Of all the shadowy images, the burnt Dûnyain loomed the largest apart from the Anasûrimbor. “Cause, Kellhus.”
“For through it,” the wire-headed one declared, “they believed they could overcome the darkness preceding all things, and so become Gods.”
“Attain the Absolute,” the teeth-baring figure concluded, his reflection as tiny as a thumb across the polish.
But what is sunlight to a mole? In their curious, collective manner, the Mutilated told how the Tekne so transformed the problems faced by the progenitors that all the old ways became impossible. It raised them from their traditions, struck the shackles of custom from their intellects, until only their common animality constrained them. They worshipped themselves as the measure of all significance, gave themselves over to wanton gluttony. Nothing was forbidden them, short the obstruction of others and their desires. Justice became the calculation of competing appetites. Logos became the principle of their entire civilization.
“By imperceptible increments,” the one-eyed Dûnyain said, his face strange and glaring, “the Tekne unfettered their desires, allowed them to plumb ever deeper perversions.”
The Tekne. Yes. The Tekne lay at the root of their argument.
“They began moulding themselves the way potter’s mould clay,” the unscathed one said.
The Tekne and the transformations wrought by its bottomless potency …
“They stood upon the very brink of the Absolute,” the teeth-baring Dûnyain called. “It pricked their fingers, it was so near!”
How, in relieving the Inchoroi of want and deprivation, it had stripped them of everything sacred …
“There was only one riddle they could not solve,” the lone unscarred Dûnyain said, “one ancient enigma the Tekne could not fathom …”
“The soul,” his teeth-baring brother gasped.
Three heartbeats of silence followed—silence and tumbling revelation. “It became their Mystery of Mysteries, the focus of their most cunning intellects.”
It no longer mattered who spoke—for the Mutilated did not lie, and the Truth spoke with but one soul.
“And when the soul at last yielded its secrets to their scrutiny …”
And there he was, a beehive head slung from the Aspect-Emperor’s imperial reflection. How? How had he found himself in such wretched straits?
“They discovered their entire race damned.”
Curse Likaro!
About the ruins of Domathuz, the Bars’ brilliance threw the shadows of Men across the soulless thrash, toiling shadows, hacking and spearing, hunched shoulder to shield. Again and again they heaved the Sranc back, gore effigies more than Men, locks pasted about their cheeks, beards sodden about gasping mouths, eyes darting, caged by urgency, even panic. Again and again, the Sranc rushed heedless into the rakes of Nibelene sorcery, surged over the heaps and swales of charred dead, threw themselves upon the beleaguered Norsirai, slobbering, crazed and innumerable, narrow-shouldered frames hewn from pale wax, eyes shining like black olives in oil, their assault as much a rapine obscenity as a wailing fury. Soundless clatter. Soundless grunts and howls. Again and again, the creatures slumped or spun to the tangle beneath their horned feet, their pelvises counting out their final breaths.
It was here the wandering lights glimpsed by the Imperial Saik to the west reappeared. The Mysunsai Grandmaster himself, fierce Obwë Gûswuran, would be among the first to spy the arrhythmic glow, flashes of dimension cutting hollows into the belly of the Shroud. He stood at the fore of ruined Domathuz, both where the Sons of Ce Tydonn were most sorely pressed and where the greatest number of his fellow Schoolmen had been felled by Chorae. He doubted his eyes at first, but a glance at his triunaries assured him the phantasms were very real.
Any fool could see the Mark. The lights multiplied in number and intensity, pocking the murk with swatches of detail, cavern glimpses of the Horde, regions shivering like countless maggots in ink …
Sorcerers … Dozens of them by the pyrotechnic density and intricacy of the approaching lights.
Obscure smouldering became a hazy glow, which soon waxed into Gnostic brilliance—or so the Grandmaster initially thought. And then, one by one, they emerged from the roiling plumes, walking some twenty cubits above the tortured plain, some naked for madness, others gowned in archaic and voluminous robes, the mouths and sockets of all shining with arcane brilliance as they blasted and wracked the raucous tracts below.
“Ishterebinth!” Gûswuran’s voice cracked on arcane thunder. “Ishterebinth joins the Great Ordeal!”
