“The very ground reeks of cunny!” the magnificent serpent boomed on a croaking laugh.
She ran, skimming the plummet, as close to the atrium as she could manage. The bodies of the Palatials she had lured below burned with bonfire brilliance, etching her nude form in red and pastel orange. She added six to the Count this way … Seventy-four.
“They say ten million died in the Falling,” Skuthula roared, “laying earth such as this throughout our Mother’s womb!”
But even now, more Palatials swarmed across the decrepit network, racing to catch or intercept her.
“Our Most Holy Ark!”
Here—emerging clear enough for her to spy the upside-down flame adorning their shields. There—a flitting stream of shadows in the niggard light below. She ran as if seeking their embrace, ducking or leaping five more whistling Chorae that lanced from points across the void of the Atrium.
She leapt from the planked walk on the edge to one of dirt and stone lower down the Skew, and halted, stood motionless in a false pocket of calm, concealed from the Wracû, but entirely visible to the upward-welling Ursranc. The vigour that was Nil’giccas lay like pins in her deepest veins, and it seemed she could sense it all, the swords and cleavers wagging on the run, the claws kicking the mire, the rattle of the crest, the ramming bulk shouldering aside putrid air. A bottomless host of telltale signs all closing upon this … one … place …
Conditioned ground.
She saw the Palatials scuttling up from the murk, their Nonmen faces disfigured by grinding malice and lascivious contempt. And somehow, she saw the ponderous crown of the Wracû rise behind her in their counterfeit faces—the details of his aspect scattered across the myriad manifestations of shock and terror. She watched them skid and tumble to a halt. She clutched Isiramûlis to the cleft between her breasts, for she had seen the Wracû’s fire in the gold glittering in their eyes.
Was this what it was like for Father?
Seeing behind the head.
The roaring vomit burst about her. She felt it tousle the remnants of her hair, buffet the remnants of her skin. She watched it consume the Ursranc as surely as any other instrument of her will …
The wretches screamed like drowning swine.
Then she was leaping out over the Skew, slipping the iron-clap of Skuthula’s jaws, brushing the ceiling, sailing over the wood and stone welter into the crotch of the gallery. Two of the Inversi she left behind had possessed Chorae …
“And pray tell what,” she cried, laughter lilting across vague armatures of gold, “would a Dragon know of cunny?”
Sixty-seven remained.
“Mog-Pharau,” the Anasûrimbor said.
The name fell hard.
A sorcerous mutter, curious for its cadence, gasped from all points. Light dazzled the image of the teeth-baring Dûnyain, transformed his remaining lip into something drawn from a glassmaker’s furnace. The reflections of the Mutilated turned in unison to the darkness …
Malowebi saw it almost at once, emerging black from the black, soundless, a great sarcophagus some nine cubits by four, rendered of ceramic or some strange metal, floating in upon its obsidian reflection …
This was happening now, he realized. Happening!
The gleaming bulk whispered past each of the farthest three Mutilated. The distorted twist that was Aurax whinged at its passage, barked some kind of cough. It loomed monolithic before the Aspect-Emperor for a heartbeat, its inky surface veined and contoured with what seemed the shrunken effigy of some face or great city—and Malowebi squinted for the way the obscuring blackness in the Anasûrimbor’s reflection melded with the thing. But it tipped backward with the same soundless precision, until it was wholly horizontal, as deep as the Aspect-Emperor’s waist for hovering a hand above the floor.
The Carapace … Could it be? Most sources claimed that Chorae had been set into it …
“Behold the Object,” the burnt Dûnyain announced on a grim call.
The surface revealed itself to be a lid like those found on sarcophagi, a graven plate that spontaneously lifted then tipped to draw down one side, where its ink-black polish fractured and reorganized the light of the Inverse Fire.
Malowebi could see nothing of its interior … nor could he assemble any coherent thought.
“But why anything so elaborate?” the Anasûrimbor asked. “If the extermination of Men is your goal, then why not use the weapon you employed in Dagliash?”
