladder for gelatinous innards and absurd quantities of blood, like an unwrung rag.
But where? Where is the soul?
Cast it aside, the Blind Slaver commands.
I would keep it for my token.
It runs a claw across the porcelain scalp, skinning it like rotted fruit, seeking …
Discharge your task!
The Arch-Ciphrang roars, clacks and stamps in impotent defiance. How? How can it pain him so? A world like bread. Like soap or cake. A world filled with dolls of meat!
And yet impregnated with pins, edged with teeth.
The pleasures I could have rendered thee, mortal … The delights.
I render here.
The Seducer-of-Thieves stalks into vacant blackness, bearing the carcass across a horned shoulder. Its hide sheds a baleful circle of illumination, one that pulses larger upon each bull-huffing exhalation. But nothing more than crude-cobbled floors are revealed, so immense is the chamber. Only as the burning trail of its blood lengthens are the limits—and the purpose—of the great cavity revealed: the cyclopean blocks, the massive square pillars … and the vast wall of gold …
Vile angel.
Kakaliol pauses between two pillars, rakes the gloom with its infernal eyes. It allows its prize to slop sizzling to the floors.
Yes … the Blind Slaver murmurs.
They stand deep in the bowel of the High Cwol, the point where the ponderous stone of Golgotterath marries the impenetrable skin of the Inchoroi Ark. The curve of the High Horn climbs vast before the demon, liquid with reflected crimson and seething, scintillating gold. A great chasm, some thirty paces wide and too deep to be fathomed, separates it from the floors, so that it plummets as deep as it soars high. The surface, however, is far from intact. A bridge spans the abyss, black stone raised across girders of gold, linking the floors to a gigantic rent in the Ark’s shell, one sealed and barricaded by stone bulwarks as mighty as any in Golgotterath, as if masons had bricked shut a rupture in a ship’s hull.
Behold, the insidious whisper declares, ?bil Noscisor …
The Intrinsic Gate.