The Unholy Consult

  But his lethal magnificence lay more in his hue and grace than in the bald facts of physiognomy. His scales were at once nacreous—shattering light into an iridescent dance—and absolute, consuming illumination without residue, so that he seemed mirror shards strung about an absence, a phantasm lacquered across void. And he stole through space as an eel through water, here hanging slow like a frond, there little more than a blur upon a flexion. He did not so much move as pulse. Combined with the uncanny black, this made him seem more wraith than monstrous lizard, a thing of ink slipping across a greased world.

  “Alas, that World is dead!” she hollered, “I fear Dragons are the stuff of little girls now!”

  Screeches greeted her reappearance. The Sranc teeming about the downward-hanging rims of the galleries opposite began hooting and gesturing. Skuthula’s snout snapped toward her, the baleful green eyes narrowed.

  “So says the delicacy,” the Scourge of Ages boomed, “to the teeth!”

  And it was all … so … clear …

  “So says the hero!” she cried with lilting derision.

  Dangling jibes like lures of silver, baiting the reptilian intellect, slowing it with the need to calculate irrelevant points of honour …

  Dangling her body like a dockside whore, baiting the Ursranc archers, a pale and brutalized temptation …

  It was all so clear because she was that reptilian intellect, coiled vast about immemorial grudges, just as she was each and every one of the masticating archers, loins taut against her floating image, hunched about the raving promise of congress. The Qirri had flung her veins, nay, her bones, across all the intervening hollows, all the false holes in being that had rendered her isolate and vulnerable …

  The Qirri had revealed what she was, what she had always been …

  A waifish dance about Chorae, whistling from strings released by fingers aimed by eyes tracking a waifish dance …

  A slender leap through an incinerating exhalation …

  A wolfish lunge and a fleet sprint …

  A clapping maw and a ducking roll …

  Wheels spinning wheels. Anasûrimbor Serwa, Exalt-Magus of the Great Ordeal, divine daughter of the Holy Aspect-Emperor—she was what happened here.

  She was this place.

  And so was the Count whittled to twenty-one.

  To live is to be sodden. There is nothing arid about existence, nothing laundered or distinct. To live is to reek, to forever seep into circumstances. All gateways to the human stink. The ears. The mouth as much as the anus, for some.

  And the eyes, the eyes most of all.

  To live is to consume and to exude, to excrete and to chew, to turn upon a thousand hidden alchemies, rheumy transformations of what we lust into what we abhor … or love.

  And so life convulsed and life was expelled from the socket, drawn sheeted in blood from the suffocating real, the very muck of amniotic origin, and held exposed to the scrutiny of cold Void, the hospice of prayer …

  So that some essence might alight …

  Some breath be drawn and screamed.

  The Mutilated told a different tale, how the Unholy Consult had never truly understood their faith, let alone the implements propping them. They knew only that the Carapace required a soul for the No-God to awaken. So they began feeding Subjects to the Object, chaining their captives in great lines, and dragging them across this very floor so they might be entombed in the Carapace—and killed by it—one after another. They did this for more than a millennia before the First Apocalypse, murdering tens of thousands, casting the corpses down the great shaft of the Abskinis, the Groundless Grave …

  “And then,” the reflection of the burnt Dûnyain said, “they inserted Nau-Cayûti … the famed son of their mortal adversary.”

  “My ancestor,” the Holy Aspect-Emperor said.

  “That is the meaning of the Celmomian Prophecy,” the caged Dûnyain explained.

  His neighbour finished the thought without the least hesitation. “Your return augurs the No-God, brother, because you are the No-God.”

  Absent limbs, Malowebi heaved and flailed.

  “You are Mog-Pharau.”

  Run! the Mbimayu Schoolman cried without voice. Flee this obscene place!

  But the reflection of the Anasûrimbor across the golden fin stood motionless before the regard of the Mutilated.

  “You are your own salvation,” the unscathed Dûnyain said. “The salvation of us all!”

  Horror pimpled the nape of a neck Malowebi no longer possessed.

  Mog-Pharau …

  “But I am already saved,” the Holy Aspect-Emperor said. “And I fear your souls are blasted beyond reclamation.”

