Only the greatest of mobbings, he claimed, could incite their pestilential descent upon Men.
The Great Ordeal traversed the intervening desolation.
There was foreboding among the Men, but there was exultation as well. Golgotterath hung in the distance before them, the trudging object, not just of their present exertions, but of anguished months of campaigning and toilsome years of preparation. Few pondered the fact explicitly, for doing so robbed the air of its sustenance, the will of its direction. Golgotterath—the end for which whole peoples had been put to the sword. Golgotterath—the warrant of so much peril, so many privations of the heart, spirit, and flesh. Golgotterath—the subject of so many outraged prayers, sinister tales, and anxious, nocturnal musings.
Golgotterath. Min-Uroikas.
The Wicked Ark.
The greatest evil the World had ever known, bloating by imperceptible degrees, step by dusty step.
There could be no denying the holiness of their undertaking. There could be no questioning the righteousness of raising arms against such a place—a cancer so foul, so obvious, that it compelled excision.
There could be no doubt.
The God of Gods walked with them—through them. The Holy Aspect-Emperor was His sceptre, and they were His rod, the very incarnation of His curse, His violent rebuke.
The song, when it arose, seemed to spark in all throats at once …
By the waters of Siol,
we hung our lyres upon the willows,
and abandoned song with our mountain.
And it seemed a miracle within a miracle, a glorious compounding of Providence, that this, of all the lays they had committed to memory, would be the song to seize their hearts now: the Warrior’s Hymn.
Ere the doom of Trysë,
we hoisted our sons upon our knees,
and counted scabs upon our hands and heart
None knew its origins. It possessed as many verses as the World possessed bone-fields, which made its subtleties all the more remarkable: the melancholic honesty, the obstinate manner in which it sang around battles instead of about them, bundling the violence in depictions of respite. It never failed to move, even when raised during the most interminable of marches, for it sang to the commons between them, the vigil that all warriors kept in the shadow of atrocity. They sang as brothers, a vast assemblage of coincident souls, and they sang as sinners, the authors of abominable deeds, isolate and astray …
In the fields of Cenei,
we broke bread that we had stolen,
and tasted the love of those who were dead.
And it was the same for all of them. The Knights of Hinnant, their faces white for paint, their eyes bred to the hazy expanses of the Secharib Plains and so strangely comforted by the flat plate of Shigogli. The iron-mailed Agmundrmen, carrying their longbows likes stocks across their shoulders, their wrists hooked high. The Massentian Columnaries, their shields like halved barrels emblazoned with the Circumfix and the Sheaf, yellow upon yellow. The two-hearted Holca tribesmen, conspicuous for their stature and the fiery crimson of their beards and manes, marching, as always, at the fore, where their battle-madness was both most useful and most safe.
Golgotterath! There before them! Inexorable and impossible. No matter what the nation, no matter what the names scrawled on the ancestor lists, it was the same for all. Golgotterath had become the World’s only portal, the one defile that could deliver them from Hell. They had pitched themselves from the precipice, leapt into the void …
And so the Wicked Stronghold loomed, sinister in aspect, as alien in scale as in appearance. The Horns reared impossible, commanding all, the two great Oars of the Ark goring the belly of the sky. Their golden skin roiled with morning brilliance, so bright as to cast palls of jaundiced light across the stoneworks below. Their hearts, which had been rooted in immobility, continuous with the very God, became progressively unmoored. Not a soul among them did not quail in some fashion, such was the premonition of enormity, of weights too vast hung upon heights too perilous. They became as gnats. And to a man they thought what every mortal had thought stumping across Shigogli’s bitter plate …
No Man belonged in such a place.
The proof of its manufacture was plain in the great abrasions marring the Canted Horn. All could see the radial beams through the stripped-away planking, glimpses of bulkheads and frames similar to those in wooden ships. The Incû-Holoinas, the dread Inchoroi Ark, was a contrivance, a Void-faring vessel, the product of innumerable, inhuman wrights and artisans … Aliens that revelled in filth and atrocity.
From where?
