The Unholy Consult (Aspect-Emperor #4)

Scylvendi?

But the Exalt-Magus turned away. She had no time. The arcane smoke had baffled the invisible Spearman merely—or so she had to assume. She soared over the black and broken heights of the Scab. The Canted Horn reared titanic before her, daylight glimmering through its chapped hull. The Horde had bloated far beyond its obscuring bulk, drawing a great curtain of darkness, ash, and ochre across the West. Hundreds of streamers radiated out from the tumult, the nearest fairly reaching Golgotterath’s ramparts: Sranc bands, she realized, the most famished and fleet. Behind them, the masses churned across what seemed the whole of the west, mob piling upon mob, a teeming that became ever more colourless and indistinct as the Shroud reared to consume everything, including the sky …

Even still, she glimpsed it: glimmering light, flashing from a socket in the twining screens and plumes.

“Father!” she boomed again, calling, beseeching, her voice cracking the distances asunder …

Just as the thirteenth pulse found her.



All Creation wailed. Dust vaulted into a high-hanging pall, swaddled them in shadow. The light of destruction became the only light, revealing Sranc, pale as fish in murky waters, packed unto trampling, howling, surging across the very bourne of visibility …

And it beggared Malowebi’s dispossessed soul.

The terror was a constant, as was the corporeal disorientation. Even though Malowebi knew he gazed from the sockets of a severed head, he felt his body nonetheless, dangling and paralytic, alternately dragged over earth and whipped about air like cords of weightless silk, a scribble across the face of the thronging plains …

The Horde.

Decanted across the great grey distance, flying in loose gales at the fore, surging into a tempest that encompassed heaven and earth, not so much covering the land as becoming it, mass upon frenzied mass, churning up plumes and veils that closed the distances, blotted the sun …

The Horde …

Smote by sorceries Malowebi could scarce conceive, Abstractions, like those belonging to the Gnosis, but unlike any Cant described in any text. Silvery hoops broad as bastion-towers, shaking everything within like images in kicked reflecting pools. Fractal blooms, lights replicating outwards, one become six, six become dozens, severing, detonating, laying out whole regions of dismembered ruin.

The Horde.

Countless raving faces becoming smooth with white wonder as death and light falls. Nightmarish. Vertiginous in ways the Iswazi mage could never articulate, a captive soul, swinging as a purse from the dread Aspect-Emperor’s girdle, watching him cast the very sum of his might into the wretched, earth-eating multitudes.



In their thousands, the Sons of Men set about gaining the Scab and securing the black curtain walls. Others were tasked with barricading and manning the breaches. Though some Lords-of-the-Ordeal balked at the notion of defending Golgotterath, they need only glimpse the western reaches of Shigogli to grasp its mortal necessity …

Lord Samp? Ussiliar and his Shrial Knights had taken the vanguard in the south, racing across the parapets in the wake of the Imperial Saik, who burned and blasted any Ursranc too foolish or maddened to flee. Seizing the gold-fanged heights proved remarkably bloodless. The mayhem and grim butchery were confined to the towers, where nary a footfall went uncontested. Though nowhere near the size of their famed cousins overlooking ?gorrior below, the structures were brutal affairs, at once squat and cyclopean, raised from blocks of crudely-hewn rock. Given the need for haste, the Saik Schoolmen were called on to scourge the halls and to blast the iron portals, clearing a path to the adjoining parapets so that the rush might continue while a force remained behind to finish clearing the structures. But the convoluted, almost hive-like, layout of the towers, combined with the raving ferocity of the Ursranc, transformed each into a pitched melee requiring hundreds of souls. The heavily armoured Shrial Knights howled and hacked their way down treacherous stairs and along narrow, lightless corridors. Those too reckless ran afoul traps and ambuscades, for the Ursranc were far more cunning than their wild kin. Men bled out in the corners, limbs tangled in the corpses of their foe. Grandmaster Ussiliar had scarce travelled five towers before the simple lack of manpower forced him to concede the advance to General Rash Soptet and his more lightly armoured Shigeki.

Progress in the south quickly ground to a halt. But once the first tower on the heights above the ruins of Domathuz had been cleared, Nansur Columnaries and Eumarnan Grandees began spilling onto the lobed back of the Scab. The initial plan had been to form up below the walls, then secure the heights in full array lest the Consult ambush and overwhelm them. But the Horde—which the assembling Men could see consuming more and more of Shigogli—denied them this tactical luxury. With General Biaxi Tarpellas dead, command of the Nansur Columns had fallen to General Ligesseras Arnius—though he would be some time learning as much. By all accounts an impulsive yet gifted field commander, he grasped the peril instantly. Who knew what secret gates the Consult might possess? He understood well the tragic lesson of Irs?lor: Should this new Horde gain the interior of Golgotterath, all would be lost. Trusting his example would count as communication enough, he led his Columnaries in a disorganized mob across the Scab, bearing beneath the crotch of the Canted Horn toward those towers directly overlooking the approaching Sranc menace. Quick to grasp his intent, General Inrilil ab Cinganjehoi commanded his mail-draped Eumarnans to do the same. To a man, his Grandees and their households gazed at the spark of white and turquoise light hanging above the nethers of the Shroud: their Holy Aspect-Emperor standing alone before the catastrophic onslaught. “To the western walls!” Lord Inrilil bellowed to his wondering kinsmen. “They have by far the better view!”

Despite its rampaging disorder, the Horde moved as if possessing a will and intent all its own. For those battling on the walls, the way it consumed ever more of the World between glances seemed a kind of nightmare. But rather than simply swallow Shigogli whole, it penetrated the desolate expanses, funnelled toward the southern extreme of the dread stronghold, winding into a tendril as vast as Carythusal, fields of commotion so immense that the Shigeki watching from the southern parapets felt the ramparts drift westward beneath their feet.

With such terror streaming below them, how could they know their doom hung above?



Kakaliol, Reaper-of-Heroes, stands gazing upon ?bil Noscisor.

Vile angel.

Scales smoking. Wounds weeping pitch and fire for blood.

Beware, the Blind Slaver whispers. Great and terrible sorceries lie coiled within the bri—

R. Scott Bakker's books