And Malowebi could only think, No-God …
The No-God lay before him.
“We could restore only one,” the unscathed Dûnyain said, mirrored in gold. “Even if more existed, they’re too indiscriminate, especially when used in numbers.”
“Our Salvation lies in the art of human extinction, not the fact,” his burnt brother explained
“Only the Object can Shut the World against the Outside,” the one-eyed Dûnyain explained.
“Yes …” the Aspect-Emperor said, “the one hundred and forty-four thousand …”
“The Object is a prosthesis of Ark,” the teeth-baring Dûnyain continued, his reflection no larger than a pinky for his position at the end. “A code lies buried in the ebb and flow of life on this World. The more deaths, the brighter this code burns, the more Ark can read …”
“So the Ark is the No-God?” Anasûrimbor Kellhus asked.
“No,” the burnt Dûnyain replied. “But then you know as much.”
“And what is it I know?”
“That the No-God collapses Subject and Object,” the one-eyed monk replied. “That it is the Absolute.”
The Holy Aspect-Emperor of the Three Seas lowered his head in thoughtful affirmation. The reflections of the Mutilated paused in collective anticipation of his next words. For all the image’s curious distensions, Malowebi could plainly see the Anasûrimbor gazing down into the Carapace …
Mulling?
Yearning?
“And you think I’m the missing piece?” Kellhus asked. “The Subject that will revive this … system?”
Was that why the Chorae had been removed from the Carapace? For him? It seemed to Malowebi that he strangled …
The nearest of the disfigured Dûnyain, the burnt one, nodded. “The Celmomian Prophecy foretells your coming, Brother.”
The wail owned all but the most booming voices. Moënghus had yet to test his own, for he stood as dumbstruck as most of the others, his fingers numb upon the black parapets of the Akeokinoi. The Scylvendi tongue defeated him, but what happened was clear. As the boggling size of the Sranc host became apparent, his father had ordered the People to shelter on the far side of the Occlusion (using their Excursi to bar the passes), while taking up position with his chieftains and commanders here … watching sights that unmoored as much as unmanned.
Rising like gaseous gums from the Horde’s forward teeth, the Shroud had gradually drawn the whole of the Shigogli within its fetid embrace, a pale gauze that had turned black in the afternoon glare, becoming ever more impenetrable, until they could no longer discern the surviving Horn’s gleam rising through the veils. Save for sorcery glimmering like silver kellics deep in nocturnal waters, the Shroud was all that could be seen, sheets braided with more septic plumes, fat as the Occlusion and as high as the blackening Vault of Heaven.
And it dismayed the Prince-Imperial, bruised with a profundity that evil Harapior could only pretend to … for he had been raised on tales of this, the ultimate moment, the day when the Fate of Men was at last sorted. The meaning of all their souls would be stamped this day! It reeked of conspiracy, how the Shroud fit into the radial arms of the Occlusion, like a receptacle embracing a dark and epic offering …
The land itself had become an altar to horror!
Kayûtas was in there … Serwa!
“Surely your plan wasn’t to chew rations and watch!” Anasûrimbor Moënghus boomed over the Horde’s wail.
The Holy King-of-Tribes turned on him with an intensity both grinding and homicidal. “The
plan, whelp, was to surprise the Ordeal while still encamped, to seize the Chorae Hoard and butcher your entire family!”
The words were meant to provoke him.
“And you expecte—?”
“I expected what I always expected when vying with Him!”
The other Chieftains looked on stone-faced above crossed arms.
“And what might that be?” Moënghus asked, chastened. For all his life, he had always been the most intemperate, the most driven by inner fury, hardened and impelled.
The barbarian grinned a charnel house grin. The scars about his mouth smiled in vertical counterpoint, and Moënghus had the disconcerting sense that all the man’s countless swazond grinned with him.
“That I will fail.”
“That is madness!” Moënghus blurted before thinking.