The Quya advanced in a haphazard arc, drawing curtains of scintillant destruction across the far-flung heave. Mightiest among them were Vippol the Elder, Far Antique Siqu to Atrithau and the Sons of Eämnor. And Cilcûliccas, another true son of Ishterebinth—and among the Lastborn, so in possession of his faculties. It was he who struck down the fell Dragon of Knives, Murathaur the Silver, during the Investiture. And there was the notorious Sûjara-nin, an Ishroi of High Siol, who the ancient chroniclers had called Bloodless for the extremity of his pallor, and who had once wandered the nations of Men as the Red Ghoul, the Vizier to mortal Kings ere he became Erratic, and sought the pardon of Nil’giccas, King of the Last Mansion. He alone had some connection to the Mysunsai, for his Near Antique predations had motivated the founding of the Mikka Council, and his methods, though the Mysunsai knew it not, had inspired their mercenary mission. It was he who had first demanded a philter of blood from his patrons, holding it as hostage until remuneration was received—the selfsame practice of the Mysunsai. And it was his moniker that had inspired Men to refer to all Nonmen as ghouls, eaters of the dead.
None of the souls watching recognized any among the Quya, whose deeds were older than old. They saw only Cûnûroi, the False Men of the Tusk, beings whose might and beauty shamed, and whose faces could not be distinguished from Sranc. Ghouls. Even still, the sheer glory of the display moved to wonder all those not embroiled in the squalor of pitched battle. These were no depraved Erratics such as those they first encountered, bent upon extracting shreds of torment they might remember. These were the last of the Intact, decked in ancient glory! The legendary wrath of the Quya had been roused!
The Nonmen of Ishterebinth had hearkened to the call of their Holy Aspect-Emperor!
Their songs flashing from their skulls, they sailed over the apoplectic fields assuming the antique posture, chest forward and arms back, as if pulled by their hearts through water. At the penultimate moment they would snap their arms forward, invert their pose as if catapulting their Abstractions. And Sranc died the way they once had died, when they were young and the obscenity of their Derivation lay fresh as atrocity. Parabolas of light whipped them into slop. Radiant combs ignited them as candles. And they shrieked as they had once shrieked, yowled at the floating spectres who were there fathers, their upward-turned faces imploding like silk clenched in fists, seeing and hating—as Men themselves hated—the existence of a more perfect rule.
But where abjection imposes uniformity, mastery affords diversity. Some thirty-three Quya advanced upon the breach, and for all the uncanny similarity of their features no two shared the same expression. Each was riven, be it by murderous cold, wailing grief, or convulsive laughter. Even the Intact displayed some besotted rictus, for the many Quya held that battle was Ri, beyond all law and restraint. Hunched above the brilliance of their Theorems, they wept and cackled, screamed and calculated, punished the white-roiling tracts beneath them.
Obwë Gûswuran possessed the bravery of the thoughtless, famous sort, even more than was common among Men of his dour and domineering ilk. Where others wandered the labyrinth, he unerringly strode the golden path, turning, choosing, and stepping out of what he necessarily saw as necessity.
He was far quicker to perceive slight than to recognize peril.
The howl and clank of the Ursranc Palatials reverberated through the metallic void.
“Many times,” the great and terrible Skuthula
croaked, “have we supped upon the virgin daughters of Man…”
Anasûrimbor Serwa whipped through the black, vaulting over the rubbish and debris revealed in the last guttering wicks of light, hearing the scrape and clap of some hundred or more Inversi spread across the very impenetrable gloom she hurtled into. The lowermost gallery was scarce more than a cave given the skew of the floors relative to the ground, which was gullied where it verged upon the canted original floors. The ceiling declined in parallel, leaving little more than a slot exposed to the great atrium where the ancient Wracu stomped and reared.
“But we do not smell your maidenhead …”
Not one of the creatures had the least inkling of her presence, at least at first. She ran among them with the ease of a child popping bubbles. Isiramûlis leapt in acrobatic counterpoint. The Ursranc merely grunted or screamed, toppled to ground pawing mortal wounds. She had killed five before coming upon the lone Chorae bearer. He died every bit as witless, but his death throes summoned the others, who came rushing at once ridiculous and dangerous for the way they hacked blindly. With nothing left to hunt, she simply ran back the way she had come, chased by a riotous, caterwauling band …
“Are you a wife,” the mighty Wracu wheezed, “or are you a whore?”