To a man they asked this, because to a man they instinctively understood the power of origins, that the truth of a thing lay in its genesis. But like the Nonmen, this thing, this mountainous Ark, had outrun its beginnings. It was enigmatic, incomprehensible, not merely in the way of miracles and cataclysms, but in the way of madness and mayhem. A thing from nowhere was a thing that should not be. And so the Ark, in their eyes, became an outrage against existence, an object so fundamentally accursed that hands became papyrus for simply gazing upon it …
An intrusion like no other … A violation.
The rapist that had despoiled the maidenhead of the World.
And so it was that disgust hooked their lips, revulsion propelled their voices, that abhorrence and loathing steeped their hearts as they cried out their battlesong. They gnashed their teeth, stamped their feet, beat sword and spear against their shields. Hatred and fury filled them, the lust to strangle, to cut and to burn and to blind. And they knew, with a conviction that made some weep, that to do evil to this place was to be holy. They became as cutthroats in the alley, murderers in the night, souls too dangerous, too deadly, to fear the machinations of any victim …
Even one so monstrous as this.
The Horns loomed ever more immense, the fortifications ever more near—close enough to reflect their shouting fury and so impart a demented, echoic resonance to their song. Soon the World rang as if across metal.
Beneath the Ark of horrors,
we saw the sun rise upon gold as night fell,
and mourned the captivity of tomorrow.
Trumpets crowed upon this, the ultimate verse, and the chorus cracked into the rumble of innumerable disjoint voices. The outer echelons of each Trial paused, then filed behind the centremost formations, creating three great, articulated squares. Thus the Host of Hosts arrayed itself across the plain the ancient Kûniüri had called Ûgorrior; and the Nonmen, Mirsurqûl, immediately below the jaws of the Ûbil Gate.
Golgotterath loomed wicked directly before them—at long last!—so close its stench hung as a corrupt emanation on the air. The Horns soared in hazy stages above, the alien traceries of the World-Curse clear for all to see. Abstract figures, unintelligible and vast, etched into the casing. Bands of evil symbol. From a distance, the fortifications below seemed a crude afterthought, the Horns so overshadowed them. But now the Men could see that they rivalled, even surpassed, those of the greatest Southron cities. The cataclysmic Fall of the Ark had occasioned some kind of igneous upheaval, creating a series of cliffs and scapular heights, black and blasted, about the submerged base of the Horns—what the ancient Kûniüri had called the Scab. A great curtain wall wandered its outer compass, towering more than fifty cubits in places, folded and knotted into a cunning series of bastions and bulwarks. The whole consisted of mighty black rocks hewn from the Scab’s interior heights, with the sole exception of the battlements, which had been adorned with tear-drop shanks of gold. The Lords of the Ordeal had reckoned they were some kind of salvage drawn from the Ark and affixed as a form of hoarding. Since no ancient texts made mention of them, the Men of the Ordeal dubbed them incisori—for the way they resembled golden fangs perched upon black-rotted gums.
The greatest gate in the evil circuit was also the only gate, the legendary Ûbil Maw, so named for the myriad Ishroi it had consumed during the Cûno-Inchoroi Wars. The Nonman had razed the
hated original long, long ago, but the lay of the Scab was such that Golgotterath could possess but one orifice, one point of egress and ingress. Rugged cliffs skirted the black formation everywhere save the southwest, where it had been scalloped into a ramp very nearly as broad as the Sempis, one that eased from the very summit to the desolate plate of Shigogli. So while the walls upon the stronghold’s high perimeter had a plummet for their foundation—and were all but impregnable for it—those guarding the southwest stood upon Ûgorrior, the same dusty earth as the Men of the Ordeal, or very nearly so. Thus their cyclopean immensity. Thus the monstrous proportions of Gwergiruh, the infamous Gatehouse of Ûbil, which squatted every bit as immense as Atyersus. Thus the flanking towers, Corrunc and Domathuz, whose gold-fanged crowns reached as high as the summit of the Andiamine Heights. And thus the famed Oblitus, the network of ascending walls that terraced the slopes from Ûbil’s black iron to the horrific immensity of the High Cwol, the fortress raised about the fabled Intrinsic Gate—the terrestrial entrance to the Upright Horn.
The stronghold hung in its evil sum upon this axis between inner and outer gateways. Thus the menacing immensity. Thus the iron-strapped stone. Thus the mad piling of Wards upon Wards—an arcane laminate so deep, so intricate, it stung the eyes of the Few.
