The Unholy Consult (Aspect-Emperor #4)



The stench of human entrails permeated the air. The Canal convulsed the whole of its glutted length. Ordealmen in their thousands formed dark clouds about each of the three breaches, blots that twinkled for countless sharp edges. The Exalt-Magus led her sisters out over the mobbed ruin of Gwergiruh beyond the shattered circuit of Golgotterath’s outer defenses. The Scarlet Spires had surmounted the Scab and secured their right flank, while the Imperial Saik was in the course of doing so on their left. Even as her sisters stepped back onto ?gorrior, the Mandate sheltered behind the northern island of intact wall, and the Mysunsai—those who heeded her call—did the same behind the monolithic southern. The Ordealmen cried out in dismay below, cursed them as craven, but Anas?rimbor Serwa had eyes only for the sinister stages of the Oblitus. The Bashrag attack was no mere contingency. The Unholy Consult had yielded evil ?bil and her monstrous towers …

The ambush was part of a larger deception. A greater catastrophe loomed.

But where?

Dozens had ignored her call for a general retreat, most of them Mysunsai, but two of her own as well: H?tta-mimot and Sapharal, older, headstrong souls, women who had pursued witchcraft under the threat of torture and death long before the Shrial Repeal and the founding of the Swayali. They lingered with their triunes as their sisters retreated, either loathe to abandon the Men dying below, or wedded to some course of action they thought decisive and heroic.

Serwa forbid any effort to contact them or their subordinates. For the nonce, knowledge was the paramount objective—her mission.

Plumes of smoke continued to rise from the gold-fanged parapets of the High Cwol, forming fans across the base of the Upright Horn, sheets of liquid black balding across mountainous gold. She conjured a Lens, scolded a handful of her sisters for wandering into her line of sight. Then Mir?nwe announced that the Mysunsai had spied another Horde spilling down the northwest slopes of the Occlusion. As catastrophic as these tidings were, Serwa had eyes only for her Lens and the image of Nonmen Erratics stepping from the parapets of the Ninth Riser—Quya, their skulls shadows for semantic incandescence.

Ghouls.

The tickle of oblivion drew her attention below: constellations of unseen Chorae borne by unseen hands. She waved the Lens down to the Third Riser, scrolled across loping companies of Ursranc archers.

“Stand fast!” she cracked across the cloudless heavens.

She barked orders to her triune, whom in turn signalled the other Grandmasters, as well as her brother Kay?tas, the Exalt-General, and the contingents of Chorae bowmen below.

Mannish shrieks and huffing Bashrag wrawls pealed through the air. The Ursranc archers formed batteries along the parapets rimming the third terrace.

Nothingness rained down on the malingering Witches and Schoolmen.

Serwa batted away the Lens. H?tta-mimot and her triune vanished in flickering succession. Sapharal and her sisters fared far better, with only one, Herea, struck … in the mid-billows, it appeared.

But the Quyan Ghouls were instantly upon them. More than a hundred of them descended the Oblitus, some naked save for the beading of ceremonial scars or myriad lines of ink script, others garbed in Ishroi glory, agleam in silk and nimil, and still others bound in rot and rags—all howling their madness in geometries of light and fire.

The timing troubled the Exalt-Magus.

“Hold!” she boomed.

Of the stranded Swayali, only Sapharal hung with her billows fully extended. Mipharal, her sister in fact of blood as well as witchcraft, clutched the injured Herea. The woman looked up and found herself at the blinding intersection of two dozen Quyan Cants. The two Witches lasted scarcely ten heartbeats. Though spared the brunt, Sapharal fell back to the surviving section of wall between Domathuz and Gwergiruh. The Ghouls pursued her with howling light, a brilliant welter of Cants, Illarillic Primitives and Thimioni Aggressives, chosen less out of sense than fury. Sapharal fled the cataclysmic advance, her tattered Wards sailing ethereal about her. But the Ghouls closed, scraping and spearing and hammering at her with lights bright enough to throw shadows in the full sun, killing all the hapless Men she passed—the Men who did not matter.

Just then, the first of the rearmed Chorae archers began surmounting the stranded islands of wall, scuttling for what cover the wrack afforded, crouching and firing. Old beyond reckoning, lusting for ruin and heartbreak, the Quya Erratics had not sensed their Chorae through the wall’s intervening bulk. Many paused to regard the new threat, but many more continued hounding Sapharal, who dove beneath a golden fang laying wedged in debris.

What followed bruised the hearts of all those who Dreamed the First Apocalypse, and so knew the Ghouls as they once were—as Ishroi and Siq?, C?nuroi of ancient old. Only the Anagogic Schoolmen were so callous as to cry out in exultation. The Chorae bowmen began finding their raving targets, and one by one the Quya began falling as salt and statuary, crashing across the First Riser or into the churning length of the Canal. The ghoulish sorcerers began shrieking their inhuman songs, raked the archers with torrents of fractal light, killing many for the violence of secondary, mundane forces. But for every one they killed, two more slipped between the battlements. And lo, the Men of the Three Seas loosed a second Chorae Hail, one avenging the tragedy of the first more than two thousand years ago.

“On them!” the Exalt-Magus thundered.

And with that she led her arcane sisters over the teeming ruins of ?bil Maw, back into the cauldron of Golgotterath, even as the Mysunsai and the Mandate floated out across either flank, their skulls furnaces of meaning, their singing an existential cacophony, the song of five hundred stone-cracking Cants.

It was a sight unlike any seen. Slaughter become beauty and light.

Dazzling Primitives, ghostly Reality Lines and blinding Inessences … all of them snuffed for the fury of Abstractions and Analogies, winking into burning, blasting existence, then fading on the smoke of dropping, burning forms. So died Sos-Praniura, Lord-of-Poisons, accursed Founder of the Mangaecca; and Mimotil Cravenhearted, Bearer of the Copper Tree at Pir Minginnial; and the mercurial Cu’c?lol, the impossibly ancient kinsman of Cu’jara Cinmoi. So fell Risaphial, nephew of Gin’yursis, and so many others, in reckless immolation, battling for the very evil that had so scarred their hearts, murdering for memory’s sake.

R. Scott Bakker's books