  Whatever relief these words occasioned for Malowebi was scuttled by the vision of figures slinking as silent as clawless cats over the obsidian floors behind the Anasûrimbor, each dressed in ashen black, each bearing a pinprick of oblivion bound to their palms.

  “I have walked the infernal deep …” the Anasûrimbor said, either unaware or unconcerned. “I have struck treaties with the Pit.”

  Each possessing pale aquatic fronds instead of a face—or rather, digits, Malowebi realized, long crone fingers extending, then clenching into crude human approximation, again and again.

  “The Hells are blind to this place,” the burnt Dûnyain declared. “Even if they watch you, they cannot see where you stand.”

  Consult skin-spies … one after another, emerging from the black, more than a dozen that Malowebi could see—and that the Anasûrimbor could not.

  The Lord-and-Prophet of the Three Seas actually smiled. “You seek to starve the very Gods,” his reflection said. “Brothers, things so great need no light to cast shadows.”

  “How do you mean?” the teeth-baring Dûnyain demanded.

  “Some have always smelled your absence.”

  “At most,” the unscathed figure retorted. “They Intuit rather than Reason. They lack the Intellect to question.”

  Malowebi saw more black-garbed assassins surfacing from the darkness reflected in the fin. There had to be a hundred of the creatures now—spiderfaces!—all of them bearing Chorae in their palms. It scissored his senses, looking forward to see reflections of the vacancies he sensed floating behind him.

  “Which is why,” the Holy Aspect-Emperor said, “they needed me.”

  The Mutilated regarded him. The scores of faceless assassins paused where they crouched.

  It seemed to Malowebi that nothing breathed.

  “An Inverse Prophet,” Anasûrimbor Kellhus said. “A revelation … sent by the Living to the Dead, by the now to the Eternal.”

  The Tydonni guarding the ruins of Domathuz warned one another with claps on the shoulder and pointing arms. A precipice of some kind walked through the Horde—toward the breach. Somehow, gravity was tipped and skinnies began falling horizontal, over their slavering kin, and in all directions. Streams of them began crashing into the Nangaels elevated upon the debris, pocking the ranks like catapult stones.

  Among the Mysunsai, confusion reigned. Every bit as bewildered as the Tydonni, each assumed that someone knew better when no one did.

  That is, save a Swayali witch, Valsarta.

  What escaped her was the profundity of the Mysunsai’s turmoil. The sideways rain of Sranc was already pelting Golgotterath’s walls by time she realized they weren’t going to act at all. By time she sailed, her billows boiling about her, to the heights above the beleaguered Nangaels, it was already too late. The peril of being cast at had become the peril of being cast.

  For Lord Woyengar, the Earl of Nangaelsa, the approach of the precipice was nothing short of surreal, Sranc pitched out on whatever direction their momentum carried them, as if they fell over some scarp’s edge, only from every point of the compass at once, each twisting and kicking down an impossible horizontal abyss. The Sranc assailing Woyengar’s forward rank slackened and thinned, then vanished altogether, and between iron helms of his vassals, the Earl of Nangaelsa watche
d the precipice step clear of the Horde …

  The Red Ghoul emerged, Sûjara-nin miraculously intact, his crimson nimil gown agleam, his eyes and mouth windows into the furnace cauldron that was his Erratic soul. The Sranc shrieked and thronged behind him, a lunatic rush that saw each descending club and cleaver pitched with its possessor over some non-existent plummet. Sûjara-nin did not so much as pause at the sight of the grim Northmen, but continued stepping from carcass to carcass, directly into the first rank …

  Lord Woyengar saw his Men raise shield and sword, then simply trip into the air and cartwheel into the occluded depths of the Horde. And then he himself was upon the mad Quya, standing where all others had been thrown—for the Chorae bound against his navel a fraction of him realized.

  Cackling, the Erratic parried his swooping broadsword, chased the deflected impact into the Earl of Nangaelsa’s exposed face. He yanked his ancient blade clear. Howling Nangaels fell upon him from all angles, only to fall over the Immaculate Rim … topple headlong into their doom.