Back out to the luminance shining through the ruined Obmaw—where she crouched for but a heartbeat, long enough to burn her slender image in the eyes of all those who would hunt her. She could feel the raising of Chorae across the galleries opposite, the aiming. She could hear the whisk of the Dragon’s horned crown, sense the shiver of his bulk. She could see the Inversi erupting from the gallery she had just fled, Nonman faces pinching in outrage …
She set herself, poised for the leap that would see her thread the Chorae and their intersecting trajectories.
“I am!” she cried with shrill calculation. “A witch!”
Fire. Fire boiled across everything about her, making glass of dirt, igniting fragments of bone, and immolating the company of leaping Palatials.
Hitherto she would have to contend with the light of burning bodies.
The count was now Eighty-seven.
He could remember her well, the Sawdilli whore he and Likaro had shared as youths. Ware that jackal! she once warned him. For he will be your doom!
Ferocious words, spoken with a weariness indistinguishable from wisdom. Even still, Malowebi doubted she had quite envisaged this.
Headless. Hostage to the Unholy Consult—or rather, the Dûnyain terror that had consumed them.
Nothing less than humanity lay in the palm of their disputation, the sum of all love and toil. Arguments like gears and wheels, observations piling upon observations, assessed, not according to the jealousies and anxieties of the speaker, but in compliance with what was—no matter how it contradicted what was holy …
“Do you see, Brother? Logos is Tekne.”
The danger of comprehension was one that Second Negotiant Malowebi knew all too well having witnessed Likaro steer their addled royal cousin through decision after decision. To grasp was to be moved. To understand was to linger upon the threshold of belief …
“Do you see our Cause?”
He could feel it even now, mulling the possibility that the True and the Sacred were not the same. How Ajencis would have gloated and crowed!
“Damnation is the impediment …”
But as much as his Intellect balked, Malowebi’s Heart foundered upon what seemed an even more profound realization: These were not Men.
“The obstacle.”
As the Inchoroi were versions of the Sranc, bred to believe as they were wrought, so too were these Thought-dancers—these Dûnyain—bred to the union of conquest and comprehension.
“The World must be Shut, Brother.”
To attain their enigmatic Absolute …
“The Will of the Ark must be realized.”
To become self-moving souls.
That poor wretch Drusas Achamian had said as much! All this time the Court had puzzled over the Aspect-Emperor, trying, again and again, to extract some kind of reason from his perplexing actions, attributing, again and again, crude motives belonging to their own souls. Had a demon possessed him? Was he the “Kucifra” that Fanayal and that Yatwerian monster had claimed? Not once had they considered the possibility that he embodied a principle, that he, like the Sranc, simply executed an imperative stamped into his soul’s foundation.
The eradication of everything other …
“The circuit of souls must be breached,” the teeth-baring Dûnyain said, his miniature visage absurd for his solitary lip. “Mankind must be hunted to the edge of extinction.”
Mad, mad sausages! The Mbimayu Schoolman reeled, not so much because anything so insane could be conceived, but because anything so insane could be true. By far the greater terror was knowing the Anasûrimbor could be convinced—not by cunning, but by reason!
Could it be so desperate as this? Had delusion always been the bastion of Mankind—ignorance?
How heartbroken poor Zabwiri would have been …
“And this is why you woo me,” the Anasûrimbor’s reflection said. Heartbroken and amused.
“Yes,” the burnt Dûnyain acknowledged, his webbed skin alarming even reflected in small. “To resurrect the No-God.”
The choral wail dimmed into something less than deafening.
Those Longbeards upon the ramparts dared the slots between the gold-fanged battlements, gazing out, while those arrayed about the breach, cried out for an unexpected respite. The tens of thousands of Sranc massed about ruined Domathuz had fallen silent. The Quya floated out from the steaming occlusions, a ragged line punctuated by semantic construct and corresponding explosions of terrestrial brilliance. The Mysunsai Triunes, meanwhile, hung upon their stations, their billows coiling like ink in water, their Nibelene Lightning whisking life from the ground with stark light. And the Sranc roiled like a vast school of fish between their arcane lines, darting both to and from the monolithic black walls, packed so thick that even the most anaemic Cants worked vivid slaughter. Despite the sorcerous sheen of the cleavers, it was butcher’s work all the same.
