The Holy King-of-Tribes reached out into her trembling aura, pinched an errant lock of her hair between thumb and forefinger.
“You think,” he grated, “your lies reek less? That you might succeed where a D?nyain has failed?”
He clamped his right hand—scarred, burnt dark for cruel seasons of sun—about her swanish throat.
She gasped, raises ineffectual hands to the great wrist. “I am everything …” she coughed, “everything you need me to be!”
“You think I am so bent, so disordered?”
Both hands were about her neck now, thumbs digging not so much for her windpipe as her carotid.
“Lover!” she cried. “Assa—!”
“You think I beat you out of shame! Out of depravity?”
“Gnngh—!”
“Disgust!” the King-of-Tribes screamed, wrenching her neck. Shadow inked the crevices of his forearms, the striping of scars, the twining of veins. And he squeezed, driving thumbs like iron hooks, palms like grinding stone. “I battered you for obscenity’s sake!” he barked, his face a lunatic mask. “I tormented you to make you believe! Punished you to gull! To deceive!”
Her manhood arched turgid in her leggings. Noises cracked from her throat. Convulsions wracked her whipcord body. The alabaster perfection of her face perforated, flexed like some horrific gill …
Cnaiür urs Skiotha hunched over her now, corded as hemp, trembling with exertion, huffing air and spittle. His concubine’s body flailed cartilaginous for a heartbeat, an eruption of blind reflexes.
Mo?nghus barged between the last chieftains intervening, saw his father hoist her ear to his lips, murmur as much as rave: “I trained you as a beast!—trained you for this very moment!”
Mo?nghus blinked for the glimpse of smoke wafting from the ligature of swazond that encased his trembling arms.
“To wait out advantage …” the most violent of men gasped on a furious exhalation. “And wait …” he murmured, sucking air, titanic exertion creaking on his voice. “And waaait …”
He thrust her down as an axe or hammer …
“Until only death remained!”
The body folded like a marionette. A noise too meaty to be a crack—its neck …
Serw?’s angelic face fell open on glistening, knuckled articulations.
Cnaiür urs Ski?tha stood so as to sweep arms to the uninvaded fractions of the sky. The Chieftains of the People roared in frenzied approval about him, even clasping one another in celebration.
Still lathered for his exertions, the breaker-of-horses-and-men turned to seize his girl-skinned son’s shoulders. The grasp firmed when Mo?nghus cringed.
“Leave my side again,” the Scylvendi King-of-Tribes grunted, “and your limbs shall be struck from you.”
It happened the instant Serwa had ordered the assault on the High Cwol. It lasted for a heartbeat, soundless for the din of battle.
A line of light, dazzling, as perfect as any Gnostic Cant, but crimson …
And in no way stained by the Mark.
A Scarlet Schoolman dropped, dragged his flaming billows into the ramparts of the Oblitus. Thir?mm? Sek was no more.
The whole of the Great Ordeal stopped for horror and wonder, including Anas?rimbor Serwa.
Another line, soundless and blinding, conjoined Myrathimi—another Scarlet Schoolman scourging the parapets—and a point hanging on the High Horn’s inner thigh, above the reach of any sorcery. A simple pulse, bright enough to induce warding arms, then she was watching Myrathimi plummeted between blinks.
Tekne.
“Sweet Seju!” Mir?nwe exclaimed in horror from her side. “The Heron Spear!”
A third pulse followed, and another Scarlet Schoolman, Ekompiras, spiralled to earth, his fiery billows breaking up like straw.
“Interpolate!” the Exalt-Magus cracked through the furore.
The triunes of her Command instantly began shrinking toward her. She was already singing with her flanking sisters …
A fourth pulse, like a sun become milk—light that gutted the haphazard Gnostic spheres, concussions that pinked cheeks for mere proximity. Air whooshing.
“Father!” she boomed.
A fifth pulse. Light striking with the force of W?lri, the Gall-Spear of H?syelt, clapping Wards into smoke and splinters, punching breath from guts, igniting the extremities of their billows.
The Swayali continued singing, the blood weeping from their noses black for the light of their mouths.
A catastrophic sixth pulse, glaring across the back of hapless sorceries.
“Scatter!”
She cried this even as Kima toppled from the sky, a white moth afire. All their billows burned. The sunlight glared, and she glimpsed the Men of the Ordeal packed across the Oblitus, gazing up awe and horror. She pulled the sash binding her billows to her waist, slipped from her flaming gown …
Even as a seventh pulse passed through it as tissue.
She landed among a company of astounded Nangaels, already singing, simultaneously batting at the embers on her hair and shift. She expected the Men to flee, but they piled before her instead, shields raised in pitiful gallantry against the vast scarp of the High Horn.
But no eighth pulse came—not for her. An incandescent line conjoined the golden heights with a cluster of Mandati and Scarlet Schoolmen hanging before the black parapets of Cwol. Four burning figures plummeted from the arcane assembly, followed by a flailing fifth. She heard Saccarees command they scatter as well. She bid the bearded warrior behind her, a grim and strapping man wearing an iron hauberk, to raise his kite shield.
She did not see the ninth pulse, only her momentary shadow across flagstones.
She nodded to the Tydonni Knight, then leapt, using his shield to vault the summit of the Riser. Like an acrobat, she swung herself into a handstand, threw herself into a crouch on the precarious summit of the battlements. The Men on this terrace, Galeoth Gesindalmen, cried out for shock. She dashed out along the lip of the parapets, racing southward. So she ran the length of the Sixth Riser, sprinting like a gazelle with slender grace, her slippered feet making a blur of the crude battlements. To her right, the Soldiers of the Circumfix flew beneath and fell away, a gallery of gawking fools …
Those nearest died in the eleventh pulse.
Serwa rode the shock wave, pirouetting, alighting like a swan, running with even more speed. The Galeoth on the terrace began casting their shields into the air behind her, seeking to obscure her passage.
She sang out on a luminous voice, still racing. Black roiled through empty air behind her, blooming like lobes of ink through water. The rope of the battlements shrank to nothing. She leapt, legs scissoring into emptiness …
The terminus of the Sixth Riser erupted behind and beneath her, slapped her spinning. The twelfth pulse.
But she caught the ground’s sorcerous echo, began walking over empty space, ascended the scarps of the Scab. The encampment floated across her periphery, distant slums and rubbish splayed across the feet of the southwest Occlusion. The pluming dust and flashing arms were what caught her attention—faraway tendrils and streams spilling down along multiple points, overrunning tents and pavilions.
Human … she realized.