The Unholy Consult
The Men across the Oblitus watched spellbound, crying out curses and heavenly pleas. Frantic shouts across the Ninth Riser drew all eyes to a flickering above the Sixth—to the radiant glare that delivered the Holy Aspect-Emperor …
The Soldiers of the Circumfix roared in exultation.
He hung the height of a Netia pine, immaculate in his white gowns, gyres of smoke swirling out and about his miraculous coming-to-be. He held his hands palms up, flattened into blades, and his face bent skyward, so that it seemed he prayed as much as peered, searching for the dread Spearman …
A thread of crimson brilliance leapt between him and the High Horn.
For a span of two heartbeats, the brilliance and subsequent glare obscured him. Thousands cried out for premonition …
But their Saviour hung intact and unmoved, gazing precisely as before.
Another pulse, consuming vision and air. Men glimpsed the multiform apparition of his Wards, wicking energies, glowing across fathomless dimensions.
Again the Spearman struck. The air crackled for errant discharges. The interplay of convexities waxed brighter, reducing the Holy Aspect-Emperor to a penitent silhouette.
And another pulse, this one obscuring him altogether. The Wards now hung glaring, an ethereal object that jarred the intellect as much as the eyes.
Only those gazing up at the dizzying immensity of the Horn saw the luminous point appear on the tubular heights …
Another crimson pulse.
The Wards crumbled into smoke about the point of impact, entropy cascading outward, through all the incandescent reticulations, spinning into spaces more profound than empty air. And the Great Ordeal cried out for terror, save for those few peering upward, who first gasped for wonder, then cried out in delirious triumph.
For they saw their Holy Aspect-Emperor step from the ether above the Spearman, standing upon the platform’s slim echo, bellowing his Metagnostic song. They saw the rain of catastrophic Abstractions, the cracking flare and shimmering implosion of the Erratic’s Wards. And they saw their Saviour fall as vengeance upon him, cast him shrieking from the impossible heights …
They watched their Holy Aspect-Emperor take up the Spear.
The Soldiers of the Circumfix boomed in triumph. Across the Oblitus and the captive walls, Men fell to their knees and gave praise. They cried out the hallowed name of Anasûrimbor Kellhus, their all-conquering Lord-and-Prophet.
The triumphant shout shrugged aside the caterwaul of the Horde, resounded deep into the shattered halls of the High Cwol, where it further inflamed the heart of Mirshoa and his Kishyati kinsmen. They hacked and hammered at the raving, Ursranc throngs, until their white-painted faces were all but violet for their foe’s blood. They battled down corridors narrow and wide, pressing ever closer to the Intrinsic Gate. Like all warriors alive in the moment, they could feel it, the leakage of their enemy’s resolve. And this incited them even more, until Mirshoa and his kin laughed and roared like gods having lethal sport.
Tumult had engulfed all that was visible. The Horde crashed upon the westward ramparts of Golgotterath, bearing south. Vast legions of Yimaleti Sranc encompassed all the western tracts of Shigogli, churning up vast curtains of dust, screens woven into the impenetrable obscurity of the Shroud. To the east, the encampment burned, and divisions of Scylvendi horsemen had formed across the outskirts—what looked to be thousands of them. Within Golgotterath, Men ran from all quarters, scrambling to seize and secure the outer walls.
The Holy Aspect-Emperor raised the Spear … cast it.
Greater and greater it loomed, a vista of ruined ramparts and smoking sockets beneath the surreal enormity of the Horns.
“Fleeing!” the old Wizard cried out in dismayed indignation. “Fleeing to Golgotterath!”
For madness it was. They hobbled across the waste with Mimara braced between them, in the Throes or between Throes—he did not know, for the Qirri had afforded her a vitality all her own. Golgotterath loomed nightmarishly before them, the Horns reaching, burnished unto blinding in the direct sunlight, the Shroud engulfing ever more of the skies beyond. Incredulity numbed him to the pit—to simply witness the image let alone scramble into it. For they desperately needed to reach the gold-fanged bulwarks and the security of the Great Ordeal. Achamian suffered a clutch of panic each time he made note of the Shroud’s progress. Even with the blessed ash, even with the cannibal vitality quickening his limbs, they had no hope of beating the Horde to the breach where ancient Corrunc had once stood.