  And so the Red Ghoul advanced across the heaped ruin, throwing all who rushed him deep into the nightmare heave of Ûgorrior. By the simple act of walking, the mad Nonman cut a broad furrow in the Tydonni ranks …

  The Yimaleti Sranc surged upon his catastrophic wake. They came as a yammering, threshing flood, instinctively gaining the flank then leaping deep into the shattered ranks, where they hacked with the nimble savagery of cats. In a matter of heartbeats, roiling violence had engulfed the Tydonni root and bough beyond the breach. Hanging above the chaos, Valsarta and the Mysunsai had no choice but to abandon the breach to Sûjara-nin. Saving the far greater numbers imperilled by his passage was more than toil enough.

  And so the Red Ghoul climbed all but uncontested into the ragged socket that had once housed Domathuz. He stood upon the slung summit of the debris, sobbing and cackling for reasons thousands of years dead. He looked out across the appalled Longbeards, Plaideölmen, forming in the Canal below.

  “Why?” he thundered in Sheyic, shrugging aside the all consuming din. A grimace fluttered about, then consumed, his flawless white face.

  “Why did you wait so long?”

  Blinding white. A shaft with a Trinket affixed had struck him full upon the cheek—a “Spank” as Chorae Bowmen called it, an impact square enough to salt a sorcerer through to his marrow. Perfectly balanced at contact, Sûjaranin remained standing in perfect salt effigy, his expression a rictus of chalked fury, his famed armour yet hanging in links of intricate crimson …

  The infamous Red Ghoul was dead, this time forsooth.

  The Sons of Plaideöl stood dumbstruck for wonder, somehow understanding the World had become less. They had yet to realize what was about to follow.

  The statue bowled forward and toppled, trampled beneath the stampeding of horned feet.

  The Breach of Domathuz had fallen. Like a chitinous flood of termites, the depravities gushed into the evil precincts of Golgotterath.

  Once a vast crypt, the Atrium had become a scintillant furnace.

  Wild with rage, the legendary Wracu whipped and struck and vomited fiery blindness. Skuthula hounded the young Grandmistress to the exclusion of all else, bent on punishing, on showing. Roaring with deranged saurian indignation, he pursued her into each gallery she vanished into, thrashing through Sranc, crushing them, consuming them—and burning them, burning them most of all, setting gallery after gallery alight. Lines and arcs and planes of Inchoroi gold bristled for reflected fire, while smoke boiled across the ceilings, streamed up into a cataract great enough to choke the vast skew of the shaft.

  And she ran and danced not so much from as with those who would murder and desecrate, no more than a moment in a far greater automata, a system of systems …

  She understood the truth of heroism, how it collapsed action into reaction, how it simply moved careless of fear or bravery.

  She understood her father’s power.

  The Ursranc Palatials hooped and screamed, many diving from the heights to crash like bundled leaves afire. Save for a scant handful, those wretches bearing Chorae now fled the fire and the dragon. She could feel each of the points of oblivion scattered across the Horn’s bowel, the ones that threatened jerking through spaces high and low, before falling still, joining those already laying fallow.

  And a fraction of her counted.

  Fourteen …

  Thirteen …

  The joists groaned for the bulk of the Wracu, wending like a monstrous serpent from level to level. Skuthula began using his immense length to herd her down to the trough of the Skew, where he tried to crush her with blind thrashing. The unearthly metal thrummed for titanic impacts …

  She floated in flawless counterpoise, naked save for her burns and her Cindersword, passing as an apparition through perfumed sheets of flame. Time and again, Skuthula materialized from the fiery shrouds, reared with iron-hooked grace, lamellar scales rimmed in crimson wrath, lacquered in oily ghosts of the conflagration.

  Time and again she held her ensorcelled sword tight …

  Seven …

  Six …

  Isiramûlis … Hearth-slayer.

  And she laughed, danced beyond the clacking violence of his jaws, like a moth dangling on a wire affixed to the mighty Wracu’s snout. She laughed with an implacable mirth, and in a voice honed to echo and resonate and filter throughout the great slanted gullet of the Atrium … the laughter of a little girl making sport of the most fearsome dragon to have ever lived.

