The Unholy Consult

  “So I am the first?” the Aspect-Emperor asked. “Have no others resisted the Goad?”

  Mekeritrig said nothing, retreated to the Chair and its frame of wicked hooks. He leaned upon one buttock, pulled his legs onto the cushion the way an adolescent girl might. Aside from a hand upon his knee, shadow obscured all save his forehead and brow.

  “Not even the famed Nau-Cayûti,” the Nonman eventually replied from shadow. “The Great are always flawed. Always damned … I had assumed the same of you.”

  Aurax bobbed its great crown at the Evil Siqu’s knees, like an abused dog seeking favour, only whispering scarcely audible syllables …

  “Gassirraaaajaalrimri …”

  Malowebi wanted to rejoice, but too many worries harried his thoughts—the fact that a window into Hell hung immediately above the least of them! What would he do, were he to witness the facts of his damnation? Embrace it?

  Or embrace them?

  The Anasûrimbor had said the Fire burned true, and he would know. He had been to Hell—or so his Three Seas enemies had claimed …

  The Evil Siqu seemed to have no inkling of what he should do, as if his faith in the efficacy of the Inverse Fire had been complete. With silence, came the spectre of unrequited violence.

  “Where is Shauriatis?” the Anasûrimbor demanded. “Where is your Halaroi master?”

  Mekeritrig leaned from the Chair’s shadowy hood. “That will avail you nothing,” he said. “Baiting.”

  “Why?”

  “Because I am eight thousand years too old.”

  “And still chained to the post,” the Aspect-Emperor snapped. “I tire of this shallow posturing. Tell me, witless Cûnuroi dog, where is Shauriatis?”

  The alabaster figure remained motionless, save for the pulse of a single vein high on his illuminated forehead …

  Then, as if draped across cobwebs, a new voice fell upon the room.

  “Calm … old friend …”

  Followed by another voice …

  “He knows all the ancient legends …”

  Also frail, as if spoken on breathing’s final allotment.

  “And you all but told him …”

  “How the Inverse Fire rekindles your zeal …”

  Five different voices had spoken, each cast of its own alloy and yet scratched into the unanimity of rust by hoary age. The Anasûrimbor had remained motionless, as if absorbed in some arcane scrutiny of their content or timbre. Now a subtle shift in position told Malowebi that he returned his gaze to the Chair-of-Hooks, and to the golden platform that floated down from the void above it … resolved as if growing as much as nearing.

  Shauriatis?

  The platform was the length and breadth of a skiff, shaped and curved like a great shield, but far too large to be wielded as such by human arms. At first it appeared to bear ten great candles set in a circle, wax gutted and knobbed and pale as bacon fat, each set within a stone pedestal … Except these candles clearly moved, and possessed (as quickly became obvious) living faces, rutted and as hairless as prunes, mouths like masticating sphincters, eyes like sparks set in mucoid shadow. The pedestals, he realized, were in fact perverse cradles, stone sconces for bodies bereft of limbs …

  Ten senescent, larval forms had been welded upon the back of some great soggomantic shield …

  The revulsion intensified as the thing neared, then settled next to the Chair-of-Hooks—just beyond the ghostly reflection of the Inverse Fire across the floors. Aurax grovelled beneath Mekeritrig’s feet.

  “At lasht …” one of the ancient worms crooned.

  “Our disparate Empires meet …” another gasped in completion.

  This? This was Shauriatis? The legendary Grandmaster of the Mangaecca?

  Cet’ingira exploded from the Chair, his face as seamed for fury as any Sranc. Semantic brilliance waxed from the apertures of his face. An apricot glow charted the fork of veins through his cheeks and sockets.

  Anasûrimbor Kellhus was utterly unsurprised, already turning, already seizing the Evil Siqu with a Metagnostic whisper that was a hairline of blinding white that leapt to the Nonman like lint to wool in winter, sheering through his Incipient Wards, then cinching his throat, an arcane noose hanging him nude and kicking beneath the wavering, infernal landscapes.

  “I am Master here,” the Holy Aspect-Emperor said.

  Malowebi whooped into the nowhere imprisoning his soul.

  “Yesh …” one of the senile larva cooed from beyond the Mantraitor’s thrashing form.

  “Our master …” another Larval croaked, his torso a swallowing throat.