“Madness? But that is the very kernel of it, is it not? The very insult his existence inflicts upon us! The very excrement he smears across our cheeks—our nostrils! That we be as gripe-moths on the plain, forever jumping from the tracks, stepping sideways, leaping blind to all inclination, laughing as blackbirds spear daisies. That we must be mad to be free!”
“You are!” Moënghus cried horror. “You are insane!”
“Yessss!” the Holy King-of-Tribes roared, clapping him about the nape, glaring with bloodthirsty hilarity. “Because it alone is sane!” he boomed on a cackle, turning back to the grim spectacle of the Shroud towering black above them all. Cnaiür urs Skiötha spat down the sheer ramps of the Nonman ruin. He raised both hands, thumbs and finger cupped …
“Until I see His shadow,” the most violent of men cried to the ponderous maelstrom, “I do not leap!”
All was uproar. At last Vippol the Elder was roused from his stupor—only to fall into another possessing far more horrific consequences. He turned to the isolated clutch of Mysunsai, his eyes coin-wide for rabid fury. “Sioli tiri himil!” his voice cracked from the shrouded heavens, “mi ishorioli tiri himil!” Only Valsarta, the sole Swayali witch upon the breach, understood the dread import of his words …
“The blood of Siol is the blood of Ishoriol!”
The Madborn stalked the Mysunsai, who yielded space as he advanced. They recalled well the tragedy of Irsûlor, where the Vokalati and the Mandate had gored each other for the act of one madman, Carindûsû. Like some primeval wraith out of myth, the deranged Quyan Archmage bore upon them, queer for the array of wire screens that he wore affixed to a harness about his cadaverous gowns—his archaic Chorae armour.
“Ishra Vippol!” Cilcûliccas boomed. “Insiqu! Siralipir jin’sharat!”
The Madborn hesitated, hung blinking, his image fogged for his seething Wards. He looked to the cyclopean ramparts, the High Horn soaring into occlusion, its mountainous mirror faces scored with chiaroscuros of dancing white and gold. He glared as though bewildered across the gaping spaces once blotted by the Canted Horn …
“Ishra Vippol!” Cilcûliccas bellowed across registers beyond sound and hearing.
The Madborn finally turned to his Intact kinsmen.
And so was one disaster averted even as another, greater catastrophe took root. Facing the prospect of sorcerous combat, all the Mysunsai about Domathuz had ceased scourging the roiling plain. Pitched melee churned the ranks across the spangled entirety of the breach. For the first time, the Sons of Ce Tydonn bore the hacking, thrashing brunt of the Horde entire. They had been trained for this, endlessly drilled, and they had endured such assaults previously, but the Sranc they faced were of a fiercer, more sturdy breed. They fell upon the Longbeards as rabid apes, stabbing, flailing as if afire. The shield wall dissolved into stabbing, grappling desperation. And so did the price of evil old Domathuz climb. Men fell, so quickly that the commanding Thanes began spanking the helms of whole companies, commanding them to advance.
But the Sons of Ce Tydonn did not break. And how could they, with the stacked glory of their nation packing the breach behind them? The Nangaels suffered the worst, for they held the foremost swale of debris beneath the sky Obwë Gûswuran had occupied and then abandoned. Even when the Mysunsai resumed ransacking the plain with their arthritic skeins of light, the Nangaels remained exposed to the undiluted violence of the Horde. Death scraped at them as iron against coal, and even though they did not break—could not break—protracted loss sucked the marrow from their bones, afflicted them with the grim assurance of death no matter what outcome claimed the field.
Their Longbeard cousins, Canutishmen, were the first to begin pointing, perplexed as to what they were seeing. Buried in the agitated heave some hundred paces beyond the Nangael’s roiling position, out where endless white faces bayed and innumerable cleavers and clubs shivered like insect shadows, Sranc had begun … flying?
Or was it dropping?
