The Great Ordeal (Aspect-Emperor #3)(125)
She gasped, drew deep the taste of smoke and war. The air reeked of burned mutton.
And she sang.
Made demonstration of her father’s dread portion.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
Dagliash
Even the God must eat.
—CONRIYAN PROVERB
Late Summer, 20 New Imperial Year (4132, Year-of-the-Tusk), the Urokkas
Not in the Near Antique days of Imperial Cenei, nor in the Far Antique days of Holy Trys?, never had the World beheld such a congregation, such a concentration of arcane might. The Sranc had at last been backed into the final corner of Yinwaul, and the Schoolmen of the Three Seas advanced upon them. The very ground smoked before the Magi, seethed. They had wrapped their faces with cloth soaked in sage and horse urine, so they might blunt the septic fumes. Otherwise, their billows flared in material contradiction of their phantom Wards, bolts of hanging cursive, a calligraphy that wooed the dawning sun with poetic threads of light. The chorus of their singing maddened the ears, drew eyes to unseen quarters. As one they walked upon a neck-breaking fall, one thousand sorcerers-of-rank, each a floating wildflower dissolving into stages of obscurity, each setting sorcerous spade to obscene earth.
The enormous fronds of the Shroud consumed everything save the pastel flash and flicker of their lights.
The Schoolmen vanished, and the Sranc burned.
Rather than fanning out as they did when Culling, the sorcerers climbed in fearsome procession, followed the fractured spine of the Urokkas into masses of the Horde. The Exalt-Magus, Saccarees, took the lead with his Mandate, blasting the heights, gutting the ravines with Gnostic geometries. Temus Enhor? and the Saik followed close behind, with Obw? G?swuran and the Mysunsai arrayed behind him. The Blind Necromancer Heramari Iyokus followed in the van with the Scarlet Spires. Nothing save the lay of the mountains opposed them. The crowns themselves had been battered into domes, but their torsos were a welter of broken stone and gravel enormities. Even though sorcerers could smooth their passage by picking between echoes of the ground beneath, precipitous terrain was often lethal. For this reason, the Schoolmen abandoned the sky as soon as the Sranc were cleared beneath and found that real ground was treacherous footing enough.
And so the sorcerers of the great Southron Schools began seizing the high places—four mountains that were in reality a dozen in their decrepitude. Yawreg was the first and lowest, a ramp for the others, gathering the edges that clench land into fists. The second, Mantigol, was the highest. Here, Saccarees witnessed the dread majesty of the Horde entire, the Shroud rearing, bulging summits of ochre, the blighted tracts beneath, the insect stain, innumerable clans herded by rage and terror across the very curvature of the World. The weak shoulders and splintered head of the third, Oloreg, provided a veritable maze of passes linking the northern to the southern slopes. And lastly, Ingol, whose bulk crowded the Sea, possessing a humped summit that gazed down upon slovenly Antareg—and Dagliash.
Across unkempt leagues they pressed, each School taking a summit as a violent station, each summit perpetually besieged. Lightning bleached the slopes, blinding threads that took seizing bodies for beads. Crested heads reared, apparitions spewing fire that lit skinnies as candles. At times it was absurd, the sight of old men tottering up the slopes, cursing skinned shins and palms. At times it was legendary, the vision of entire mountains surmounted in fire and light. Gullies, gorges, and slopes burned as though dowsed in pitch. Sranc were heaped for their own pyre, forming berms in places, twitching dunes too bloody to burn. The creatures themselves were emaciated—many raced naked, limbs bulbous for joints, torsos fluted for ribs, phalluses arched into scalloped abdomens—and crazed for it, gifted with a bird-like quickness, as though their bodies had consumed the contents of their bones. Many Schoolmen endured the terror of whole bands bounding through the catastrophes they wrought, falling directly upon their Wards, hacking like crazed monkeys. But the pallid creatures always relented, fleeing whatever direction safety afforded. And the Horde, possessing only the brute intelligence of mobs and herds, milled upon the foundations of the Urokkas, drawn in ever greater concentrations by the promise of rutting murder, but cowed by the displays of arcane destruction above. The Schoolmen garrisoned the passes and established eyries upon each of the summits, impromptu camps where the sorcerers could tend to their injured and recoup their strength. None could hear a mundane word, even when shouted into hands and ear. A cacophony of sorcerous cries never ceased to knot the freakish din, but otherwise nothing human could be heard.
The mountains were wrested from the Horde one-by-one. The Scarlet Schoolmen defended the bull-skull summit of Yawreg, watched in horror as the putrid masses overran their only path of retreat. The Mysunsai occupied the greater heights of Mantigol adjacent, their numbers thinned for assisting their Anagogic confreres. The Imperial Saik held the ruined archipelago of scarps that was Oloreg; they more than any others found themselves continuously embattled. Meanwhile the Mandate cleared the crawling heights of Ingol with razors of light, Abstractions, then draped their triunes as a sparking shawl about the mountain’s shoulders. Both the day and his men exhausted, the Exalt-Magus of the Great Ordeal finally halted his advance and took the measure of what he had achieved.
Wherever the World held dirt, it plumed skyward for the scribble of violent millions, but nowhere else. Saccarees peered out across a great hollow in the Shroud, a cavern as deep as the sky was tall, born of sea, stone, and stony earth. The clarity was unnatural, pure for the septic obscurity that caged it. The long, knifing curve of the River Sursa was scarcely visible. Dagliash seemed a monolithic bark upon Antareg below, a barge stripped to the hull, floating upon a Sranc tide. The intervening tracts sizzled for condensing so much fury—a thousand screeching faces in every tessera, a thousand shaking cleavers and a thousand bared teeth, on and on, forming a mosaic that vanished into the Shroud, into numbers that broke the back of reason.