  The Anasûrimbor strode past the wheedling heels of Mekeritrig directly to the abomination that was Shauriatis. He fairly leaned over the near edge, so close that Malowebi could see everything: the trails of offal greasing the metal from the base of the chipped cradles to the bevel; the magisterial Inchoroi figures stamped across the gleaming curve; and varieties of skin, this one velvet and lobed like petals, that one harassed into fibrous wisps, this one dimpled with ruby lesions, that one drawn amphibian thin across veins like black string. He understood the nature of the contrivance at once, for the totem-lore of the Iswazi told of many Mbimayu who had sought to save their souls from damnation.

  The legendary Shauriatis, the sorcerous architect of the Unholy Consult, did stand before them, his soul tumbling and forever deflected, roosting like a sparrow for but a breath in each wretch before capsizing into another. Such cunning! Dying vessels, denuded souls, gouged of some vital passion, allowing him to alight whole, rather than be drawn and divided across the Outside like other Proxies …

  Shauriatis!—not so much the wretches themselves, as the intervals between.

  “Tell me, Archidemu,” the Anasûrimbor said. “How long has it been since you were usurped?”

  Usurped?

  There the image was, the horrid obscenity that were the Larvals, as pitted with grisly detail as anything the Iswazi mage had ever seen, and he watched the Aspect-Emperor pass his haloed hand through them, saw miniatures of the scene sweep without the least substance across the man’s palm and fingers …

  Less than smoke. Phantasm.

  Malowebi cursed the Great Sage.

  Tekne.

  “Brother!” the Exalt-Magus cried upon seeing Kayûtas standing with Saccarees and Lord Soter.

  “She lives!” one of the numerous Mandate Schoolmen cried. Hundreds of worried faces turned to follow her floating descent. Her passage over the crowded ranks of Ainoni had sparked commotion through the ruined halls of the High Cwol, for her prolonged absence had been noted by all. At some point the Soldiers of the Circumfix had begun falling to their knees and crying out, “Serwa! Serwa Memirrû!”—the antique Ainoni moniker for heroes reborn. She watched, with a kind of harried wonder, as the sorcerers took up the call in turn.

  She came to ground immediately before her brother. His look fastened upon the grievous burns that she had taken as her garb. He too had survived some kind of fiery assault, but only his beard and crimson Kidruhil surcoat appeared to have suffered.

  “Serwa—” he began.

  “We have no time,” she interrupted. “I saw Father upon the Vigil.”

  A heartbeat of passionless scrutiny.

  “So soon?”

  “We need to storm the Ark now!”

  “Easily said,” Kayûtas said scowling. “A Wracu guards the threshold.”

  “Then kill it!” she cried.

  “Skuthula,” Saccarees croaked on a ragged breath. He too sported glistening burns, though nowhere near so severe as her own. “Skuthula the Black defends the Intrinsic Gate …”

  She looked to the Mandate Grandmaster for a moment, then back to her brother. The legendary Black Worm had very nearly killed them, she realized. She turned to the battered maw of the Intrinsic Gate, and peering with her prodigious arcane sight, sensed Chorae … a faint constellation of voids hanging in spaces unseen.

  “Father …” she said, thoughts racing.
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  A grave nod from her elder brother. “For the nonce, he confronts the Unholy Consult alone.”

  The Aspect-Emperor strode into the visible reality of the Larvals, waded through the gold-gleaming intricacy of the floating shield, paused in the very centre of the wretches. The image hung impossibly static, with each of the grotesqueries caught upon some infirm expression.

  “Reveal yourselves!” the Anasûrimbor cried out to the blackness.

  Despite his turmoil, Malowebi could only marvel at the substance of the mirage, which was nothing at all, and yet somehow duped the eye into seeing onerous matter. Drool hung like ice, from the chin of the nearest, reflecting a past stage of the Inverse Fire on a molten thread.

  “Set aside your vain ornaments!” the Anasûrimbor boomed into the metallic gloom.

  As if in cryptic reply, the Larvals winked out of existence.

  What was happening? Who did he think he was calling?

  Aurang had been cast to its death. Aurax cowered against the Chair-of-Hooks, clinging to its knees, keening in terror, riven in the manner of dogs beaten unto madness. And the sounds of strangulation meant that Mekeritrig still hung kicking behind them …

  Shauriatis?

