The Great Ordeal (Aspect-Emperor #3)(132)
It began the way it always begins, with an unruly few breaking ranks, running wild and raging ahead of the others. One Galeoth even cut loose his armour and clothing as he ran, until he leapt, phallus curved against his belly, across the desolation wearing naught but his boots.
Others joined them, like moths drawn to the light of glory. More followed, and more after them, some running to rescue their reckless brothers, others answering to the sudden hunger that gaped within them, an ancient hole uncovered …
Kill. Few souls thought the word, but every soul pursued its dread and simple course. Kill. Kill! The forward ranks thinned, then dissolved altogether. Bawling officers scrambled to retrieve their companies.
Shrugging aside any vestigial discipline, the Men of the Great Ordeal surged as one glittering sheet toward their foe, their mouths watering.
Saubon followed his Holy Aspect-Emperor into the mammoth shadow of Ciworal, his ears ringing.
“Long have they prepared for my coming,” Kellhus explained, his voice slipping between the din. The sorcerous paean of the Nuns echoed from over the horizon. Otherwise only His voice could be heard, tunnelling through a sound so great as to become ground, an impact without conclusion, bludgeoning, rattling tooth and bone, always.
“Absent the No-God,” Kellhus continued, “they have no hope of overcoming me directly …”
The entrance leered vacant, smashed into a breach long, long ago. Lichens scabbed the northward faces, while grasses ringed and limned the whole, clinging to every joist. No mortar had been used, simply great, fitted blocks. Walls rose concentrically, three shells, each hunching higher on thinner foundations, each battered into a more profound anonymity, bastions enclosing a husk enclosing a heap.
Kellhus placed a hand on his shoulder. It was strange, as always, to be reminded of his greater height. Strange and gratifying.
“Fear not for my safety, old friend.”
Saubon craned his neck to spy the citadel’s rugged peak, black against the bright plate of the sky. The brunt of morning was already upon them.
“Here …” Kellhus said, casting his look about the structure. “The greater Mansion riddles the whole of the mountain, but its axle, the Great Well of Viri, lies here, beneath this pla—”
The Aspect-Emperor snapped his gaze toward Ciworal’s smashed gate. Sranc erupted from the maw, bolted toward them, blades convulsing, silken faces crushed by frenzy.
Saubon’s bones fairly jumped from his limbs, such was his shock. But Kellhus strode without the least hesitation to meet the inhuman rush, muttering in voices that chewed nerves and illumined the ground at his feet. The creatures leapt toward him, their skin fish-white and their rag-armour curiously dark in the gloom. Even as their cleavers swung high, geysers exploded from their chests, puffs of violet mist. Dozens toppled in near unison, hearts spit gasping across the ground.
Saubon stood dumbstruck, as did Gwanw? at his side.
“Gird yourself!” Kellhus called to the entire company. “I have yet to kick the hornet’s nest …”
He spake light and miraculously stepped into the glare gaping high above the ancient stronghold.
Saubon stood blinking and wondering. Though he loathed worship, despised kneeling as violently as he demanded it of others, he fairly shook for the gratitude welling through his veins, for the miracle of being here, at this moment. Here he stood, the Believer-King of Caraskand, within a fortress laurelled in ancient legends, raised upon an underworld city more ancient still, watching a living God set foot upon the sky …
Anas?rimbor Kellhus, the Holy Aspect-Emperor.
It struck him then, the beauty of his life—the sheer significance. And a low and vicious pocket of his soul cackled, hunched over the moment with a miser’s unbecoming glee. What did falsehood matter, when this was true? In the light of such power …
In the light of such power!
He turned, saw that Mepiro, Bogyar, Scraul and the others were laughing—laughing because he was laughing, Saubon realized. The wail of the Horde blotted all, of course, but no sound was required to hear the joy and the savagery of their amusement. They could see it, the mania of recognition, not only of fortunes shared, but of hungers, atrocities committed in fact and desire. Never, it seemed, had the World been so ferocious with communal portent. Bogyar’s face even flushed crimson, a sign that would have alarmed Saubon mere moments before, but simply piled another hilarity onto the heap now.
The Exalt-General howled into the miracle of his own silence. The Shroud hung like plague above the stumped walls. Charred Sranc sweetened the air. His ardour strained against his breeches, and his eyes strayed to Gwanw?, who also laughed, her manner as leering as any man’s.
The Meat …
A sorcerous crack—producing echoes like boulders tumbling down iron chutes. It should have knocked the mirth from the Company of the Raft, but instead they squinted up in grinning wonder, hooted and cheered soundlessly, watched dark monoliths thrown tumbling upward, into the sky …
There was so much more than proof in miracles; there was might.
Numbers. Mad numbers.
Mad lights.
Gazing out from above the summit of mount Ingol, the Exalt-Magus, Saccarees, could almost see it whole: an oceanic mass twining and involuting like a living thing, a leviathan as vast and terrible as anything out of his Dreams of the First Apocalypse, lashing entire mountains with tentacular fury.