For all their passion and conviction, the Men of the Ordeal were daunted. An attempt to rekindle the Hymn faltered, dissolved into a chorus of disparate shouts: individuals attempting to rekindle the ardour of their brothers.
They knew the tales. Short of stealth or captivity or collusion, no Man had ever gained Golgotterath. With the Sohonc, the Knights of Trysë had contested Ûbil, the Extrinsic Gate, for the space of a single, ancient afternoon, but at a cost so grievous that Anasûrimbor Celmomas bid them withdraw before nightfall. Only the Nonmen, Nil’giccas and his allies, had managed to overrun this, the most wicked of all places.
An eerie, almost numb, silence fell across the entirety of the Great Ordeal. The morning sun climbed behind their backs. Their conjoined shadows, thrown long before them when they first assembled, shrunk to the height of grave-markers. The titanic gold of the Horns cast a yellow pall across skin, fabric, and sand.
Not a soul could be spied on the black ramparts. But the Ordealmen could feel them, it seemed, wet eyes watching, dog-chests panting, inhuman lips sucking drool …
The sentinels scattered across the heights of the Akeokinoi were all dead by this time. Near naked Scylvendi now watched in their stead, their skin painted the grey and white of the Occlusion.
Luminous, the Holy Aspect-Emperor rode to the fore of the host, paused upon the foot of the incline so that he and his retinue of Believer-Kings might be seen. Cheering erupted among the nearest ranks, then passed like a wave outward to the extremities. His head was bare, his leonine mane braided tight to the back of his neck. Unlike his warlike companions, he had no armour; he wore some kind of grand, scholastic billows instead, white silk so lambent it seemed mercurial, bound to his form with a serpentine black sash. Unlike his sorcerous advisors, he was armed; the pommel of his famed sword, Enshoiya, jutted above his left shoulder.
The Decapitants swayed from his hip, as always, smudges of black and thistle.
The roaring faded.
His back to Golgotterath, he assessed the mighty fruit of his labour, the Great Ordeal, and it seemed to those who were near that he wept, not for fear or regret or loss, but for wonder.
“Who?” he cried in a voice that somehow closed the distance between him and the most remote of his followers. “Who among my Kings will offer our Enemy terms?”
Hringa Vûkyelt, Believer-King of Thunyerus, stepped forth from the Aspect-Emperor’s immediate entourage, keen to repeat and so secure his dead father’s glory. Passing his Lord-and-Prophet, he strode alone across the dusty interval, stopping beneath the monstrous shins of Gwergiruh. He wore his famed father’s coat of mail, which was black, and weighed two thousand kellics of copper. He hoisted his grandfather’s legendary shield, the ensorcelled Wark, an ancient heirloom of his family. He peered up at the parapets, and seeing nothing, allowed his eyes to roam the Horns, the breathtaking bulk, climbing into haze and heaven, higher and higher …
He feigned losing his balance, tripped into a mock pirouette.
The Men of the Ordeal roared, first for laughter, then for exaltation. The skies rang.
The Believer-King whirled from his pantomime, cried, “Yeeesss!” to the vacant parapets. “We laugh at you! We mock!” He turned back to grin at his hundred thousand brothers.
“The choice is simple!” he bellowed to the black heights. “Open this gate, live as slaves! Or huddle behind it”—he threw a glance over his shoulder—“and burn! In! Hell!”
Ûgorrior boomed with pounding shields and vibrant cheer.
The black parapets remained empty, the ramparts unmanned.
The Foe made no answer.
King Hringa Vûkyelt stood waiting, scanning the battlements, his grin fading into a frown. After several heartbeats, he shrugged, and slinging Wark over his shoulder, began strolling back to his brother Believer-Kings. Even as he turned a great, paint-and-fetish-adorned Sranc leapt from the blackness and cast a spear as thick as a weaver’s beam, shrieking, “Mirukaka hor’uruz!” in the corrupt tongue of his race.
This, the first glimpse of their enemy, astounded the Host. The shaft struck the Believer-King in the small, drove him to his face. Thousands among the Men gasped, certain he was dead. But Wark had preserved him, just as it had preserved his grandfather and his grandfather’s grandfather before him. Grimacing, the Believer-King of Thunyerus hoisted himself back to his feet.