  “Cease this pantomime!” the Anasûrimbor cried.

  Had the Consult indeed succumbed to the toll of ages? Grown so decrepit as this?

  The man whirled to his right without warning, tossing Malowebi’s field of view on a precipitous arc. The Aspect-Emperor strode from the oily immediacy of the light, slowed to a pause beside a rising fin of golden metal: some kind of partition the ancient renovators had raised the obsidian floor around, rather than remove.

  The gloom defeated Malowebi at first. One would think hanging Hell from the ceiling would afford better lighting! But the glints and contrasts slowly morphed into structure and detail the longer he peered. The mirror polish of the floors extended into the jaundiced murk, ending at a curved golden wall. Six equidistantly spaced shafts punctuated the intersection of the tipped floor and the suspended wall—corridors become stairways. Six sets of obsidian steps rose from the black polish to meet them, devoid of handrails or any other ornamentation.

  Five forms descended them, moulting shadows step by relentless step … horrifying the Mbimayu Schoolman by stages.

  Led by the King-of-Tribes and his girl-skinned son, a file of Scylvendi warriors on horseback finned the gravel heights of the Occlusion. The Umbilicus burned as a gutted ulcer amid the fields of smoking char below. The Horde enveloped Golgotterath in vast tentacular masses beyond, concealing all in chalk obscurity in its wake, lest anyone witness the inevitable atrocities committed.

  “The skin-spy …” Moënghus called to his father. “She wanted you to throw the Tribes across the plain?”

  “Aye,” Cnaiür urs Skiotha replied, gnawing on his ration of amicut.

  “To seize the breaches before the Ordeal could defend them?”

  The Scylvendi King-of-Tribes leaned to spit a wayward fragment of bone. He wiped his mouth with a swazond-ribbed forearm, glared at his son with a murderous intensity.

  “Aye.”

  The young man did not flinch from his scrutiny—and why should he, dwelling as he had beneath the Dûnyain’s bloodless gaze?

  “Then the People would have been fed to the Horde?”

  Cnaiür urs Skiotha spat again, this time for the sake of spitting, then peered at the High Horn’s shadow through ponderous skirts of chalk and ochre.

  “Everything,” he said, “will be eaten here.”

  CHAPTER

  EIGHTEEN

  The Golden Room

  Nay, the world is not equal in the eyes of the God.

  —Scholars 7:16 Tractate

  Fall together, land alone.

  —Ainoni saying

  Early Autumn, 20 New Imperial Year (4132, Year-of-the-Tusk), Golgotterath.

  Earth and sky wailed, a chorus so featureless as to sound angelic, so titanic as to become the voice of every Man who dared open his mouth to breathe, let alone howl against it.

  Dusk lay watches away. But for some reason the chalk dust of Shigogli, which had been pale as bone upon the ground, blackened as it hung in the Shroud, spinning a pall that had blotted the day and unleashed the night. Dragonheads vomited brilliance both within and beneath the Canted Horn’s immense, metallic husk, fire that seethed gold across wracked heights and feathered the Shrial Knights in endless parade of fading shadows. Nibelene Lightning glared and flickered from points across Ûgorrior, illuminating the Sons of the Middle-North in fluttering white. While along the western ramparts, myriad Gnostic Abstractions waxed and smouldered, throwing incandescent blue like paint, bending shadows about the Eumarnan’s booted feet.

  Golgotterath had become an island of slaughtering lights.

  Inhuman thousands scaled the ramparts at any given time, but the surfaces were too treacherous for the creatures to overwhelm the parapets. Individual Schoolmen roamed the heights, and were quick to visit destruction upon any Sranc threatening to test the defenders. The battle turned on the breaches, on the Men assembled across pitches of gore and debris, and on the sorcerers singing in cracked voices above, wracking the murky throngs with meanings damned by God. It was a battle of violent surges, great waves crashing across breakers of sorcery and iron, the survivors slinking back in thin sheets as the Horde recoiled to surge forward anew. Again and again, the Men of the Ordeal stymied the foul onslaught, crying out the names of Gods and loved ones in voices they could not hear. Again and again, they slumped to knees or staggered against their fellows in the gasping wake.

