So the Holca closed with the Bashrag, leaping into them with hacking fury, hewing their tripled ankles, picking their chariot breasts, axing their cauldron skulls. They moved with the lethal alacrity of cats despite their hulking frames, possessed of a ferociousness that was as insane as it was unconquerable. Even disembowelled, they stood and raged and battled. The Sons of Holca fought crazed, and the Bashrag, in their dim way, were astonished. They croaked and mewled to their brothers. They assailed the Crimson Men in ever greater numbers and fell, grunting, pawing gouts of violet with three-handed hands.
The lumbering obscenities numbered at most some few thousand, and for all the punishment they had meted, their numbers had been whittled down. As more and more of the beasts answered the alarums raised by the Holca, the bloody contests began to turn across the entirety of the Canal.
So the battle hung poised when the Nuns and Schoolmen assailed the Quya. Be they black and rheumy or white and clear, all eyes turned upward to the vaulting of wicked lights, incandescent and ephemeral. And for a miraculous moment they simply stood wondering, Man and Bashrag, shedding shadows that spun about their feet. And as the Quyan Ghouls began dropping, blasted and burning, the soulless hulks were seized by terror. The Soldiers of the Circumfix let out a mighty shout, charged en masse, and began avenging the thousands that had been killed.
Not a soul among them at this point knew of the Horde descending from the west.
The foremost triunes stayed low, striding scarcely above the heads of the Men massed and advancing below. They sang continuously and in unison, their heads inclined to the threat of the Oblitus, great plumes of sorcerous smoke materializing from their outstretched hands, drawn high into obscuring shrouds on the wind. Perched on the islanded walls, meanwhile, the Chorae Bowmen began methodically pelting the terraces of the Oblitus with their Trinkets, bringing down vast systems of interlocking Wards. The Believer-Kings and their vassals surged onward and upward using hooks and chains, climbing from the carnage and shadow of the Canal, seizing first the Second and then the Third Riser, where their arms and armour flashed newborn in the nooning sun.
And they understood the wicked might of the Consult had been broken. Golgotterath lay open, helpless before their righteous fury. An eagerness seized them, a predatory knowledge that whetted their lust for blood and destruction. Men whooped, cried out triumphant, rushing over the abandoned tiers of the Oblitus. Anas?rimbor Serwa remained suspicious, even though she understood their conviction. Their Holy Aspect-Emperor had overthrown every place he had coveted. Why should Golgotterath prove any different?
Unless the ancient and monstrous intellects of the Consult played a far different game.
One that turned on timing.
She had already signalled her concerns to her elder brother, Kay?tas, who concurred. The newborn Horde was the cornerstone of the Consult’s design, not the gold-fanged bulwarks of Golgotterath, which need only occupy the Great Ordeal long enough for the Horde to descend upon it …
This was why Father stood alone upon Shigogli, luring, cowing, wreaking untold destruction.
To purchase her and her brother more time.
“Seize the heights!” the Exalt-Magus thundered, her voice resonating across the Horns. “Storm the High Cwol!”
A sovereign brilliance, one glaring more against the noon sun than for it …
The Holy Aspect-Emperor hung low and solitary above the desolate plate of Shigogli, facing the intersection of the Occlusion and the blue-towering Yimaleti.
The very vista before him crawled, teemed with masses so great as to baffle the eyes, dupe the immovable frame of sky and earth into decamping. Sranc and more Sranc, nude save for crusts of muck, gibbering and yammering, brandishing crude axes and cruder spears, their canine members taut across their abdomens, stained violet for blood. They had swamped the northwest Occlusion. Pallid cataracts now draped the shoulders of every summit, cascading down and flushing out across the wasted plain, a thousand strands of turbulence convolving into one vast and loping onslaught …
Into the Blessed Saviour’s furious light.
In their rutting thousands, He smote them. And still they continued raging, continued running, tidal surges of innumerable, screeching faces, white beauty crushed into vicious, bestial inhumanity. They scratched and scrambled across the carcasses of the slain, leapt screaming into his armatures of scything light. Limbs and torsos erupted as autumn leaves about lines of brilliant white.
The Horde surged below and the Holy Aspect-Emperor hung above, flashing as a beacon, singing the only hymns the septic masses could reckon, genocidal Abstractions that carved tracts of ruin from the festering rush, Metagnostic disputations that consumed legions across the span of a league. Hearts exploded from myriad breasts. Skulls spontaneously imploded, wrung like rags. Wherever He walked, the Blessed Saviour trailed skirts of luminous destruction, plastering whole swathes of the plain with smoking, twitching dead. But they were pockets, merely, for the Sranc deluge swelled across the horizon, encompassed more and more of Shigogli.
Soon He stood stranded, hanging above an earth whose every ground had been overrun by white screams and raving appetites.
The Shroud engulfed first the Holy Aspect-Emperor, then his miraculous light in billowing obscurity. And for all his divine might, the Horde descended upon Golgotterath as if unhindered.
There are regions, places, gloaming tracts between the cruel edges and the mists—between the living and the dead. Hooks allowing the soul to linger beyond the moist endurance of the body.
Proyas lies breathing, naked and limbs askew upon the tiers, showered in the light of the very images that compel him.
The Horns soaring high as lightning. The black crab of Golgotterath, smoking.
The Shroud of another Horde, vast rags of ash roiling sunlit about gloom and darkness … nearing.
A silhouette appears below the spectacle, at the base of the breach in the leather wall—a physically powerful man, a warrior, sporting a Kianene helm. Even though he stands outside the Umbilicus, Proyas somehow knows the man belongs to the shadow play within, understands that he has always belonged, despite the madness and mayhem shouting the contrary.
The figure strides into the airy gloom, accumulating menace with warlike visibility. An entourage of armed wraiths follow, but they are obscured by his approach. Wild black mane. Stooped carriage. Scars upon scars upon scars—swazond without number. High cheekbones … and the eyes. His eyes. His unravelling look.
Cnaiür urs Skiotha strides up the tiers, rises to blot the smoke-roped vista of Min-Uroikas. His corded chest and torso lay bare in ritual display. Swazond are stacked in puckered sheaves across his entire skin, the record of his murderous life, shelling him. They encase his neck, a corded filigree that climbs the gunwale of his jaw, and reaches no higher than his lower lip … as if he were about to drown in his homicidal trophies.
The most violent of all Men.
Proyas gazes, blinking, but not for want of faith in his eyes. He lies beyond incredulity. Were it not for his anguish, he would have laughed.