Once again, the Great Ordeal roared.
“Is that ‘Yes’?” Hringa Vûkyelt called to the lonely Ursranc, “or ‘No’?”
Stung by tears of hilarity, Men clutched their sides, even swatted their cheeks.
“Well?” the Thunyeri shouted to the creature.
Rather than speak, his foul interlocutor stiffened about a spasmodic start, spouted violet blood across the stone. He was heaved upward, his limbs flopping in unison. The Great Ordeal drew collective breath, for a Nonman held him high overhead, his face indistinguishable from his victim’s, but his nude form the very image of inflamed, porcelain perfection. He heaved the Sranc out over the parapets, laughing as he did so. The carcass crashed in a shamble to the ground, popped like rotted fruit.
Silence claimed the reaches of Ûgorrior. The Nonman’s ridicule trailed into a crazed murmuring. He raised his face to the sun, turned it from side to side as if to warm either cheek.
“Who,” King Hringa Vûkyelt cried, “speaks for the Unho—?”
“Yoouu!” the nude Nonman raged in deformed Sheyic. He raised a foot upon the battlement, scanned the whole of Ûgorrior, glared for what seemed an eternal moment of incredulity. “You have wrecked me!”
The hard-bitten Thunyeri peered at the figure, scowling. “Don’t look at me! I have no idea what happened to your clothes!”
The gales of warlike laughter seemed to focus the Nonman’s attention. He stood bold, raked the distant formations with bald contempt. Then he made Hringa Vûkyelt the prize of a sneering gaze, one that bespoke ten thousand years of racial contempt.
“The World holds no terror for me,” the Nonman said. “I stand naked as the falling sword!”
He closed his eyes, shook his head in pity. His body seemed oiled for beauty. “I am the terror … Yimral’emilias simpiraccas …”
Twin suns glared from his waxen skull. Great arcs of Gnostic energy encompassed him …
Hringa Vûkyelt reached for his Chorae. But somehow, his Holy Aspect-Emperor was there, at his side, staying his han—
A dazzling tempest seized them, erupted across blind angles, Quyan assaults twisting and cracking across Gnostic defenses. The Men of the Ordeal blinked in the wake of the onslaught, their eyes adjusting …
The Holy Aspect-Emperor stood unharmed, his Believer-King kneeling at his side. A wild mane
of scorching formed a perfect circle about them, blackened earth still smoking.
The Host of Hosts erupted in jubilant fury.
The Nonman looked to the cheering masses, imperious, but more for incapacity than presumption. Neither smiling nor sneering, he had the air of a drunk parsing suspicions of affront, one who imagined himself too cunning to yield any reaction. Let the World wait, he would be the one to decide …
Whatever it was that happened …
Anasûrimbor Kellhus commanded Hringa Vûkyelt to clutch tight his Chorae and withdraw. Robbed of his swagger, the Thunyeri hastened back to his Household, leaving his Lord-and-Prophet alone beneath the dwarfing turrets of Gwergiruh.
“Cet’ingira!” the Holy Aspect-Emperor called up to the nude figure. His voice fell upon the air like a cudgel upon pottery. “Mekeritrig!”
An old and wicked name, attached to innumerable legends, a curse upon innumerable lips.
The Evil Siqu inclined his face downward, but his dark eyes lingered on the masses beyond.
“They laugh …” he finally called down, as though uncertain whether to be wounded or offended.
“Do you recall me, Man-traitor?”
The eyes clicked down. A lucid interval passed between them.
“You?”
Peering, as if vision were naught but memory. Then the dawning of delight.
“Yesssss,” the ancient Erratic said. “I remember …”
“Do you repent your obscene iniquity?” the Holy Aspect-Emperor boomed across the wastes of Ûgorrior. “Will you embrace your damnation?”
Cet’ingira smiled. His eyelids fluttered. He rolled his chin upon his breastbone. “Can you mean such things?” he marvelled. “Or do you speak this for them?”
“Do! You! Repent!”
The Evil Siqu thrust out a cramped hand, a curious gesture toward the assembled masses. “So the nettle condemns the oak!”