  The logic was simple: those who grew too weary, fell. The ferocity of the Sranc combined with the thrashing density of their bodies, required enduring strength, a tenacity that not all Men, no matter how inveterate, possessed. None other than King Hoga Hogrim died this way, electing to remain at the tumultuous fore with his Men despite his sapped limbs. A hulking creature barrelled into the Believer-King, knocked his greatshield to the side, then clove his thigh to the bone. The nephew of the famous Gothyelk fell gouting blood, shaking uncontrollably as the immediacy of his circumstances drained away. Dismayed faces floated above him for a time, then death came spiralling down …

  Bore him wailing to the fire.

  Only a minority of the Yimaleti clans carried javelins—and archery was all but unknown to them. But periodically, concatenations of these Sranc came against the breaches, and the Men of the Ordeal found themselves enduring absurd showers of the weapons. As crude as they were, the black, fire-sharpened shafts always managed to murder a select handful through a variety of cruel flukes. This was how King Coithus Narnol was maimed and forced to retire back to the Canal, and how Thane Sosering Rauchurl was felled from the heights of Gwergiruh. He was grinning to his compatriots when the missile dropped from the void of his left, piercing his cheek, breaking his teeth, and pitching him headlong into the frenzied threshing below. Death came spiralling down …

  Bore him wondering to the brace of Gilgaöl.

  The Sorcerers of the Circumfix hung immune for the most part, but they did not escape unscathed. Seven among the most elderly Schoolmen, all hailing from different Schools, simply slumped from the air, undone by their exertions. Along the breaches facing Ûgorrior, where the bulk of the Chorae Hoard plundered from Sakarpus had been expended to neuter the ensorcelled walls, more than two dozen Mysunsai were struck from the sky over time. The sheer number of carcasses had raised a second ground upon the ground, one far more grisly, and far more treacherous to stand upon. At some point, the Sranc trapped in the press began hacking their dead cousins into pieces, hurling them remarkable distances, either ineffectually at the Schoolmen punishing them from above, or across the armoured ranks arrayed against them. Soon, torrents of limbs and spinning heads—even organs and roping entrails—rained down upon the Men of the Ordeal. Roiling among themselves, the Sranc had begun hurling themselves. Sheets of slicked meat fell upon the Mysunsai triunes especially, a
charnel deluge, and periodically, either by happenstance or for some witless cunning, a Chorae would find itself within the soaring mire …

  The brilliant and irascible Hagnar the Elder was felled this way, his leg salted to the bone. As was Parsalates, one of the Mikka Surconsuls, and some twenty others. Points of nothingness pricked the macabre hail, Wards became as fumes, and Schoolmen were tossed into the infernal pit …

  Darker and darker the Shroud grew, even though the sun was mere watches past its zenith. The chalk dust blackened, biting eyes and throats, obscuring more and more of the sepulchral tracts, until each Man found himself stranded within a dwindling island of turbulent visibility. And with the encroaching black came a horror and a dismay, a premonition of doom that no heroism or fervour could dispel, that for more and more souls resolved into the breathless tingle of futility that was the certainty of defeat.

  To smother sight is to strangle hope, for direction is the bounty of vision. At points across the ramparts and the breaches lone Swayali witches began to appear, Nuns with their billows bound and meaning flashing from their mouths. But rather than delving into the lunatic fray, they hung behind the bristling ranks of Men. One by one, blinding white pillars appeared between their outstretched arms, lancing up through the smothering locks of the Shroud …

  Bars of Heaven anchored the circuit of Golgotterath’s mighty curtain walls, puncturing as much as glaring through the Shroud, throwing shadows of it across its own seething veils, and cutting wedges of visibility into the engulfing blackness, disrobing the heaving multitudes, the endless raving that was the Horde. Bright unto blinding, the incandescence made silhouettes of the Schoolmen, dazzled the eyes and blunted the viciousness of the endless inhuman surge.

  And the Men clutched shoulders for wonder.

  Dared to believe once again.

  “How long have you known?” the nearest and perhaps most hideous figure asked.

  They were Men, Malowebi realized. Mutilated Men.

  They stood upon their individual stair some three steps from the floor, each garbed in quilted robes of grey silk. Each had recently shaved their scalps, and each was pallid for want of sun. But the similarities ended there—catastrophically so.