The Unholy Consult

  Behold, the insidious whisper declares, Ûbil Noscisor …

  The Intrinsic Gate.

  The stench of human entrails permeated the air. The Canal convulsed the whole of its glutted length. Ordealmen in their thousands formed dark clouds about each of the three breaches, blots that twinkled for countless sharp edges. The Exalt-Magus led her sisters out over the mobbed ruin of Gwergiruh beyond the shattered circuit of Golgotterath’s outer defenses. The Scarlet Spires had surmounted the Scab and secured their right flank, while the Imperial Saik was in the course of doing so on their left. Even as her sisters stepped back onto Ûgorrior, the Mandate sheltered behind the northern island of intact wall, and the Mysunsai—those who heeded her call—did the same behind the monolithic southern. The Ordealmen cried out in dismay below, cursed them as craven, but Anasûrimbor Serwa had eyes only for the sinister stages of the Oblitus. The Bashrag attack was no mere contingency. The Unholy Consult had yielded evil Ûbil and her monstrous towers …

  The ambush was part of a larger deception. A greater catastrophe loomed.

  But where?

  Dozens had ignored her call for a general retreat, most of them Mysunsai, but two of her own as well: Hûtta-mimot and Sapharal, older, headstrong souls, women who had pursued witchcraft under the threat of torture and death long before the Shrial Repeal and the founding of the Swayali. They lingered with their triunes as their sisters retreated, either loathe to abandon the Men dying below, or wedded to some course of action they thought decisive and heroic.

  Serwa forbid any effort to contact them or their subordinates. For the nonce, knowledge was the paramount objective—her mission.

  Plumes of smoke continued to rise from the gold-fanged parapets of the High Cwol, forming fans across the base of the Upright Horn, sheets of liquid black balding across mountainous gold. She conjured a Lens, scolded a handful of her sisters for wandering into her line of sight. Then Mirûnwe announced that the Mysunsai had spied another Horde spilling down the northwest slopes of the Occlusion. As catastrophic as these tidings were, Serwa had eyes only for her Lens and the image of Nonmen Erratics stepping from the parapets of the Ninth Riser—Quya, their skulls shadows for semantic incandescence.

  Ghouls.

  The tickle of oblivion drew her attention below: constellations of unseen Chorae borne by unseen hands. She waved the Lens down to the Third Riser, scrolled across loping companies of Ursranc archers.

  “Stand fast!” she cracked across the cloudless heavens.

  She barked orders to her triune, whom in turn signalled the other Grandmasters, as well as her brother Kayûtas, the Exalt-General, and the contingents of Chorae bowmen below.

  Mannish shrieks and huffing Bashrag wrawls pealed through the air. The Ursranc archers formed batteries along the parapets rimming the third terrace.

  Nothingness rained down on the malingering Witches and Schoolmen.

  Serwa batted away the Lens. Hûtta-mimot and her triune vanished in flickering succession. Sapharal and her sisters fared far better, with only one, Herea, struck … in the mid-billows, it appeared.

  But the Quyan Ghouls were instantly upon them. More than a hundred of them descended the Oblitus, some naked save for the beading of ceremonial scars or myriad lines of ink script, others garbed in Ishroi glory, agleam in silk and nimil, and still others bound in rot and rags—all howling their madness in geometries of light and fire.

  The timing troubled the Exalt-Magus.

  “Hold!” she boomed.

  Of the stranded Swayali, only Sapharal hung with her billows fully extended. Mipharal, her sister in fact of blood as well as witchcraft, clutched the injured Herea. The woman looked up and found herself at the blinding intersection of two dozen Quyan Cants. The two Witches lasted scarcely ten heartbeats. Though spared the brunt, Sapharal fell back to the surviving section of wall between Domathuz and Gwergiruh. The Ghouls pursued her with howling light, a brilliant welter of Cants, Illarillic Primitives and Thimioni Aggressives, chosen less out of sense than fury. Sapharal fled the cataclysmic advance, her tattered Wards sailing ethereal about her. But the Ghouls closed, scraping and spearing and hammering at her with lights bright enough to throw shadows in the full sun, killing all the hapless Men she passed—the Men who did not matter.

  Just then, the first of the rearmed Chorae archers began surmounting the stranded islands of wall, scuttling for what cover the wrack afforded, crouching and firing. Old beyond reckoning, lusting for ruin and heartbreak, the Quya Erratics had not sensed their Chorae through the wall’s intervening bulk. Many paused to regard the new threat, but many more continued hounding Sapharal, who dove beneath a golden fang laying wedged in debris.

  What followed bruised the hearts of all those who Dreamed the First Apocalypse, and so knew the Ghouls as they once were—as Ishroi and Siqû, Cûnuroi of ancient old. Only the Anagogic Schoolmen were so callous as to cry out in exultation. The Chorae bowmen began finding their raving targets, and one by one the Quya began falling as salt and statuary, crashing across the First Riser or into the churning length of the Canal. The ghoulish sorcerers began shrieking their inhuman songs, raked the archers with torrents of fractal light, killing many for the violence of secondary, mundane forces. But for every one they killed, two more slipped between the battlements. And lo, the Men of the Three Seas loosed a second Chorae Hail, one avenging the tragedy of the first more than two thousand years ago.

  “On them!” the Exalt-Magus thundered.

  And with that she led her arcane sisters over the teeming ruins of Ûbil Maw, back into the cauldron of Golgotterath, even as the Mysunsai and the Mandate floated out across either flank, their skulls furnaces of meaning, their singing an existential cacophony, the song of five hundred stone-cracking Cants.

  It was a sight unlike any seen. Slaughter become beauty and light.

  Dazzling Primitives, ghostly Reality Lines and blinding Inessences … all of them snuffed for the fury of Abstractions and Analogies, winking into burning, blasting existence, then fading on the smoke of dropping, burning forms. So died Sos-Praniura, Lord-of-Poisons, accursed Founder of the Mangaecca; and Mimotil Cravenhearted, Bearer of the Copper Tree at Pir Minginnial; and the mercurial Cu’cûlol, the impossibly ancient kinsman of Cu’jara Cinmoi. So fell Risaphial, nephew of Gin’yursis, and so many others, in reckless immolation, battling for the very evil that had so scarred their hearts, murdering for memory’s sake.

  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 he
r 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 Krû 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 battle-axe 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.

  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. Anasûrimbor 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, Kayûtas, 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. “St
orm 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.