The Sons of Ce Tydonn howled in unison—a cry that they could hear. They began clapping axes and broadswords upon their raised shields.
Obwë Gûswuran stepped forward, led his Triune toward the Ishterebinthi, believing it his prerogative and obligation. The Triunes stationed adjacent moved to accompany him. A vestment of lead-grey felt anchored the complexity of the Grandmaster’s billows, bearing the tripartite symbol of his School in iridescent gold embroidery: the Bent Scroll of the Oaranat above the Bow-and-Quill of the Nilitar between the Compass of the Mikka. Some fifteen of his Schoolmen strode the empty heights on either flank, many of them likewise adorned.
Among the Quya, Cilcûliccas had guessed the intent of the Grandmaster’s approach and attempted to alert Vippol the Elder, but to no avail. The Madborn wracked the heaving press, screaming, crying the name of his long dead brother. And so it was with many others: Lost to whatever loss that trammelled their memory, they relived battles they had endured thousands of years past: Imogirion, Pir Minningial, Pir Pihal, and others. They hollered the names of the beloved dead, mourned and avenged calamities older than the languages of Men.
As the Whore would have it, the Red Ghoul would be the first to receive the Mysunsai Grandmaster. Given his legendary lust for destruction, Sûjaranin had wandered far ahead of his fellows, alternately cackling and sobbing, hanging resplendent in his gown of ensorcelled crimson nimil, Orimuril, the famed “Immaculate Rim,” which the Men of the Three Seas had named the Scarp in fear and envy centuries past. He battered the earth with Viritic Inflationaries, flung Sranc on the back of exploding spheres, gouts of them, flying on arcs that fell mere cubits short of his sandalled feet. He seemed to notice the Schoolmen only when they were upon him, so deep had he fallen into the pit of himself. Frowning like a man just awoken, the Red Ghoul hung peering as the Mysunsai fo
rmed about him … then saw the gold-embroidered Compass adorning the chest of Obwë Gûswuran …
The Grandmaster’s defensive Analogies, which he had cast only to shelter against mundane missiles, proved no match for the Abstractions of Sûjara-nin. Spectral stone crumbled into smoke, and Obwë Gûswuran fell burning, his body kicking itself into portions about the scything white brilliance of Mimtis Rings.
Death came swirling down … bore his essence to the loins of Hell.
Sûjara-nin slew another Mysunsai in the astonished heartbeats that followed, felled two more as the remaining ten frantically sang to duel. The surviving eight turned as one upon the raving, crimson-armoured Nonman, wracked him with the Nibelene Lightning that had become their reflex, caged him in a thicket of blinding white threads, then sent him crashing into the raucous throngs below—for he too had cast only the Wards he had needed to turn aside spears.
The Red Ghoul was no more.
Like a mouse in the shadow of a fire-spitting cat, she darted across the carrion earth. Great stones clacked through Skuthula’s outraged roar. Molten sputum sloshed about her and the surrounding ground, mushroomed into whooshing brilliance.
She leapt beyond it.
“Maidenhead is all I smell!” she cried on a gasp. “Could it be yours?”
She clasped ropes, swung into the circus gloom of the second gallery.
Fire flooded after, roiling like a living, seeking thing. Isiramûlis firm in hand, she slipped as a ghost from the incendiary tentacles. The glare yanked a heartbeat of structure and detail from what had been no more than shreds of polish winking in the murk. She found herself on a battered catwalk, racing constellations of lucent orange beads, peering into a world as labyrinthine as it was crude. The skew was such that terraces and walkways had been strewn throughout, some heaped from stone and carcass dirt, others rendered out of wood so rotted in regions as to hang like cobwebs—the extent of all circumscribed by the pitch of the golden ceilings. In some cases, four or even five terraces occupied the length of any given slope, with two or three shrunken floors tucked beneath each. It was as if some savage world had parasitized the gut of a more fundamental and yet contradictory frame—an irretrievable hulk.