So fell the remnants of an entire Age.
Fairly two dozen Ghouls survived that initial onslaught. They could have fled the advancing triunes of Men, but nearly all of them persisted, some laughing, booming taunts in their melodious tongues, others simply shrieking out Cants, battling wraiths from their past, perhaps, shadows of ancient heartbreak. Hanging resplendent in their billows, the Magi of the Three Seas laved them in killing lights, tore away Quyan Wards like tissue, knocked the Erratic Quya from the skies, sent their blazing corpses crashing to earth.
Even as Bashrag hacked and Men howled below their slippered feet.
It opens and closes now, the Eye …
Dilating with the arrival of her birthing pains then squinting at their passage, and sometimes, more rarely, blinking and peering in the calm between, like a napping dog noting unexpected arrivals.
Mimara seizes the hand of the luminous angel that is her mother, screams, though her voice is little more than rope, rigging on a beached wreck. She hears herself whimper, sob. She gazes into the angel’s diamond eyes, begging, not for anything tangible or intangible, not even to make the agony stop, just begging, beseeching without hope or object.
She does not need the Eye to know the Blessed Empress thinks her daughter is dying.
It seems she must be dying, so excruciating the pain has become, so fruitless the ordeal. Mimara had not thought such anguish possible, the piling on of ache and twisting cramp and laceration and bulbous rupture. Her womb has become a great claw, alien and relentless, clenching and unclenching about the palm of her belly, kneading and crushing her very centre, again and again and again, until her screams are the screams of a stranger.
The latest series relents, and she actually cackles, so out of proportion is the pain, so lunatic. Her mother shushes and soothes. She falls to panting. Her eyes flutter, and the leather-walled chamber—gritty gloom slicked in pale lantern light—reels and revolves in aching delirium. Her mother is talking, she realizes … to someone hidden behind the shadows battling like starlings across her periphery …
“No. Impossible. Her canal … It must unshut …”
Achamian, she realizes …
Akka!
She raises her head against the cramping, sees him at the foot of the mattress, bickering with Mother yet again. The ugliness of his Mark is enough to kick bile to the back of her throat, but the beauty of his presence is … is …
Enough.
You can come out now, little one. Father has returned.
The Blessed Empress does not share her relief. “I forbid it!” she is crying high and shrill. “You will no—!”
“Trust me!” the old Wizard booms in irascible fury.
Her mother flinches, notices her scrutiny. Achamian follows her gaze.
They are ashamed, she realizes, even though quarrelling over the dying has ever been the lot of those who love. She tries to smile, but can only feed the grimace that tyrannizes her face. “I … I t-told you …” she gasps to her Empress mother. “I told you … he would come …”
The old Wizard kneels at her side, his smell pungent and unforgiving. He is trying to smile. Without explanation he wets his finger, prods it into the pouch …
How could she forget it?
He pulls an ash-furred fingertip from the maw of the thing, proffers it …
“Akka!” her mother protests. “Mimara … don’t …”
Mimara looks to him, the one Man she has ever trusted with her weakness, her father, her lover …
Her first disciple.
He cannot bring himself to smile; they have travelled far, beyond the need for compassionate deceptions. He does not know whether the Qirri will harm her or her child. He knows only that she has no choice.
Are you sure?
His nod is almost imperceptible.
She takes his hand, swallows his finger to the second knuckle, sucks at what is bitter and strong.
Nil’giccas …
Priest of Waste and Wild.
The Canal had become an abattoir.
The Men had exhausted the initial, inhuman fury of the Bashrag—by dint of numbers if nothing else. The giants had sheered through the ranks effortlessly at first, hacking broad swathes clear of all save the dead. When the Men had taken to panic, they had trampled and hewn, chased the survivors into disparate clots of resistance, or to the great bladders of Men about the destroyed towers and gate. But as their ferocity lapsed into labour, the massacres evolved into battles, which became more and more pitched.
The violence of the assault had been far from even. The bulk of the attack had come in the centre, where the Bashrag appeared intent on retaking ruined Gwergiruh. But here they confronted the legendary Sosering Rauchurl, High-Thane of Holca, along with two hundred and seventy-three of his tribal kinsmen. The Holca were the fiercest of the Sons of Thunyerus, though their cousins scarcely thought them human. They were famed for many things: their fiery hair, their prodigious strength, their battle-madness—and the fact that each possessed two hearts. The lands of Holca lay on the very frontier of Mannish hegemony, high on the waters of the mighty Wernma, in the violent shadow of the Wilderness the scalpers called the Mop. They were suckled in the shadow of the Sranc, veterans of countless mobbings, and like very few Men, they counted Bashrag among their ancestral foes.
Their heads great, wiry swags, their limbs pocked with cancerous moles, the Bashrag cudgelled and cleaved their way through the crush about Gwergiruh, where Rauchurl had assembled his kinsmen along ruined heights. As the grotesqueries lurched neared the base, the Holca leapt upon them, a shouting rain of battleaxes and red-flushed limbs. Obscene skulls cracked. Violet gushed from great scale gowns of iron. The Bashrag wavered. Seized by a berserker fury, Rauchurl closed with foul Kr? Gai, a chieftain renowned among his misbegotten kind. They roared at each other, Inchoroi obscenity and unnatural Man, the one lurching and dark, mucose and pallid, the other flushed with wild vitality, trembling with red-rimmed life, both screaming a fury more primal than thought or soul. Rauchurl leapt, swung his battleaxe wide on its leather strap … and caught the monstrosity’s jaw, portioning the vestigial faces on either cheek, sending the elephantine head backward. The High-Thane of the Holca did not so much holler in triumph as he screamed, adding his spittle to the descending haze of violet.