They were too late. He could feel it in his bones.
They could have walked the sky, had Mimara been willing to relinquish her accursed Chorae. But she insisted that she needed them. He had relented without protest: the Scylvendi were already burning pavilions by that point, and his greatest concern was to slip from the encampment unnoticed.
But very soon now, she would have no choice.
Very soon.
“Someone pursues us!” Esmenet cried over the growing howl.
The old Wizard followed her terrified gaze. At first all he could see was contradiction, the contrast of the lean vista they fled from with the black and brooding turmoil they fled to. Then he saw the far precincts of the encampment burning, the Scylvendi myriads fanning through the whorls and clots of canvas hovels as though flushing game from a meadow …
And closer still, a war-party numbering in the hundreds, galloping hard on their trail.
“Move! Move!” he exclaimed.
Mimara cried out for anguish, and somehow they managed to quicken their pace. But a shambling, stumbling trot was not going to save them. Within heartbeats, the People of War had gained enough ground to begin testing their bows. A shaft sunk into the ash to the right of them—then another just behind. The third glanced his Wards, skidded burning. Then a continuous hail of archery began flashing across the back of his Gnostic defenses …
It was time.
“Cast aside your Chorae, Mim!”
“No!” she barked savagely.
“Stubborn wench!” the old Wizard cried, fairly tripping for disbelief. “Yield them or die! It is that sim—!”
“Wait!” Esmenet hollered, looking over her shoulder as she hustled. “They’re turning about! They’re … The—!”
“Look!” Mimara croaked on a hook of agony.
Achamian had already turned, his gaze compelled by a crimson dazzle across his periphery.
Even though leagues distant, the Horns of Golgotterath nonetheless loomed, impossibly monstrous. The Great Ordeal had overrun the fell stair of the Oblitus—a sight that was itself breathtaking—and was even now assailing the High Cwol—the great citadel of the Intrinsic Gate! And there it was: a glittering bloodred line, conjoining a point low on the profile of the High Horn with what had been a Schoolman. A light miraculously unpolluted by sorcery’s Mark … a killing light.
Tekne.
“What is it?” Mimara cried. “The Heron Spear?”
Could it be? No. The Heron Spear had frequented too many Dreams for him to mistake it.
“The colour is wrong …”
A different Inchoroi weapon of light? A different Spear?
Speechless, they limped and raced across Shigogli’s desolate beam. The Spear flashed and flashed again, counting out their progress with burning Schoolmen …
Until Kellhus at last appeared.
Suspended high, a thread of ruby brilliance pulled perfectly taut … striking not the lurid convolutions of the Horde, nor the turrets of the High Cwol, but the inner thigh of the Canted Horn—where the golden shell was most decrepit.
A crack slit the sky’s throat. The echo rumbled like Fanim drums-of-war.
The Holy Aspect-Emperor cast the Spear again.
And again.
The sight was one the Soldiers of the Circumfix simply could not credit. For many, standing beneath the Horns stirred memories of dozing at the root of some ancient tree, the trunk a great and heavy bulk upon their brow, the curvature climbing to o
bscure whole empires of the sky. The forces, the torsions did not matter. Permanence was utterly assured, such were the proportions. Mountains did not leap, and the Horns did not fall.
And yet, the Canted Horn shuddered, wagged like something suspended from a line, then dipped, no more than the slightest declination—what would be counted an insult in jnan—but catastrophic nonetheless.
The sky teetered.
A sound like a dog’s yawn groaned across all Creation. The pinnacle swayed out, sheering through the cloud hooked about its gleaming neck. The Horn toppled. The eyes of many simply refused to believe, such was the scale. The ground seemed to heave beneath their feet, yanked as cloth torn between dog and master. The structure revolved in a ponderous pirouette, then sailed on an imploding hinge out across the plain. The sun burnished its golden descent, a bead of brilliance drawn over leagues of unearthly gold. On the plain below, Sranc wailed in the sudden shadow, legions scattering for terror into countless other such scatterings. A sound like coins zipping across fine mail—an enormous, airy whisk. Then a series of yawing cracks, concussions that swatted exposed skin—deafened. And there, before infidel eyes, the very sky plummeted, a vast, deformed cylinder, ribbed like the hull of a ship, obliterating Golgotterath’s ramparts, thumping the plains with geologic violence …
Casting Sranc like dust into the erupting air.