  Skuthula the Black howled and raged and flailed its immense, serpentine frame.

  And Anasûrimbor Serwa slipped and eluded, counted the Ursranc dying and misfiring.

  One …

  Zero …

  “Now!” she cried upon a sorcerous thunderclap, a voice that made a harp of the ancient Wracu’s roar.

  Light.

  Cold.

  Terror …

  Breath.

  A convulsive wail of arrival …

  Lost in the deluge of those departing.

  Malowebi looked to the diminishing line of the Mutilated reflected across the fore of the soggomantic fin, then to the assembly of gulping, gripping faces reflected across the rear.

  “I bore word of the temporal to the divine,” the Aspect-Emperor said. “You aren’t so hidden as you think.”

  The burnt Dûnyain swept his hand high on a graceful arc. Sudden light flared from what seemed a thousand points scattered across the cavernous deeps, revealing leagues of arcane mechanism, shapes so intricate as to be an alien language to the Mbimayu Schoolman. “You would compare your burnt brick temples to a cathedral such as this?”

  “The Ark is our argument, Brother,” the lone unscathed monk said. “Would you deny the material incarnation of Logos?”

  The Holy Aspect-Emperor did not so much as glance at the gulfs of golden reticulation. “And if the Logos no longer moves me …” he said, his greasy resemblance at last turning to survey the skin-spies assembled across the margins of the Golden Room. “What is your contingency then?”

  The great frame of lights fell dark, and the gold was muted to gleam, threads in abyssal blackness. For the first time, Malowebi found his gaze hooked on the other diabolical head hanging with him against the Aspect-Emperor’s thigh—the other Decapitant. For the first time, he noticed the same obscuring distortion that marred the Anasûrimbor—like globules of ink hanging in quicksilver—marring it.

  What he saw stopped his ethereal heart …

  “Coercion, of course,” the teeth-baring Dûnyain replied.

  Gibbering, hitching terror.

  “You are utterly overmatched, Anasûrimbor,” his one-eyed brother said.

  Antlers, savage and knuckled, rising mangled as if scribbled by a drunk or a child. Four of them …

  No …

  “And yet you forget,” Anasûrimbor Kellhus replied, grinning.

  His reflection raised a knee, stamped a sandalled heel down …

  A cata
clysmic thump, mazing the obsidian polish with concentric fractures, resounding through the mountainous bones of the structure, where it reverberated and returned to rock them all …

  Without uttering a word of sorcery.

  “I am Master here.”

  Terror kicking like a frenzied mule.

  Second Negotiant Malowebi wailed, his repentance unheard …

  Forgave Likaro all his countless flaws and sins.

  The very World had become as a mill about her, every city, every soul wheels spinning within wheels, murmuring in places, groaning throughout. And in all creation Golgotterath was the most violent grinding gear.

  The place most unpredictable.

  “Now, Kayûtas!”

  She sensed it even as she shouted, the prick of oblivion, no more than two paces to her right, just appearing as if drawn from a pocket …

  She did not need to hear the click.

  The quarrel barely stubbed her knuckle, and yet it was enough—more than enough.

  The ancient Cindersword did not so much fall from her hand as with …

  The Princess-Imperial slumped to her knees, cradling her stumped right forearm. Blood welled, melting salt as snow.

  One hundred, she thought, looking up to the rising menace of Skuthula, the fire-spitting grin …

  One hundred stones.

  She knelt on the ashen edge, crouched over her arm. The great serpent hung above her, its elephantine skull declined, the spines on its crest clattering for jubilation. Slather fell in blazing strings from its maw. The globed emerald of its eyes burnt for admiration.

  “Long has it been,” the legendary Wracu croaked, “since we supped upon a hero such as you …”

  The Princess-Imperial drew upright on her knees, matched its baleful gaze.

  “I’m a witch.”

  The strands of her thought parted. Meaning made black shadow of her skull.

  In a single motion, she retrieved Isiramûlis with her left hand.

  Skuthula the Black vomited Hell.

  Singing into the furnace, she raked lines of mercurial brilliance across the region before her.

  She felt a sound with her heart, an impact that transcended the scale of hearing.