From all points of the compass they rushed inward, as if assailing something in their midst, something that flung them airwards even as they hacked down, pitching them on a line that ran perfectly parallel to the plain, accelerating for more than a hundred paces. The scene baffled the eyes: a terrestrial nucleus of Sranc in their hundreds continually imploding about a point that hurled each of them above and out, as if down the face of a cliff. Scrabbling white figures plummeted in all directions as if over some kind of sorcerous edge, at last whipping with neck-breaking effect into the radial masses …
And it moved…
“Emilidis, the Accursed Smith, was cunny, and we knew him!”
The Dragon’s retch had sparked an inferno, for the wood was little more than tinder. Sealed in the bowel of the Ark, the ramshackle network of posts and platforms and catwalks had never seen moisture, aside from mould and urine, perhaps. But as quickly as the flame sprinted from point to point, the Exalt-Magus out-distanced it with ease, her feet slapping through the septic mire in the trough of the gallery.
“The tender wheeze of his meat!” the magnificent beast roared. “The brittle temper of his bones! We devoured the maker of your little sword!”
Her drumming feet kicked offal into a spray, cracked open fumes that would have overcome any other man. But she slipped through it all as though untouched—indeed, as something untouchable.
“Yesss …”
Never had her task been so clear.
“We …”
“Like …”
“Cunny …”
Despite her gifts, she had always fended clutter, always battled to keep pace with the World’s frenetic surge. Always and everywhere, she had been hemmed by things obstinate and mercurial, trapped within the urgent cage of what was here and what was now—forever thrown back upon herself by what was other.
“And so Skuthula woos Skuthula!” she cried, pitching her laughter to chime through the crackling roar.
Nothing could touch her simply because she was everything.
The white-glowing gash of the Obmaw. The mounded carcass earth. The Great Atrium, ascending on the Skew to fathomless heights, louvered by countless floors. The Ursranc Palatials clustering about the rim of the lowermost galleries, yammering and gesticulating, a thousand squints hungry for her merest sign …
And of course the Dragon.
“Insolent whore! We shall see what songs you sing when I pluck your legs from your hips!”
“You would not like my songs, dirtsnake!”
She backtracked the instant of her call, began leaping up the Skew, toward the whooshing bowers of the fire. She glimpsed a score of Ursranc shrieking and puling as they ran ablaze. Holding Isiramûlis tight, she plunged into the hairy brilliance, climbed timbers skinned in coals.
“A witch?” Skuthula croaked in saurian incredulity. “Of all the might the realms of Men have assembled, they send a scrag witch to test our might?”
The flame fell like wetted rose petals from her skin. The soot stained her, but the smoke was toothless, unable to bite her eyes or breath no matter how viscous the acrid swirl. In heartbeats, she emerged where she had vanished, standing upon the Great Atrium’s rim hundreds
of paces from her adversaries’ expectation, her skin and burns wreathed in sluicing smoke.
The fire had made a vast, burning grin of the gallery, slicking every golden surface with replicas of its image, etching the void in reams of fractured light. Coiled before the aperture of the Obmaw, Skuthula the Black stood revealed, the enormity of his form glossed in the light of his own violent manufacture.
“Send us your Heroes!” the black monstrosity roared. “Send us your Men, so that we might martyr their courage, light them as votives to the True Holy!”
No soul living knew how the Inchoroi had spawned Dragons, the devious alchemy of their concoction, for like apples, their seed gave rise to different fruits, variations upon the same gargantuan theme. It was none other than Skuthula who had inspired the Nonmen of old to name their race “Worms,” for he was the most serpentine of the Wracu. His monstrous bulk hung barrelled about a frame that consisted almost entirely of spine and ribs, save for the spindly legs arrayed beneath, dozens of them, rising and falling in centipedal waves as the creature moved. He was skinned in countless black scales, the length and breadth of Norsirai shields across his length, shrinking to the size of broaches about the skittering articulations of its legs. His wings lay clasped as lateen sails about his elongated back, rising from two massive swales of muscle that alone lent shoulders to his dread form. Spear-long quills maned the back of his neck, a crest of stark white spines forming a thicket about his massive, gored crown.
“Feed us those who can bear the burden of our glory! Who can hoist our legend upon their shoulders—raise it by their measure!”