The Great Ordeal (Aspect-Emperor #3)(129)
Their fellow Schoolmen had scoffed and sneered, called them “grave-robbers”, an affront without compare among the Cond, let alone the ?meri they strove to emulate. Despite their demonstrations of outrage, the Mangaecca secretly celebrated the appellation, for it concealed their far darker ambition. In sooth, Viri was nothing more than a brilliant misdirection, a false grave to obscure the true, a cover for the Mangaecca’s evacuation of Sauglish, not to mention the endless northward trickle of chattel and supplies. For all its immensity, Nogaral was nothing but artifice, a way to plunder the Inc?-Holoinas, the Ark itself, under the guise of ransacking Viri.
With the destruction of Nogaral, the ruse came to an end, and the cancer that had replaced the Mangaecca, the Unholy Consult of Shae?nanra, Cet’ingira, and Aurang, declared itself to those they would exterminate. And so Viri faded into shadow and scholarship once again, a grave marking the loss of a second innocence—the innocence of Men—and the rebirth of an original terror, Min-Uroikas, or as the High Norsirai would come to call it, Golgotterath.
Where greed for the Ark had moved Men to reclaim Viri as a sham the first time, then fear and hatred of the Ark would move them to reclaim the dead Mansion as a bulwark the second. After centuries of intermittent war between Golgotterath and the High Norsirai, Anas?rimbor Nanor-Mikhus, High-King of A?rsi, laid the foundations of Dagliash, or “Shieldhold”, the fortress whose fame would all but blot Viri from the fickle histories of Men.
As the nameless poet of the Kelmariad writes,
Set upon woe, hewn from deceit, garrisoned by hope,
Our Shield against the Legions of the Dying Sun,
Pray to her, our fortress, our House of Thousands,
Implore her as you would any other sacred idol!
For her miracles are numbered by our children.
But no God was ever so generous or so reliable as Dagliash. For centuries she would be the very bastion of Men, a lone beacon raised against the nightmarish gloom of Golgotterath. The ancient Norsirai called her by many names: the Obstinate, the Unconquerable—even “the Lilac” for the violet that perpetually stained her walls. The shores below mount Antareg were beached in splintered bones instead of sand, such were the numbers cast down the cliffs. Time and time again the Consult threw their inhuman legions at the fortress. Time and time again they were thrown back reeling. As Viri dwindled in human memory, Dagliash became the very emblem of Mannish ferocity and resolve, a name traded in rice paddies and mountain vales, in temple processions and booming harbours throughout E?rwa.
And so word of her overthrow reverberated as far as the courts of Mehtsonc, Iothiah, and Shir. Swart Kings cried for silence and bent their ear. And somehow they knew, those hard and archaic Men, knew what they should not know given the way conceit trivializes faraway foes. Somehow they understood that the long-besieged Gate, not of A?rsi, but of humanity itself, had finally fallen. And though they as yet knew nothing of the No-God, their skin pimpled for brushing its absolute shadow.
The Exalt-General salivated for the smell of burning lamb.
Kellhus beached the Raft on lichen-pitted stone, and with a lurch, Saubon’s householders leapt from the timber platform incredulous, disbelieving … much as Saubon did himself. The Witches had assaulted the fortifications in a manner too methodical to be described as furious, and yet all the more furious for it. After spreading wide, they had rushed the eroded stoneworks, closed the interval with fifty cubit strides, laving the ramparts with blistering arcs and amputating lines. Nothing had survived to slow them, so they had simply stepped over the smoking walls and bastions to prosecute their scintillant extermination within.
Now Saubon stood gawking up with his fellows at the scorched walls soaring about them. A bare hand seized his plated shoulder and he saw his Lord-and-Prophet grinning as he pressed by, walking out among the smoking carcasses that matted the courtyard. Dagliash had fallen in mere heartbeats, thanks to the Swayali, but the clamour of the Horde grew more swollen with each heartbeat following.
Saubon waved his war-party to take positions flanking the Holy Aspect-Emperor. They were here, Saubon knew, but for a single purpose: to protect their Lord-and-Prophet and the Nuns from Chorae. The Knights of the Desert Lion numbered some forty-eight in all, some hulking, others reed thin, and a few (like his unlikely Scylvendi scout, Skunxa) comically rotund. Saubon had spent more than fifteen years assembling them, plucking only the most ferocious souls from those serving him through the Unification Wars. Soldiers of the rank need only see his entourage to know that merit, as opposed to bloodline, could raise them. Give a life to the right sort of man, Saubon had learned, and that man would wager that life no matter what the throw.
They had set ground in the Ribbaral, an area that had once housed the fortress’s famed workshops, but had been reduced to mounds of debris and gravel. The ruins of the Ciworal, the great redoubt of Dagliash, soared dark above the glowing form of the Aspect-Emperor. As with the outermost ramparts, the cyclopean works lay hunched as though beneath sheets, summits and heights sucked round by the ages. Saubon kicked over one of the inhuman defenders—the Ursranc so oft mentioned in the Holy Sagas. The thing seemed identical to any other Sranc, save its stature and the uniform nature of its weapon and armour. He peered at the Twin Horns branded into the thing’s cheek—the mark of its wicked masters. He wondered what the scarred tissue would taste like, braised over a low fire …