The impact threw Men from their feet. Blood popped from their noses, flecked the whites of their eyes. The ground shook as though quaked for more than thirty heartbeats—the time required for the structure’s monstrous crown to join its monstrous nethers. The Canted Horn hammered the very drum-skin of the World, and all Creation resounded. As far away as Carythusal, napping babes started awake, began bawling.
The Horde fell silent. A great gust of lucid air galloped into the belly of the Shroud—revealing the endless, virulent masses … white-faced and agog.
The Men of the Ordeal did not have time to wonder—they scarce had time to regain their feet. Showers of ejecta followed hard upon the shock-wave’s clarity, a tempest of gravel and grit that pinched throats and pricked eyes. They milled in a stupor, coughed and called out, daubed noses or swatted ears. One by one, the Sons of Men squinted through the lifting screens, saw the Great Ordeal intact and the Horde grievously wounded. Prince Inrilil ab Cinganjehoi raised his eyes to his Holy Aspect-Emperor standing high upon the Spearman’s perch, shrieked in crazed and unmanly exultation.
And all the surviving Soldiers of Circumfix joined him.
CHAPTER
SIXTEEN
The Incû-Holoinas
To understand beatings is to hate brave brothers.
—Celestial Aphorisms, MEMGOWA
Early Autumn, 20 New Imperial Year (4132, Year-of-the-Tusk), Golgotterath.
Cataclysm, crashing and golden.
The tink and clatter of debris trailed into the hiss of raining sand.
Astonished silence …
Across the terraces of the Oblitus, along the gold-fanged walls and the bulbous heights, the Soldiers of the Circumfix climbed to their feet coughing, squinting, peering across the devastation. The Canted Horn lay like a boned limb across the Shigogli, a train of shattered cylinders, some buckled, others impossibly intact, larded with vast, freestanding hoops, sections of skinless girding that reached higher than the Occlusion despite the calamity they had endured. Dead Sranc encircled the ruin, an enormous halo of carcasses tangled like string, bleached into a vast frieze for the dust settling across them.
Dawning comprehension.
Cries of triumph cascaded across the heights of Golgotterath, swelled into a single, booming roar. As one, the Men of the Ordeal turned to their Most Holy Aspect-Emperor standing high upon the Spearman’s pulpit, their voices broken for incredulity and adoration. Windswept, Anasûrimbor Kellhus raised the gleaming convolutions of the Spear above his head in reply.
The Men of the Ordeal howled in adulation, wept for jubilation.
Many glimpsed the rock plummeting down the length of the High Horn, gasped for incomprehension. The Holy Aspect-Emperor glanced up—
Hurtling granite exploded against unseen convexities—Wards—shattered into a wilting bloom of debris. The Soldiers of the Circumfix cried out.
Some saw the winged horror of the Horde-General flitting down and about, then darting like a sparrow into obscurity. Some saw the Aspect-Emperor slip like a coin from a slashed purse, only to vanish into the oblivion of sorcerous light. Some saw the Spear topple out into the void, trailing a rope attached to some kind of metallic coffer …
A yammering susurrus arose across the great plate of Shigogli, a raw and virulent murmuring. The Soldiers of the Circumfix looked to the packed leagues about Golgotterath—across the pale and rapacious millions. A sound like chattering teeth climbed into the very pith of the sky, the rattle of snakes without number. Then the crazed yowl resumed, lust bound to hatred bound famished frenzy, thread twisted into caterwauling thread …
The Lords of the Ordeal bellowed what commands they could.
The broken silhouette of Golgotterath loomed before the three ailing refugees.
“Get up …” the old Wizard wheezed—as much to himself as the others, for he hacked spittle on his hands and knees. He could scarce hear his own voice for the whine clawing at his ears. “Get up! Hurry!”
A shadow fell across him. He glanced up, saw Mimara towering across the hazed disc of the sun, her hand held out. Esmenet was already pressing herself to her feet, blank-faced and blasted white with chalk. The old Wizard clasped the pregnant girl’s wrist.
