The Great Ordeal (Aspect-Emperor #3)(100)
Many of these began standing.
Clack … Clack … Clack …
Sorweel gawked about, stumbling after the Siqu, who turned to him while still trotting. His shout need not be inaudible.
Run!
A sorcerous mutter somehow steamed through the mad Lament …
And Sorweel was running hard upon the heels of the glittering Nonman warrior, pitching over midden slopes. Once again he glimpsed the Amiolas reflected in Oinaral’s oval shield. Once again he glimpsed the spectral horror of Immiriccas gazing back upon him. And the Believer-King stopped amid a clutch of grovelling wretches, astonished and appalled.
Was he dead?
What—what? What was happening here?
Oinaral receded into the deeps, his light slouching across the countless aggrieved. A wall of ascending arches reared before Nonman Siqu, curved about void. His mail coats glittered like something out of legend …
Shadow fell across the young Believer-King.
What happened?
A bloodred light sparked behind him—and he whirled about, recalling the sorcerous singing. He saw dozens of Erratics, naked and rag-bound, staggering over and through their brothers while bounding as wild apes toward him. He saw a figure gowned in rags a fair distance behind, his mouth and eyes flaring white, a piercing, crimson bolus scribbling between his upraised hands. There was a crack like thunder. Something happened he could not quite fathom, let alone describe—something like light blowing the blood from all the intervening bodies. A warble passed through the screaming chorus.
Hot fluid slapped across him.
Somehow Oinaral had him in an iron clasp and was drawing him backward.
Clack … Clack … Clack …
“Hell!” he screamed at the Siqu. “I’m in Hell!”
But the ghoul could not hear him.
CHAPTER TEN
Dagliash
The song of Truth is the cracking of Desire. Only when Men weep do they know.
—CANTICLES, 6:6, The Chronicle of the Tusk
Give them dirt, and they will multiply.
—A?RSI PROVERB
Late Summer, 20 New Imperial Year (4132, Year-of-the-Tusk), High Illawor
Harsunc. The Fish Knife.
This was what the A?rsic Knights-Chieftain called the River Sursa, for this was what the waterway resembled, especially when glimpsed from the rampart heights of Dagliash in the glare of evening: a long thin blade of silver cutting the lifeless wastes of Agongorea from the spare Erengaw Plains, the eastern bank nearly straight; and the western bank, the one prone to flooding, curved as though from years of whetting.
Fish was also the belittling cognomen the ancient A?rsi had used for the Sranc—their version of skinnies. “The Fish,” the war-bitten would say, “must first jump the Knife.” They spoke the way all warlike Men speak, filled with bluff and hatred, saying only what was injurious to their foe, deriding (as they should) all that was lethal and true. In their simple and dangerous hearts, the River Sursa was always theirs, always the instrument of Men.
But in truth the Harsunc possessed two deadly edges. Since the days of Nanor-Ukkerja, the blood of innumerable Men had mucked her banks, souls lost in battles whose names were carved on cracked and buried stone. Chronicles told of bloated bodies jamming the river’s throat, of great rotting sheets that skinned the waters for days, even weeks, before decay and the relentless current finally delivered them to the gullet of the Misty Sea.
The Harsunc was as apt to be defended as crossed—to run red as purple. “If it is our Knife,” Nau-Cay?ti asks his cocksure generals in the Kay?tiad, “then why have we raised Dagliash to watch over it?”
Indeed, it would be the wrong edge that would prove the most keen in the end. The No-God would end the millennial dispute. Dagliash would be wrecked. All the Bardic metaphors, the generational meanings, the midnight tales of dread and glory would burn with the cities of the High Norsirai. The River Sursa, to the extent it was referred to at all, became the “Chogiaz”, what the Sranc had named it in their obscene tongue. Two thousand years would pass ere Men breathed meaning into its spare aspect once again. Two thousand years would the Knife wait for the Great Ordeal to dare its ancient and murderous edges.
The Ordealman trudged onward, crossing the vast swamp the Horde had made of the River Migmarsa, so passing from High Illawor into Yinwaul—from a land scarcely mentioned in the Holy Sagas, to one mentioned as much as any other. The Horde continued its withdrawal, gathering and retreating before the shining hosts. The great smoke that had concealed it, the dust of a million stamping feet, thinned as the ground became stonier, so that it seemed the horizon steamed more than billowed before the pursuing horsemen. At times they could even glimpse the beasts, pale masses seething, multiplied until they matted the contours of the land. Hillocks and knolls overrun, vales choked, distances plumbed, encompassed. Everywhere great masses shifting and sloughing, as if the very world moulted. Men gazed stupefied, neither fearing nor wondering, for most lacked the means to truly comprehend what they witnessed. They knew only that they were dwarfed, little more than insignificant specks in the thrall of jealous enormities. Their lives, they understood, mattered only in their sum. And since this is the grim truth of all human life, the insight possessed the character of revelation.
And it came to seem holy, eating Sranc. To consume them was to partake of the Horde.