The three refugees stood gawking as the aftermath resolved from the dust.
“We should keep moving …” Achamian murmured.
No one so much as twitched.
“Is it possible?” Esmenet said in a flat voice.
Achamian had no wind to reply. He scarce had wind to conceive …
Ajencis famously spoke of the way the soul could make anything a marker of anything else—how all human signs were arbitrary. Even when it came to sorcery, he argued, what mattered were the meanings. But some symbols, Achamian knew, were indistinguishable from their meaning. Some symbols tyrannized, others galvanized, not by virtue of what they meant, but because of what they accomplished.
A sword was such a symbol. As was a shield, or a Circumfix …
The dust settled like sand kicked in a tidal pool, baring details that seemed nude for the brilliance of the sun and the dark contrast of the Shroud rearing beyond. Golgotterath lay exposed before them, like the skull of some mountain-headed beast, half-buried in desolation, only one great antler remaining …
One Horn.
The School of Mandate had made fetishes of many things, for theirs had always been a desperate cause, and the desperate were forever bent on anchoring their preposterous hopes with more tangible items. But the Horns of Golgotterath had been their one and only idol, the image they had perpetually prayed against. For it was always there, a shadow thrown across the curve of the entire World, lingering on the extremis of every glance, every gaze, no matter how trivial or epic the occasion, a memory of horror that had become horror, a leering token of itself.
A symbol of terror that was terror, distilled and embodied.
And it had been broken …
The sight stole his breath. The Canted Horn lay strewn into a mountain chain of barrelled ruin, shining golden in the sunlight, like a brace of ceremonial armbands spilled and trampled across the dirt. A stinging seized his eyes—sand. A peculiar vertigo reeled through him, an impulse to repair what he saw via some adjustment of vantage, as if a tilt of his head or gain in elevation might somehow bring the two Horns back together.
Esmenet was clutching his hand, shushing reassurance. Mimara smoothed his shoulder and back.
He couldn’t breathe. Why couldn’t he breathe? He thought of how the God-Kings of Ûmerau would execute criminals by ratcheting hoops of bronze about their breasts tighter and tighter. He heard the dry sobb
ing of someone old.
“We—” he began, only to feel an infant’s hand clench the cords of his voice.
No matter how violently he blinked the grit remained.
Mimara cried out, folded about her great abdomen. He heard the roaring of thousands upon thousands of human throats—the Great Ordeal howling in triumph.
“Come!” Esmenet was calling into his ear, compassion belied by urgency. “We need to keep moving.”
But she was already too late.
More than Sranc had been killed by the cyclopean collapse. None of the Shigeki or Saik Schoolmen on Golgotterath’s southern ramparts had known of the Spear or the turmoil it had caused across the Oblitus. The bulk of the Canted Horn, hanging like a mountain above them, had occluded all. Only when the Holy Aspect-Emperor began using the ancient Inchoroi artifact did they turn from the dire spectacle of the streaming Horde and gaze up toward the crack and thrum of the vast forces suspended above. General Rash Soptet had stood with Grandmaster Temus Enhorû atop the ninth tower, straining to shout over the swelling howl of their foe. Together, they turned squinting, for the high sun blazed across the rim of the Horn’s immense belly. They felt the ground fly up toward it, so massive was the structure. The old Grandmaster screamed some kind of Ward, but it availed him no more than the General’s outflung arms. The golden ground clapped down, folding all life and light in infinite gloom.
Grandmaster Ussiliar had been locked in a vicious melee deep in the bowel of the fifth tower when the Canted Horn smote the floor of the World. Walls buckled. Dust and debris rained from the ceilings. Even jammed shoulder to shield, the Shrial Knights were knocked from their feet. The Ursranc were quicker to recover, as the Whore would have it, and they worked a terrible slaughter before the Men regained their wits and ferocity. A slavering chieftain, nearly as tall as a Man and draped in a coat of iron chains, fetters that had been soldered into a crude hauberk, assailed the disoriented Ussiliar, goring him in the thigh before the Shrial Grandmaster finally stoved the obscenity’s skull.